TELL ME WHO YOU HATE,
I'LL TELL YOU WHO YOU ARE
Tell me who you hate, I'll tell you who you are
Thomas had an idea. A filthy idea. The kind that makes you billions of dollars rich and envied by everyone. One that pushes aside the codes of morality and ethics, sacrificed on the altar of money. And God knows he would have no shortage of customers.
With the help of Josh and Tasha, this genius young coder creates a smartphone app, The 8 list, which sees the user make a list of eight names. The people he hates the most.
Samuel Beckett, his former boss (and future father-in-law), will be his business angel by investing in the foundation of 8team, Thomas' promising start-up.
The 8 list is now one of the world's largest networks. For better, but mostly for worse! Divorces, harassment, murders... Recluse his 8plex, Thomas is soon accused of all the evils, until he is forced to appear before the Senate. His marriage to Kay suffers, Thomas' world unravels as his app gains millions of haters.
What is the basis of our identity? Our loves or our sorrows? Never have so many human beings been so connected today... And yet so alone.
And what if hate was a business like any other?
Science fiction
Social Criticism
Social Media
Release : october 2022
Format : 14x21cm
Pierre Léauté is an author of novels and an inveterate geek. He weighs a lot in the game, sixty-four kilograms to be exact, a total weight made up of 15% of his skeleton, whose main bones are the metacarpals and phalanges, abnormally strengthened by intensive writing practice for lack of adamantium.
THOMAS VAN PETERS
Founder of 8team and the app, The 8 list. Ambitious computer prodigy. Very affected by the accidental death of his mother in a plane crash and by an absent father, Tobias. Sometimes cunning and manipulative.
Actor: François Civil
KAREN BECKETT
Wife of Thomas, daughter of tycoon Samuel Beckett. Mother of a little girl, Millie, born with a heart defect. Furious that she will not inherit the majority of the shares in the 8team company when her father dies.
Actress: Ana-Taylor Joy
SAMUEL BECKETT
Boss of Fratech and main investor in Thomas' start-up. Underestimates Thomas and resents his relationship with Karen, his beloved daughter. Suffers from terminal cancer.
Actor: Kenneth Brannagh
JOSH RODINSKY
Friend of Thomas and co-creator of The 8 list. Gay and from an orthodox Jewish family. One of the few whose moral compass never wavers. Is clear about the monsters that are Thomas and Karen. Thomas pulls him away from the Board when he sinks into alcohol and drugs.
Actor: Miles Teller
TOBIAS VAN PETERS
Thomas' father. Devoured by the vice of gambling, he abandoned his family shortly after the death of his wife in the late 1980s. Salesman who gave Thomas his first computer. Tries to reconnect with his son, but for money. Tobias will write an unauthorised biography about Thomas.
Actor: David Harbour
ESTELLE VAN PETERS
Thomas' sister. Unable to fly, or keep a guy for more than a few months. Confidant.
Actress: Ludmilla Makowski
CECILE « MACHINE GUN » BERTHOT, POLICEWOMAN
A policewoman who stopped Thomas's career as a delinquent dead in her tracks. She sets him straight, but is seriously injured in a road accident.
Actress: Viola Davis
SHARON BIEHN
Thomas's right-hand woman after Josh is ousted from the board. Public figure in the company, COO of 8team. Torn by moral dilemmas and desperately loyal to Thomas.
Actress: Tessa Thompson
CLAIRE BOROSKA, SENATOR
Chair of a Senate committee investigating the 8leaks, a massive leak of personal data that 8team allegedly covered up.
Actress: Holly Hunter
MARIA
Tom's grandmother. Italian by birth, with a volcanic temper. She took the children, Tom and Estelle, and raised them. Hates three things: clutter, computers and Tobias.
Actress: Valeria Golino
Tom, a young prodigy employee of FraTech, a London computer security company, makes a daring double bet in the same day: leave his lucrative job and his girlfriend, Karen, who is incidentally the daughter of his boss, Sam Beckett. His crazy idea? To launch his own smartphone application. The 8list! The idea of a social network where users would list the names of the eight people they hate the most. Drawn into this adventure in spite of himself, Tom's roommate Josh agrees to lend him a hand. But such a project requires money! And the only investor willing to risk tens of thousands of dollars is none other than Beckett. On one condition... To give him 51% of the future shares. For weeks, Tom, Josh and Tasha, a graphic designer in need of a contract, toil at coding and programming the beginnings of the app. Their progress is rapid and the demonstration of the test version convinces their interested patron. Karen sees Tom again : it turns out that she's not a naïve woman at all.
An enthusiastic GQ journalist published an article: "Bashing, a new Eldorado?" and the 8list gradually became the phenomenon of the moment.
Kay and Tom's fancy wedding in a backwater of Wales, not far from a manor house owned by Sam Beckett. In the cellar of Harlech Hall, his father-in-law tells Tom that when he dies, Karen will inherit everything. Including the application.
2008. Tom founds 8team, the company responsible for managing the ever-growing social network. He moves to California where 8plex, the headquarters of his burgeoning business, is built.
2011. Obama announces the death of Oussama Ben Laden. Good news in the tense context of 8team's IPO.
8team goes from strength to strength. Tom diversifies his customer base towards families and children, while Beckett, consumed by illness, shoots himself in the head. His suicide reveals Tom's dirty trick of taking over the majority of the shares. Tom opens his new villa in Bel Air. Alone.
The kid's version of the app is a huge success, even though many kids cheat and sign up for the adult version. Under the influence of drugs and alcohol, Josh is removed from the board. But then a new scandal breaks, the sinister case of the sequel killer: the noose is tightening around Randall "8" Stern who is aiming at his latest target: a one-year-old child. Karen is worried about Millie and argues with Tom about her. All the hidden resentments come out.
2016.Met Gala: 8team's new COO, Sharon Biehn, announces the creation of a charitable foundation in front of the gotha. Tom and Kay put on a brave face, even though the two have been sleeping in separate rooms on different coasts of the American continent for several years.
8team is about to experience troubled times because of a whistleblower, Barry McLannink, a disgruntled employee who exfiltrates evidence that the company has been covering up the massive loss of personal data. After Trump's election, an investigative committee is formed on Capitol Hill under the leadership of the dreadful Claire Boroska, determined to hear from Thomas. The latter gets out of the public embarrassment, but not without difficulty.
A sniper targets him on his return from Washington. His Ferrari is destroyed by the sniper's fire. He miraculously escapes. The CEO of 8team then sinks into paranoia about the identity of the perpetrator. The CIA? The Russians? Or even... Josh?
2019.Thomas' father, Tobias, publishes an unauthorised biography of his son... The book is a great success. The book dismantles the wheels of Tom's rise. Tom is furious and accuses Josh of not having been careful enough. The two former friends have a harsh exchange of words in London, during which Josh tells Tom that he should beware of Karen, the source of all his problems.
2020.Global lockdown. The company 8team is under attack from Anonymous and a bashing campaign... The share price falls! Who benefits from the crime? Tom ignores the restrictions and joins his wife in Jerusalem, who is staying at the King David Hotel. But he falls into a trap set by Karen.
Tom is forced to commit pseudocide: he appears dead to the world, while Karen takes control of the Board. Thomas Van Peters (his name appears for the first time in the book) is now nothing more than an anonymous recluse on a lost island in Polynesia. A biochip as a leash. The years pass until an unexpected visit from his daughter. Angry at her absent father, Millie uses a word that is devastating to a man once as ambitious as Tom: obsolescence, an illness that is finally catching up with our hero and his app.
The story is surrounded by high technology, smartphones and the internet. It deals with the emergence of start-ups that have become global firms, listed on the stock exchange.
The story takes place in two distinct time frames:
PAST
Brussels or an equivalent European city in the late 1980s. Working class neighbourhood. Thomas Van Peters and his little sister live in their grandmother Maria's small house. Their mother, a flight attendant, recently died in a plane crash. Tobias, the father, sometimes visits his children to give them presents when he is lucky. That's how Thomas gets his first computer. His room becomes a geek's den...
Life is not easy. Thomas makes mistakes. He is a kind of John Connor capable of cracking Skynet at the age of 13, a little computer genius who hacks credit cards. The police catch him. A detective, Cecile Berthot, makes a deal with Maria: to set this damn rascal straight.
After brilliant studies, Thomas meets his future best friend, Josh, in Copenhagen. They both share a passion for coding and start to work together to uncover active flaws for large companies.
PRESENT
Thomas and Josh work at FraTech, which is run with an iron fist by the very rich Samuel Beckett. The London-based company sells its services in cybersecurity, and (the tip of the iceberg) virus creation. While having a secret affair with his boss's daughter Karen, Thomas drops everything and wants to launch an app, the 8list.
His success is growing: he moves to California in his 8plex and lives in Bel Air.
In the story, past and present are intertwined. The whole thing forms a double loop, like a palindrome or a horizontal 'eight'. The story begins with a hero in the midst of a shameless rise to fame for those he crushes or neglects and ends with the other side of the coin as his work and social existence escape him. The first and last scenes are connected.
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