Welcome, friend! There are books that entertain, and then there are books that leave you thinking long after you’ve put them down. Your Behavior Will Be Monitored by Justin Feinstein was exactly that kind of read for me—clever, immersive, and just unsettling enough to make me pause and reflect on the systems shaping our world.
Told through emails, chat logs, and internal documents, the novel follows a copywriter tasked with training an AI to understand and influence human behavior. As I read, I found myself both amused and uneasy, questioning the ethics of surveillance, persuasion, and the human choices driving it all.
I’m excited to welcome Justin to the blog today to talk about writing speculative fiction in a rapidly evolving world, crafting a story through unconventional formats, and what it means to teach a machine how to persuade.
Here is what Your Behavior Will Be Monitored is about:
This compulsively readable novel wrestles with vital questions of our time: sentience, purpose, life, death…and how to make a really good commercial. Told entirely through questionably obtained company emails, chat messages, TED Talks, bot trainings, and more, Your Behavior Will Be Monitored presents an all too plausible near future in which emotionally intelligent AI go up against emotionally stunted humans.
Megacorporation UniView is poised to cement their reputation as “the most trusted name in AI.” After pioneering self-driving and HR bots, UniView is now barreling toward an audacious new launch. That is, if they can pull it off in time.
Enter Noah. A down-and-out copywriter reeling from a midlife crisis, he isn’t the typical hire for a groundbreaking tech company full of brilliant engineers and run by a cutthroat CEO. But Lex, UniView’s Head of HR and one of their greatest successes, makes no mistakes—her algorithm ensures it.
UniView’s latest venture—a bot named Quinn that creates revolutionary personalized advertising—needs expert training. Noah needs to teach Quinn—who is a much better student than he ever could have hoped for—the finer points of consumer motivation and the art of writing a catchy tagline. But when corporate competitors force UniView to accelerate their timeline to market, guardrails around the AI loosen just as Quinn seems to be learning a bit too much.
Addictively readable and ridiculously entertaining, Your Behavior Will Be Monitored is a page-turning, hilarious science fictional romp through the promise and perils of an AI-driven future that we probably deserve.
Get to know the author: Justin Feinstein
Hi Justin! Welcome to Armed with A Book. It is a pleasure to chat with you. Please tell me and my readers a bit about yourself.
Hello! Your Behavior Will Be Monitored is my debut novel, but I’ve been writing for many years (I won’t age myself by saying how many). I’ve also worked as a copywriter and creative director for a long time (first in advertising, now in tech), so writing is a big part of my personal and professional lives. I struggle to find enough time to read, but I play a mean game of Scrabble.
Your Behavior Will Be Monitored takes place in a near future that feels uncannily plausible. What draws you to writing speculative fiction that sits just a few steps ahead of our present rather than in a distant future?
I have much respect for anyone who imagines and writes about the distant future, and consume plenty of those stories, both on the page and screen. But I’ve never felt the urge to create in that space. If anything, it feels daunting.
For me, near-future speculative fiction (or at least the type that I write) is very much intertwined with current/emerging technology. That said, I’m less inspired by the technology itself than how it impacts human behavior, on both micro and macro levels. Speculating about that stuff and then seeing it come to fruition (or not) is fascinating to me, especially with the staggering rate that technology is currently evolving and seeping into so many areas of our lives.
It should come as no surprise that I’m a huge Black Mirror fan.
In your author’s note, you reflect on writing about the near future while the real world of AI is evolving so quickly. How did the rapid advancement of AI affect the way you revised or shaped this manuscript? I ask because I’d love for readers to glimpse what it’s like to write speculative fiction while the technology itself is changing so rapidly.
I started writing Your Behavior Will Be Monitored in early 2022, back when AIwas something people were aware of, but didn’t talk about that much. Then Chat GPT launched that November (when I was about halfway through the book) and suddenly AI was everywhere. It was both exhilarating and terrifying, because I felt a lot of pressure to finish, sell and publish the book, none of which are fast processes. I’ve been fortunate that the deluge of change and technological leaps forward since then haven’t rendered the book obsolete (beyond a few of the smaller edits I reference in my author notes), but I’ve basically spent every day since then with a mild simmering panic when glancing at the headlines. As if the creep of AI isn’t anxiety-inducing enough…
Your Behavior Will Be Monitored unfolds through emails, chat messages, training sessions, TED Talks, and other documents. Was the book always envisioned in this format, or did the structure evolve as you wrote? What challenges and freedoms did this format offer you as a storyteller?
I love this question! I was very much inspired by Several People Are Typing by Calvin Kasulke, which is hilarious, written entirely in Slack, and greatly expanded my conception of what a novel could be. My book started as a chat dialogue between Noah (a copywriter/the pseudo-protagonist) and Quinn (an emotionally advanced bot), which should come as no surprise to anyone who has read it. As I kept writing I realized that incorporating other digital elements (i.e., file types) could help the story grow larger and involve a larger cast of characters, including the company itself. I think I started with emails, then it just kept going from there.
There are definite constraints when working with this format, most notably the lack of exposition, but the deeper I got in the process, the more I discovered ways to guide the reader and sustain momentum. The order of information was crucial – a simple error message could carry a lot of narrative weight, depending on when it occurred in the story and on whose device. It was kind of like putting together a puzzle in reverse. I worked for a long time off just Post-it notes with Sharpie scrawl on a board, similar to how screenwriters “break” a story. It was all very modular and easy to shuffle around.
Quinn begins as a system designed to learn persuasion, but over time she seems to develop a much broader awareness of influence and consequences. When you were writing her arc, how did you think about the line between sophisticated pattern-recognition and something closer to sentience?
Quinn’s growth and blossoming awareness happened very organically. I had a good sense of who she was from the start, at least from a personality/tone perspective, but the more of her dialogue I wrote, the more I felt her yearning for meaning beyond her role (what she would refer to as her “reasons to believe”). I love that she uses hollow advertising tropes and terminology, basically the language at her disposal, as a vehicle to express profound thought, and even act out in frustration. Many readers have stated that she is their favorite character, which warms my heart, since she is (as noted in the book) “just ones and zeros.”
As far as the issue of bot sentience, it’s certainly becoming a hot topic, with many informed opinions well beyond my limited scope. So, far be it from me to weigh in on where it does or doesn’t begin. But I did enjoy imagining how it could happen if it did, and what that might look like. She does, to some extent, follow the classic structure of a monster/machine that outgrows its original intent and develops its own motives, but I’d like to think (hope?) this is a more nuanced take.
When I was writing my thoughts on this book, I was surprised by how much I thought about Lex as both a character and a system—an HR bot whose algorithm seems to understand humans better than they understand themselves. How did you balance making Lex feel both machine-like and strangely human?
So many great questions! Lex was a lot of fun to write. She’s kind of a combination of cold AI precision, vapid corporate HR, and hyper-personalized attentiveness. Of the three bots, she’s probably the most bot-like, in that she expresses less emotion and desire than Quinn and Sam, but she does have a simmering frustration that builds throughout the book. I particularly enjoyed writing the moments where she struggles to interpret basic human behavior (e.g., someone pretending to shoot themself in the head).
While Quinn and Lex initially seem to be the central forces in the story, I found Sam’s arc especially compelling. How did you approach Sam’s character development within a narrative built largely from fragments and correspondence?
I liked the idea of working with an earlier model/less complex bot who finds joy in a simple, repetitive task (i.e., driving employees to and from work). Even though his scenes carry less weight since they aren’t in the office, the casual conversations with employees is a good vehicle (no pun intended) for character development. It was also fun to have him drive around and comment on a future New York – the city I lived in for 13 years that remains a big part of me.
What’s crazy is that I wrote the book before I even knew what Waymo was, and now their cars are everywhere in LA (where I live). I even recorded my book unboxing video in one! So much of Sam’s commentary about the impact of self-driving cars is already coming to fruition, which blows my mind.
Some of the most unsettling moments in the book don’t come from Quinn or Lex, but from the decisions humans make about how to use them—especially when profit and competition enter the picture. When writing the novel, were you more interested in exploring the risks of AI itself, or the risks of the people who control it?
I’ll try to answer this question carefully to avoid spoilers ☺ I was much more concerned with writing a compelling story than highlighting any sort of future warning. So, if anything, the only role that risk played for me was as a narrative tool. There’s definitely a lingering message to the ending, but hopefully it doesn’t come off too heavy-handed.
All that said, as AI development has rapidly accelerated and a lot of what’s in the book has begun to happen already (as opposed to years from now, which was what I initially expected), it has been received as a timely cautionary tale, which I don’t mind. It’s always helpful to have written something topically relevant, and as long as people enjoy the story and characters (which they seem to) I’m happy broadening the conversation about the book. It leads to great interview questions like these, although I always make sure to mention that I’m no AI expert, just a storyteller.
If you could interview Lex, Sam or Quinn, who would you choose—and what would you ask them first?
I would ask Quinn how it feels to know that so many people connect with her story, which I hope would please her.
How do you see the ethical landscape of advertising today, and how might AI complicate it further?
Any ethics in advertising are purely for show, and it’s been that way for a long time, sadly. AI just accelerates and amplifies the preexisting drive for profit and exploitation.
If readers take away one idea or one unsettling situation from Your Behavior Will Be Monitored, what do you hope it is?
Technology isn’t inherently good or bad – it all depends on how we use and regulate it.
I see myself as an essayist as well, so I’m curious: what advice would you give writers who want to develop their voice through essays or nonfiction?
I’m fortunate to be married to a fantastic writing teacher: Julia Fierro, novelist and founder/director of the Sackett Street Writers Workshop, where I began as a student and am now an instructor. Julia does a great job of empowering and inspiring new voices, and I’m happy to amplify her approach and philosophy. She often speaks of how important it is to be vulnerable on the page, which I think is something a lot of beginning writers struggle with. This is especially true for nonfiction/essay writing, without fictional characters to serve as emotional shields.
Sometime writers feel a need to project a certain degree of confidence and/or sophistication, which can get in the way of their more authentic voice and make their writing feel cold or distant. Vulnerability, fears and desires, and all the messiness that comes with them are what draws us in and makes any character, fictional or real, relatable. I think this can even be applied to nonfiction that isn’t first-person or narrative-focussed – something just showing ambiguity or the pros and cons of contrasting viewpoints can make a piece feel more human and less clinical.
Is there anything else you would like to add?
Thanks so much for asking such great questions! This was a lot of fun.
Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me!
Many thanks to Tachyon Publications LLC for connecting me with Justin and providing a review copy of the book for an honest review. Learn more about Justin on his website.
Thank you for joining us! Add this book to your Goodreads now! 🙂 You can read my review here.
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