EDITORIAL

by Peter Jukes and Hardeep Matharu

The Endless Insecurity of ‘Digital Nomads’

If the product is free, you’re the product. When it comes to so much of our lives lived on social media, this is one of the defining truths of our age, and it is brilliantly realised in Vincenzo Latronico’s novella Perfection, translated into English by Sophie Hughes, which was recently shortlisted for the International Booker Prize.

It tells the story of two southern European web designers, Anna and Tom, as they relocate to Berlin around 2010 and live out a perfectly curated Instagram life – working from home in a flat filled with pot plants and Nordic furniture, living off Google Translate, organic food, unsatisfactory sex toys, and microdoses of ketamine and MDMA.

They work in web design “tweaking colours for different interfaces, producing yet another variation on the current look in vogue in their neighbourhood, which could have just as well been New York – or anywhere in the world, for that matter”. They pass their leisure time on social media “utterly mesmerised by the apartment, kale salad, or the kitten of someone living two blocks or two continents away”.

Containing no dialogue – a homage to George Perec’s novella on the 1960s, Things – it’s a detached and quietly disturbing account of how a generation have had their “inner landscape reconfigured by 20 years of the internet”.