Infoquake grew out of my experiences with the dot-com industry of the ’90s.I have spent a dozen years in the trenches of high-tech companies in Washington and Baltimore. I’ve programmed websites for the U.S. Army and the FBI, and taught software to the U.S. Congress and the World Bank.
During this time, I’ve had my share of manipulative bosses like Infoquake’s hero Natch. One boss ordered me to steal electricity from other vendors at tradeshows. Another boss swindled me out of thousands of dollars in sales commissions and fired me when I complained. A third boss flew his entire sales force across the country for a conference, only to tell everyone they were fired. The stories are endless.
So I decided to write Infoquake to provide a grunt’s-eye view of high tech sales, marketing and product development. The book began as a tongue-in-cheek novel called Jump 225.7. The protagonist was a lovable scamp named Natch who had a big problem with authority. My characters drank a beverage called ChaiQuoke, they read opinion pieces from reporters called drudges, and they ran crazy, useless programs like Randomly Generated Pleasurable Startle 37b. I finished the first draft of this novel on September 10, 2001.
You know what happened the next day.
I put Jump 225.7 aside and started over. My dark mood in those days transformed the light-hearted novel into something different altogether. I started asking deeper questions that demanded serious answers. Why are we so driven to acquire more when most of us already have everything we need? Why do we constantly seek to build a bigger, better and faster mousetrap? Is this drive an innate part of human nature? Is it, in fact, wired into the structure of the universe itself?
The end result of these speculations is the Jump 225 Trilogy, starting with the novel Infoquake and continuing with MultiReal and Geosynchron. I hope readers find it to be a unique and challenging mixture of science, business, politics and plain ol’ fun.
Towards Perfection,
David Louis Edelman
July, 2006