A bit about Feed

Feed by M.T. Anderson is one of my favorite adolescent novels. I first read it a couple of years ago; but as time progresses, I think it holds increasing relevance. It is set in the future when most Americans stay connected through a feed brain implant. As you can probably imagine, all one has to do is think about something and voila the thoughts are tagged with a plethora of related links and advertisements.

In one scene, the narrator, Titus is out mall shopping with his girlfriend, Violet. A rebel deep down, Violet talks about an experiment she has been conducting.

"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 & Kar. We were bannered 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." (p. 81)

Titus and Violet go from store to store asking about various "weird shit" (p. 83), but buying nothing. While looking at home endoscopy kits, she says,

"For the last two days, okay? I've been earmarking all this different stuff as if I want to buy it--you know, a pennywhistle, a barrel of institutional lard, some really cheesy boy-pop, a sarong, an industrial lawn mower, all of this information on male pattern baldness, business stationery, barrettes . . . And I've been looking up house painting for the Antartic homeowner, and the way people get married in Tonga, and genealogy home pages in the Czech Republic . . . I don't know, it's all out there waiting."

I picked up one box. "This one is the cheaptest. You swallow the pills and they take pictures as they go down."

She said, "Once you start looking at all this stuff, all of these sites, you realize this obscure stuff isn't obscure at all. Each thing is like a whole world. I can't tell you. (p. 84)

I will probably have more to say about Feed in future posts. In today's society, I cannot help but recall the biting social commentaries Anderson so deftly implies, and I especially love his use of language to seal his perspective.