short book but appropriately so. omniscient narrator for our couple, and there is no dialogue in the entire work, which I didnt notice until page 100 somehow. misc unstructured thoughts below.
so interesting - the MCs lament they were born too late to afford the world they want to inhabit, but so much of their identity comes from coming of age at the same time as the age of information and the internet. they are so entangled in this - their job is to sell image, both as their front-end developer roles and as they sublet their apartment with curated listing photos. They love Berlin, they hate its gentrification; their passions became their jobs but they have the sense (and ultimately strong realization) they cant understand why they do it. both the city and their work shift from an undeniable coolness to a flattened, bland image that could be sold anywhere. They wonder when neural networks will take away their jobs (it mostly has by now 2025), and wander searching parts of Europe for the feeling they had when they were twentysomethings, but that feeling is gone, just as Berlin is now. In the end they essentially run an airbnb, with curated marketing and discrete IG agreements with content creators to write reviews. It ends with a snarky comment on how the stay was just like the pictures.
so much of their characters are just an unconscious internalizaion of all that which they have learned to care about through social media - plants, cooking, interior design even. they sometimes will blanch at the thought they are nothing more than a product of their times, and what they have and who they are was not their decision but a roll of temporal dice.
Unconsciously, their image is everything. They discuss when theres the humanitarian crisis how they want to help, but have no actual skills to be useful as web developers. The event itself provokes shame retrospectively for them - the vanity of their lives feels on full display as they stand, uselessly, volunteering, wanting to help but also in a meta sense knowing it was to continue to serve the image of the people they are. before the crisis, all news and tragedy is simultaneously so reachable but so disconnected. after the crisis, its like it never happened.
the author is not shy in snidely remarking how the globalization of capitalism essentially rots away culture and value. kudos. worth the read.