Imagine a future where you connect to the internet via a feed implanted in your brain. A feed that knows what you like, and sends you content accordingly. It even sends you adverts for the things it knows you will like. It doesn't sound too far away, does it?
Well, M. T. Andersen wrote Feed 10 years ago, before internet connected mobiles, before facebook (if anyone can remember a world without status updates!), which makes the book a shockingly accurate vision of the future, and a tour de force in dystopian fiction.
Below is a little post from M. T. Andersen about his thought process behind the book. What do you think?
When
I wrote Feed, my intention wasn’t really to predict future tech — but instead,
to think about cultural conditions as they already were then. All around us,
ads, TV shows, and movies nudge us with images of the high life, playing on our
desire to belong. When I was a teen, this drove me crazy (as it bugs and
worries many teens). There’s always that subliminal message seducing us and
bullying us: If you just get this, and buy this, and order that, you’ll be
cool, and you’ll be loved. See how much fun these kids are having? If you want
to be wanted, then you need to want what other people want. And other people —
what they want is this. Buy it. Buy it now.
This
marketing has become even more intense (and not just for teens!) now that most
of us are connected all the time through devices of one kind or another. I
don’t even notice the ads that flit past me anymore, I take them so much for
granted. And even though I know that my favorite shows are paid for product
placement, I take that for granted, too.
Of
course, I wrote Feed back in 2001, before most of these devices existed, and
before marketing systems
had become as sophisticated as they are now. But even then I was still tapped
into a wider system of corporate communication. Already my dreams of who I
wanted to be, my understanding of who I had been in the past, my hopes for who
I’d become in the future — these things
had already been influenced and perhaps even constructed by advertising images,
movie sequences,
and prime-time TV, the hours of images of twenty-somethings crammed into bars,
girls smiling at men who drank the right beer, leaving me with a dim impression
that I was supposed to like a certain kind of music, a certain kind of shirt, a
certain kind of ribs.
So
I began to conceive of a story in which these media connections and social
networking
connections
weren’t external, but within us all. What if we no longer needed devices? What
if we had
an Internet feed within us, so we were never disconnected?
It
is out of the memory of my anger as a teen at the bullying manoeuvres of “youth
marketing” that I
wrote the book — but also out of the knowledge that even now, I’m part of this
system of desire. I still can’t get out of my head the images of who I’m
supposed to be. (For my current age: the picket
fence, the lawn, holding some daughter up toward the sun in a moment of joy
about our paint swatches, strapping my tykes into the SUV.)
I
don’t think this would have been an interesting book to write (or to read) if I
had only hated the hyper-marketed world I describe. For me, the key to the
discomfort — and the exploration — is how much I love some of it, how much I
still do want to be slick like the people on the tube, beautiful, laughing,
surrounded by friends. And how much I legitimately do think that the technology-based
information resources at our command now are incredible. These are tools for
an amazing new understanding of the world, though they come with strings
attached. Think about
the way technological progress over the last twenty years has revolutionized the
artistic possibilities in film or the data-collection processes of medical
research — or almost any field. We have
at our fingertips knowledge and power like no other generation before us, and
that’s intoxicating.
I
am no Luddite. And this would not have been an effective satire, in my opinion,
if I hadn’t also been seduced by what I was mocking. It is the anguish of
indecision that animates it. This is indeed a brave new world, but there is a
cost. My conception of that cost has perhaps changed a little since I wrote the
book a decade ago. At the time, I was worried about the cultural effect of this
information buzz on how we understood ourselves — even on our own neurological
development. Now I am more worried by how this media shell actually insulates
us from understanding the world around
us.
We
live in an increasingly complicated world of commerce. It’s very hard to track
where the things we
buy come from, where they’re assembled, who’s involved in making or growing all
of the things we consume. Food is regularly shipped to us across thousands of
miles from corporate farms. The gadgetry we love is constructed in residential
factories on the other side of the world. Our winter clothes are stitched
together in concrete bunkhouses in tropical climes. As time goes on, it becomes
harder and harder for any of us to keep track of how things were made and how
they got to us. Yet at the same time, whenever we buy something, we’re also
putting in a “yea” vote for the system that put it together. We’re responsible
for a world we don’t understand.
For
democracy to work effectively, there must be an educated and informed
electorate. By the same token, for the free market to work, it requires
informed and intelligent consumers. We have to comprehend the long-term effects
of what we buy, or we are nothing but dupes.
Unfortunately,
in a saturated media world, it is hard to find these things out. We are all
suspended in a sphere of imagery and voices vying for attention. How do we know
that what’s going on is actually in our best interest? How can we be sure that
our way of life will be preserved for the future? And do we really want it to
be?
This
is what I worry about now, as I consider the feed and its possibilities. People
have told me that Feed is coming true. (Many of the technologies I discussed
have been explored in recent years.) But in a sense, I believe it already was
the reality when I was writing.
I
was already dreaming in advertisements.
Feed is available now from all good bookshops.
Buy from your local bookseller
Amazon
The Book Depository
Waterstones
WHSmith
Also available as an eBook
Feed is available now from all good bookshops.
Buy from your local bookseller
Amazon
The Book Depository
Waterstones
WHSmith
Also available as an eBook
