The Every by Dave Eggers, 2021

He’s acutely aware of the confusion surrounding one of MoviePass 2.0’s biggest innovations: a new feature called PreShow that will play ads on users’ phones in exchange for credits toward the purchase of movie tickets. PreShow’s facial-recognition technology tracks people’s eyeballs to ensure subscribers are really watching — as opposed to putting their phones on the sofa and walking away

MoviePass 2.0 Wants (to Sell) Your Attention by Chris Lee in Vulture, 2022 Mar 11

Delaney Wells got screen-addicted in her early teens, but recovered. Her parents’ health-food store was driven out of business by a national chain acquired by the jungle, the world’s biggest on-line department store. Delaney becomes a foe of the source of these problems: the Every, a merger of the jungle and the Cirlce, the world’s largest social-media/indexing service. She wants freedom from the Every, and schemes for a decade to join the Every and destroy it from the inside. With the help of her friend and co-conspirator Wes, she lands a job; Wes later follows her coattails to an Every job too. Once inside, Delaney begins her orientation by rotating through several Every departments, all the while looking for leavers to wrench and gears to spike.

First and foremost The Every is satire. There’s lots of low-hanging fruit, and Eggers makes sure he puts an arrow through every one, sometimes to good effect, and sometimes more like St. Sebastian. The Every’s using eye-tracking software, spandex and social-media canceling to vanquish a political antagonist was clever and funny. New employees have to arrange a field trip, and Delaney organizes a trip to watch sea lions, which comes together with all the usual difficulties, falls apart spectacularly during the trip, and has a long, drawn-out postmortem. This too is funny, but the humor runs a little too close to “wow, look at all these weirdos and dimwits.”

The Every also wants to be novel of ideas, with concepts like freedom, autonomy, and privacy rubbing up against concepts like security, safety, and transparency. In this The Every is less successful. Ideas clash several times throughout the book, but it usually goes like this:

Surveillance capitalism good: you won’t forget to take your pills.
Surveillance capitalism bad: freedom.

Early in the book it becomes clear Wes is going to drink the Kool-Aid, and many of these arguments are between him and Delaney. Occasionally Delaney engages a co-worker, but because she’s undercover, those arguments are even more tepid and over reliant on irony. Delaney has a favored, Shoshana-Zuboff-like professor who sends an occasional (snail-mail) letter, but those grow more despairing.

The third role The Every tries to play is as a dystopian warning, but for that to be compelling it has to wrestle with the satire and win, which it doesn’t (a truck bomber wears a Tim Berners-Lee mask to foil surveillance cameras). Delaney’s attempts to spark revolution-fomenting dystopias show diminishing returns; it’s hard to ramp up much further after introducing a lie detector into a friend app. And the ending, though foreshadowed, is completely unearned. The intention was probably to produce a “gosh, how terrible and ruthless and ominous” cliff-hanger for a likely third book in the series, but instead produces (at least in me) a feeling of “huh, Eggers went there” (readers of The Parade are rolling their eyes and thinking, of course he went there).

The Every follows up The Circle, which I haven’t read. I don’t know if it’s necessary to read The Circle before The Every, but I don’t think so. The Every’s satire is so broad there isn’t anyplace to hide subtle call-backs to the earlier story (the reference to the movie was not subtle); the story is so thin it needs no other explanations than Delaney vs. the machine; and the main human character in The Circle hardly appears in The Every, but when she does appear it’s sigificant in a generic way.