When MT Anderson Publishing a novel for young people Feeding in 2002, there were no social media feeds to scroll in real life. Launched two years before Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook in his dorm room and four years before he announced Facebook News Feed, Feeding takes place in a world where children have brains implanted to create a permanent layer of augmented reality known as a “feed”. In doing so, they become so absorbed in countless opportunities to buy things that they overlook environmental pollution, political turmoil, and anything but their material gratification. In the 20 years since its publication, Feeding has evolved into a contemporary classic, a classroom staple frequently subject to book-ban campaigns but often beloved by readers who marvel at the incredible predictive power of Anderson’s myopia.
Courtesy of Candlewick Press
Teen narrator Titus and his friends are so accustomed to a feed that mediates every aspect of their lives that they end up hospitalized as a stuntman’s stunt doubles against technology. temporarily disconnect them. Since the feed has now blended into their bodies, this is a real potential medical emergency. (“Feels like I’m in a small room,” thought Titus, in the eerie silence after his feed had stopped working. As he waited for it to settle down, he was stimulated. animated by physical art hanging on the wall – not stimulating enough.) Titus is delighted that the feed is back up and running and resumes the flow of news, private messages and targeted advertisements.
The best thing about feed, Titus explains, is that “it knows everything you want and hopefully, sometimes you even know what those things are. It can tell you how to get them and help you make tough buying decisions. Everything we think and feel is done by companies, mainly data companies like Feedlink and OnFeed and American Feedware, and they create a special profile, a profile just for you, after that they give their affiliates, or other records the companies that buy them, and they can know what we need. This passage, written a few years before the advent of the mobile advertising industry, is like a chipper marketing copy for a data brokerage today. Anderson predicted a slightly exaggerated version of this. Web 2.0 before it existed and wasn’t what he predicted Two decades ago, Anderson’s vision of algorithmic advertising forecasting was considered science fiction; now, it’s like a miracle. flourishes he adds to keep the novel grounded in reality.
Some details are still sci-fi movie: Titus goes to the moon for a quick weekend getaway, and back home, he hovers around his vertically stacked suburbs in a van. “truck” is flying. And even though commercial brain implants are come to us soon, they’re not quite here yet — we’re stuck with screens for now. But the feed itself is instantly recognizable as a version of the Internet we live in today, complete with constant pop-up ads and opportunities to spend money. Anderson stitches together excerpts from advertisements throughout the book. “Nature… .v. nurture. Primus prime hour broadcast event,” says one such advertisement. (Yes, three years before YouTube was created and five years before Netflix rolled out the streaming option, Anderson also predicted the rise of video streaming. Titus’ favorite feed of you. raft’ is called OH? OH! Thing!)
Like some of YA’s other works, the plot is a tough romance. Titus falls in love with Violet, an unusually quiet girl from the suburbs who lives with a book-loving and money-poor single father. She’s different from Titus’s tough buddies, including the tall, wealthy Link (whom Titus aptly refers to as a genetic clone of Abraham Lincoln). Resuscitated in the hospital after their feeds were cut, Violet and Titus fell into a quick, giddy trance, each recognizing the other as a sensitive soul in a corrupted world. But Titus worries that he’s not smart enough for Violet—and Violet is worried that her feed’s glitch is literally killing her, and she can’t afford to fix it. .
Violet has a punk spirit; before her body began to wear out, she encouraged Titus to fight off purported advertising by pretending to be interested in buying an assortment of random items. “I won’t let them catalog me,” she told Titus, after warning him that the feed was designed to bring humanity into a single consumer profile. Unlike Titus’ friends, who could barely string a sentence together, Violet loved language. She admired Titus in part because of his ability to use metaphors. This sets her apart from the others; in the world of Feeding, the language was so degraded that the president also uttered a jumble of curses and slang. Reading tidbits and clips of interspersed speeches in today’s novel, this particular Anderson invention feels particularly prophetic. At one point, the president reluctantly apologized for calling a political ally a “big asshole.” And included in teen lingo? “Humble.” Overall, review Feeding Now, 20 years after its publication, its satire is still remarkably conjecture.
