Josh Riedel’s “Please Report Your Bug Here” takes place in Silicon Valley in the early 2010s. As the author was an early employee of Instagram and his debut novel, which comes garnished with advertising commentary from skeptics of literary technology, is framed as a diaristic exhibition, we are prepared for a satire of high risk and close to the bones. And yet this is not exactly the world we know.

The technology, for one thing, is more advanced. Ethan, a recent art history student working for a new dating app called DateDate, explains that one of the app’s best features is its “mood detection technology”…