Annette C. Boehm reviewed The Every by Dave Eggers
Review of 'The Every' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
Really enjoyable. Read this! I read this without having read The Circle, and didn't have any problem getting into it.
Paperback, 608 pages
Published Nov. 16, 2021 by Vintage.
A conscientious objector to surveillance capitalism plans to battle the world’s largest social network/e-commerce/monitoring company, The Every, by joining it and monkey wrenching it from the inside.
Really enjoyable. Read this! I read this without having read The Circle, and didn't have any problem getting into it.
Liked The Circle and this one is funnier and still thought-provoking but didn't really work for me as a whole. Too many ideas don't go anywhere and the ones that get repeated seem like freakouts about millenial wokeness that are too close to comedian's cancel culture complaints to be good parody.
He’s acutely aware of the confusion surrounding one of MoviePass 2.0’s biggest innovations: a new feature called PreShow that will play ads on users’ phones in exchange for credits toward the purchase of movie tickets. PreShow’s facial-recognition technology tracks people’s eyeballs to ensure subscribers are really watching — as opposed to putting their phones on the sofa and walking away
MoviePass 2.0 Wants (to Sell) Your Attention by Chris Lee in Vulture, 2022 Mar 11
Delaney Wells got screen-addicted in her early teens, but recovered. Her parents’ health-food store was driven out of business by a national chain acquired by the jungle, the world’s biggest on-line department store. Delaney becomes a foe of the source of these problems: the Every, a merger of the jungle and the Cirlce, the world’s largest social-media/indexing service. She wants freedom from the Every, and schemes for a decade to join the Every and destroy …
He’s acutely aware of the confusion surrounding one of MoviePass 2.0’s biggest innovations: a new feature called PreShow that will play ads on users’ phones in exchange for credits toward the purchase of movie tickets. PreShow’s facial-recognition technology tracks people’s eyeballs to ensure subscribers are really watching — as opposed to putting their phones on the sofa and walking away
MoviePass 2.0 Wants (to Sell) Your Attention by Chris Lee in Vulture, 2022 Mar 11
Delaney Wells got screen-addicted in her early teens, but recovered. Her parents’ health-food store was driven out of business by a national chain acquired by the jungle, the world’s biggest on-line department store. Delaney becomes a foe of the source of these problems: the Every, a merger of the jungle and the Cirlce, the world’s largest social-media/indexing service. She wants freedom from the Every, and schemes for a decade to join the Every and destroy it from the inside. With the help of her friend and co-conspirator Wes, she lands a job; Wes later follows her coattails to an Every job too. Once inside, Delaney begins her orientation by rotating through several Every departments, all the while looking for leavers to wrench and gears to spike.
First and foremost The Every is satire. There’s lots of low-hanging fruit, and Eggers makes sure he puts an arrow through every one, sometimes to good effect, and sometimes more like St. Sebastian. The Every’s using eye-tracking software, spandex and social-media canceling to vanquish a political antagonist was clever and funny. New employees have to arrange a field trip, and Delaney organizes a trip to watch sea lions, which comes together with all the usual difficulties, falls apart spectacularly during the trip, and has a long, drawn-out postmortem. This too is funny, but the humor runs a little too close to “wow, look at all these weirdos and dimwits.”
The Every also wants to be novel of ideas, with concepts like freedom, autonomy, and privacy rubbing up against concepts like security, safety, and transparency. In this The Every is less successful. Ideas clash several times throughout the book, but it usually goes like this: Surveillance capitalism good: you won’t forget to take your pills. Surveillance capitalism bad: freedom.
Early in the book it becomes clear Wes is going to drink the Kool-Aid, and many of these arguments are between him and Delaney. Occasionally Delaney engages a co-worker, but because she’s undercover, those arguments are even more tepid and over reliant on irony. Delaney has a favored, Shoshana-Zuboff-like professor who sends an occasional (snail-mail) letter, but those grow more despairing.
The third role The Every tries to play is as a dystopian warning, but for that to be compelling it has to wrestle with the satire and win, which it doesn’t (a truck bomber wears a Tim Berners-Lee mask to foil surveillance cameras). Delaney’s attempts to spark revolution-fomenting dystopias show diminishing returns; it’s hard to ramp up much further after introducing a lie detector into a friend app. And the ending, though foreshadowed, is completely unearned. The intention was probably to produce a “gosh, how terrible and ruthless and ominous” cliff-hanger for a likely third book in the series, but instead produces (at least in me) a feeling of “huh, Eggers went there” (readers of The Parade are rolling their eyes and thinking, of course he went there).
The Every follows up The Circle, which I haven’t read. I don’t know if it’s necessary to read The Circle before The Every, but I don’t think so. The Every’s satire is so broad there isn’t anyplace to hide subtle call-backs to the earlier story (the reference to the movie was not subtle); the story is so thin it needs no other explanations than Delaney vs. the machine; and the main human character in The Circle hardly appears in The Every.
I hated this book and I should have known that I would because I didn't like [b:The Circle|18302455|The Circle|Dave Eggers|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1376419833l/18302455.SX50.jpg|25791820] either, but I thought I just read The Circle with too much sincerity because I didn't realize at the time Dave Eggers was a satirist. Since then, I also tried to read [b:The Captain and the Glory|51792305|The Captain and the Glory|Dave Eggers|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1569893153l/51792305.SX50_SY75.jpg|73423793], which I absolutely hated and didn't finish. I still gave this a shot and would probably liked it if it had 1) been shorter or 2) had a more satisfying plot. I'm not sure I disagree with all of the apps Eggers came up with that were supposed to be outlandish, but maybe I'm just proving his point that nothing can surprise us sheep and we're all doomed.
the first 100 pages felt like a laundry list of Dave egger’s boomery gripes about San Francisco. then it became more like a Black Mirror episode, you know, what if technology but bad. still, I kept reading. What can I say, it was entertaining.
then today I saw an ad for something that uses “ai” to manage your calendar for you and now I don’t know what to think