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A review by brice_mo
Hum by Helen Phillips
4.25
Thanks to NetGalley and Simon Element for the ARC!
Helen Phillips’s Hum is a crackling interrogation of the cost of convenience.
Recently, the internet has been feeling claustrophobic—when I check the weather, I have to watch an ad for allergy medications. Every time I look at instagram, it’s almost 70% targeted content. If I try to read the news, it’s either locked behind a paywall or sponsored by companies who benefit from controlling it. If I want to opt out, I can pay to have my own time back in an “ad-free experience.”
It seems like the entirety of the human experience is problematized so that a solution can be sold.
This is also the world Hum takes place in.
It would be easy to dismiss the book as an anti-AI, woe-is-me, “cellphones are destroying us” take on life, but it’s not that. It’s not even a dystopia in the way the marketing copy suggests. This is a story about how everything that makes life easier actually distances us from it—a world where predictive text begins to flatten and anonymize something as simple as a text between spouses. Phillips is unconcerned with the usual tropes of AI usurping our humanity; she’s more interested in how companies market the idea of humanity itself. Like our own world, the novel’s surveillance state isn’t managed by a shadowy government—it’s handled by corporations who know and exploit our buying habits.
The plot is simple, centering primarily on a brief family vacation in the Botanical Garden, an AirBnB-like resort that offers an escape from the polluted, noise-filled air of the city. It’s a smart way to depict the artifice of “authenticity," and it’s an effective backdrop for Phillips to critique iPad kids and instagram parents. That sounds simplistic, but it works because the author is so careful in how she depicts the family’s relationships to each other. They are victimized and intentionally isolated by predatory technology. At one point, the protagonist realizes that the four family members are not sharing twenty-four hours in a day; they are dividing ninety-six hours because each person is so detached.
This is a breezy book with big questions (there’s a fairly robust compendium of research at the end), and Phillips invites us to wrestle with the discomfort of a paywall between the world and the self. In other words, Hum asks us to think about the reality we already inhabit and encourages us to, well, touch grass while we still can.
Helen Phillips’s Hum is a crackling interrogation of the cost of convenience.
Recently, the internet has been feeling claustrophobic—when I check the weather, I have to watch an ad for allergy medications. Every time I look at instagram, it’s almost 70% targeted content. If I try to read the news, it’s either locked behind a paywall or sponsored by companies who benefit from controlling it. If I want to opt out, I can pay to have my own time back in an “ad-free experience.”
It seems like the entirety of the human experience is problematized so that a solution can be sold.
This is also the world Hum takes place in.
It would be easy to dismiss the book as an anti-AI, woe-is-me, “cellphones are destroying us” take on life, but it’s not that. It’s not even a dystopia in the way the marketing copy suggests. This is a story about how everything that makes life easier actually distances us from it—a world where predictive text begins to flatten and anonymize something as simple as a text between spouses. Phillips is unconcerned with the usual tropes of AI usurping our humanity; she’s more interested in how companies market the idea of humanity itself. Like our own world, the novel’s surveillance state isn’t managed by a shadowy government—it’s handled by corporations who know and exploit our buying habits.
The plot is simple, centering primarily on a brief family vacation in the Botanical Garden, an AirBnB-like resort that offers an escape from the polluted, noise-filled air of the city. It’s a smart way to depict the artifice of “authenticity," and it’s an effective backdrop for Phillips to critique iPad kids and instagram parents. That sounds simplistic, but it works because the author is so careful in how she depicts the family’s relationships to each other. They are victimized and intentionally isolated by predatory technology. At one point, the protagonist realizes that the four family members are not sharing twenty-four hours in a day; they are dividing ninety-six hours because each person is so detached.
This is a breezy book with big questions (there’s a fairly robust compendium of research at the end), and Phillips invites us to wrestle with the discomfort of a paywall between the world and the self. In other words, Hum asks us to think about the reality we already inhabit and encourages us to, well, touch grass while we still can.