Review: The Every

The Every by Dave Eggers
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

A close friend of mine who works in tech recommended this to me, so I picked it up even though I thought it might not be my thing. It turns out that it wasn't, and for more than one reason, so I didn't quite get half-way through. Feel free, therefore, to dismiss what follows as not having given the book a fair chance before bailing.

Dystopian, for me, is a bit like kale. I don't enjoy it, but occasionally I consume some because I feel like I ought to.

I'm not talking here about the cookie-cutter teen dystopian fiction that was in vogue for a while there, by the way, but about genuine classics like 1984 or Brave New World.

The Every is written with a lot of skill in many aspects, though it's not in the class of those two I just mentioned. It's also a satire as well as a dystopian, and it has genuinely, if darkly, funny moments, like an entire busload of people sitting grimly on their phones searching for reasons, however tenuous, to be offended by whatever was happening, regardless of what that was.

It's a satire on big tech, which means it's a satire on Silicon Valley, which means it's a satire on Northern California and the kind of people who populate it, a weird blend of hippy sensibilities with nonsensical management fads and the cult-like corporate loyalty of a 1950s Japanese salaryman. Northern California seems particularly prone to cultishness, in fact, and that's definitely portrayed here. The people of the all-encompassing behemoth of social media, personal tech, and e-commerce that is known as the Every read as if someone set out to clone Kevin Kelly, but didn't know how to implement the Wise, Humane, Sensible, Knowledgeable and Self-Reflective features, so just left them on the development backlog and hacked in a "temporary" fix of corporate surveillance and Newspeak, figuring that would be fine.

It goes, in fact, beyond satire all the way to strawman, which is my other big problem with it. The Everyones, as they are known, are remarkably easy to manipulate, but apparently only in the direction of more dystopianism. The protagonist and her friend/roommate set out to penetrate the Every from within and sow the seeds of its destruction, but their approach - obviously flawed on the face of it - is to seed it with ideas so patently ridiculous and contrary to human values that people will revolt and reject it en masse.

As far as I read (42%), this never happened; their ideas, however awful, kept getting not only adopted but extended to be even worse. I glanced at the ending, because it felt like it was heading for a tragedy but there was still some possibility of a change of direction, and confirmed that it does, in fact, have a tragic ending, so I stopped reading. As someone who has bailed out of social media exactly because it resembles what the author is satirizing, I don't find watching an unfolding disaster of people at their worst to be either entertaining or compelling. I'm also (like Kevin Kelly) a techno-optimist, and an optimist in general about human nature; not being on social media is an essential element, for me, in maintaining that optimism, and so is not finishing a book in which there are hardly any people of goodwill who recognize the problem, and they're helpless to improve matters.

Nor do I find that a particularly convincing scenario, though, of course, satires don't have to be realistic. The "if this goes on" genre, of which this is definitely a part, has always exaggerated current trends, ignoring the likelihood that they'll either self-correct or be corrected by people with a different viewpoint.

What does make the scenario slightly more believable is that, thanks to pervasive social media, in the quite-near-future setting of this book there's no more local journalism (maybe no journalism at all), and the only place that people can organize collectively is owned and controlled by what they would be organizing against, plus it possesses near-universal surveillance. Any dissent could simply be buried by the algorithm, and there are no effective competitors, US regulators having apparently failed to prevent the Every from living up to its name and absorbing any competitor or startup that comes anywhere near its space. (Something which I find unlikely in itself, by the way.) A few isolated voices are all that is speaking up, and they tend to be Luddites, like the main character's old professor, who writes to her by hand on paper. In reality, of course, there are plenty of technologists who are speaking out against exactly these trends, there are whistleblowers and former employees and people whose companies were bought who have since vested and cashed out, all of whom feel entirely free to raise criticism of the various parts of Big Tech (combined, for rhetorical purposes of this book, in the Every, even though e-commerce is very different from social media, which is very different from search, which is very different from hardware manufacturing, and all of those sectors consist of multiple players both in the US and elsewhere).

The sheeplike Everyones, while giving knee-jerk lip service to diversity, are actually participating in a huge exercise of flattening, genericisizing, and homogenizing diversity, directed by more-savvy bad actors who know how to manipulate them or are simply taking personal advantage of what, in the universe of this book, is a kind of law of gravity by which everything is set up to get worse in general while benefiting some people in particular. In parallel to that, though, is the book's flattening of the complexity of what it is parodying and satirizing, the elision of real debate within the tech sector, and the manipulation that the author has to do to drive that "inevitable" decline for purposes of (I assume) a rhetorical point.

Said more simply: I understand this is a parody, but it's parodying something dramatically oversimplified from the real world. Not only that, but it's buying into the delusion that Northern California (where the author lives) is the world, that if you can fool some of the people all of the time everyone else will just go along without protest.

As a matter of personal taste, I don't enjoy dystopian dark humour, even if it's well done (which this is). But as a matter of philosophy, if this is meant to be a polemic and not just a comedic parody, I think it's too much of a caricature and leaves out too much for me to take it seriously. I have reasons for optimism, and I don't see them here.

I received a copy via Netgalley for review.

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