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.
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