Of all things Geek. I am…
If you are a regular viewer of this blog, you may be thinking to yourself, “Palmer reviewing a Coupland book about Marshall McLuhan? Hasn’t this already been done before?”
It has! Back in February of 2024, I reviewed Extraordinary Canadians: Marshall McLuhan by Douglas Coupland. But the thing about reading through an author’s biography is that sometimes they cover a subject more than once.
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search| is a project from douglas coupland that came from his artist’s residency at google’s cultures institute lab in paris in the spring of 2015.
it is a deep reflective dive into who we are as a species based on our search data, and there is a lot of search data.
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The cover reads “You’re holding a book about a company you’ve most likely never heard of. This company has no Steve Jobs, nor does it have a CEO who jet-skis with starlets. It’s only the 461st largest company on earth, but were it to vanish tomorrow our modern world would immediately be the worse for its absence.”
The book in question is Kitten Clone by Douglas Coupland as part of a series of authors in residence, this particular edition focusing on being “Inside Alcatel-Lucent.”
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Is Raymond Gunt the worst person ever? At a minimum, he’s had some help…
This book’s main character, Raymond Gunt, may in fact be the worst person ever, or he may just be proof that assumptions and a lack of context make for the worst in people. Truth be told, that’s probably and sadly more common than we’d all like to think.
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Shopping in Jail: Ideas, Essays, and Stories for the Increasingly Real Twenty-First Century by Douglas Coupland is eye-opening. While the writing and delivery is very Coupland, the medium this time is unique.
This collection of essays isn’t random. It all belongs together and reflects where Coupland and we as a human species were when this was published in the fall of 2013.
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