Feed

aaronvegh writes "Although it qualifies as a Young Adult novel, M.T. Anderson's Feed is a worthy read by any card-carrying geek. Especially the kind curious about where today's Net culture is heading. Set in a dystopian future America, the narrative follows a 14-year-old boy named Titus as he hangs out with his friends and tries to win the love of Violet, a girl much smarter than he." Read on for the rest of aaronvegh's review. Feed author M.T. Anderson pages 320 publisher Walker Childrens Paperbacks rating 8 reviewer aaronvegh ISBN 074459085X summary A disturbing and believeable rendering of a dystopian future America features some cool tech gone amazingly wrong.

The trouble is, all the citizens of this future state are connected to the global network with a direct neural link, called the Feed. The Feed connects its users directly to all others, allowing instant access to information and communication.

Like today's Net, however, the flow of information has grown disturbingly two-way: the Feed is owned by corporations, and their agenda to increase consumerism has led to such privacy-stripping "innovations" as predictive marketing (getting "bannered" by merely looking at purchaseable items) and constant interruptions (such as chats being broken by Google AdSense-inspired ads).

Even more sinister, those same corporations bought out the government's role in education, and so Titus and his friends attend School(TM) -- where literacy is not on the curriculum. Instead, students learn how to make purchase decisions and better use their Feed.

Titus' new girlfriend, however, is representative of a growing counter-culture. Violet's education is strictly home-based, and her objections to the mainstream grow increasingly strident, even as she becomes a victim of it. It is perhaps no coincidence that her lack of affluence in this society is tied to her resistance against it.

The citizens of this future America, weaned on the Feed, are shockingly illiterate. Their language is largely incoherent, riddled with "like"s and "thing"s. Poor verbal composition is combined with an almost complete lack of vocabulary, so characters are often caught referring to objects as "thing... uh..." -- pause while they look up the term through their Feed -- "table."

We often attribute poor language skills to teenagers, but the author's willingness to show adults with the same deficiencies is telling. Even the President of the United States appears unfocused and uneducated.

Not surprisingly, the inhabitants of this world are incredibly self-absorbed. Titus repeatedly demonstrates a callous disregard for the feelings of his dying girlfriend, although he has the good grace to feel guilty buying a sweater while she confesses her fear of death. It's a culture where citizens are trained to value only what's shiny and new, and to dispose of the old and used. How any relationship can survive in that environment is a mystery only philosophers and Slashdot commentators might dare address.

The author's handling of the characters is both realistic and sensitive. I found myself shaking my head at Titus and his friends, but my disgust was accompanied by a sympathy; like a baby raised by wolves, his behaviour is completely understood, if not acceptable.

In fact, the picture drawn of this future is all too clear, and the author's skill at connecting the dots between today and that time make for some serious introspection. After all, today's Internet is an obvious precursor of the Feed, and as commercial life makes ever-greater demands of our attention online, where does it end?

The gear that makes this future possible is incredibly empowering. It connects all people together, literally, to the sum total of all human knowledge, while providing a complete, instant telecommunications network. But corporate interest is clearly the villain here, with all technology perverted to consumerist ends, ripping away privacy, individual expression and true liberty. In the right hands, the Feed would be more powerful than the agricultural, industrial and communications revolutions put together; instead, the Feed is leading its users to an apocalypse, as the author strongly hints at the end of the novel.

Most savage of all, the citizens of this future America don't see the apocalypse coming. As they increasingly turn a blind eye to how their goods are manufactured and delivered (sound familiar?), they ignore the radiation-induced skin lesions that everyone has, the fact that couples can't reproduce without a "conceptionarium", the glowing green clouds, the dead seas, the ash falling from the sky. In their dome habitats, life goes on, in the malls and upcars and fake lawns underneath the Clouds(TM) -- while the other nations of the Earth vow to obliterate America's corporations by any means necessary.

It's a hell on Earth, but a hell that seems destined to come to a crashing halt. Like the best in science fiction, this novel shows us the worst-case scenario, so we can thoughtfully avoid it.

You can purchase Feed from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews. To see your own review here, carefully read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Comments

Re:Another Matrix Rip off

[yohan1701]

Actually this is closer to an Outer limits episode that pre dates the Matrix by many years

Re:Dystopian

[misleb]

Star Trek (particularly TNG) would an example of near utopian Sci Fi. It does exist. It just doesn't stand out as "fiction" to many geeks when it is utopian.

-matthew

Dude, that's not a novel, that's happening today

[JudgeFurious]

At least the part about the language skills.

Example (And I'm going to preface this with a solid "I have absolutely minimal input in this situation though I'm trying" statement)

My stepson is a frickin pod person thanks to DSL and a father (who he lives with) who literally refuses to pull the plug. The kid comes home from school (not School(TM) yet but soon I'm sure) and goes online. He stays online until he goes to sleep. When he's at our house (every other weekend, his dad got custody and then prompty opted to let the net and television handle most of the chores) it's a war to get him to do anything that doesn't involve a video game. We have broadband too but we try to keep him from spending the entire weekend on it. What's two days though every two weeks when he lives online the rest of the time (admittedly outside of school).

He seems to me to be a pretty bright kid and makes ok grades but his communication skills are almost non-existent. Getting more than a couple of sentences out of him at one time is a triumph and if they're understandable then that's a bonus. He's got to use the English language at school (doesn't he?) so you would think he'd know a few words. A noun or two here and there? Maybe? If that's the case though then he doesn't exhibit any sign of it that I can see.

At his age (Almost 16) I was trying to figure out how to earn enough money to get a car, trying to get laid (with little luck), and had interests in music, books, sports, and a pack of friends all thinking about much of the same things.

The idea of this kid working anywhere is laughable. He doesn't even mention cars or driving and to the best of my knowledge doesn't know what a girl is (and I check his browser cache when he leaves so we're not even talking about hitting the porn here). He doesn't read, he doesn't listen to music, and he doesn't even want to go outside much less actually do something that might require sweating. Friends? Hell if I know.

I wonder how many other kids are already hooked up to "The Feed" for all practical purposes?

It's a bait 'n' switch.

[Grendel Drago]

It's a bait-and-switch, see, originating in the 1950s. The 1950s were supposedly the halcyon days of apple pie, clean (too cheap to meter!) nuclear power and robots that would clean your house---any day now! The 1950s were also a time of paranoia, McCarthyism and of course the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation.

To reflect this duality, take Asimov and PKD. Asimov's stories reflect the attitude that technology will save us, that robots will do our bidding and be our Fuzzy Friends. PKD's view is that aliens, or maybe robots, or maybe mutants, but in any case something utterly inhuman, will supplant and replace us. (See the short stories "The Golden Man", "The Hanging Man" or "The Father-Thing" for some really top-drawer examples of that.)

If you've been reading solely PKD, no wonder you think it's all doom and gloom!

Let's look at the last few SF books I read. "A Fire Upon the Deep" (Vernor Vinge), "The Left Hand of Darkness" (Ursula K LeGuin), "The Turing Option" (Harry Harrison and Marvin Minsky). Hmm---not a dystopia to be found. (Though that last books was a damned waste of time.)

Hell, Vinge writes about ubiquitous computing in a way that doesn't lead to suckness and defeat. (See "Fast Times at Fairmont High" or the upcoming "Rainbows End".)

Also---you say that "the cure is always free love or fascism". Aside from Norman Spinrad trying to make a point ("The Iron Dream"), when is fascism recommended? When is "free love" recommended as a cure for a dystopia? The only free-love-proposing book I remember is "Stranger in a Strange Land", and that was hardly set in a dystopia.

--grendel drago