DON QUIXOTE OF LA MANCHA, CALIFORNIA: A Novel of Delusion, Algorithms, and Windmills

A Novel of Delusion, Algorithms, and Windmills

Don Donald Quixón was once a perfectly reasonable software product manager from La Mancha, California — a suburb forty minutes southeast of Los Angeles, notable for its In-N-Out Burger and little else. Then he discovered podcasts. Then YouTube manifestos. Then three subreddits and a Telegram channel that pinged at 3am.

Having consumed more internet content than any human mind was designed to process, Don Donald arrives at an inescapable conclusion: the world is broken, no one is doing anything about it, and he — Knight of the Digital Age, riding his twelve-mile-per-hour electric scooter — is the man to fix it.

What follows is one of the funniest, most painfully accurate satires of the internet age ever written. Accompanied by his squire Sancho Panza-Lopez — an eternally optimistic, taco-eating car wash employee who joined the quest partly for friendship, mostly for the promised podcast network — Don Quixón wages war on surveillance windmills along the I-10, attempts to liberate Amazon fulfillment center workers via a 27-tweet thread, battles the Algorithm from a Chick-fil-A parking lot in Fontana, and dedicates all his adventures to the memory of a UX researcher in Culver City who has entirely forgotten he exists.

Brilliantly structured as a modern reimagining of Cervantes' immortal classic, Don Quixote of La Mancha, California is funny, and then sad, and then funny again. It is a novel about delusion and friendship, about the human need for meaning in a meaningless feed, and about what happens when a man in his fifties realizes that fighting windmills — even fake ones, even wrong ones — is better than optimizing one more roadmap.

A satirical novel for anyone who has ever doomscrolled their way to a manifesto.