Eggers’s exuberant and polemical novel The Every, a sequel to The Circle, extrapolates from trends in our current world to indict Big Tech. The future Eggers envisions is surveillance capitalism on steroids: the Bay Area company previously known as the Circle has rebranded as the Every and swallowed pretty much everything in its path, including a certain e-commerce company dubbed “the jungle.” Nothing escapes the Every’s metric-driven totalitarian watch—or the hyperrationalizations of its unethical leaders in their weaponization of shame. Meanwhile, scattered anti-technology “trogs” try, largely unsuccessfully, to resist the company’s influence. As we follow one of the trogs who infiltrate the Every, determined to sabotage the company from the inside, nothing escapes Eggers’s keen and merciless eye for her encounters with the absurd, the ridiculous, and the horrifying. We can’t say we weren’t warned.•
‘The Every’
Dave Eggers’s novel is the California Book Club’s February 2024 selection.
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