A new sensation is sweeping across America. An app called Liv is matching people with corpses through a Tinder-like interface. The kids are crazy for it, and a lot of people stand to make a lot of money off of it. But Tom, a venture capitalist who is unwittingly pulled into the fray, despises it. Auden, the company’s founder, just wants to share his hobby with the world. And in between them is Mara, Auden’s stepsister and girlfriend, whom Tom becomes entranced by. But can they navigate a love triangle while surviving the insane new world of the corpse market?
I will be discussing major plot spoilers in this piece; you have been warned.
In our modern era, we’ve been exposed to some pretty wild concepts through the ubiquity of phones and our instant access to app-supplied dopamine rushes tailored to eat our time and resources. We have cryptocurrencies, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), Facebook, LinkedIn, LLMs disguised as Artificial Intelligence, along with everyone’s new favorite craze, sports betting and prediction markets. But there is one we all recognize: online dating. Not a novel concept by the time smartphones and the 2010s internet got their hands on it, but one that has become a part of the cultural lexicon as a rotating roulette where participants could “swipe” left or right based on their interest in the profile the algorithm serves them. So what if, instead of people or items in a shop, you could match with a corpse? That’s the question asked by For Human Use that never truly gets answered. The characters through which the story is viewed never actually engage with the app itself, nor are they particularly fond of the experience it tries to sell, minus the “visionary” Auden pioneering the concept. But even he doesn’t really seem to have as much of a connection beyond his own hobby of embalming corpses. Yeah, a hobby. Not his job, occupation, profession, or even vocation, his fucking hobby.
So, how does it become a sensation within the world of For Human Use? Well, it just does. Nobody knows why, but the youth are ecstatic about it. They post pictures on social media posing with their corpses. A trend starts where they start wearing bags over their own head, along with the corpse asking their followers to guess which one is the dead one. Liv’s media team latches onto it, promoting their users to keep it going. Anyone under 18 isn’t even supposed to be able to make an account, but there aren’t concerns by those in the company that parents are doing it for their kids. It all blows up in their faces when an incredibly popular teenager kills herself for the bit with an executive accidentally applauding the work, only to find out she never had access to the corpses in the first place, always posing with her alive friends. But is there an outcry? Eh, kind of, not really; things keep spinning out of control, and it’s because the youths just can’t stop, and Liv and its financial backers are willing to keep the cash cow mooing.
Financially, the company seems to be a hit. We never really learn what it costs the customer, though, or how the corpses are acquired. It all just sort of comes together as people are pumping millions and billions of dollars into it. Tom, a financial bloodhound, does some major sleuthing and discovers that laws are being broken in terms of how the company represents itself to investors, the SEC, and the public. His boss doesn’t really want to hear all that much about it, taking a wait-and-see approach, seeing Tom’s frustrations as a personal fixation on Auden and not seeing the forest for the trees. So when Tom makes a fool of himself, he has to get fired and get recruited by a financial activist who wants Tom to manage a fund designed to take down Liv. So they start shorting the corpse market to fund PACs designed to elect people to regulate Liv. It plays the long game, extending both the page count and the endurance of my patience.
But let’s take another step back, because besides the fact that the book spends a, in my opinion, heinous amount of time on financial lingo (coming from someone whose comfort movie is The Big Short), it’s not really about that either. It’s about a love triangle between Tom, Auden, and the founder’s stepsister/girlfriend, Mara. A frankly astonishing amount of the book is conversations between Tom and his poker buddies about how to approach Mara after they link up on a dating app after an awkward encounter earlier. They discuss the rules he should follow to show that he’s interested, but not too interested. Signs he needs to look out for to see that she is interested, but not too interested. And Tom has to walk a fine line with this relationship because the fact that Auden and Mara are step-siblings is not super public, and to be fair, it was for only about a year or two in their late teens. The whole dynamic is messy and not in the “grab your popcorn” kind of way. It just feels like more juice was being squeezed out than the lemon had to give. It led to extremely contrived plot points that acted like roadblocks for character development. I couldn’t even root for the love story because it just felt so far-fetched.
I can hear y’all saying right now, “but Alex, why the fuck are we even talking about this book?” Honestly, I feel like I just have to get this one off my chest. No matter how much I try to avoid thinking about it, it surfaces like some psychopathic dolphin to remind me it’s there before diving down to the depths to do the crazy things dolphins do. For Human Use bites off way more than it can chew by trying to be about everything in the tech/finance relationship we see playing out on our feeds. I know Cole is our resident Avatar lover, so let’s throw him a bone. Liv is the Avatar for every social ill we try to ascribe to the growing influence of big tech in American society. It is the “master” of the four elements, killer apps, runaway finance, the breaking of a social taboo, and the now dread media commentary. The representation of Liv is so bloated it can be read as dating apps, LLM/AI, gambling apps, and any sort of fad that makes adults say “kidsamirite?” It’s almost afraid to be about something so it ends up being about nothing.
You could try to argue that this is a satirical nature of the narrative, that all of these things are overblown big tech and finance fantasies, but it fails to put any nails in the coffin. The financial conversations are so detached from the reality of the story, filled with increasingly indecipherable technobabble as the corpse market takes over and discussions of actual numbers disappear into the aether like asset values after a bad quarterly earnings report. We hear that the whole stock market starts to get pulled into the future of Liv, mirroring the way that most of today’s GDP is reportedly tied up in the build out of data centers for LLMs/AI. I am somewhat sympathetic to the idea that this is about runaway AI and the delirium it causes for everyone involved whether you’re chatting with an angel or sure you’re about to revolutionize the way people work by burning hundreds of billions in a furnace. But Auden, despite coming off as a big tech huckster salesman who has no fucking clue what he’s talking about in the first half, starts being portrayed as a misunderstood genius whose idea got away from him as money and the youth got involved. But we never actually see what he was trying to do. He never explains himself. The most I could come up with is some bastardized version of the wonderful Caitlin Doughty’s attempts at reconnecting us with the concept of death, but it is virtually non-existent within For Human Use.
Something that I keep coming back to try and defend the book is that the ridiculous insanity that spins out of control is the point. But the book tries to have its cake and eat it too by having the world spin out of control around “normal” people who just happen to be exposed to a shit ton of money all the time. The book flirts with the idea that necrophilia could be happening, but never really looks it in the eye, always a sideways smirk like “what if, ya know, someone did?” It’s a running joke. It doesn’t really explain the economy behind the corpse production. Is Liv buying them? Are people donating them? Is it a black market that becomes a legitimate market? Its narrative and themes almost mirror the ludicrous nature of the tech and finance relationship we’ve watched play out over the years. Almost like the book realizes that it needs to move fast and break things to keep the reader’s interest. Not only is the corpse market a surface-level examination, but we get: online dating, step-sibling relationships, love triangles, pedophilia (yeah…this would require a whole thing and frankly I’m tired), divorce tensions in business, #metoo, suicide, finance in politics, NGOs, revolution, and social media infiltrating the traditional media. It just doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be about besides Tom and Mara, with a little Auden sprinkled in as a treat.
Where it becomes necessary to write about it for me is that I just don’t like sloppy satire that targets everyone except for the people making money off of it. It tries to take a whack idea to its limits and hits the wall early. For Human Use wants to be X, the everything app. And honestly, its greatest crime is that it does emulate it: it’s completely devoid of humor.
Rating: For Human Use – Let the rigor mortis set in on this one.
-Alex