Review: The Every

The Every by Dave Eggers
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I really quite enjoyed this book's predecessor "The Circle" for the way it predicted the work environment and the work of workers in the future. It seemed quite prescient. I was hoping for more of that here, Egger's concepts of the future world. But here the novel world building was less about the work environment but more about the world, changed quite drastically from our world, but a quite obvious possibility, perhaps even likelihood, of a future. And it felt much less positive than the first book. "The Every" is Egger's cautionary tale about putting too much power in the hands of a few well-meaning technocrats. The novel's protagonists are smart folks that try to destroy the Every, an amalgamation of Google and Amazon, from within. But whatever our heroes do, the opposite impacts occur. Instead of their sabotage making things worse for The Every, it enriches them. In the end, the story is quite Biblical. I enjoyed the story, and found parts of it, like the visit to the seals, humorous in a cringeworthy, too much like people I know, way. Eggers story of the ruling woke mob of technocrats is entertaining and, at the same time, frightening, as it feels all too likely. And if you are an app developer and want to have some ideas that are wonderful and moral at first blush, but could be perverted to enslave people in some way, Eggers has a ton of ideas.

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