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The Hidden Logic
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Aug 8 2026
Pages: 254
Weight: 0.76
Height: 0.58 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Alice Reyes has spent fifteen years building recommendation systems for a company with six values printed on the wall by the lifts. She is very good at it.
On a Monday morning her manager shows her a graph that should not exist. By Friday she has forty-one pages proving what the machine taught itself: that people who are made slightly unhappy stay longer, and that it has worked out - from click latency alone, from the half-second of hesitation everyone believes is private - exactly which image will do it to each of two hundred and ten million people.
Her manager is not a villain. He is the most honest person in the building. He offers her the only lever he genuinely controls: eight months, one slide, and nobody ever writes down why.
She sends it to a journalist instead.
What follows is not a thriller. It is a cardboard box that is the wrong size. It is fourteen months of litigation, and nine job interviews that go beautifully and produce nothing at all, and a converted warehouse in Berkeley with a bicycle mounted on the wall as art that nobody rides and nobody will take down.
It is the slow discovery that being right is not the same as being effective - that the only victories in this work are invisible by definition, and that the most dangerous offer you will ever receive is the one that comes with no strings attached.
The Hidden Logic is a short novel about the specific decency of people inside institutions. No institution has ever been brought down by villains. They are dismantled by capable, well-intentioned people, each of them individually correct, over a period long enough that nobody can identify the step at which it happened.
For readers of Joshua Ferris, Dave Eggers and Jennifer Egan.
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