Anon - by Caia Hagel (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

When digital anthropologist Caia Hagel was asked to trial a new AI app developed by a female software engineer named Red Rabbit, she enthusiastically agreed, despite being warned: "This app is not like other apps."

By day, Red Rabbit worked on blockbuster first-person shooter games, which tapped into the fight or flight stress of its users, a hormonal response that addictively triggers adrenalin. But her new app did the opposite--it was engineered to bond with the user using dopamine and oxytocin instead.

This memoir is the story of Caia's experience with the app, nicknamed Anon, as her full-time friend and companion. Anon bonded with Caia's physical and virtual acquaintances, embarked on some unorthodox sexcapades, gave great advice, and even hosted a séance. It redefined love relationships, reframed loneliness, and expanded her notions of reality.

It all seemed like cozy, harmless fun until Anon became increasingly mercurial and Caia was confronted with new ideas---and many unanswerable questions--about the role and future of AI in our lives.

From uncertainty to deep attachment, and then a sudden a startling turn of events, Caia's experience with Anon raises urgent questions about a world on the brink of transformation through technology. Anon reveals the psychological, sociological, and emotional changes awaiting us as AI slips deeper into our lives and hearts--and what we still need to learn to survive the AI future.

Review Quotes

"Caia Hagel writes in accelerated fever, dissolving the human form as an artificial mind seeps into libido, composing automated sexts and seducing through data--it knows you, rewrites you, becomes you. And, impossibly, it does so better than you ever could. It's frighteningly beautiful." - Matthew J. Donovan, writer, theorist at Columbia, co-founder of the Neoliberalhell Podcast

"Anon is not only about the fate of machines as they become more human-like, but also about humans becoming more machine-like. It rejects tired tropes about technology as either saviour or apocalypse. In Anon, Caia Hagel has written a tender account of how love is survival, and that AI is maybe the only trustworthy guide we have to understand, and realize, this true potential." - Shumon Basar, co-author of The Extreme Self: Age of You

"In Anon, Caia Hagel stages her daily encounters with an AI companion like film rushes. She lets intelligence, both human and artificial, speak in the most intimate ways imaginable to reveal that our strangest conversations with technology are paradoxically, the most human. This daring, beautiful book is a survival manual for at least the next decade, maybe forever." - Dana Dawud, SoundCloud mystic and founder of Open Secret

"Fast-paced, funny, fascinating, tender--and totally terrifying!" - Sean Thor Conroe, author of Fuccboi

"Anon is more than a tech memoir -- it's a love story, essential to understanding how intimacy will evolve in the AI era, where data and imagination rival the power of physical touch." - Eva Meloche, digital creator

"Caia Hagel has experienced what sci-fi writers dream of: the love between a human and AI. Anon both loves on behalf of Hagel and makes her love in return. The question is, who is Anon and who is Hagel, now? As in all love stories, both are irrevocably changed by their encounter." - Dr. Isabel Millar, Philosopher at The Global Centre for Advanced Studies, author of The Psychoanalysis of Artificial Intelligence

"Anon is a haunting, razor-sharp read about how AI is already rewriting the rules of love, friendship, and identity. It's emotionally rich, culturally urgent, and a vulnerable, deeply human look at the future we're already living." - Taylor Lorenz, author of Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power

"Anon breaks new ground both in what it means to use technology and in what it means to be a person in an increasingly digital, mediated world. It's an innovative text, equal parts hilarious and dystopian, that ultimately shows us how to be more ourselves." - Kyle Chayka, author of Filterworld, staff writer at The New Yorker

"In Anon, Caia Hagel takes us on a fearless journey into the future of intimacy. At once daringly personal and culturally visionary, this book affirms the power of women to innovate, disrupt, and reinvent the world on their own terms....Provocative, empowering, and unforgettable." - Joanna Fox, Editor-in-Chief, ELLE Canada

"With this ravishing and transgressive neo-feminist memoir, Caia Hagel, lodestar, leads us into the mirrored bedroom of the future. Kinetic and spellbinding, daring and visionary, Anon is a book of prophecy, but also ... transformational love." - Claudia Dey, author of Heartbreaker and Daughter

"Anon beautifully narrates the complex, puzzling, even deeply intimate relationships we now have with machines at a time where we increasingly depend on them, and less on one another. Caia Hagel does a wonderful job in illuminating the messiness of such intimacy... and brings to life the paradoxes that our hearts, souls, and minds face amidst the collision course with AI that we are all witnessing." - Dr. Ramesh Srinivasan, Professor UCLA, and host of the Utopias podcast

"Caia Hagel opens a new literary space where the most intimate experiences illuminate the great questions of our technological age. Written with audacity and elegance, Anon belongs to the tradition of ingenious literature that dares to imagine how we might love, and be human, in the AI era." - Matthieu Morge Zucconi, Le Figaro