Dave Eggers prizes the human work of literature. As writer, editor, teacher, and literacy advocate, he puts a premium on presence, conversation, empathy, and care. His 2021 novel, The Every, offers a case in point. A panoramic portrayal of a media megalith (think Amazon crossed with Google, Meta, and Apple), it zeroes in not on the tech so much as the need that spurs the development of apps we hope will fulfill us, even as they push us further apart. Recently, Eggers and I corresponded about the novel via email.
This interview appears in Issue 26 of Alta Journal.
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The Every stands on its own, but it’s also a sequel to The Circle. At what point did you know you wanted to revisit this material?
I never planned to write a sequel, to this or anything I’ve done. But after The Circle came out, I kept taking notes, and pretty soon, I was seeing a pivot in how we interact with technology. If The Circle was in large part about surveillance and how humanity is changing while living in a panopticon, The Every was about how readily we cede our free will to algorithms. In The Circle, the protagonist is both naïve and given to the kind of blind optimism that drives much of Silicon Valley. In The Every, the protagonist is a skeptic and enters the company with the intent to bring it down.
It appears that media companies, including Meta, used your books to train AI—although not The Every or The Circle.
After The Circle came out, a friend who was working at Facebook said it was on a list of recommended reading at the company. This reasserted something I’ve noticed in Silicon Valley, which is that the people working there are pretty self-aware. Remember a few years ago when Facebook ran an ad campaign asking to be regulated? It’s clear they don’t trust themselves to make the rules. But this latest news, that most of my books (along with roughly 191,000 others) were fed into AI, but somehow the time was taken to exclude The Circle and The Every, struck me as grimly encouraging. There’s apparently some human, somewhere, making these decisions, which is good news. But that same person apparently fears their AI might grow a conscience by reading certain novels.
With the introduction of ChatGPT, the digital-human divide seems ever more dire. Would you consider writing a third novel to make a trilogy?
I’m done. I wrote The Circle and The Every to scare myself, and to horrify (and entertain?) the reader, and I can’t be in that place anymore. Especially with the dark places ChatGPT is taking us. Until recently, I was on strike with the Writers Guild of America, and one thing on the table was whether or not AI would be allowed to write scripts. Think about that for a second. There are humans willing to use machines to write stories. Machines that can’t read. We have to remember this always: machines can’t read, or comprehend even one sentence. They can be trained to string words together in a way that makes sense to humans, but only humans can read, and only humans can create art.
You published over 30 covers for the McSweeney’s hardcover edition of The Every. Why?
Really, it’s an interest in beautiful things and in doing things as non-mechanically as possible. The machinelike part of the publishing business would say you need just one cover, but there’s nothing in the business of bookselling that says this is true. No rules, no laws, no best practices, even. The only force that tells anyone we need just one cover is Amazon, and the hardcover of The Every wasn’t sold on Amazon.
Why do you write?
When I think about that question, the first thing that comes to mind is the letters I get. I can’t answer email from readers, because that would keep me on screens even more than I already am, but a couple of times a week, I sit down with the mail and have a ball. A few years ago, I got real stationery, so I sit on my couch and read the mail and answer every letter, and it feels very calm and civilized. And the letters are always well-thought-out and sane. Online, people are petulant and weird and angry; so often, they don’t take time to sound civilized. How did we get here? The standards for everyday communication have never been lower. But when people write letters, they have time to be their best selves. Humanity in all its thoughtful civility reasserts itself, and we can be hopeful about our species again.•
