California Book Club host John Freeman kicked off a lively and wise conversation about Dave Eggers’s The Every by noting that while it has been written about as a book that addresses technology, “it’s also really about free will and choice and how the ways that technology, as it’s being adapted, has slowly—we’ve given it all of our free will because we’re overwhelmed by choice.”
Eggers responded that he has a good friend who is a clinical psychologist who was attached to a state university for years, and every year her caseload doubled. The doubling paralleled the rise of the smartphone. It got to the point where she had to quit and go into private practice because she couldn’t get anywhere near to meeting the demand for mental health services. He mused, “So much of it is…young people being completely overwhelmed with technology, but along with it is being overwhelmed by choice…what to do with their lives, what to do with their careers. We’re blessed with the internet giving us everything in the world…but with that comes a paralysis, almost. I think we have to realize that our time is finite.”
Eggers commented that young minds are not meant to contend with that level of choice, that sense of infinite possibility every day. “We’re meant to be mostly offline, in the world interacting with humans…. I think for the sake of the sanity of the young people, I think we do have to help them be free of this level of exposure.” Much of The Every is about younger people, he continued, and he’s been obsessed with ways to bring young people’s experiences offline.
Freeman commented that Eggers’s books for both children and adults also have an overlapping impetus to say, “Hey, get out there [into the outdoors].” Eggers traced that to growing up outdoors in a free-range childhood most of his life. He said, “We felt like the creek behind our house was the Mississippi, and we thought that the maybe-three-foot slope that went from my house to the woods was Kilimanjaro.” Going on, Eggers remarked, “I feel like kids are just like any sort of creature you know. They need light. They need sun. They need exercise. They need all of these things…how you would care for any plant or animal or anything.”
The investor Caterina Fake joined the conversation. She and Eggers have known each since the mid-’90s, when they both worked at the online magazine Salon. Eggers commented that one of the spurs to writing the novel The Circle, the precursor to The Every, was an editor they worked with at Salon who was an early adopter of technology and who showed them a software that allowed you to watch people search the internet. Fake commented that this was a feature on HotBot or AltaVista, early pre-Google search engines; it was “very early surveillance.”
Eggers noted that this was when he thought, “You take a great thing, where you can search the world for information and find all kinds of stuff right away—so, this beautiful idea—and then a minute later, you make it so creepy and terrifying. I thought, whoever’s creating this stuff—there’s a set of creepy minds that are part of the creation of so many of these companies, and no one’s holding them back and saying, ‘That’s so sick.’”
Eggers commented that when Fake started Flickr, a “great service beloved by a lot of artists,” she was one of the significant moral voices out there. He praised her decision to make people pay to use the service. He asked about her decision-making process around requiring people to pay rather than surveilling them to make a profit.
Fake said, “I really believe that if you’re providing a service on the internet, the most reasonable way of ‘monetizing’ that…the most honest way, is to actually just charge for the service.” The cost inhibited the growth of the platform. Flickr had preceded Facebook by a few months and had the first feed, which she called “recent activity.” However, Facebook went a different direction than Flickr and began using “data harvesting as a way of selling advertising to you, propaganda to you, and ideology to you.”
Eggers decried the use of AI at the university level, elaborating that he hopes that a new picture-book class he’s teaching fifth and sixth graders at 826 Valencia, a nonprofit that teaches under-resourced children, instills a “love of creating something and owning it and feeling like that came out of you and only you; there’s nobody else in the history of the world that could have done what you just did.” He would find it tragic if a kid thought his or her own thoughts didn’t matter and that the machine should be asked to do the writing. “If we can really instill that love of seeing one’s thoughts on paper, and expressing them well and being rewarded for it, then I think we might have a chance.” •
Join us on March 21 at 5 p.m. Pacific, when author Laila Lalami will appear in conversation with Alta Journal books editor and California Book Club guest host David L. Ulin and special guest Danzy Senna to discuss The Other Americans. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
