The Every is the biggest tech company in the world, controlling more and more of people’s everyday lives. But two young idealists, Delaney and Wes, believe things have gone too far and plan to join the company to bring it down from the inside...
The Every is the sequel to Dave Eggers’ 2013 novel The Circle and, like the previous book, it’s a mix of elements that succeed and fail to make for another ok dystopian novel.
Like too many sequels, The Every is very similar to the previous story with little variation, though there are of course some new features added. The Circle (a company like Apple/Google/Facebook) has now gobbled up and merged with the other giant tech firms, including Amazon (referred to only as “the jungle”), and rebranded as The Every to become the biggest company in human history. Mae Holland, the protagonist of the first book (the Emma Watson character if you just saw the Netflix movie), is now head of the company with former leader Bailey (the Tim Honks character) edged out.
And that’s really it in terms of how far things have progressed since the end of the first book. There’s obviously been a lot of advances in tech since 2013 with smart devices now pervading most people’s homes, so details like that are worked into the Every’s insidious reach (ie. “Ovals” = Apple Watches/FitBits). The message of the first book remains - privacy good, social media bad - with a heavier focus on personal freedoms and how much people are willing to sacrifice for the sake of convenience, which some of the leaps might be convincing or not, depending on your view of humanity and where we’re headed. Like Mercer in The Circle, there’s another lecturing anti-tech voice in the form of Agarwal, Delaney’s college professor.
The Every also has the same problem I had with The Circle in that the ideas Delaney and Wes pitch (designed to enrage people and bring the company down) become adopted far too quickly and easily with no nuance in the reactions around the world. Every single idea is a masterstroke without any setbacks which is crazy. They’re new hires - and nobody else at The Every, all of them geniuses, had already come up with these ideas?
The reactions of people to these new ideas is also vastly simplistic. Online behaviour is not real world behaviour - just because some people may not like a company or person and will say as much on social media doesn’t mean they’ll stop buying a product by that company or boycott that person’s output. I mean, banning travel and pets - and people just go along with it? That’s just not convincing. The reality is that though there is a lot of outrage on sites like Twitter, most people in real life are reasonable and wouldn’t behave like the minority of loud voices online.
But I get it - like The Circle, Eggers is writing a sort of parable and needs for these things to just be. He’s not shooting for realism. Still, I don’t find his core message of gloom and doom towards big tech that remarkable or persuasive. While you could argue we’re already there, I just don’t think we’re headed towards this authoritarian nightmare that Eggers is portraying and the views he’s presenting are a bit silly and myopic - all humans being controlled like mindless puppets? Please. Look at how many people in our world are refusing to take a life-saving vaccine from a horrendous disease. We don’t behave as one as a species.
The story is interesting - up to a point. It’s fun to see Delaney “rotate” (spend a week or two) through the Every’s many departments and Eggers has done a remarkable job of imagining a convincing tech corporation. The effect is like reading an Orwellian Alice in Wonderland/Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with more than an air of The Prisoner about it. But it gets repetitive after a while and a bit dull once you realise this is basically the rest of the novel. Because the plot is nebulous and naively futile too, the ending is somewhat anticlimactic and underwhelming.
Some episodes felt unnecessary, like the whole homeless people living outside the campus thing and Delaney’s group decide to give them free tech, but I liked the sub-plot of a covert resistance in the company - of others with the mindset of Delaney and Wes - and whether or not it was real or a ploy to weed out actual dissenters. Delaney’s interrogation by someone who may or may not be an ally was very compelling, as was Mae’s Darth Vader-esque transformation from the character we saw in the first book and the person she is now.
Other aspects of the story were very clever. Like how, when in the Every cafeteria, Delaney and Wes have to speak in an extremely basic, almost pidgin-like language, to fool the AI, and Everys like Kiki who misuse multisyllabic words they don’t understand in sentences to hit absurd arbitrary vocabulary quotas for their Ovals. The commentary of how AI/algorithms have made us all talk gibberish instead of communicating clearly is brilliant. Some points are banal though, like how cult-like these companies can seem, and how too much constant information leads to poor sleep, burn-out and stress - duh.
There’s a lot in this novel that’s very imaginative, but, like the first book, The Every left me underwhelmed and unconvinced as to its overall message. I haven’t given up that many personal freedoms and I don’t expect people in general would be willing to give up as much as the people in the book’s world have. And this idea that companies like The Every will only lead to Orwellian futures - eh… I don’t know. I think Eggers is a bit too hung up on an either/or dichotomy and can’t see the myriad variations on where we go from here - which is fine, he’s not a soothsayer, it just makes his story less powerful.
The Every is essentially an updated version of The Circle. If you liked that, you’ll probably like this and for those who haven’t read The Circle, you don’t really need to read it first to pick up The Every. It’s a bit too long and repetitive in places and isn’t as powerful as I think it wants to be, but I found it to be a sometimes intriguing and compelling read - a decent, if forgettable, dystopian fiction.
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