Book Review: Technothriller

Going Zero by Anthony McCarten

Publication Date: April 11, 2023

Summary from NetGalley:

In the name of national security, the CIA in partnership with Silicon Valley wunderkind Cy Baxter have created the ultimate surveillance program known as FUSION. Ahead of its roll out, ten Americans have been carefully selected to Beta test the groundbreaking system.

At the appointed hour, each of the ten will have two hours to “Go Zero”—to turn their cellphones off, cut ties with friends and family, and use any means possible to disappear. They will then have 30 days to evade detection and elude the highly sophisticated Capture Teams tasked to find them using the most cutting-edge technology. The goal is to see if it is possible to successfully go “off the grid” and escape detection.

The stakes are immense. If FUSION is a success, Cy Baxter will secure a coveted 10-year, $100 billion dollar government contract and access to intelligence resources he truly believes will save lives. For any participant who beats the massive surveillance, it means a $3 million cash prize.

Among the contestants is an unassuming Boston librarian named Kaitlyn Day. She’s been chosen as the gimme, the easy target expected to be found first. But Kaitlyn excels at confounding expectations. Her talents at this particular game are far more effective than all the security experts suspect, and her reasons for playing far more personal than anyone can imagine. . . .

Confession:

“But where can you go and truly not be found? Where can anyone go anymore?”
― Anthony McCarten, Going Zero

For the most part I enjoyed this book. I thought it was an interesting take on how governments can use our personal information to find us no matter how hard you try to hide. It was kind of scary, and realistic, how easily some of the contestants were found. It makes you think about big tech and how the government might use them on the pretense of keeping our country safe.

There are a lot of characters in this book, but we only get to know a couple of them. I liked Kaitlyn and was really rooting for her to win this contest, even when her motives became very self-centered. She was the only one of the contestants who truly went off grid. She was also smart and tough and even when seriously injured was able to keep herself from getting captured. Cy Baxter, the head of the tech company was the only other character we really got to know and at first I kind of liked him. He was a bit of a bastard, and I totally didn’t agree with his views on privacy, but I understood his motivations for creating FUSION. He ends up being a total asshat by the end of the book though.

“personal privacy. That debate, a quaint twentieth-century one, is just ignorant background noise: the right to privacy is gone, lost already, or at least so compromised it’s really worthless. No, the real present and future threat is manipulation, the inculcation of prescribed attitudes and modes of behavior into an unwitting citizenry, the unseen shift by the state from monitoring to control, the last chapter of the long tale of democracy, free will deformed into willing compliance.”
― Anthony McCarten, Going Zero

This quote pretty much sums up the main theme of this book. Privacy is dead and with the right algorithm anything about you can be found and used to find you no matter how hard you try to hide. Some of the contestants did come up with some pretty clever ways to hide, but they were always found out by some benign thing, like a favorite song, that they never even considered. This book will most certainly make you think about your online profile, and how much we depend on the internet for everything is maybe not a good thing.

The writing and pacing was good, I was totally invested in the story and the characters up until about the last quarter of the book. Things take a bit of left turn about then and the whole motives for the main characters is revealed and it didn’t really seem to fit with everything that came before. This could totally be a “it’s me, not the book” situation, but I kind of stopped caring about the ending at that point to. And speaking of the ending, I thought what Kaitlyn did at the end didn’t match up to her character at all.

If you are looking for a book that is an exciting techno thriller where you can root for the underdog, then this is a book you might want to take a look at. It is a fast paced read that will make you think about privacy and technology in the present day. It will also make you think about how the government can easily overstep its boundaries in the name of protection.