several people are typing by calvin kasulke

Puzzling over ambiguous signs: this is literature’s game, too. Reading the novel, I thought of a Slackian pleasure, which is the work of constructing, in your mind, a flesh-and-blood colleague from the messages she writes. (A last-act queer love story, which taps into the delight of realizing that two colleagues are seeing each other, is surprisingly satisfying.) But the benign vibe only underscores how estranging even the best offices can be, with their demands that we upload more and more of ourselves for work.

the ebb and flow of formality feels sharply observed-that is to say, realistically tricky.

He is as alert to Slackers’ individual tics-the team member who uses the 'away' status as a crutch, for example-as he is to the ambience of the program itself. It wonderfully captures Slack’s tropes, from the broad (anxious jokes about the boss reading one’s D.M.s) to the subtle (the use of Giphy to soften an interaction). I blazed through it in an hour, came up for air, and then immediately blazed through it again-behavior that mystified me until I remembered how I am on Slack. It doesn’t feel much like literature, but it does feel like any number of Slack-adjacent activities: procrastinating, eavesdropping, solving a puzzle. But when Slackbot discovers a world (and an empty body) outside the app, will it hijack a ride into the 'real' world? Meanwhile, Gerald's co-workers are scrambling to stem a company PR catastrophe like no other, their CEO suspects someone is sabotaging his office furniture, and if Gerald gets to work from home all the time, why can't everyone? Hilarious, irreverent, and wholly original, Several People Are Typing is the perfect remedy for any idle fingers waiting to doomscroll: a satire of both the virtual office and contemporary life, and a perfect antidote to the way we live #now. Faced with the looming abyss of a disembodied life online, Gerald enlists co-worker Pradeep to care for his body and Slackbot, the service's AI assistant, to help him navigate his new digital reality. He posts for help, but his colleagues assume it's an elaborate joke to exploit the new working-from-home policy, and now that Gerald's productivity is through the roof, his bosses are only too happy to let him work from. Is it still WFH when you're now just binary code? Whilst working on a spreadsheet for a New York-based PR firm, Gerald has his consciousness uploaded into his company's Slack channel.

Several people are typing by calvin kasulke