Or would be, if the white world Lyle starts from made any more sense than the blue world he envisions in his death throes.
The trouble is, the author doesn't understand people at all. When all our base needs are met, when we're secure and healthy, we don't lose all motivation and cease to do anything. We create. Heck, some people create even when they can't afford to feed themselves, because they can't help it. Creating and engaging each other in games, and dance, and song, and stories, and all arts and crafts, is a base human drive. You can't just ignore it.
I mean, sure, some folks will lose themselves in front of the TV or the computer, but that's the exception, not the rule. Most of us here on the ol' Interwebz are using the medium for... you guessed it... creation. Sharing ideas. Communication and engagement.
It's not all positive, of course, but for the purposes of dismantling the logic behind the State of Salt, it doesn't matter. If every person on the planet had Internet access directly implanted in our brains, it wouldn't change the fundamental drive of humans to use their minds to DO stuff. Even dumb stuff. Even horrible stuff.
Brave New World did the socialist-hedonist dystopia better.
Though, granted, it sounds like the dystopia in this book is just an excuse for weird tentacle-monster sex later. Point is, I utterly fail to care. The starting scenario makes no sense, and our protagonist cannot be sympathetic, because the situation he's raging against is unclear and baffles more than it horrifies. His escape from it has no power to move me.
I could almost get into it as a fascinating trip through the wild fancies of a deranged mind, though. Maybe he's a paranoid schizophrenic or something, the State of Salt is white because that's the color of clinic coats and padded walls, and that's the world he sees when he's taking his meds, and he's one of those people who convinces himself that he's not his "real self" when medicated and chooses the familiar delusion over facing up to stark, frightening reality with its confusing rules and expectations. I dunno. It makes more sense than taking the book at its word.
~Neshomeh