Before social media made loneliness public, Douglas Coupland had already imagined people whose emotional lives were being quietly rearranged by screens. ‘Microserfs’, published in 1995 after first appearing in shorter form in Wired, now reads less like a period novel about Microsoft and more like an early field report from the future. Its characters do not doomscroll or curate online selves. They code, obsess, joke, eat badly, live together, and still struggle to feel fully seen.
