Bit Rot

Douglas Coupland's new book Bit Rot is published on the occasion of his eponymous exhibition at Witte de With, Rotterdam in autumn/winter 2015/16 (11 September 2015 - 3 January 2016).The book combines fictional short stories with essays, and creates a parallel narrative to the exhibition itself: pieces in the exhibition become materializations of words, and some of the words in this book are a dematerialization of objects in the show.Bit Rot addresses subjects such as the death of the middle class, the rise of the Internet and its impact on our lives, and in short, evinces a shedding of twentieth-century notions of what the future is and could be.The book is named after a phenomenon in digital archiving that describes the way digital files of any sort spontaneously (and quickly) decompose. It also describes, Coupland explains, the way his brain has been feeling since 2000.