My novel, Toys in Babylon – A Language App Parody and Whodunnit, hits the shelves at midnight. It is a thinly-disguised parody of Duolingo – a popular online learning app.
Briefly, things go horribly wrong when a Duolingo-like company replaces staff with AI so adroitly that its cast of cartoon educators begins thinking on its own. What follows is a madcap romp as the company struggles to put the genie back in the bottle.
It was of course tempting to dwell on what seemingly every other writer obsesses about: Duo’s meme status as an unforgiving curmudgeon. The green owl’s penchant for guilting customers into maintaining or resuming their respective streaks is Topic Number One for nearly every YouTube video, TikTok, article or blog post about Duolingo on the Internet. But not Toys in Babylon.
Instead, I regard the mascot’s easy-to-hate pestering as a public relations feint, a clever marketing diversion – a way to titillate reporters and bloggers while the company struggles and, in many instances, blunders with more momentous issues – including, for example, whether to mothball or terminate dozens of courses, address security breaches effectively, dismiss legions of devoted foreign language volunteers, shutter an otherwise enormous and thriving community forum, erase years of Wiki-like commercial translation exercises, and, more recently, replace huge swaths of contractors with AI.
It is from these latter struggles that Toys in Babylon fills its inkwell. The company I satirize is fictitious, but it should resonate with anyone who has spent time cursing the owl. Happy reading!