Feed - M.T Anderson

"Identity crises, consumerism, and star-crossed teenage love in a futuristic society where people connect to the Internet via feeds implanted in their brains.

For Titus and his friends, it started out like any ordinary trip to the moon - a chance to party during spring break and play with some stupid low-grav at the Ricochet Lounge. But that was before the crazy hacker caused all their feeds to malfunction, sending them to the hospital to lie around with nothing inside their heads for days. And it was before Titus met Violet, a beautiful, brainy teenage girl who has decided to fight the feed and its omnipresent ability to categorize human thoughts and desires."

I think this book's main function is to make you uncomfortable. To present you with your own reality, the one you are trying to avoid, with an unswerving amount of brutality. 

And, boy, did it make me uncomfortable. It's everything obnoxious about our media-frenzied, frantic-paced, impulse-driven, uneducated-praising society exemplified to the max. In Anderson's worryingly plausible world people are hardwired into corporate feeds that advertise to them according to what they're thinking, feeling, saying, looking at, etc. They chat with each other, watch shows, check the internet, invade each other's privacy, all within their bodies. Schools have quit teaching them facts because all that's accessible at the push of a button-no simpler than that, with nothing more than a thought. All their interactions are interrupted by this internal conversation/shopping/distraction. Through a combination of advertising and ignorance these shallow people don't care that the feeds are destroying them, causing lesions and their skin to litrally fall off, after they've already destroyed the world where they continue to live in vertically stacked suburbs with fake air and fake sun and fake food. They all (adults included) speak in that valley-girl like/dude hollowness, only their words are mega and unit and still plenty of like and f words. 

The writing did take awhile to get used to. The excessive use of slang and the word like, already my worst enemy, was an interesting stylistic choice. I was worried that it would frustrate me, and bring me out of the story but it surprisingly didn't. It really added to the sense of the world and the character. 

I really disliked the main character, Titus. While reading it, I was often disappointed with his choices, but I think he was the perfect embodiment of this shallow world. He doesn't want to deal with the reality of his girlfriend's slow death. It disturbs his perfect life, it distracts him for his shopping. He is so unbelievably self involved that he doesn't think that maybe she needs him there. I loved that Anderson offers no judgment or solution, just shows us this world with all its many flaws and lets it creep under your skin and make you uncomfortable with where the world is headed. 

I do have one gripe. I do wish that Anderson went a little deeper into the world and the horrors of it. But again maybe that was a choice, to show the horror that is so blatently on the surface on the society. 


Age rating 15 +. Some explicit content. A few minor foreplay scenes, mal which is the dystopian version of drugs and some f bombs.