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A daily record of what I'm thinking about what I'm reading

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Monday, March 23, 2020

Story "Out There" in current New Yorkee - no spoilers here - w/ an ambiguous ending

The story Out There, by presumably young and not widely published author Kate Folk, in the current New Yorker, is a bit of a puzzle; I'm pretty sure I get the abrupt conclusion, but she leaves some ambiguity in place, intentionally. I won't give anything away - but - I have to say I could see the conclusion coming from miles away, at least if I'm right about what the last segment means. The story is from the POV of a young woman who has had a lot of bad luck and bad breaks in her life, particularly in relationships; she ventures out for the first time into the "out there" world of on-line matchmaking - at which point Folk throws in a twist that puts us into the future, though maybe not that far into the future: the online-dating world is replete w/ what are known as "blots," robot guys who look exactly like handsome young men and who are programmed to speak and interact, though their actual purpose is eventually to steal all the encrypted info from the woman they're "dating" - in other words a next-dimension step above Siri and Alexa, but aimed at women specifically. Maybe not that different than the risks already in place w/ online dating or of using the Internet, right? The first gen of these blots didn't work so well because the "men" were so "nice" as to be spotted and outed and dumped pretty quickly. The next gen behaves more typically like a young guy, making them even harder for women, like the narrator in this story, to spot and to dump. And it makes it harder for us as readers to interpret the character: a guy who's clumsy w/ personal conversation or a machine programmed to be so? That's as far as I'll go w/ this story/this post, but am wondering how others might interpret the final scene.

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