© David Zaugh 2020
can’t have this discussion without things sounding absurd, dystopian, and (yes) funny. TikTok, for instance, is very, very funny and very, very absurd—but it also has a dark side as well, with implications that reach all the way to geopolitical security. Prior to becoming a writer, you worked in the tech industry for over a dozen years. How did that experience inform and inspire your writing of Version Zero? My former tech career was a huge inspiration. I worked as a user experience (UX) expert. This meant I had to research and design the entire experience of a product or service—not just the interface, but also everything surrounding it: marketing, customer onboarding, retention, business model, etc. My job was basically a deep study in motivation. What does the company really want?
Version Zero incorporates elements of thrillers, sci-fi, and comedy and is also a bit of a love story. How would you describe your novel? I think of Version Zero as a caper, where the good guys are trying to pull off a revolution against an evil empire. But the world of tech, as with most everything in life, is tough to divide into clean-cut camps of good vs. evil— we’re all enmeshed in technology, whether we want to be or not. So the other job of the story is to try to explain and debate the merits of tech and the larger issue of the venture capitalism that so often fuels it. In my mind, you
Lots of tech companies had the aspirational veneer of wanting to “make the world a better place,” but when I dove deep into the true motivations of the companies, I noticed the same patterns over and over again: companies wanted to make money (of course), but do it with as little effort as possible, and (importantly) bend users’ behaviors to their will. They wanted to change, “disrupt,” how people lived their daily lives in important spheres like communication, dating, friendship, news, or social standing. I found this last bit absolutely fascinating. If tech is so obsessed with disruption paradigms, the next question must be: Whose paradigms are we talking about? Who’s making the next models of human behavior?
Version Zero addresses some of the timeliest issues today regarding Big Tech and personal privacy. What do
you hope readers take away from your novel that can help them navigate the ever-growing digitization of today’s world? I already know there’s a growing awareness that our tech lives are fraught with danger. My 8-year-old daughter already takes kiddie classes on cybersecurity, scams, and how all of social media is fake. I think the average user already has a pretty good idea that they’re giving up quite a bit and getting quite a bit of bad of stuff in return—endless envy from Instagram, paranoia and anxiety from questionable news, etc. What I want people to understand is that in a larger context beyond tech, our entire being is completely soaked in hypocrisy—that hypocrisy is the default state of late-stage American capitalism. We routinely compromise our most basic ideals every day, many times a day, and there’s no escape from that. In this way, Version Zero can never be a howto guide that readers can turn to to better navigate our massive digital world because there fundamentally is no way to navigate such a thing well. It’d be like trying to come up with the best way to walk barefoot on lava—it’s just not possible.
interact with technology, and in what ways is your novel in conversation with this moment? I have to say, as a parent, tech has absolutely been a tremendous lifesaver for the pandemic. It’s allowed my daughter to go to school, keep up with her piano lessons, and FaceTime with friends. That’s the surface level of tech, the side consumers pay attention to.
Version Zero is more concerned with the deeper, more unseeable side of tech. I mentioned that my job as a UX expert was to divine the motivations of app creators, and I found that those motivations were base at best and downright manipulative at worst. I wanted to make sure the novel touched on things tech excels at promoting, like extremism, racism, and toxic bubble groupthink, because tech has also made the pandemic much more horrible than it should be. The degree to which it has exacerbated suffering vastly outweighs the benefit of (say) virtual classroom teaching. It amplified fake news and conspiracy theory to epic levels, enabled a monster of a president, and stymied any comprehensive effort to roll out a crucially needed health and safety guideline that would’ve stopped the I know lots of people frequently take spread much sooner, saved hundigital detox breaks, and that’s dreds of thousands of lives, and very telling, because they’re adspared millions of small busi“I want Version Zero to mitting there is only a binary nesses. Tech, in other words, show that tech represents choice when it comes to tech: has also been a tremendous either you use it, or you don’t. life-taker. As users, we’re stuck a huge moral Rubicon that One of the big elements of Verusing something (again, on a we’re currently wading sion Zero is to point out how, in daily basis) that is responsible up to our necks at the the face of unchecked, pervasive for some really terrible things. hypocrisy, the only real choice is to Our moral quandary is one of deepest part.” cast hard judgment on the way we Version Zero’s major themes, but live our lives. I’m starting to judge the the book doesn’t ask what we should internet as being bad as a whole—while do—it asks if hypocrisy is the natural at the same time acknowledging it’s a domistate of our human existence. nant tool that we’re stuck with. There’s no answer here Threaded into your novel is a love story between Max but the clear awareness that not only are we are doing and his long-time friend Akiko. What role does romance things wrong, we are sometimes enjoying the wrongplay in this high-stakes thriller, and why was it important ness, especially when it comes to our addiction to social to include it? media validation or “free” shipping on Amazon. I want Version Zero to show that tech represents a huge moral Between my YA novels and me and my wife’s imprint, Joy Rubicon that we’re currently wading up to our necks at Revolution, you can probably guess I’m a big fan of love. the deepest part. I really truly believe love is the biggest motivation around.
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The publication of Version Zero coincides with a oncein-a-century pandemic that, for many, has increased our dependence on the very technology your novel critiques. How do you think that has altered how we
People will do beautiful things for love, but they’ll do absolutely awful things for it, too. Max has all this unrequited love for Akiko that has nowhere to go. Whenever people repress strong emotions for long enough, those emotions
burst out in unexpected ways. For Max, his bottled-up feelings manifest into his crusade to fix the internet. But, really, I think he just wants what he never can have, and it drives him to a kind of madness. Your previous novels, Frankly in Love and Super Fake Love Song, were marketed to young adults. How has writing a novel for adults differed from writing novels geared towards a younger audience? I ponder this a lot, and I think I might have a working theory. For me, YA is all about dealing with known quantities—topics like racism, gender equality, abuse, or the ever-classic finding of oneself. We clearly know what we should think about these subjects and feel a moral obligation to teach our youth the optimistic path of highest potential. In adult novels, however, authors grapple with stuff the jury’s still out on. We still don’t understand why people do evil things, for example. We don’t understand where abuse originates from. On a lighter note, we don’t understand why one specific person falls in love with another. And we certainly don’t understand why we have this crazy, never-ending drive to build technologies that exploit our fellow humans at massive scale. We can’t come to conclusions about any of these topics, because we’re having a hard time articulating exactly what these topics are in the first place. So, in my mind that’s the mission of fiction for adults: to articulate the subject as best we can, over and over again, adding detail and insight with each pass. You and your wife (bestselling author Nicola Yoon) recently announced the launch of Joy Revolution, your own imprint with Random House Children’s Books, featuring love stories starring people of color. Why did you want to start your own imprint and what do you hope to achieve with it? Both Nicola and I grew up with zero romantic role models in any form of media. Not books, movies, TV, nothing. It was painful to be excluded from discussion on a subject so essential to the human heart: love! We always dreamed of counterbalancing that by giving kids what we never had—a safe place for readers to simply experience the full breadth of their humanity without the fear of being turned into yet another Racism 101 parable. Nicola and I both passionately believe love is the beginning and end of all things in this life. It was an easy bet to go all in on. Because everyone deserves love first before anything else.
What’s next for you? Joy Revolution made its official start a little over a month ago, so it’s been exciting to talk to authors and field manuscript submissions. Exciting things are afoot there—should be some very nice updates soon! Writing-wise, I’m always working on something. I just completed a very sad adult novel that made Nicola hate me because it made her cry so much. Also, she and I are working on a YA adventure story together. The Frankly In Love film adaptation, while tripped up by the pandemic, still moves forward. And there’s always more secret stuff in the Yoon R&D lab that I can’t talk about yet.
>> A PL AYLIST >>
CURATED BY DAVID YO O N “Ones and Zeros” | Jack Johnson Sunny SoCal laid-back vibe + biting media critique “Tequila Sunrise” | Cypress Hill The Brads’ favorite coding jam “Who That Be” | Rich Brian Shane and Max’s favorite Poolwhip ride-around jam “Army of Me” | Bjork Akiko’s coding jam “Break” | Beenzino Max’s moping-around-the-house jam “Dosis Multiple” | Pfirter Song to break the internet to “You Oughta Know” | Das Racist Akiko’s late-night drunken singing song “Night” | Kelly Lee Owens Song for Akiko and Max “Dead!” | My Chemical Romance Brayden’s song “AS A.W.O.L.” | Amnesia Scanner Pilot’s song “Creeper” | The Acid Song for Noelle “Niji (Tobynation Sayonaradio remix)” | Denki Groove Song for saying goodbye in Tokyo “Atmosphere” | James Blake Song to play in the dark
1.
Version Zero is set in 2018, but the world described in the novel is both similar to our own and distinctly different. What differences did you notice, and why do you think that Yoon chose to make them? Was your reading experience changed by the fact that the novel is narrated from the future, looking back on the events of 2018?
2.
If he had not been fired from Wren, do you think Max still would have decided to create Version Zero?
3.
How do the different generations portrayed in the novel relate to technology?
4.
Pilot describes the internet as a “social space devoid of trust.” Do you agree? How does anonymity on the internet change human interaction? Take a particular look at Noelle’s story.
5.
Discuss the relationship between Akiko, Max, and Shane. Why is Akiko drawn to each of the men? And what has created the strong bond among the three of them? Do you think that Shane is the better partner for Akiko? Why, or why not?
6.
How much impact does social media have on your own life? Did Version Zero make you think about your social media and internet usage in a different way?
7.
Many characters in Version Zero struggle to define their moral code and what they owe to society. Take a look at the way Max, Pilot, and Akiko view morality, and compare and contrast them. How do each of these characters follow (or disregard) their moral compass?
8.
Who is the true villain at the heart of the novel, if there is one?
9.
Do you believe that Max ultimately makes the right decision in destroying the internet? Would you have made the same choice? What kind of new world do you think will be created after the internet was disconnected?
10. What do you imagine happened to Max after the novel’s end? What will he do next?