The Downloaded

I see a lot of complaints that Sawyer included identity politics and social tropes and whatnot in the book. I don't mind those kinds of things. I often enjoy them! But I think this book took every contentious point of identity/culture/society and jammed them in 200 pages or whatever. And badly. Nearly nothing served the plot (nor the plot them). Points were raised and discarded so quickly it was crazy. We paired a rapey ex-con with anti-vaxxing and other undesirable traits so blatantly that the guy shoulda been twirling a moustache. It was just shoved down our throats. I'm not sure whether Sawyer is on the side of the vaccinations or trans people or robots or whatever as the text would appear to suggest or whether he's actually against all these things and is offering the book up as a kind of straw man.

Aside from all that, there's the rest (small) rest of the book, where we have instantaneous no-delay mind projection via quantum entanglement but it still takes 20 minutes to get a message to Mars (something that was mentioned for no good reason, as a character is apologizing for a delay that the reader never saw nor no characters complained about). Food stays good for improbably long times. Mennonite communities are completely homogenous. Letitia is said to be unable to blush, with no explanation of why. It's just a random fact thrown out about her with no backstory. Does she have a disease?

Oh, and I forgot the extreme February heat in Waterloo. 2 mentions of that. Just "yeah, we thought we were causing global warming, but it's still warm long after we're mostly dead". Nothing else. No explanation. I dunno. Is Sawyer's message "maybe not climate change"? It might not be, but if not, then what is it? Just another weird detail thrown in to be weird?

Characters were flat, with most of them being a name and maybe one trait.

Update
I shouldn't keep coming back, but I keep remembering things and being annoyed.

I feel like the simulation/hibernation was wasted. It was just so 2 groups of people could show up after 500 years? If there was any justice, the Martian would've been running a simulation on these people.

Just so many concepts thrown in a book and nothing done with them.