SocProf reviewed The Every by Dave Eggers
We're f*cked
5 stars
Content warning Review includes spoilers - A good book with one major critical omission
This novel is a sequel to Dave Eggers's The Circle. When the Circle was about a tech company that looked an awful lot like a hybrid of Facebook and Google, the Every is the resulting monster if Facebook / Google merged with Amazon, leading to the fictional company called the Every. It is absolutely terrifying how plausible the resulting dystopia is. And yet, it misses a BIG part of some critical aspects of the current times it aims to satirize. The premise focuses on Delaney, a young woman who gets herself hired at The Every with the deliberate objective of destroying it from the inside. Why? Because the Every, as the name indicates, controls (almost) everything. In the book, its main victim and martyr is a dog, whose deprivation of free running time at the beach, leads to his death. The Every is evil but full of people with good intentions, saving the environment, proper sourcing of resources, animal rights. But somehow, the Every applies awful tech solutions to these social issues. Horrifying results ensues (pets get banned) with every deepening of a culture of surveillance enabled by the company. So how will Delaney destroy it? By coming up with more and more awful ideas, each supposed to unleash such a backlash that it will end the company, only to be placidly (sometimes enthusiastically) embraced by an apathetic general public, expanding the reach of the Every deeper into people's lives. With every new idea, Delaney thinks she's got it, but no. This culminates with her sharing her last two ideas with the leader of the Every, Mae Holland (readers might remember her from The circle). As Delaney actually manages to convince herself that the Every can be used for goods, then... something happens. The book is a page-turner. Up until the end, I had no idea what would come next, and how the whole thing would resolve. The conclusion is we're fcked and it might be too late. With every new app, every new (both meaningless and treated as* meaningful metric), with ever more data, and bits of human features and behavior that can be quantified, the surveillance society expands in every direction. But here is what Eggers misses: the Every are all portrayed as socially liberal / economically libertarian. They care about the planet, animals, saving people, eliminating violence in society. But they go about it awfully. But where is the rise of fascism that we see today? Has the Every defeated it? How? As much as the book is near-future satire of our present day, it completely ignores this essential feature of our times: the rise of authoritarianism / fascism / theocracy. Somehow, this has completely disappeared in the Every's near future, and therefore escapes Eggers's critical eye, free to be then directed at the Everyones (as the Every employees call themselves), often portrayed as the "snowflakes" stereotypes that right-wingers like to lob at lefties. It's still a good book but it's a major omission.
