A while ago, I wrote a review of Dave Eggers’ novel The Circle from 2015, which was made into a good film with Emma Watson in the starring role. The Circle told the story of a naïve young woman who goes to work for a huge, powerful California tech company (called The Circle), that combines an insular campus full of idealistic young employees, a charismatic male founder with cult-leader magnetism, and the sort of messianic “save the world through better tech and openness” approach to business that is by now all too familiar.
I’ve recently become a real fan of Dave Eggers, as I’ve read more of his books and come to appreciate what a fine and prolific writer he is. He is one of the few popular authors I know of who routinely produces outstanding, smart best-sellers in both fiction and non-fiction categories, and I’ve now enjoyed and appreciated several of his books from each genre.
But in The Every, Eggers’s sequel to The Circle, he has outdone himself, with a just-barely fictionalized account of a recognizable, chaotic, fast-evolving version of our society that will make you laugh at its absurdity, at the same time it will terrify you with how closely it appears to mirror our own world, and the dangerous directions in which we seem to be heading.
In The Every, The Circle has grown by mergers and acquisitions into a new mega-corporation (The Every) that now dominates almost every sphere of global business, and increasingly politics, communications, healthcare and the environment, through its tight control of supply chains and its massive financial power. But the real source of its power is data, obtained through the steady erosion of personal privacy protections, which are collapsing under a relentless onslaught of popular new smartphone applications, sold by The Every to an eager population under the guise of personal empowerment and self-improvement.
As in The Circle, the main protagonist is an intelligent and sympathetic young woman. But there the similarities end, because in The Circle, our hero (or anti-hero) Mae Holland took the frustrations and setbacks she encountered in her job as the fuel that led her to challenge the company’s leadership to a dangerous game of corporate politics, and through a series of smart moves and timely revelations to ultimately triumph over them.
In the nearly omnipotent and all-knowing environment of The Every, though, our hero is Delaney, on a secret private mission to work her way into the company, to find the one lever that will allow her to destroy it in the hope of saving human privacy and freedom. With the help of a hacker friend, she manages to get hired, then slowly evolves a plan to use her social engineering skills to propose new applications so horrific in their privacy implications that she dreams they will create a public revolt that must lead to the company’s demise.
There’s only one problem with her plan. Each time she helps create another terrible new privacy-violating app, it becomes wildly popular, leading to even less freedom and privacy for everyone, and turns into another huge triumph for The Every instead. Can Delaney find a way out of her increasingly hopeless situation? And how long can she keep up her quixotic campaign to save the world, before she’s discovered and fired or worse?
This is an inspired dystopian novel, and a black comedy as well. It’s funny in the sense that every time another setback occurs, as Delaney’s subversive plans produce the exact opposite result that we would expect and hope for (in terms of peoples’ presumed desire for freedom and dignity), you have to laugh. And admit to yourself that although it’s another very depressing plot twist, it also seems perfectly realistic – exactly what you believe would probably happen in our own society, as well as the world of the novel.
It’s brilliant too in its portrayals of the behavior of people at work in a modern tech company, as they deal with the internal contradictions between their desire to please management, to gain status relative to their peers, to conform to get ahead, and to handle qualms about doing something seemingly immoral or repugnant when it also pays their salaries.
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World asked essentially the same questions about what we humans want (as between technology and freedom) almost a century ago, but most of the science and technology he envisioned in his story didn’t exist yet. It does in the world of The Every. There’s hardly any advanced technology, or corporate, political and social behavior modification in this book that isn’t already here, or utterly believable based on current trends.
Read it and dread (or maybe not, depending on where you are on the “convenience versus privacy” spectrum). Highly recommended.
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