California is spectacular, but even more so because so many people who live there are from elsewhere. People who are new to it see the state’s beauty better than others and tell the rest of the world. But not all of them. Saul Bellow took a grim view of what the state’s magnetic force drew. In Seize the Day, he wrote that “in Los Angeles all the loose objects of the country were collected, as if America had been titled and everything that wasn’t tightly screwed down had slid into Southern California.”
Another great Chicago writer has taken better to the Golden State—Dave Eggers, who arrived in the Bay Area 30 years ago and hasn’t left since. Unlike Bellow, who was fascinated by people but didn’t like them very much, Eggers adores people and appreciates California on an elementary level. As he wrote in his memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, the state’s everyday scenery clobbered him in his early days, the way California can. Driving on the highway, he steers “past the surfers, through the eucalyptus forest before Half Moon Bay, birds swooping up and over then back, circling around us—they too, for us!—then the cliffs before Seaside—then flat for a little while, then a few more bends and can you see that motherfucking sky? I mean, have you fucking been to California?”
I still remember the moment I read this sentence, a Californian mulching through a New York City winter. Every cell in my body wanted to come home. Eggers had a different conditional reason for that barbaric yawp of receptivity. He’d arrived in California after the tragic death within months of his two parents, with his younger brother to raise. A Heartbreaking Work tells the story of how they fared and how out of loss, or desire, the feeling of being alive, which can emerge in grief, we create utopian structures to hold us. They can be a family, a friend group, a magazine (Eggers starts two during the book, Might and McSweeney’s).
Ever since then, as he expanded to an astounding array of genres—essentially all of them but poetry—Eggers has continued to write about the ways we create Valhallas. Why we need them, what possibilities and pitfalls they hold. In his books, these structures take on a variety of shapes: families (Heroes of the Frontier), boondoggles (A Hologram for the King), imaginary tribes (The Wild Things), and even parks, like the one at the heart of his Newbery-winning latest book, The Eyes and the Impossible, in which dogs live in a kind of state of Eden, until humans arrive.
Shaggy-dogged, grand and full of hope, sometimes sinister (as in The Parade), these utopian dreams are the engine of organization behind Eggers’s books. They create the indelible pockets of pressure between outside and in—the space wherein an attempt to live up to ideas collides with people and their limitations. Not for nothing are three of Eggers’s best-known books portraits of seekers and survivors: Zeitoun, What Is the What, and The Monk of Mokha. How his books narrate that negotiation, the feeling of dreaming and of being let down, is a big part of their genius.
Of course, California has been at this arcadian business for years—not just providing a home for communes, planned communities, of which there have been many, but also dreamlands. It has in fact built the world’s biggest, most-far-reaching utopian experiment in human history, and that’s the internet and all the associated businesses that have sprawled across every scintilla of human life, offering us not simply life itself—but more life, sometimes a replacement to life, a betterment of it through its abstraction, and prosthetic tools with which to engage in the real thing. Or the parts we’d rather deal with at a remove.
The early 2000s were a gold rush for space on an infinite plane, as companies conquered territories by type of service (flower delivery, antique shoes, basketball stats) and were, in turn, gobbled up by bigger sites, bigger retailers. In the past dozen years, that model of the web has been retooled by the consolidation of power within the hands of a few tech giants, several of whom touch us (and we them) through their social media products. In this transition from users who buy products or view media to people who are the product (through the data we create by using the internet) and the media we produce, a fundamental shift occurred. As digital pioneer and futurist Jaron Lanier put it, “as the internet, the devices, and the algorithms advanced, advertising inevitably morphed into mass behavior modification.”
How did we get here? In the future, if anyone wants an answer, they will need to turn to Eggers’s two novels The Circle and The Every, which unfold during this extraordinary period as well as the near future. (I reviewed the first when it came out and edited the second in my current job at Alfred A. Knopf, where it was the first book I worked on.) The Circle revolves around Mae Holland, whose parents need extensive health care and for that she holds her nose and takes a job in the new tech giant, a company called the Circle, that has parked itself in the Bay and gradually learns to succeed there. On her first day, she is struck by the building as if it were a mirage: “My God, Mae thought,” Eggers writes, “it’s heaven.”
The Circle was a novel of its time—the era in which tech giants were considered gods and ultimately good. Magazines were awash with their founders wearing fleece vests on their covers. Mae is not, in this sense, a dupe for becoming seduced by the Circle and its technology—all of us were. Who didn’t buy an iPhone in this period and stroke its screen and marvel at how soft it was, how silken? But inside the Circle, life was somewhat different. What begins as a highly automated workplace starts to seem like an insanely robotic one—if workers don’t receive enough likes, they are demoted. If they aren’t going transparent or allowing their life to be viewed at work all the time, they are viewed as secretive. Keeping up with this, Mae steadily drops values that have been essential to human life—balance, privacy, and belonging. Very quickly, the work family she develops inside the Circle replaces her actual family, and she begins to mimic the needs and values of the corporation.
The Circle landed in 2013, the year of the National Security Agency Prism scandal, in which it was revealed that one of the United States’ agencies had a secret spy program looking at domestic activity. In this sense, the novel might read like a thriller, but it touches a different genre we are all familiar with—the corporate exposé. Most of the moral dilemmas, as experienced by Mae, are entirely about her employment at that corporation. The corporation is the villain, and whether she bends to it or not—to help her family—gives us the dramatic tension of that story. Inside the Circle, we get to see how a company like that operated, what it tried out (in software and policies) on employees, what it made them reframe. “SECRETS ARE LIES; SHARING IS CARING; PRIVACY IS THEFT,” Mae says at one of the all-office meetings, which are like megachurch performances. The applause is thunderous.
In The Every, Eggers navigates the world these mega–tech corporations have wrought, unfurling this type of behavioral modification on the users themselves. It is a world in which every experience, every object—photos! sandwich makers’ backgrounds—is hoovered up and owned, ranked, and possessed by one company. To keep us involved, all the tools used inside the Circle by Mae (frowns, likes, PartiRanks) have been let loose on the population at large, and they’ve created a mob of people furiously turning to the cloud for signals of how to live and act, and then battling one another with ever more fury to enforce those signals. It’s a perfect circle of everyone looking at everything and trying to parse (or sometimes police) every utterance, every interaction, every node of existence.
As we begin, Mae has risen so far high up into the Circle, and the Every—the corporation that has gobbled it up—that she’s something of a phantom. Rumored to be pregnant. Her voice uploaded into onboarding software. Caroming into this behemoth is Delaney Wells, whose goal it quickly becomes clear is to take down the company from within. She’d started this effort a long way back and even, strategically, wrote her college thesis on the folly of an antitrust measure against the Circle, coining the phrase “Benevolent Market Mastery”—a great euphemism for dominance. During her job interview, she plays the part of an aspiring corporate drone, while meanwhile her body is in full revolt. “Delaney marveled at how quickly her armpits became dank swamps.”
If The Circle sometimes felt like a corporate exposé, The Every has all the hallmarks of corporate espionage. At times, it reads like a slapstick version of The East, Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij’s edgy 2013 thriller. Delaney and her roommate, Wes, live like radicals in a part of San Francisco known for its off-the-grid restaurants and high concentration of Trogs (short for troglodyte, people who refuse technology’s vision of the future). Wes has been raised by two mothers and is prone to wearing significant T-shirts. (One of them depicts the assassinated Swedish prime minister Olof Palme.) With Wes’s irony-heavy technological savvy and Delaney’s acting skills and conceptual power, surely they can make a dent in this corporation by mimicking its worst aspects back to it.
One would think. But every time Delaney floats a new idea meant to tackle the company, the Every absorbs the notion and it becomes wildly popular. How about an app in which friends can rate their friends? (It winds up with the name AuthentiFriend.) Done. It’s not a far cry from the fictional apps people are already using, like OwnSelf, which atomizes every aspect of the day, from steps to how much time one talks to a kid to the kinds of language one uses, and judges and rates and parcels it out. In one scene, Delaney is interrupted midconversation by an urgent ding from her colleague Winnie’s computer:
“Sixteen minutes. Time to move around,” she said, and then she began marching in place, her knees as high as she could manage while wearing snug denim. With every fourth step, Winnie did a kind of twisting motion at the waist, with her elbows high. Then she returned to marching. Delaney had not been invited to join, so she simply sat and looked into the rafters.
Most of this is, at the start, as in The Circle, somewhat recognizable. Who doesn’t want to get a few more steps in and make better use of time? Who doesn’t wish their photos were better organized, maybe even had more captions? Bit by bit, though, more life is fed into the Every and its assorted apps, and bit by bit, the lives of all the characters in the book begin to be regulated by it.
Eggers seems to have spent some time inside a tech company, or he’s very, very good at imagining their cultures. One of the best recurring set pieces includes Dream Fridays, where a motivational-speaker approach is taken to all employee gatherings that showcase new innovations. In one of them, an earnest technologist has started a VR app called Stop+Lük, in which travelers can book virtual trips to places led by actual tour guides. “Sweet lord God,” Delaney thought, “she hadn’t seen the umlaut coming.”
Here’s where The Every really sinks its teeth into us. For who doesn’t want to reduce carbon? Who doesn’t want to reduce the harm we wreak on the planet? This worry, this frisson of fear of sheer existence, is the true quarry of this novel, as, led by Delaney, regulations and restrictions proliferate across the Every. Wes gets a job there and using hashtags manages to make bananas verboten (Bananaskam, he types into a public chat board in the lunchroom, mimicking the Swedish word for flight shame). The algorithms have already been set loose on books, juicing down the classics into their most essential words. AuthentiFriend is sped up, and Wes and Delaney set loose 10 other ideas just as bad.
Once the novel has its engine up and running, the scenarios of ridiculousness proliferate and implode. So many of these inventions speak to “leering and shame” as a form of culture and control. There are people who watch what others do and comment on and report on them called Sams and Samaritans, an app that channels their ratings called DeputEyes. An app that regulates what people say called TruVoice. There are a few remaining anything-goes areas—a part of San Francisco known for its lack of surveillance has the vibe of a western frontier. Meantime, online, a Twitter-like feed in which anything goes called Blech. They all draw on what appears to be the engines of our digitized world, AI and facial recognition, and so many of them are logical leaps forward from the inventions that power and stud the action in The Circle.
As the value of offense takes over all other values, every single interaction becomes traumatic. Watching elephant seals mate on a company trip turns into a catastrophe from which attendees need counseling. Delaney gets demerits from her colleagues for not watching her shared video fast enough. A new interface for decision-making arises called Are You Sure?, which rates all possible moral vectors of decision-making—from buying a rug to making orange juice—making anything not funneled through it seem insane and reckless. Pets are banned on campus.
So many of them—these apps, inventions, etc.—are at war with pleasure. With uselessness, with meandering, with what cannot be controlled. Of course, a group of wild mammals on a beach going through the natural cycle of birth and rearing would be overwhelming and terrorizing to the Everyones (which is what the employees are called) who go to see them. In many ways, The Every feels more of a San Francisco novel than The Circle does. Following Wes and Delaney to and from work, as they walk their dog, Hurricane, around the bay, you burst the bubble that was not often pierced in The Circle. You feel the surf crashing and wind, and watching a dog enjoy it simply and beautifully makes Delaney and Wes’s quest to undo this death star seem reasonable.
As a heroine, Delaney is such a different protagonist from Mae. She has to be. She grew up with the Circle as a familiar orienting point, with—as the narrative voice points out—journalism as a historic artifact. Instead, she grew up with screens, with elsewhere being here and here being the abstract thing. She’s a compelling mixture—very bright, skeptical, warm, funny, and determined. Her plan is also generationally apt: How many young people now, irate at the world they inherited, want to take down the institutions they believe are destroying us or spreading toxicity through the culture? How could anyone blame them?
If anything, the young today have seen a world made by gluttony, and The Every pulses with this value word: the word every appears so often in the book that it becomes like a shining, shimmering fish, swimming in the rapids of the plot. It can be every as in aggrandizing, every as in greed, every as in all of us, every as totalitarian, the Every as in a company that—while the Circle replaced the family—replaces democracy. (The Every gets involved in taking out candidates when needed.) There are even sonics at work here, since the Circle bought a company “named after the South American jungle” and the two combined to form the Every, which is a kind of off-rhyme for the name of the company that does not come up here: Amazon. In this way, Eggers has written his book’s eponymous corporate name into the very language of the book, showing how its power lingers and vibrates beyond even scenes that take place there.
And so we wind up in a world not unlike our own. The conflagrations of commentary that occur at the Every, however righteous—one of the employees calls a corridor of cattle farms on the 101 Trigger Valley for vegans—also wind up serving an insidious purpose: distraction. While people watch and monitor one another, more and more wealth is being amassed by a very small group of people. Wealth and power on a colossal scale. Eggers’s portrait of the necrotic values of startup acquisition is so arresting and disturbing. How companies are fattened up to be bought, killed, and a billion is but a right number. How dangerous it is for living that this practice has such lucrative incentives. It leads us to one or just a few big companies, swallowing everything. Every idea. The fatigue we have with choice in the world of the internet economy leads to a willing death of choice. You handle it, the actions of society say, and the few companies that control tech are more than willing to do so.
Battered, betrayed, Delaney sort of doesn’t have a chance with a company the size of the Every. It’s not that it can’t be brought down; there is nowhere to grab. There is a plot in which Delaney continues and Eggers follows it speedily to a breathtaking conclusion. Ultimately, though, as with any dystopian thriller, the idea at the heart of The Every is the main character, and here, that character is riveting. It’s an idea posed as a question: What if we have created a perfect panopticon in which to modify human behavior with metrics and shame? Where does that lead humanity? How does it feel to live in that world? How do we change it? Why do we find choice so enervating? Some of the questions this leads to in The Every, as elections tee up around the world, elections in which candidates aspire to be dictators, are, to put it mildly, disquieting. There are several kinds of utopias out there, after all. One is a world in which all people are free; another is a world in which all decisions are made from above. One of the terrifying points made by The Every is that we might have already made our choice in this matter. •
Join us on February 15 at 5 p.m. Pacific, when Eggers will appear in conversation with California Book Club host John Freeman and special guest Caterina Fake to discuss The Every. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
