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TOMORROW the ebook re-release of my 2010 #YA #SF debut The Unidentified will be available at your favorite online retailer, unless your favorite online retailer is Amazon, because it won’t be there!

https://books2read.com/b/bpJdnq

It’s an experiment in putting out this story as I always intended, revisioned and redesigned (still including THE BEST blurb ever. Thanks @pluralistic !)

The behind-the-scenes saga:
https://raemariz.com/the-unidentified/#intro
(I’ll include full text below for people who hate clicking links)

rae mariz

@raemariz@spore.social replied · 7 hours ago

I first started writing this book in 2004. That was three years before the release of the first iPhone, two years before Twitter launched. Social media and surveillance technology wasn’t as pervasive then as I’d described it in this story. At the time, I thought I was being clever by observing trends and exaggerating for satirical purposes how technology might alter our relationships with each other… now, I don’t know what to think.

rae mariz

@raemariz@spore.social replied · 7 hours ago

Our present social lives are so hypermediated that the descriptions of “online drama” in the book sometimes feel quaint. It’s hard to remember what day-to-day life was like before the ubiquity of those technologies—and a lot of us were there! It’s not even that long ago! I figured the re-release of this edition, fifteen years after publication, could be like opening a time capsule. But since I’d set the story in “the near-future”, it’s a stranger experience than I thought it would be.

rae mariz

@raemariz@spore.social replied · 7 hours ago

While drafting this book, I was in my mid-twenties and deeply involved in a rapidly changing “street art scene”. Posters and stickers. Graffiti and billboard liberation. No one knew if we should be called artists or vandals; I think a lot of us thought of ourselves as both and neither.

Little by little, then seemingly all at once, underground artists started partnering with shoe brands and clothing labels.

rae mariz

@raemariz@spore.social replied · 7 hours ago

The aesthetics of street art were suddenly big business, and there was competition to get gallery shows and appeal to art collectors. Very few of these guys (they were predominantly men, yes) ever saw this commodification of their art as “selling out”, that there was anything to be lost from allowing one’s form of self-expression to become a decorative addition to a commercial logo.

rae mariz

@raemariz@spore.social replied · 7 hours ago

Witnessing the shift, I thought of the people even younger than I was who would be growing up in a world where there wasn’t even a counterculture pushing back against these mainstream ideas of what “success” looks like. Just a pervasive culture grooming kids to be young entrepreneurs who could monetize their personal brand.

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