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October 17, 2021 02:34 pm

In New Sequel to 'The Circle', Dave Eggers Satirizes Algorithms Instead of Surveillance

Novelist Dave Eggers has just published a sequel to his 2013 dystopian tale of a tech company called The Circle — in which a low-tech crusader now tries to destroy the most powerful tech company in the world.Ars Technica quips that "When big tech rules all, don't say Dave Eggers didn't warn us." The Every quickly asserts itself as a logical progression from its literary forebear. Moving past simply recording everything, this world now revolves around measuring everything so that technology can spit out directions... The Every's health app tells you when to get up and jump at your desk. The Every's storage solution will digitize all your belongings as 3D-printable files so you can incinerate your waste and lower your carbon footprint. Media from The Every is driven by data-tracking technology that can tell when readers/viewers/listeners tend to abandon ship; it then tells creators how to improve... "The Circle was more about surveillance and whether privacy is possible," said Eggers. "This is more about whether we want to exercise free will on a daily basis, or are we happier to have these algorithms feed us and free us of all these decisions and anxieties? What if there was one monopoly who promised to make you your best self so long as you basically gave up control over every decision?" Though its themes are no laughing matter, The Every is littered with the smirk-inducing ideas you'd expect from Eggers. Each matter-of-fact aside about how life has evolved from our present day into this book's near future is a comedic dystopian gem... You don't have to go far these days to see how tech-reliant society has become; it's painfully evident that our world is quite comfortable with outsourcing decisions and plans to the algorithm. In this light, The Every isn't blazing new trails with its central themes, but few works will so reliably stop you mid-sentence or post-chapter for a moment of reflection. And that's because Eggers has a gift. Consistently, his ideas are amusing and laugh-out-loud funny, but there's also a deep sense of reality beneath them. When that clicks for you during a reading session, you arrive at the realization that the real world isn't so far behind the Every world. Comedy can turn into horror quickly. "The best way to hold a mirror up to the way we live now is to turn the absurdity up just a little more, and we can reflect back on how we're living now," Eggers tells Ars Technica. "Then, maybe, there's a fork in the road where we say, 'Well, we actually don't want that, if that comes to fruition, maybe we'll fight back.' That's about the only hope you can have writing something like this." Ars Technica notes that Eggers and his publisher McSweeney's "took extra care to sell through places beyond Amazon... 'It felt like a book about the increasing saturation and reach of a monopoly was a good opportunity to make a bit of a point: We still have a choice for the time being. You can go into [a local store like] Book People and buy a book there and support the local economy as opposed to giving money to the apex predator. If we want retail diversity, we need to feed smaller operations." The article adds that Eggers doesn't have a smartphone, and he tries to stay offline.

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