The Every

The Every is Dave Eggers’s sequel to The Circle. The Every is an omnipotent tech company, the combination of The Circle (a thinly veiled Google) and The Jungle (a thinly veiled Amazon). Eggers does a wonderful job of satire, as he did of Trump in The Captain and the Glory. Here are some of my favorite bits of satire from the book.

Smart Speakers

This was a wonderfully good jab at how we’ve changed our minds about large corporations listening to everything we say. I remember back when Google released the Moto X (it’s first Google-made Android phone once it purchased Motorola). It has this feature called “OK Google Now” that let you control your phone by voice. Many of the reviews were freaked out that the phone was always listening to you. But now, we have smart speakers everywhere.

Smart speakers had an awkward introduction to the world. They arrived in the 2010s to phenomenal sales, with hundreds of millions of households adopting them within the first few years. Before the Every entered the picture, the makers of the devices—at the beginning there were three main players in the field, including the jungle—assured the buyers that the AI assistants were never activated unless their designated name or code word was spoken. This reassured the users that their private everyday conversations were not being heard, that only brief requests were audible, and even then, never stored. But a few months later, it was revealed that the smart speakers were in fact listening all the time, or could listen all the time. In fact, they could be activated by their manufacturers any time at all. For this, the manufacturers apologized; perhaps there had been some confusion, they said. Were we unclear?

The users, though momentarily upset at this foundational and central deception, were assuaged when they were told that under no circumstances were their conversations recorded. It would be, both users and manufacturers agreed, an egregious breach of trust to have a machine that a customer brought into their house—a machine, everyone noted, that was purchased primarily to play music and inform them of the current traffic—actually recording the conversations conducted in these private households. That would be unethical. And so it was assumed that no recording was being done by these home assistants, until one day the manufacturers admitted that they had in fact been recording just about every conversation every user had ever had, from the very beginning.

Again the makers were contrite. When you were asking before about whether we were recording conversations, they said, we didn’t quite understand what you meant. We thought you meant recording and listening to these conversations, and that of course we would never do. We would never. We record the conversations of hundreds of millions of users, yes, but no humans ever listen to any of these conversations. Conversations in the home, between family members, are private, are sacrosanct! they said. We simply record these conversations to improve our software, they said, to optimize our services, to better serve you, the customers, better.

And for a while the users, though feeling wary and burned by the series of revelations, looked askance at their smart speakers, wondering if the tradeoff was actually worth it. On the one hand, their private family conversations were being recorded and stored offsite for unknown future use by a trillion-dollar private company with a limitless litany of privacy violations. On the other hand, they could find out the weather without having to look out the window.

Fine, the users said sternly, fists on hips, you can continue to record everything we say, but—but!—if we ever find out that you manufacturers were having actual humans listen to our conversations, that will be one step over the line.

We would never! the manufacturers said, hurt by the inference, which, they felt, was offensive even to think about, given how open and transparent they had been from the start. Didn’t we reveal, they asked, after we were caught, that our smart speakers were turning themselves off and on at their own behest? And didn’t we admit, after we were caught, that we were listening to and recording anything we wanted at any time, anything that was said in the private homes of hundreds of millions of users? And didn’t we reveal, after we were caught, that we were recording all the private conversations every user had in the privacy of their own homes?

After all this openness and contrition, they said, it stings to think that customers would wonder aloud if other shoes might drop. No more shoes, said the manufacturers, would be dropping. We stand before you barefoot and humbled.

When it was revealed that the manufacturers had in fact hired 10,000 humans, whose only purpose was to listen to, transcribe and analyze the private conversations that had been recorded by these smart speakers, the manufacturers were amazed at the outrage, as muted as it was. Yes, they said, we have all along been recording and listening to your conversations, they said to their customers, but none of these 10,000 workers know your names, so what possible difference would it make that we have all of your private conversations recorded, and that we could with one or two keystrokes de-anonymize your conversations at any time? And, given the fact that every database ever created has been hacked, these recordings could be accessed by anyone at any time who had will enough to get them? What, the manufacturers asked, are you getting so worked up about?

In fact, no one got worked up at all. Lawmakers were mute, regulators invisible, and sales skyrocketed.

The Every (p. 405-407)

On Using Technology to Make Art

This was a pretty straight on satire of Amazon. In The Every, the company

“But a living author, or a publisher, can avail themselves of the numbers and act on them,” he said. “And this kind of data has been invaluable to publishers and some of their authors already. Just those data points, sales versus book-starts versus completions, that’s huge. Completions, of course, convert favorably to sales of the author’s next book. So for publishers, figuring out where and why people are stopping is crucial. Sometimes it’s obvious. Like, unlikable characters. We can help fix that. Algo Mas actually wrote a pretty simple code for turning an unlikable character into, like, your favorite person.”

“Wow,” Delaney said.

“The main thing is that the main character should behave the way you want them to, and do what you want them to do.”

“That’s just common sense,” Delaney said.

“Right? It kind of makes you worry about a lot of writers—the fact that they didn’t know this. But we’re making inroads with colleges and MFA programs, so now they have the information. We give it to them for free, as a public service.”

Delaney made a grateful, admiring whistle-sound.

“But some of the other issues are structural,” Alessandro said. “For instance, people don’t like epistolary novels. We found readers were skipping over most of the letters, especially if they were set off from the rest of the type with indents or smaller font size. But we found they were willing to read them if the letters were less than 450 words each, spaced every hundred pages or so, and were included in the body of the text—same size, same font, same indentation, and decidedly never italic.”

“That makes sense,” Delaney said.

“We found so many things!” Alessandro said. “Overall number of pages is fairly clear. No book should be over 500 pages, and if it is over 500, we found that the absolute limit to anyone’s tolerance is 577.”⁽¹⁾In a bit of self-referential parody, not that The Every is exactly 577 pages

“Even that seems undisciplined,” Delaney said.

“Right. Another key was the number of ideas or themes,” he said, “the number a reader would be able to tolerate in any book. I thought it would be nine or ten, but guess how many?”

“Three?” Delaney guessed.

“Exactly!” Alessandro said. “Any more than three, and people start quitting. The books that tossed out ideas left and right were always de-preferenced. Especially if those ideas get outdated. You read a book by Jules Verne and he’s going to spend twenty pages describing technology that’s obsolete now. That leads to high quit numbers, and a lot of interpaginate skims. The skimmers often technically finish their books, but we can tell by their reduced time spent on each page that they’re not really reading each page.

The Every (p. 205-207)

While this looks absurd at it’s face, Eggers probably lifted this from the book Amazon Unbound where Jeff Bezos has a very similar view on movies.

Bezos continued to reproach [Amazon Studios Chief] Price. “You and I are not aligned,” he said. “There must be a way to test these concepts. You are telling me that we are making $100 million decisions and we don’t have time to evaluate whether they are good decisions? There must be a way for us to see what will work and what won’t, so we don’t have to make all these decisions in a vacuum.”

After more debate, Bezos boiled it down: “Look, I know what it takes to make a great show. This should not be that hard. All of these iconic shows have basic things in common.” And off the top of his head, displaying his characteristic ability to shift disciplines multiple times a day, then reduce complex issues down to their most essential essence, he started to reel off the ingredients of epic storytelling:

• A heroic protagonist who experiences growth and change
• A compelling antagonist
• Wish fulfillment (e.g., the protagonist has hidden abilities, such as superpowers or magic)
• Moral choices Diverse worldbuilding (different geographic landscapes)
• Urgency to watch next episode (cliffhangers)
• Civilizational high stakes (a global threat to humanity like an alien invasion—or a devastating pandemic)
• Humor
• Betrayal
• Positive emotions (love, joy, hope)
• Negative emotions (loss, sorrow)
• Violence

Price helped riff on the list and wrote it all down dutifully. Afterward, Amazon Studios executives had to send Bezos regular updates on the projects in development that included spreadsheets describing how each show had each storytelling element; and if one element was missing, they had to explain why. But Price also told colleagues to keep the checklist from the outside world. Amazon shouldn’t dictate to accomplished auteurs the ingredients of a good story. Good shows should break such rules, not conform to them.

Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire (p. 152).

The Hypocrisy of Education

Eggers does a great job of describing the way that the protagonist, Delaney is addicted to screens. Her parents try to keep screens away from her while school keeps demanding that she use a computer.

The next few years were full of predictable skirmishes. Her parents devised restrictions and she found ways around them. They installed filters and she easily flouted them. They went to support groups and watched grave documentaries and came back with new restrictions, filters and strategies, none of which had any effect at all. And all this preceded Delaney’s entry to social media. The Circle’s endless and overlapping platforms tripled her engagement and deepened her addiction. By the time she was thirteen she was sending approximately 540 messages a day—most of them blurry pictures of herself in the corner of a screen; it was a thing. And texts. And brief dance videos. And, for a six-month period when an app called Fingrnls reigned, sending close-up photos of her fingernails bearing five-letter acronymic missives.

Her parents, finally, intervened again, this time sending her to a detox camp in Montana, not far from her grandmother, JuJu—a former airline pilot, onetime bass fishing champion, and serial dater of far younger men. Delaney was supposed to spend a month there, without phones, with no connections at all beyond the eighteen other girls, generally her age. Their days were structured but not militant. It was not a boot camp. They worked the farm. They hiked. They rode horses, milked cows, birthed calves, fed goats. They rose with the sun and slept through the night, and after a month Delaney asked to stay through the year. She did so, visiting JuJu every weekend, loving the simplicity of it, the very few things in her life. In eighth grade, she rejoined her Idaho school, feeling happy and balanced and strong.

Then something odd happened. Her school, which had been warning parents, since kindergarten, about the dangers of screentime and the atomization of the adolescent attention span, began an inexorable march toward full digital immersion. Her teachers did not assign her homework during school; instead, they posted the homework after school, online, and required students to complete it on CircleClass, an online platform known to collect all-encompassing data on every user. Her social studies teacher assigned videos that had to be watched online, while her English teachers required her to type her papers and submit them through CircleWrites, using that app’s semifunctional AI grammar and spellcheck functions.

Delaney’s parents, who had given up wifi to keep their daughter offline, were squeezed. For a time, they took her to the library each night, to use the internet connection there, but the drive was thirty minutes each way, and finally they were forced to restart their wifi, and to dance again with the very addiction they’d successfully snuffed out. It was like curing their child of a meth dependency only to have her school require that its students maintain, at all times, a low-level high.

Meanwhile, the school continued to warn about social media and the black hole of screentime. They prohibited phones in the classroom while allowing laptops, which the students easily jerry-rigged to show porn and pet videos. The educators lamented the diminishing attention span of their students and the obsessive digital contact from parents, while requiring that students have internet access to complete even the most basic tasks, and issuing every parental permission slip and directive through digital-only conduits. On Tuesday her parents would attend a school-sponsored evening devoted to teen tech addictions and how to break them, and on Wednesday her algebra teacher would assign two hours of homework that had to be done online. At an all-school assembly on Friday, a guest speaker would exhort the students to spend the weekend offline and away from all devices, and throughout the day, Delaney’s instructors would each assign weekend homework that could not be completed or turned in without looking at a screen.

Delaney was irritable, always on edge, dinged eighteen hours a day by classmates wanting to compare notes, and innumerable representatives of her school following up, revising, amending, rescheduling, clarifying. She was sleeping less than five hours a night. Finally, after she was found slumbering midday in the school’s utility closet, they decided as a family that home-schooling was the only viable option. Back at home, Delaney slowly retrained her mind. In a few weeks, she could think for an hour straight. After a month, she could concentrate enough to read books, could form original thoughts that were not just slight variations or reactions to ephemeral text fragments. After three months, she retook her spot on the bridge over the river and reclaimed her mind.

The Every (p. 60-62)

The Satire of Tech Ideas

In chapter 20, Delaney and Wes, our 2 protagonists come up with ideas that had serious ethical or privacy issues. These were all reprehensible ideas that seemed on the surface virtuous. When The Every released these ideas, Delaney and Wes thought that surely be a public outcry. Unfortunately, the public seemed to love all of their new ideas.

They started small. They created an app that told eaters, after they ate, whether or not they enjoyed what they ate. Delaney threw together some metrics that the users’ ovals could detect, and applied terms like pulse-rate optimization, endorphin count and pleasure center. They called it Satisfied? and it was an immediate hit. For a week it was the most downloaded app on campus, then in California, then the world. No one thought it too silly, no one thought it evil. Instead, Wes—who got credit for it—was feted as a new force in food-related tech, given Satisfied? followed so closely on the heels of Bananaskam. Everyones were dazzled by his tech-aided diet dichotomy: You should not eat what you should not eat, but what you should eat should be enjoyed, and here’s the app that tells you if you enjoyed it.

“That didn’t work out as I expected,” Wes said.

“And we shouldn’t have had you take credit,” Delaney said.

They invented a way to introduce ideas anonymously, and called it AnonIdea. It was a way for selfless Everyones to toss a notion into the mix, and have any other Everyone take the lead in developing it. No credit needed, no credit asked. This was seen on campus as a radically benevolent and selfless platform, and so only Delaney and Wes contributed any ideas to it.

Their next notion was simple but just offensive enough that they thought it would provoke widespread disgust. HappyNow? built on Satisfied? but was expanded to answer, in real time, whether the user was happy. They applied the same metrics used for Satisfied? but added the user’s recent purchases. It only made sense that a happy person would be buying happy things—workout gear, flowers, champagne, bright clothing, sex-positive toys—and in healthy quantities. HappyNow? analyzed your purchases and provided a Happy/Healthy rating (HH), illustrated by a range of expressions on the face of a cartoon hippo. Retailers and marketers loved this, given its circularity: to be considered happy, one only needed to buy more happy things, given who but a happy person would buy so many happy things?

Building on HappyNow? Delaney came up with Did I?, which used users’ ovals to determine whether orgasm was reached during any given coital session. A follow-up measured orgasm duration, intensity, and overall quality. Another update allowed the user to compare their orgasms with their friends, relatives and high-school crushes—and finally with any group in the world, the data divisible by region, demographics, income and genetic predisposition.

People loved it.

“I guess we have to get sillier?” Wes mused. They were back at the Shed, and Hurricane was chewing on his back paws. His fur everywhere was patchy and coarse; he looked like moth-eaten rug. Wes had him on hormones and antibiotics, but nothing worked. He only wanted to run. Wes dropped to the floor and rubbed Hurricane’s tummy; Hurricane wheezed.

“And flood the zone,” Delaney said. “There has to be a point where there’s too much nonsense.”

Wes looked up. “Too much nonsense,” he said dryly. He held Hurricane’s snout and locked eyes with the sick dog. “She thinks there’s a limit to nonsense. Isn’t that interesting that she thinks that?”

Delaney’s next notion was obnoxious and served no purpose but to prove the limitless self-regard of the Every and its staff. Henceforth, our campus should be called Everywhere, Delaney proposed. And anything not on campus is Nowhere. This was picked up by a Gang of 40 member named Valerie Bayonne, and was codified in days. People on- and off- campus found it delightfully irreverent and even clever, which gave great satisfaction to Valerie, who had been irreverent and clever enough to recognize these qualities in the idea.

Delaney’s next notion was obnoxious and served no purpose but to prove the limitless self-regard of the Every and its staff. Henceforth, our campus should be called Everywhere, Delaney proposed. And anything not on campus is Nowhere. This was picked up by a Gang of 40 member named Valerie Bayonne, and was codified in days. People on- and off- campus found it delightfully irreverent and even clever, which gave great satisfaction to Valerie, who had been irreverent and clever enough to recognize these qualities in the idea.

Wes thought of Kerpow!, an app made to “encourage spontaneity” among the world’s peoples. “Spontaneity is the spice of life!” he wrote, “and so important to our emotional and intellectual lives!” Kerpow!, once downloaded, reminded the user, every two hours, to do something unexpected. It was a hit.

Delaney introduced Thinking of You, an app that automatically sent a brief message—a T.O.Y., or toy—to each of the user’s contacts, twice a day. Thinking of you! the message might say, or could be modified, personalized, made more frequent as needed. Delaney hoped people would be driven mad by the addition of hundreds, minimum, of new messages a day, but most humans felt happy to be thought of, even if by an algorithm, and so the introduction of the toy, too, was a success.

Wes upped the ante with Show Your Love, which insisted that any messages of love, support, well-wishes or birthday greetings to family or friends be made public and counted. It caught on immediately, and the arms race began: it was ludicrous and selfish and weird to send any loving messages privately, so all were made public, and had to be sent often, to prove that love. The grandmother who sent thirty messages to Khalil or Siobhan by lunch loved her grandson or granddaughter abundantly, and clearly more than the grandmother who sent only eleven. The numbers could not lie.

The natural next step was WereThey?, which called upon the wisdom of the crowd to determine whether one’s parents were any good. The user supplied data, photos, emails, texts, video evidence, and the child’s subsequent success with college, romance and career. Between AI assessors and the experts and laypersons who weighed in from near and far, the quality of any given parental performance, birth to present, could be deduced. Wes added a tagline—Data for Dada, Metrics for Mama—which Delaney considered gilding the lily, but in any case, neither Delaney nor Wes expected much pushback on the app, and none arrived. People wanted this kind of certainty and now could get it.

Delaney conjured Departy, but couldn’t take credit; it was inevitable. Departy notified you of the death of anyone in your network, and then assessed who in your network knew the deceased and to whom you ought to send condolences. DepartyPlus connected the user with florists, travel agents and estate lawyers, and DepartyElite handled all these things, including the messages of condolence, for you. It was adopted by millions in weeks.

Wes created PassionProject, which grew out of research proving that people were happier when they had a passion—one overarching hobby or pastime in their life. For those unsure of what their passion was, PassionProject would scour all of the user’s available social media feeds, searches, purchases, posts and real-world movements and determine, “with 99.3% accuracy,” Wes said, the user’s favorite thing to do. People found it enormously helpful.

After seeing a child shammed one day for leaving his dog’s feces on the street for a full half-minute while he retrieved a baggie, Delaney thought of Takes a Village, or Tav, which allowed the user to film and tag children for their misdeeds and deviances, and connect that evidence to the tracking-chips most children wore in their ankles. Both Delaney and Wes had high hopes that the idea of tavving would nauseate all humans, would be the last straw, but instead most people were grateful; it removed guesswork from parenting, and illuminated the few remaining blindspots between children and those rearing them.

Delaney suggested something she called FictFix, expecting, correctly as it turned out, that Alessandro would claim it. The main thrust of FictFix was to take old novels and fix them. Unsympathetic protagonists were made likeable, chiefly through aggregating online complaints and implementing suggestions; problematic and outdated terminology was changed to reflect contemporary standards; and superfluous chapters, passages and anything preachy was removed. This could be done instantly in e-books, even those purchased long before. When FictFix rolled out, it was done gingerly, Alessandro assuming the blowback would be extreme. But there was not much, and it was confined to a few irrelevant academics, whose own back catalogs were soon fixed by their former graduate students.

“That one surprised me,” Wes said.

Delaney could no longer be surprised.

But she tried. She introduced an extension to FictFix that invited the correction of all texts, from 20th-century newspapers to 16th-century treatises, to avoid offense and improve clarity. These texts were opened to group editing, wiki-style, which allowed the texts to be quickly and continuously improved. The response was universally positive.

EndDis was Wes’s creation, an app where users could present a picture of anything, and ask the internet if it should exist, or if it should be eliminated in the real world and historical record. Wes’s notes on it insisted the subjects be inconsequential, things like pumpkin bread and wall-to-wall carpet, but EndDis was quickly hijacked to pass judgment on people, mostly celebrities, most of whom the internet said should die and be stricken from the human chronicle.

As a palate cleanser, Wes thought of ShouldEye, a decision-making app whereby a person could ask the general public to help them make a decision. From dating to burrito-purchasing, a user could announce a conundrum, ask for a quorum, and put their trust in the wisdom of the crowd. This was the most popular idea yet, was renamed Concensus, and, when municipalities and nation-states began adopting it as their chief tool for decision-making, and when Del’s parents relied on it to make any choice, and when millions began using it to decide whether or not they should leave the house, eat lunch, talk to family members or friends, or breed—given the environmental impact of babymaking, the inherent narcissism of the notion—Del and Wes decided to take a step back to regroup.

“Nothing’s working,” Delaney said.

“Actually, everything’s working,” Wes noted.

“Nothing goes too far,” Delaney said.

“Nothing’s breaking.”

“But maybe it’s bending?” Wes said doubtfully.

“It could be bending,” Delaney said, though she’d never been so scared.

The Every (p. 228-234)

On Technology and Travel

There’s a satire around why we should only use virtual reality for travel because of the destruction of the environment. I find the satire part a bit boring here but Eggers does a great job of highlighting the danger of tour books “touristifying” beautiful and unseen locales.

“Yes, some of you know this place,” Ortiz said, her voice lowering. “And the fact that you know this place is a problem. Perhaps even the problem. Let me tell you why. This film you’re seeing was taken in the 1990s, before Nosara was discovered by Americans and Europeans. This is the town now.”

A montage of crowded streets, gaudy with T-shirt and tourist-oriented shops, overtook the screen. A tour bus waddled through the narrow streets. Dazed visitors in cargo shorts ambled down the sidewalk in front of a Best Western. A shot of an Avis rental car office. A Little Caesars pizza outlet. A mound of tin cans and plastic bottles dumped in the jungle. A series of For Sale signs, all of them presented by multinationals like Sotheby’s and Chavez-Millstein. In one shot, a man in a lizard-print shirt was pointing and yelling at a local woman selling jewelry from a streetside folding table.

“I saw my country,” Ortiz continued, “and especially my little town, overrun and fundamentally changed by tourism. I saw the land grabs. I saw my family and neighbors priced out and pushed away. We moved again and again, as foreign multimillionaires and developers bought every hectare anywhere near the sea or possessing any view. We went ever-inland until we were living on the third ring of San José—that’s the Costa Rican capital, not the city in the South Bay—next to the Pepsi bottler.

“If you’ve been to Costa Rica in the last twenty years, you’ve seen that it is essentially Florida—a playground for the American middle class. Every beach is wrecked with cheap trinket shops and pizza places. Any pristine valley they could stretch a zipline across, they did. The country has lost much of its identity, and my fellow Ticos and Ticas run around like obsequious little capitalists, chasing the tourist dollar. My people have, in my opinion, lost their dignity. No offense if you’ve been to Costa Rica,” she added, to a few chuckles. “I don’t blame you individually. But I blame us all, collectively, for our avaricious pursuit of cheap experiences abroad.”

The Every (p. 133)