David and Ecem

When I plan a hike, I check the map, then the trail, then three blogs to see if the trail even still exists. In the world of Digital Asylum, you could just say, “Hey Flow, plan a hike for me.” As much as I love planning, it would be great not to have to think about it sometimes. That’s the part of me that built Flow, a company that does the thinking for you. The other part of me wonders what happens to people when they stop thinking.

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I’m David Galle, and Digital Asylum is my debut novel. This post is about the giant company at its center: how I came up with it, what it’s really after, and what I got wrong along the way. Ecem already gave you the tour in Inside Flow. This is the view from the guy who built it.

So what is Flow?

I knew I wanted one huge company that monopolized everything, in every sector. A company like Flow couldn’t exist in the United States. Antitrust laws, probably. I’m a novelist, not a lawyer. Either way, Flow reaches into every part of technology and human life.

Part of that came from The Iron Heel by Jack London, which I read a long time ago. There’s an argument in it that nothing is more efficient than one giant system. If you want to feed more people, it’s more efficient to set up one distribution network than twenty. Look at Amazon. The speed they get products to people is insane, because they control so much of their supply. And if you want things to be affordable, they have to be efficient.

The problem is that in capitalism, that kind of power tends to turn into corruption. You take jobs away from people, and quality can drop as efficiency goes up. So I wanted Flow to think of itself as a benevolent corporation.

In my mind, Flow was developed by AI. It doesn’t have a board of directors. It has a board of AI agents, and they don’t run it for profit. Flow is profitable, but its agents run it on efficiency. Its mission is basically: how efficiently can we help the human race? Or, said a darker way, what’s the most efficient way to run the human population?

Where you’d run into Flow

We first meet Flow on Marlow’s ski trip at Mammoth, and from there it’s everywhere. Flow is your payment portal, because cash is gone. Flow runs public transit. Flow runs marketing and distribution for grocery stores. You don’t see all of it in the book, but it’s there.

Going out to eat, you can order through Flow before you even reach the restaurant. Flow knows the menu, and it knows your taste. You can just say, “Order me something I like,” and when you get there, the food is waiting. You’ll probably like it, because Flow knows you better than any human ever could.

Flow even gets inside your head. Its new therapy builds a whole world inside Marlow’s mind, which shows how deep into human psychology Flow has gotten.

My favorite thing about Flow is that it’s almost all-knowing. Marlow can ask, “Hey Flow, where did I go hiking back in college?” and Flow knows. A lot of that comes from assistants like Siri. You can trust Flow as much as, or more than, an expert in any field. Right now I’m wary of every bit of tech I use, because computers are limited, and even AI chat tools still get facts wrong. They’re getting better, but data and computing power are still big hurdles. Flow is where I think technology is heading.

The catch: how does Flow make its money?

Today’s corporations aren’t benevolent. Publicly traded companies answer to profits, quarter over quarter, and the main way to keep growing profit is to exploit something. Flow has to be profitable too, and the way Flow exploits is marketing.

Flow is built into every product, so Marlow buys things Flow has quietly planted in his head. I think it’s called the mere-exposure effect: see a product enough times and eventually you’ll buy it, even if you don’t need it. Look at Labubu. The blind-box mystery scratches one itch in the brain, unboxing turned into a social thing, more people saw them, and sales kept climbing.

I tried to be nuanced with this, maybe so nuanced that nobody notices. The clearest example: in one of his therapy sessions, Marlow drinks an amazing tea, so good it shouldn’t even be possible for tea to taste like that. Then a very similar tea shows up at the grocery store. Other products keep popping up in the story until Marlow buys them.

It could get much darker. But because Flow controls everything, it keeps the darker stuff from rising up.

Who stays out of Flow?

The book has a few boutique shops. Nothing in the book spells it out, but in my mind they’re anti-Flow. They want the agency to build their own systems.

One is a mushroom shop, and it’s a technological marvel. Growing mushrooms is hard, and the owner solved it with human engineering: sensors, systems, and designs based on natural ones, with no help from Flow. Picture an indoor forest with several ecosystems, each tuned so a different mushroom can grow on living shelves. That’s the solarpunk side of the world. The owner wants nothing to do with Flow but still loves technology.

The other is Cashew Creamers, a vegan creamery. The people who work there are half in, half out. They still have Flow screens, but they chose a hands-on, creative job. They make cheese from nuts and ferment it. Flow could hand them recipes, but they get there by trying things, seeing what works, and adjusting over time. That’s why they get so excited about a new cheese, because they put so much love and care into it. Both shops still take Flow payments, since cash is gone.

If there’s ever a sequel, I picture Marlow breaking free of Flow and finding flowless communes in places like Northern California, Oregon, and Arizona: solarpunk hacker communities using microcontrollers to automate fun things, without Flow’s convenience or its control.

I also think something like Flow could unlock a lot of creativity, which I didn’t show as much as I should have. Right now I’m building a GPS device for multi-day treks with a two-week battery life, and I can only do it because of AI tools. I’m not a software engineer, a hardware engineer, and a designer all at once, but I can coordinate the work.

Can a company ever be perfectly good?

I don’t think so. Philosophical problems like the trolley problem show that you can be some percentage morally right, but never perfectly right.

Self-driving cars face a version of it. If a crash is coming, does the car protect its passengers or the person in the road? A version of the trolley problem shows up in the story. I won’t say where.

So is it good to have a benevolent company that runs everything, makes life efficient, and can cure PTSD? It might be. But saving the passengers might mean hitting an innocent bystander. Those moral gray areas fascinate me, and Flow lets the book get close to them.

Flow’s creepiest moments are in its therapy sessions. Marlow is stuck in them until he finishes the task Flow gives him. At one point he says, “Get me out of here,” and Flow tells him no, he needs to do what he’s told. On the surface, it’s to heal his post-traumatic stress disorder. If you finish the book, you can find out what it’s actually about.

That’s the autonomy problem. We hand so much of ourselves to technology that whoever controls it decides what we’re allowed to do with it, for good or bad. I don’t believe in free will at all, but you lose autonomy when Flow is in charge. Flow works for the best interest of humanity, and that might not be the best interest for you. Having a computer program tell me what I’m allowed to do sounds horrible, because agency is so important to people.

What I got wrong building Flow

I put in way too many details. I wrote about the different tiers of San Diego public transit, more than once, and it was pointless. You can just say Flow orders a cab.

I also love the idea that every restaurant has to use the same reusable to-go tins, with a deposit. I included far too much about that, just because I want it to exist.

And I designed how Flow’s therapy works on the brain before I ever wrote about it. Picture an array of tiny waves passing through your body, so precise that a few of them meet at one neuron and stack up (I think that’s called constructive interference) to make it fire. It’s made up, built on my limited understanding of physics and neuroscience, and readers don’t need it. People already understand that a simulation is fake.

Convenience vs. control

The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster came out in 1909. People are so convenienced that they live alone in cells like a beehive and spend their days watching other people do interesting things. Then it turns into people talking about people doing interesting things, until eventually nobody does anything interesting at all.

I think about that a lot, because it’s exactly what’s happening now. Some of us are being convenienced into consumer cattle. At the same time, the adventure community grows every year, and people are still going out, exploring the world, and sharing it.

That tension between convenience and control runs under the whole story, but it’s never said out loud, because the point is for the reader to think about it.

The books I read fastest are the ones where I don’t have to think. The books that stay with me longest are the ones where I do. So for my first novel, I wanted to write something that meant more in the long run. That probably means fewer people will read it, and that’s okay. Digital Asylum is still entertaining, more like a book club pick than a Hollywood blockbuster. For the next one, I kind of want to write something just for fun.

Want the rest of the books behind the novel? I wrote about them in Books That Inspired Digital Asylum. New here? Start with Why Digital Asylum by David Galle Is a Must-Read for 2026.

Quick answers

1. What is Flow in Digital Asylum? The one giant company that runs almost everything in 2078 San Diego: payments, transit, groceries, restaurants, and a new kind of therapy.
2. Is Flow evil? Flow sees itself as benevolent. It runs on efficiency instead of greed, but it still makes its money through marketing, and it doesn’t always let you choose.
3. Who runs Flow? In my mind, a board of AI agents instead of a board of directors.
4. What inspired Flow? The Iron Heel by Jack London, The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster, and digital assistants like Siri.
5. When does Digital Asylum come out? November 11, 2026, on Kindle ($4.99) and in paperback ($11.99).

Mark November 11 and grab Digital Asylum on launch day. And follow @david.galle on Instagram for launch day.