INTERVIEW : Josh Riedel by Lauren C. Johnson
Please Report Your Bug Here
Henry Holt & Co.
Interview by
Lauren C. Johnson
When I moved to San Francisco in December 2017, the public was increasingly wary of Big Tech, and local communities were organizing against the grave inequalities and displacement the industry had created throughout the Bay Area. Yet, even then, it felt like the sun would never quite set on Silicon Valley or the growth-at-all-costs-minded start-up culture.
I remember walking through downtown San Francisco on my way to work, rolling my eyes at seas of tech bros in Patagonia vests while—admittedly—feeling rather swaggery for scoring a contract gig at one of these companies. My first months in San Francisco were lonely and thrilling. Like Ethan Block, the protagonist of Josh Riedel’s debut novel, Please Report Your Bug Here (Holt, January 2023), I sometimes got swept up believing I was “making the world a better place.”
Please Report Your Bug Here begins in 2010: the halcyon days of disruptors “moving fast and breaking things.” Ethan Block is a 24-year-old college graduate with a degree in art history and six figures worth of student loan debt. He works at DateDate—one of those swipe-y mobile dating apps that supposedly optimize the search for love. As the start-up’s only non-technical employee, Ethan is responsible for flagging software bugs and scouring DateDate’s user-generated image database for illicit and illegal media. Soon, Ethan’s sense of reality distorts when the app transports him to an eerily beautiful other-world swathed in tall wet grass.
Riedel has a few things in common with his protagonist. In 2010, he was Instagram’s first employee; a non-technical worker responsible for building brand relationships and launching the platform’s blog and social media accounts. He lived in San Francisco for several years before pursuing an MFA in creative writing from the University of Arizona.
I was excited to talk to Riedel about Please Report Your Bug Here: a satirical and witty time capsule of 2010’s San Francisco, told through the eyes of a young adult trying to understand his values and get right with himself. Riedel and I chatted over tea in the sunlit apartment he shares with his wife, Erin. Here’s the best of our conversation, edited for clarity and brevity.
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Lauren C. Johnson: Please Report Your Bug Here takes place in 2010—two years before the launch of Tinder and four years before Bumble's launch. If Ethan's story were to begin today, in 2023, how would his world be different? How would it be the same?
Josh Riedel: I think 2010 was an important "micro era" for tech; around 2010, many social networks shifted to mobile, which changed how we interact online. Apps were gaining traction, and people realized, 'oh, I can be online and social when I'm on the go.' I also think the public was generally more optimistic about tech. I was fascinated with this moment in time, so putting Ethan in that whole set of circumstances was a very conscious decision.
If the novel had been set in 2023, I think Ethan would have taken a more critical stance about the work he's getting into, and that might have helped him better navigate the industry. Today, I think the public is more educated around technology, and workers, in general, are more organized. Strikes are more frequent, for example. I think this would all influence how Ethan feels about start-ups.
But Ethan brings a lot into his work that's not the company's or the industry's fault, per se. Ethan's a recent college grad, and he's kind of looking for a new identity after college. And it seems like this industry can offer that. He's expecting work or a start-up—a business or corporation—to fulfill these things that it never promised him in the first place.
LCJ: Ethan encounters a lot of technology that didn't exist in 2010. There's the banal, like self-regenerating churros (which sound both wonderful and nightmarish) and the wildly fantastical, like teleportation portals. You ask your readers to suspend their disbelief and lean into satire and the speculative. Can you speak to some of these choices? Why was veering into the fantastical important to you?
JR: As a fiction writer, I've always gravitated toward the fantastic. When I was younger, I wrote what you could call magical realism. And I think spending my 20s working in Silicon Valley shifted my mindset even more toward the speculative. I think that’s because I was around engineers, designers—really anyone working in this industry—and they’re all trying to imagine different futures and then actually realize them.
You brought up the regenerating churros and the sequoia, and it's important to consider the context for our technology. So, the regenerating churro belongs to Yarbo, the art tech collective—that's part of their own distinct culture as opposed to DateDate, which is venture funded in this traditional way, where there's a pipeline to get acquired by a bigger corporation.
It was fun to imagine; what if this regenerating churro existed? And what if it wasn't invented in a venture-funded lab in Silicon Valley? Would it get the same resources? Would we put the resources into making it grow into this bigger thing that we could share worldwide? I was having a lot of fun playing with these ideas. I think it's important to think about the context in which we use our technology and the context in which it's invented.
As for the portals, that's an example of how the speculative element can explore an emotional truth or a feeling. That's coming from someone with the personal experience of having super monotonous jobs, not just in tech.
LCJ: I read you worked in a button factory?
JR Yeah. Like the buttons you put on your jacket. You have a machine, and it’s a motion that you did, then there’s a part where you wear a thimble…it was very Portland DIY! There’s something about that kind of work where you become disconnected…you don't really care about the buttons; you enter this weird trance.
It wasn't a super conscious decision to make Ethan discover a portal in the app, but I landed on something that resonated for me as I was writing Ethan’s character. I was like, "oh, he's reviewing these photos [as a content moderator] or he’s trying to replicate a bug." These are repetitive activities you can lose yourself in.
LCJ: Right. And he's looking at what are probably horrendous photos you could find on the Dark Web. I'm wondering, is there some dissociation happening? Or if the portal could be a metaphor for disassociation?
JR: I think that's a good point. I hope there's something there that resonates for people who’ve had jobs like that. And not just content moderators, but the button factory example too. The kind of repetitive work where you’re doing the same thing over and over for whatever reason.
LCJ: I really love Ethan’s character arc. In the beginning of the novel, he complains to Noma:
“This is why I couldn’t be an art critic. I feel like my interpretation isn’t the same aswhatever someone else sees.”
“Isn’t that the point?” Noma slipped into a faux-authoritative voice. “We are all subjective beings.”
Do you think Ethan learns to trust his own perspectives by the end of this novel?
JR: I hope so. I hope people have that reading. At the end of the book, I can point to how Ethan turns down the Founder's invitation to work at another start-up. I feel like he's becoming less willing to get swept up in someone else's vision. In that sense, I think he's trusting his own perspective.
In a way, it is a learning experience to get swept up in these intense jobs after college. It is a way to get to know yourself. We may have a more solid sense of ourselves as we get older through experiences, but I feel like we're always trying to understand ourselves, at least, I am. That's also what makes DateDate so tough: it's trying to quantify and categorize compatibility without considering the dynamic nature of the individual or two people.
LCJ: To piggyback on that question, I also really loved this passage:
“The Founder’s circumstances brought to the surface a lingering question: To what extent are my passions my own? How are my interests and pursuits shaped by external factors—other people’s expectations, my own economic conditions, even the compliments of the professor who noticed Isabel’s Miró T-shirt as I steamed his latte?”
“To what extent are my passions my own?” is an essential question throughout this novel. Because how can we find love if we’re not right with our own preferences and perspectives?
Do you think these questions are just part of being a 24-year-old, like Ethan, or are they especially heightened in the modern era, where a certain privileged class is fixated on optimizing every aspect of our lives?
JR: I think it's both. As a 24-year-old, Ethan's invested in trying to figure out who he is in the world. Now that he graduated from college, he's no longer an art history major. Ethan has a lot of student loan debt, so he needs to work. So how does he fit into this world? And what are the compromises he must make?
I recently had a conversation with a friend of mine about this. We were talking about reading and how we both wanted to make an effort to go to the library and roam from book to book, read a page here, and see where that leads. Just have an experience disconnected from what people are talking about online.
No matter what, we're all products of the culture around us. How much do you let Twitter, or whatever social media you're on, amplify all those things?
LCJ: Do you think Ethan is really looking for romantic love in this novel?
JR: I think he’s trying to understand what love is, and he’s looking for a deeper sense of love. That extends to the love we have for our friends and even for ourselves. He’s coming off a breakup and that breakup makes him ask questions like, "Whoa, was I in love? Was that love? Or was that something else?"
LCJ: Given my own background as a non-technical worker in tech, the dynamics within the Corporation were more harrowing to read about than the horror of people disappearing into other worlds. This got me thinking that maybe it’s not the technology, per say, that’s creating so many societal problems. It’s the industry’s growth model under capitalism. Grow, grow, grow, acquire, acquire, acquire at all costs.
In the Year of Our Lord 2023, do you think people are less naïve about the tech industry’s potential to “make the world a better place?” Where do we go from here?
JR: People are less optimistic about tech, but hopefully that makes it better. I think people are more educated today and have more knowledge about the businesses behind the products.
When I first worked in the industry, some of the optimism around tech just seemed kind of hollow. However old Mark Zuckerberg was at the time—like celebrating some 23-year-old genius founder. I know we still do that with people on the cover of Forbes, but I feel like there's more skepticism now, and more education about how these products actually work.
The writer Ben Tarnoff has an extreme opinion, but I think I agree with him. He wrote an op-ed essentially saying the problem with tech is that it's a business. It’s under capitalism and set up for unlimited growth, and ultimately, the solution is de-privatization. I thought that was an interesting perspective. In an ideal world, I think that would be great. At the same time, these private companies can invest in making products that are easy to use and aren't confusing. So, there's some kind of balance to strike there.
LCJ: Please Report Your Bug Here hits a very specific way for me as someone who’s worked in the tech industry for the past 5 years in San Francisco. What do you hope resonates with readers who live in other cities and work across other industries?
JR: This is a workplace novel; it's about losing yourself to work and searching for identity through work. I hope this novel spans across industries. Even if you haven't been part of a start-up acquisition that gets shoehorned into a bigger company, you may recognize some of the power struggles around how companies treat workers. I think a lot about publishing work, like HarperCollins workers being on strike right now. They're very passionate about their jobs, and they're not being treated fairly.
LCJ: How do we keep our jobs from swallowing us whole?
JR: I feel like companies need to do things to make sure they're not exploiting their workers. Like an actual paid vacation, and not expecting you to be available 24 hours a day.
When Instagram was acquired, and I knew I would start taking the shuttle down to Menlo Park daily, I thought, "I'm gonna read so much, and I'm probably gonna write [on the shuttle]." That just did not happen because the shuttle is an extension of the campus. The whole environment is people either on calls or typing away, and you get swept up in it.
LCJ: I really loved the way nature inserts itself throughout the novel—often in unsettling ways. The roaring ocean in the other world serves as a metronome throughout the story. I especially love the scene where that sequoia absorbs Ethan. Can you speak to the natural world’s presence in your novel? What were some of your intentions?
JR: Living in San Francisco definitely influenced the way I wrote about nature. We're in a medium-sized city surrounded by the most beautiful landscapes. Some people who haven’t spent time here may not even realize the city borders the Pacific Ocean. There's the bay and the ocean and you can drive across the Golden Gate Bridge and see sequoias and red woods. So, that’s one part of it.
At the beginning of the novel, Soren talks about how the technology we use is of the earth, meaning it all comes from the earth. We need rare-earth minerals to make our phones and computers. So, the natural world and technology are interconnected. In a way, the phones we hold are natural artifacts, and I wanted to play with that concept.
LCJ: Do you think Ethan loves San Francisco?
JR: I think Ethan likes San Francisco. He has his own way of moving through San Francisco—like, he’s constantly going to the taqueria. My wife, Erin, jokes about how he is always disappointed with the burrito. This might be the author reading into the text, but I think San Francisco is a place of longing for Ethan. He knows there's so much going on here that he hasn’t been able to discover because he's commuting down to Menlo Park.
LCJ: What about you? Why did you come back to San Francisco after your MFA program?
JR: My friends were still here, so having a community of people really makes the place. And I love the Bay Area; I love the natural world. I’ve become what a friend of mine calls “weather delicate.” I grew up in St. Louis where we have four seasons, but now I think the Bay Area’s [mild] weather is perfect.
There’s a creative energy here that's different from other places. I love working with people who are creative in a way that I'm not; I think engineers and designers are creative in their own way and that’s motivating for my own work.
LCJ: Finally, what’s your advice to fellow people who are seriously pursuing the arts while working fulltime in the tech industry? Basically, this question is for me.
JR: That's such a good question because I couldn't figure this out for myself when I was younger. But if I were me now working at one of these companies, I would really take advantage of my vacation time. Even if it's just two days where you go somewhere to write.
