"You may have my time, my eyes, my dopamine, my data, my children's sleep cycles. But what's inside, the smallest and last and most defended part of me, is mine."
January. Brooklyn. Lea Valmont steps off a plane carrying a duffel bag and the documentary record of what her former employer - one of the largest platforms in human history - chose to do with what its own internal studies showed. Across the East River, a seventeen-year-old senior at Stuyvesant High School scrolls a feed that has been timing his loneliness for years. In a hospital room no one knows about, a philosopher writes a single sentence in a notebook she will leave to a stranger she has never met: What's inside is mine.
That sentence returns four times in this book. In a Brooklyn apartment in the dark. In a Senate hearing room. On a bench in Brooklyn Bridge Park. At the bottom of a notebook left as inheritance. Each time, it costs more.
WHAT'S INSIDE IS MINE - The Predation Novel is sixteen chapters of fiction built on a foundation of fact. Every scene rests on a public source: the internal Meta studies surfaced by Frances Haugen, the British coroner's inquest into the death of Molly Russell, the complaint filed by forty-two state attorneys general, the testimony of a boy who switched off his phone in front of a Senate committee while a country watched.
The book argues a thesis its predecessor missed. If you are not paying for the product, you are the product is brilliant and incomplete. It misses the part that hurts. The customer is not the product. The customer is the prey. Predators model their prey, second by second, to optimise capture. That is the difference between an industry and a hunt.
This is also a polyphonic experience. Ten original songs preceded the prose. Sixteen chapters, sixteen sonic returns. Each chapter opens with a QR code: read the prose alone, listen first, or synchronise the two so the last sentence and the last note arrive together.
Lea has the documents. Nolan has the courage to put the phone down. Sister Inez Castello has the sentence that turns into a movement. The platform has lawyers, lobbyists, and the patience of every algorithm that has ever waited for a teenage girl to feel ugly at three in the morning.
For readers of The Circle by Dave Eggers, The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff - and anyone who has handed a phone to a child and felt, for half a second, the shape of something wrong.
A literary thriller. A documentary brief. An album. A bilingual edition (English and French). Sixteen chapters. Ten songs. And a single sentence that may be the last line of defence we have left.
By the last page, you will know where the line is.
WHAT'S INSIDE IS MINE PLAY LISTBIENVENUE: https: //youtube.com/shorts/xghkm8jgBtc?feature=share SCROLL DOWN: https: //www.youtube.com/shorts/Q7C80ZoaD_4 SCROLL DOWN V02: https: //youtube.com/shorts/S0LU5oDujwE?feature=share LE PRODUIT C'EST TOI: https: //youtube.com/shorts/voufk1gUAvY GLASSHOUSE: https: //www.youtube.com/shorts/H8LcNoNX7Ro PETITS ECRANS, GRAND DEGATS: https: //youtube.com/shorts/4M8Wt78th5w PETITS ECRANS, GRAND DEGATS V02: https: //youtube.com/shorts/W8c_k51XCOQ PHANTOM TOUCH: https: //youtube.com/shorts/YQdZ0KR0XkQ PHANTOM TOUCH2: https: //youtube.com/shorts/lxEt7SfmomQ SICK & STUPID: https: //youtube.com/shorts/3lShV3SlOYE DEBRANCHEE: https: //youtube.com/shorts/1qkLJTS3o2Y DEBRANCHEE V02: https: //youtube.com/shorts/-PzQyftlrGY HUMAN CODE V01: https: //youtube.com/shorts/wXI8A2YpXpM HUMAN CODE V02: https: //youtube.com/shorts/t6Tfc9rztFQAUBE NOUVELLE V01: https: //youtube.com/shorts/pUw8pFuLk4g AUBE NOUVELLE V02: https: //youtube.com/shorts/XI-HFRaZ0kU