Former tech reporter explores the promises and perils of the internet era in the novel ‘What Kind of Paradise'
Janelle Brown laughs as she recounts her initial reaction upon getting her first email address as a student at UC Berkeley in the mid-1990s.
'I went into the basement of the engineering building where you could get on the internet, and I downloaded a Beastie Boys video,' the bestselling author told the Chronicle by phone from her home in Los Angeles. 'It took 45 minutes, but it was amazing. I could hardly believe it was possible. The world was definitely changing.'
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What Kind of Paradise
By Janelle Brown
(Random House; 368 pages; $30)
'What Kind of Paradise' — An Evening with Author Janelle Brown: 6:30 p.m. Friday, June 6. Free. A Great Good Place for Books, 6120 La Salle Ave., Oakland. www.ggpbooks.com
Meet Janelle Brown: 3 p.m. Saturday, June 7. Atherton Library, 2 Dinkelspiel Station Lane, Atherton. Free. Registration required at www.smcl.bibliocommons.com.
Inspired in part by her post-college years as a tech reporter at Wired and Salon, Brown's sixth novel, 'What Kind of Paradise,' is set in 1996 San Francisco and rural Montana. Released on Tuesday, June 3, the book deftly captures both the giddy enthusiasm of that period when the internet's possibilities felt boundless, as well as the unforeseen dangers and downsides that were ushered in with the digital revolution.
'It was a heady time when a bunch of kids in San Francisco saw everything through this optimistic, utopian prism, and, on the other hand, the Unabomber was dominating the news,' reflected Brown, referring to Ted Kaczynski, an anti-technology domestic terrorist who shunned modern life and murdered three people and injured 23 with homemade letter bombs from 1978 until his capture by the FBI in April 1996.
'What Kind of Paradise' imagines if a Kaczynski-esque figure were also a father, raising a child to fear and abhor technological change. The book features a teenager named Jane whose iconoclast dad has steeped her in his radically anti-technology views.
After discovering a photo that sheds light on their mysterious past, Jane escapes from their cabin in the Montana woods to San Francisco where the dot-com era is ushering in transformational cultural change.
Brown, who grew up in Atherton, discussed writing a coming-of-age story that explores tech's promises and perils, and 'how we ever escape the belief systems we were born into.'
Q: This question runs through your novel about whether technology is a positive force for good, or one that is bound to doom us. Have you been wrestling with these issues for a while?
A: Yes, it's a subject that has been increasingly weighing on me. When I worked at Salon and Wired in San Francisco in the 1990s, I was a total booster. I drank the Kool-Aid. I believed so strongly, as we all did back then, that technology was going to make our world better.
As the decades have progressed, and I've seen technology's ugly underbelly, I've been grappling with my own sense of culpability. What if, at the beginning, we had been more open-eyed about the potential downsides? Could we have steered the world in a better direction where we had more accountability and oversight, instead of having a reflexive stance that any government oversight of technology is bad?
Q: Sounds like hindsight has helped you see your techno utopianism differently.
A: Definitely. I spent time going through the Wired archives (to research the novel), and it kind of broke my heart. When I look back on our rah-rah boosterism, I see we were wrong about so much — especially now that I see the world through my kids' eyes, who are 15 and 13.
I've been incredibly concerned about the downsides of AI, the depersonalization of living on screens and how technology has enabled extremism. Algorithms amplify the most radical and outrageous points of view, and fringe ideas become part of the mainstream in an alarming way no one anticipated.
Q: What inspired you to explore these ideas through a father-daughter relationship in which the dad is a lot like the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski?
A: I had been wanting to write about technology from the point of view of someone coming into San Francisco in the '90s with naivete to this whole new world opening up. Then, about four years ago, I listened to an interesting podcast on the Kaczynski story. I vividly remember living through it and being at Wired when he was captured. Everyone's reaction was, 'Yes, they caught him!'
As I listened to his story, I thought how prescient he was in some ways, in terms of how he saw the future and tried to warn us. Of course, his writings were also incredibly disturbing, sexist, anti-liberal. I realized these are two sides of the same coin, two very different views of the same future.
Q: You've written great descriptions of mid-'90s San Francisco, with its juice bars and 20-somethings out in South Park. What did you most want to convey about that period?
A: It was such an exciting time. San Francisco was the birthplace of the whole modern internet era, and it was all done by young people. We were barely out of college, hardly qualified to do what we were doing, but we got to define this whole new era.
People forget, because the tech world isn't like this anymore, but it was funky, artsy. There were a lot of weirdos who were in bands and making weird art, and everyone was a bit of a misfit. It wasn't until IPOs and tech bros blew in and everyone realized that they could make a lot of money that it really changed. And San Francisco changed. It felt less vibrant to me.
Q: Did you enjoy developing Jane's character? She's self-reliant and incredibly well-read after a childhood spent studying philosophy in the woods with her dad, but she's also in some ways a normal teenager.
A: Yeah, I love teenagers. I'm fascinated with coming-of-age stories and that moment in time when you're still unformed clay and life's forces are starting to press you into shape. As much as I had ideas about technology to explore, at the heart of every book I write is a relationship story. I love writing about thorny family relationships, legacy and what we take from the people who raise us and how we break free of them. In this case, her father isn't mentally well, but he's convincing, charismatic and smart — and he's her whole world.
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