Excerpt
Feed
by Anderson, M. T.
Copyright © 2006 by M. T. Anderson. Excerpted by permission.
Terms of Use
It was maybe, okay, maybe it was like two days after the party with the “never pukes when he chugalugs” that Violet chatted me first thing in the morning and said she was working on a brand-new project. I asked her what was the old project, and she was like, did I want to see the new one? I said, Okay, should I come over to su casa? I’ve never been there, and she was like, No, not yet. Let’s meet at the mall.
I was like, Okay, sure, fine, whatever swings your string, and she was all, Babycakes, you swing my string, which is a nice thing for someone to say to you, especially before you use mouthwash.
So I flew over to the mall near her house through the rain, which was coming down outside in this really hard way. Everyone had on all their lights until they got above the clouds. Up there it was sunny, and people were flying very businesslike.
The mall was really busy, there were a lot of crowds there. They were buying all this stuff, like the inflatable houses for their kids, and the dog massagers, and the tooth extensions that people were wearing, the white ones which you slid over your real teeth and they made your mouth just like one big single tooth going all the way across.
Violet was standing near the fountain and she had a real low shirt on, to show off her lesion, because the stars of the Oh? Wow! Thing! had started to get lesions, so now people were thinking better about lesions, and lesions even looked kind of cool. Violet looked great in her low shirt, and besides that she was smiling, and really excited for her idea.
For a second we said hello and just laughed about all of the stupid things people were buying and then Violet, she pointed out that, regarding legs to stand on, I didn’t have very much of one, because I was wheeling around a wheelbarrow full of a giant hot cross bun from Bun in a Barrow.
I said, “Yum, yum, yum.”
She was like, “You ready?”
I asked her what the idea was.
She said, “Look around you.” I did. It was the mall. She said, “Listen to me.” I listened. She said, “I was sitting at the feed doctor’s a few days ago, and I started to think about things. Okay. All right. Everything we do gets thrown into a big calculation. Like they’re watching us right now. They can tell where you’re looking. They want to know what you want.”
“It’s a mall,” I said.
“They’re also waiting to make you want things. Everything we’ve grown up with – the stories on the feed, the games, all of that – it’s all streamlining our personalities so we’re easier to sell to. I mean, they do these demographic studies that divide everyone up into a few personality types, and then you get ads based on what you’re supposedly like. They try to figure out who you are, and to make you conform to one of their types for easy marketing. It’s like a spiral: They keep making everything more basic so it will appeal to everyone. And gradually, everyone gets used to everything being basic, so we get less and less varied as people, more simple. So the corps make everything even simpler. And it goes on and on.”
This was the kind of thing people talked about a lot, like, parents were going on about how toys were stupid now, when they used to be good, and how everything on the feed had its price, and okay, it might be true, but it’s also boring, so I was like, “Yeah. Okay. That’s the feed. So what?”
“This is my project.”
“Is . . . ?”
She smiled and put her finger inside the collar of my shirt. “Listen,” she said. “What I’m doing, what I’ve been doing over the feed for the last two days, is trying to create a customer profile that’s so screwed, no one can market to it. I’m not going to let them catalog me. I’m going to become invisible.”
I stared at her for a minute. She ran her finger along the edge of my collar, so her nail touched the skin of my throat. I waited for an explanation. She didn’t tell me any more, but she said to come with her, and she grabbed one of the nodules on my shirt – it was one of those nodule shirts – and she led me toward Bebrekker & Karl.
We went into the store, and immediately our feeds were all completely Bebrekker & Karl. We were bannered with all this crazy high-tech fun stuff they sold there. Then a guy walked up to us and said could he help us. I said I didn’t know. But Violet was like, “Sure. Do you have those big searchlights? I mean, the really strong ones?”
“Yeah,” he said. “We have . . . yeah. We have those.” He went over to some rack, and he took these big searchlights off the rack. He showed us some different models. The feeds had specs. They showed us the specs while he talked.
When he went into the back to get another, cheaper searchlight, I said to Violet, “What next?”
She whispered, “Complicating. Resisting.”
Bebrekker & Karl were bannering us big. It was, We’ve streamlined the Tesla coil for personal use – you can even wear it in your hair! With these new, da da da, and Relax, yawn, and slump! While our greased cybermassage beads travel up and down your back! Guaranteed to make you etc., like that.
I was like, “Okay, huh?” but the guy came back and he had another searchlight.
He told us, “You can see shit real good with this one? I have one of these on my upcar. It’s sometimes like – whoa, really – whoa. There was this one time? And I was flying along at night and I shined the light down at the ground, to look at the tops of all the suburb pods? And all over the top of them, it looked like it was moving, like there was a black goo? So I turned up the brightness, and I went down, and I shined it more bright, and it turned out the black moving goo was all these hordes of cockroaches. There were miles of them, running all over the tops of the domes. . . .
THIS IS THE INPUT.
STUDENTS OUTPUTS: MAP TEXT, ANALYSIS, EXPOSITIONS
TEACHER OUTPUT: ANALYSIS
DURATION: 4 WEEKS.
FEED
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
FEED
Author Matthew Tobin Anderson
Country United States
Language English
Genre(s) Science fiction novel
Publisher Miramax Books
Publication date 2002
Feed is a novel of the postcyberpunk genre by M T Matthew Tobin Anderson. The story revolves around a teenage boy and his relationship with a girl with a vastly different world perspective. They live within a futuristic world where technology has merged electronics and telecommunications with the human mind, something which plays a major role in the novel. The book is a dark satire about corporate power, consumerism, information technology, and data mining in society.
CONTENTS
1 Background
2 Plot summary
1 BACKGROUND
The story depicts a future in which the Internet has evolved into the “Feednet¨; a computer network to which the brains of American citizens are directly connected by means of an implanted computer chip called a “Feed”, which over 70% of Americans have set in their brain. Privacy has become a thing of the past; Corporations are free to monitor and manipulate citizens’ thoughts, people’s thoughts are interrupted by the mental equivalent of pop-up ads, sometimes to a debilitating degree, and the government can even manipulate one’s memories. People can m-chat each other (a form of evolved Instant Messaging) on closed channels, effectively creating a form of telepathy. In addition, the Feed chip is implanted at such an early age that it actually takes over the running of many brain functions as the child matures. As a result, certain sites on the Feednet allow users to go “In Mal”; deliberately cause their feedchips to malfunction, causing physical and mental sensations similar to some illegal drugs.
2 PLOT SUMMARY
While spending Spring Break on the moon, Titus and his friends meet Violet Durn, a strange young woman whom they invite to go partying with them. While at a club, a man from the Coalition of Pity (an anti-feed organization) hacks their feeds, causing them to uncontrollably spout anti-feed slogans before going unconscious. They wake up in a hospital, unable to connect to their FeedNet. Since they have nothing else to do, Violet and Titus begin to talk instead of M-Chatting. Violet then brings Titus with her to a garden where a hole in space can be seen straightening the dead plants. Titus says, “It’s like a squid in love with the sky”, and Violet kisses Titus. They become boyfriend and girlfriend. After several days, their Feeds are brought back online and they go back to Earth.
After a short period of recuperation, Quendy throws a party while her parents are choking. Titus comments how quickly things have gone back to normal. Violet reveals to him that her feed was damaged much more severely than his.
Meanwhile, Titus begins to have strange dreams in which his feed is examined by unknown individuals. It is suggested that the others who were hacked have these dreams, too. At first, Titus cannot remember these dreams for weeks.
Soon, Violet comes up with the idea of resisting the feed. The corporations and conglomerates responsible for the feed participate in data mining by monitoring the purchases and interests of those with the feed, and using this information to fit individuals into consumer profiles. Violet plans to show interest in random items that will make it impossible for her to be fit into a profile. She and Titus spend a day at the mall, looking at strange items. At the end of the day, Violet receives such an immense amount of banners that they temporarily cut off the outside world.
When school restarts, Titus goes through a phase of depression caused by feelings of inferiority to Violet, accentuated by poor marks in school. Noticing this, his parents try to cheer him up. It is revealed that humans are no longer capable of sexual reproduction due to radiation, and all babies are tailor-made through artificial insemenation. Titus’s appearance was partly based on a failed movie star. Titus’s parents then buy him a new upcar.
Titus, Violet, and Titus’ father go car shopping. Violet thinks Titus is spoiled, though she does not say this explicitly. She tells him that the hacker from the Coalition of Pity died from the bludgeoning given to him by the police. At dinner, Titus and his father have a fight over whether she should have told Titus that the hacker died.
The next day, Titus and Violet go on a day-trip to Beef Country, where in-vitro meat is made in massive slabs. Titus picks Violet up at her house, where he meets her father for the first time. On the way home, Violet asks Titus how he would like to die, saying she has been thinking about it a lot. Titus chooses sensory overload, and asks whether Violet will be around to pull his plug. She says that she will, but seems uncertain.
Titus has another nightmare. He dreams of riots, pollution, and oppression. Violet wakes him up, having had the same dream or a similar one. Though Titus does not know it, Violet realizes that someone, most likely the Coalition of Pity, has been accessing her personal information. She calls FeedTech customer service, but is presented with an artificial intelligence that is of little to no help.
Soon after, Coca-Cola holds a promotion where free coke is awarded to people who talk about it to their friends about it a lot. Titus, Marty, Link, Calista, Loga, Quendy, and Violet all get together, planning to rip off the company by talking about coke for a number of hours. Calista, Loga, and Quendy show up in “riot gear:” clothing based on a twentieth century riot, including Kent State, the stonewall shootings, and the watts riot. Because Violet gives an intelligent comment on coke’s carbonation, the other girls make fun of her. Ultimately, everyone ends up thirsty for coke, and leave to get some. Violet tells Titus to take her away, and Titus does so, grudgingly. On the way home, they fight in the car, and Violet tells Titus that her feed is severely malfunctioning, and she may well die. They reconcile, and go to Titus’ house. Violet wants to experience many things before she dies. Titus and Violet go to the ocean, rendered poisonous by pollution. Various parts of Violet’s body are shutting down periodically at this point.
The next day at school, Calista is seen to have got an artificial lesion, which Link finds very attractive. This angers Quendy greatly. She calls the lesion stupid. Titus tells Violet over the feed, and she reacts with disgust. Titus invites her to a party on Friday.Titus also reveals to Violet that Link is a genetic clone of Abraham Lincoln, created as part of a secret patriotic experiment.
At the party, Titus and his friends are shocked to see Quendy, who has engaged in “birching,” a process in which small artificial lesions are made all over the body. Titus and Violet are repulsed, Calista is angry, and Link and Marty both find it sexy. Violet is extremely disturbed by this, so Titus takes her upstairs to the attic where he once played Sardines as a child, and describes the feeling of walking through an empty house, knowing everyone is aware of your every move, though you do not know where they are. Violet interprets this s an analogy for the fall of America, and fells better, though Titus is unaware of the significance of what he has said. They return downstairs, where the others are playing Spin the Bottle. Marty gets Violet, but before he can kiss her, Violet begins a tirade probably initiated by her deteriorating feed. She calls Quendy a monster, and criticizes Titus’ friends for playing games while their skin is falling off. This fit ends when she collapses and is taken to the hospital.
At the hospital, Titus meets Violet’s father again. He is shown a place where he can monitor Violet’s feed efficiency, which would be at 98% for a normal person. Hers is at 52.9%, but goes up to 87.3% after she is treated. With few exceptions, the chapters from here to the end of the book are named whatever Violet’s feed efficiency currently is. When Titus is allowed to see her, they have a rather awkward conversation, before Titus leaves.
In the aftermath of the malfunction, Violet loses one year of memories: the year before she got the feed installed. To avoid losing more memories, she makes large records of things she can remember, and sends them to Titus. Titus does not watch them, and deletes them at the end of the day. Violet’s body parts shut down more and more often. She and her father petition FeedTech for free repairs. Quendy and Titus talk. Quendy has forgiven Violet, and tries to show Titus images of what is happening to her, but Titus does not look. Quendy takes Titus’ hand.
Violet sends Titus a list of things she wants to do. The first few items represent things she would like to do with Titus, including dancing, going to the mountains, and visiting Fort Wayne. After that, her list becomes more fantastical, describing an ideal life in which she does not have the feed and is actually from Fort Wayne. She wants to grow old and have grandchildren with Titus, retire by a lake, and have a dog named Thomas Paine. The second to last item may be an attack on Titus. In it, Violet says that she wants to not remember what will actually happen, which includes Titus standing by her bed, waiting until he has been there long enough to be a good person. Titus does listen to the whole thing, but not at once.
At Link’s house, Titus, Marty, and Link decide to go into mal. Though Titus says he was in mal shortly before the book begins, this is the first time he has done it since meeting Violet, probably because Violet does not like mal. Somehow, the three end up at the mall, and discuss Violet’s list in a change room. Violet calls Titus, and is angry at him, particularly because he is unaware of the enviromental disaster that happened that morning in Mexico. Though the details are never given, some sort of toxic waste seems to have engulfed a number of villages there, and the Global Alliance is prepared to go to war with the United States. Titus decides to drive to her house. As the mal wears off, he becomes sleepy. While he sleeps, Violet gives him further bad news in the form of a memory of that morning.
Violet’s leg froze up as she was going downstairs, and she fell. At this time, Nina, from FeedTech appeared to respond to Violet’s request for help. FeedTech decided not to help Violet because of her strange customer profile – something brought about by resisting the feed. Nina offered to go shopping with Violet to help her form a aviable consumer profile, but Violet told her to fuck off.
That weekend, Violet comes to Titus’ house to ask him to go to the mountains. He is reluctant at first, but ultimately agrees. Violet’s father does not want her to see Titus anymore, so she is avoiding him. They stay at a cheap hotel. That evening, Violet tries to have sex with Titus, but Titus refuses, telling her that he keeps imagining her already dead. They criticize each other’s lifestyles, and break up. On the way home, Violet’s arm stops working and Titus considers apoligizing, but does not. As Violet gets out of the car back home, her legs fail, and she falls over.
The next day, Violet apoligizes to Titus over the Feed, but Titus does not answer. The summer as Titus sees it then unfolds. He and Quendy start going out, and he goes on a trip to Io with Link and Marty. However, the lesions get so bad that nobody has much skin anymore, and everyone’s hair falls out. Marty gets a “speech tattoo” that forces him to say “Nike” every sentance. A glitch in the feed then causes people to freeze in place, something like Violet. Titus thinks of her for the first time in a while. For unexplained reasons, bees come out of the walls of people’s suburbs and attack people aggresively. Finally, Titus’s new car is no longer cool, which makes him feel “tired.”
In the late summer, Titus’ father returns from a corporate getaway. He shows memories of the whaling expedition to his family, but cuts them short when he begins staring at a female co-worker’s chest and getting sexual feelings. At this time, Titus receives a message from Violet’s father saying that Violet wanted Titus to know when it was “all over,” and that this time has come.
Titus goes to Violet’s house where Violet is comatose and bedridden. Her father tells Titus stories of her decline intended to make Titus feel bad. He blames Titus, because it was he who took her to the Rumble Spot. Titus denies responsibility, saying that she wanted to live. In response, her father shows him memories of parts of her body and brain shutting down, the pain she experienced, and the reality of her current state of incontinence. He then tells Titus to be with the eloi. Titus asks what that means, and he tells him to look it up. They fight, and Titus goes home. In unbearable guilt and grief, he sits on his floor naked. When a banner ad for jeans comes on, Titus orders pair after pair until he has no money left at all.
Some time later, Titus gos to visit her again. He does not speak to her father, but tells her “stories” – little one-sentance bits of news and trivia that were all he was able to find in the vastness of the information available over the feed. Finally, he tells her the story of their relationship in the form of a movie trailer. The book ends with a commercial for the blue jean warehouse that ends with “everything must go.”
Though Titus is largely unaware of it, the America of the book is rapidly collapsing, a decline that mirrors that of Violet. In some ways, Violet represents what the author believes America should stand for. Just as Violet does not quite die in the book (the last chapter being called 4.6%), it is never explicitly stated that America ends, though the damage, like the damage to Violet, is likely completely unrepairable. The world may also end as a result of America’s actions, with the severe damage to the health of the general population and enormous ecological disasters. Meanwhile, Titus, the consumer, and Anderson’s image of what America is becoming ignores and distances himself from Violet to avoid hearing what she has to say. The book ends on a very pessimistic note.
