Hilary Zaid can’t tell you the exact time and place she first began working on her sophomore novel, “Forget I Told You This,” but she’ll note, without uncertainty, that it began in the Obama era.

在过去的政治乐观精神,有限公司ncern over the book’s major preoccupations — surveillance technology, algorithms, big data — was “kind of a tinfoil-hat topic,” the Oakland author recently recalled. Things are different now. The years that followed Donald Trump’s presidential election ushered in a shift in mainstream perceptions around privacy, data and the once-heralded tech disrupters like Facebook.

“Once we had a different kind of government, a different kind of president, people (now) have a different sense of, ‘Oh, data actually can be used against me, and that can be scary,’ ” she told the Chronicle. “We live in an unregulated data ecosystem, and we don’t really know what the effects are.”

This uncertainty and fear lays the groundwork for a digital era not unlike our own in Zaid’s twisty thriller. In “Forget I Told You This,” Q, a powerful social media company, has scraped so much data from our lives that while it conveniently knows to remind you to buy flowers for your partner’s birthday, it’s slowly turning society into a surveillance state.

Within this tech landscape is Amy Black, an Oakland artist who loves the most archaic of things: calligraphy and the art of letter-writing. A single queer mother whose partner is long gone (for reasons Zaid slowly teases out) and whose son is traveling the world after graduating high school, she’s left to take care of her brother and aging parents who have temporarily moved into her house. Closed off from the world, she’s “an artist trying to assert an identity — to be seen as an artist in an age of artificial intelligence and surveillance,” Zaid explained.

Ironically, Amy places hope in an artist-in-residency program at Q, where she soon finds herself unwittingly caught up in the byzantine, if increasingly optimized, world of a tech overlord that promises to predict and shape every corner of human life.

“It seemed to me like a perfect interweaving of the deeply personal and deeply psychological components of Amy’s character with these larger themes,” said Timothy Schaffert, co-editor of the University of Nebraska Press’ Zero Street Fiction series that Zaid’s book will launch.

He compares Amy to a Jimmy Stewart character in a Bay Area-set Hitchcock movie, with the “juxtaposition of her psychological state or anxieties and her phobias, and then her inclination towards spoiling this world plot that’s underway with this technology company.”

When it comes to Q’s world, “I am not making up the technology,” Zaid noted. Beyond the myriad ways that current apps and their algorithms collect human data and have been used — for instance, toprop up authoritarianismworldwide — Zaid pointed to last year’s Dobbs v. Jackson Supreme Court decision and how digital traces can potentially be used toprosecute those accessing reproductive care. In this sense, nothing about her novel is what readers might call “dystopian.”

“This is not a futuristic fantasy,” she emphasized. “It’s now. It’s yesterday. This is how it is. They’re wonderful things that I didn’t make up that are just incredible, but also these uses are problematic.”

The characteristics of Q are also strikingly familiar. “I don’t want to be sued by an owner of any giant tech companies,” she said, “but Facebook and Meta are places that come right to mind: the giant social network, the extraordinary culling of data from people, the psychographics.” She also noted the “brilliant timing” of Elon Musk changing the name of Twitter to X.

Zaid, though, is not a Luddite. She understands the necessity of technology in the modern world and once worked at Ikonic Interactive, one of the first web development companies in San Francisco. Her book’s fun-house image of the digital world acknowledges what she identifies as a primal, if well-intentioned, pitfall at the heart of our race to optimize.

“Big Data was like a God … a way of making sense of the mess of our lives, pulling it all together, giving it meaning,” she writes in her novel. “Ifsomeoneknew everything, if someonecouldknow everything, there was no reason to be afraid.”

Zaid sympathizes with what she believes is a distinctly human belief “that if you just have this ability to see everything, you could connect all the dots. Anthropologically, we’re pattern seekers. … Where there’s just stars in the sky, we see pictures.”

She also believes that technologists mean to use that instinct for good — to build connections, to even help diagnose diseases — but acknowledges that “there’s another way of seeing it, which is always being watched.”

And, yet, on a smaller scale, Zaid is optimistic despite the increasingly frightening tangle of our tech era. In her novel, Amy finds herself involved with a mysterious group known as the Neighborhood that takes it upon itself to solve the large dilemmas at the heart of her book.

“The pandemic created some Neighborhoods,” she said of the real world. “People do want to do things for collective good, and I hope that’s a force that can rise against really powerful countervailing forces that transcend technology. … I hope that there are these little pockets of rebellion where people are striving towards that.”

Brandon Yu is a freelance writer.