Good satire is hard to find. The absurdity of modern life accelerates and mutates so rapidly that satire often tells a joke just as we’ve tired of laughing at it. Then there is the tendency to satirize reality not as one finds it but as one finds it easiest to criticize. Novel trends and dangers are ignored in favor of old bogeymen or else pinned on scapegoats. The latter is nowhere truer than in satire of technological progress.

It is a relief, then, that Mary South’s new collection of short stories, You Will Never Be Forgotten, never flinches from an uncomfortable truth: We often invite and abet the conditions we claim to despise. Her stories unfold in a grotesquely comic projection of our technological society, peopled by online trolls, content moderators, deranged fanboys, clones, and a ghost in a machine (a cellphone, of course). But it’s very much about us and how our motivations create feedback loops with our technologies.