Feed

What a disturbing book. It portrays teens in a future where consumerism run amok has destroyed the planet and all human decency. Computers have been implanted into people's bodies so that they can have a continuous feed of news, gossip, product information, advertising, and generally distracting trivia. A kid meets a girl who is different; she wants to be normal, but she also wants poetry and nature and life, all of which are incompatible with people's one and only purpose: consuming. Soon you realize that the constant attention to things and gossip has not only brought out the worst in teens, they are merely acting on the decisions adults have made. Among the creepy things - meat is raised artificially, great giant, dripping walls of it. School (TM) has been privatized and is pretty much where we're headed only worse..People are getting lesions because of the toxicity of their world. These become fashionable, though clearly people are falling apart, quite literally. Any solution that isn't profitable is out of the question, though it seems there will soon be a world revolt against the United States,which has brought on environmental collapse. Perhaps the most disturbing thing of all is that people are mostly passive - and the shallowness is really scary. Stunningly inventive, brutal, and thought-provoking. Not a good cure for insomnia. Whew, what a horrifying story - and amazing that it was written before Facebook launched. This pairs interestingly with Dave Egger's The Circle, which depicts a future that's about ten minutes from now.

I'm trying to get a fix on why like I didn't, you know, like this thing, this book too much. Everyone says its meg brag but it just felt maybe a little disconnected like the time when I went a whole day without checking facebook? And then when I checked nothing had really happened and nobody had messaged me and I was going all like "What nobody messaged me" and then my friends were all like "What we would've messaged you but you didn't message us" and everyone was wondering why I was going all mal over it...

When my ex-wife and I first started dating, she made me dinner one night using her grandmother's macaroni and cheese recipe. The recipe called for 3 tablespoons of flour; my ex-wife put in 3 cups. This book is kind of like that: It has the right ingredients, but not in the right proportions. I wanted to like it right from the beginning, I really did. But ultimately, it never quite rises above its own cleverness. "OMG people aren't paying attention to IMPORTANT things! The world is DOOMED and we're doing it to ourselves!" It's basically 300 pages of old-codgery-ness disguised in made-up young'un's speak.

Feed presents a world in which people are bombarded with advertisements and consumed with consumerism, while they ignore the various social, political and environmental situations going on around them. Part of the problem is that such a view does not extrapolate the current situation of social feeds in any meaningful, or in my opinion accurate, way. For goodness's sake, I can hardly look at Facebook, Twitter, Feedly or LinkedIn (or even Goodreads) without being reminded of the many — often conflicting — social, political and environmental situations that everyone else wants me to be concerned about. To be ignorant of them, I have to ignore my feeds.

Also, I'm not sure that the problem of ignorance about world problems is unique to technological advancement. When I went to high school in the early 90s, I certainly didn't have the constant social feeds available today, let alone the constant brainstream of the characters in Feed — yet I am fairly certain I was at least as ignorant of world events in my time as Titus is in the story. And I probably was better informed than most people throughout most of history who, lets face it, rarely give much of a crap about what's going on outside of their immediate social circle regardless of what level of technology they have.

Finally, there's some shock-value stereotypes that don't work for me. Trademarking Clouds™ and School™ is a hootenanny and gives a bit of the OMG THE CORPORATIONS ARE RAISING OUR KIDS AND CONTROLLING OUR AIR! freakout, until you realize that any corporation worth it's salt would register the trademarks instead of relying on the state-level common law protection of a TM. And of course Violet is homeschooled by an eccentric, jilted father rather than a "normal" dad in a stable relationship, because of course only weirdos want to homeschool their kids. The PR guy spinning the use of the word "shithead" seems bizarre even for a politician — and I write this on a day when a guy named Weiner is trying to explain away erotic indiscretions he made via social media so that he can be the mayor of the largest city in the country.

So, while this book has a few interesting moments and potential for some real insight, it ultimately fails to deliver. On to the next one.