The Every
By Dave Eggers
(577 pages, dystopian/satire, 2021)
The Every is the companion book/sequel to Eggers’ The Circle, which showed us a mega-corporation bent on being the sole provider of new technology and its cultish work campus. In The Every, the Circle has rebranded and become the Every after acquiring “a corporation named after a South American jungle” and a myriad of other apps and developers. The campus has grown into a self-contained entity that employees rarely leave, many of them choosing to simply live at work. The Every has no competitors; if an app or idea has value, they buy it. The U.S. government has even contracted the company to manage things like voter registration, census data, and surveillance. Everything we do is reduced to a number on a graph, constantly being analyzed and programmed into some new app initiative.
Enter Delaney and Wes, two tech skeptics working together to bring down the tech giant. Delaney has carefully worked for years to become the perfect candidate to work for the Every, and immediately upon being hired begins her mission to sabotage the mega-corp from within. Wes is her partner on the outside, helping her keep up the facade and collecting information. Their tactic is to push the Every to the tipping point where their users finally realize just how insidious and untrustworthy their gadgets are. But the company seems to have no restraint – how much surveillance, data collection, and micromanagement is too much? When will their users say enough is enough?
Follow Delaney as she moves onto the Every campus and bounces from department to department, feeding focus groups a barrage of terrible ideas that are immediately sent to the app store. Just how much privacy are we willing to give up in exchange for safety and convenience? Will she find humanity’s limit?
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Lindsey Neilson