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I am a fan of Coupland and I have read everything he has ever published, but it is clear after reading Jpod that he's been in Vancouver too long and needs to get out for a weekend, if only to try another city's dope and take-out. Jpod is supposed to be the sequel to Microserfs, but Coupland wastes this one hunting-and-pecking for Gen Y/Echo Boom culture like a noob coder; he doesn't see that the map is not the terrain. So what if the main character's Mom is growing and selling weed, Dad is dating his son's classmates, and his boss is being manipulated by a billionaire Asian criminal? Sure it's shocking, but is this the zeitgeist, or just, "Extreme Vancouver?" Coupland needs to look beyond the electronic globe his own character creates (he writes himself into the book and creates an interactive-globe killer app that saves the group from techie overwork and under-compensation); that metaphor for an impersonal electronic world fails because his characters never break through as real people with any purpose. Gen Y's struggle to assert "authorship", i.e. identity in a world where society = electronic gaming, should have been inherent in the characters' personal lives and struggles; instead, Coupland builds them with thin and obvious devices like everyone playing the "what-superpower-would-you-have" game. In the end, I am not sure this story or these characters matter, and I think they may as well not have been. Phooey, Doug, Phoeey I say! Has the well run dry?