Mischief Mid-Monthly: September 2024

Surprise- we’re back early. Mid-Monthly is going to be how we talk one-on-one. Well, not really. There’s more than one person reading. But there’s only one author.

Enjoy Sam’s thoughts on his most recent read.

Bombardment & Addiction: MT. Anderson’s FEED

I recently read a short book titled Feed which has scared me on a deeper level.

In the distant future, corporations run the United States. Kids attend School™, fashion trends change in fifteen minutes, and due to mass pollution and radioactivity, people have moved to the moon, other planets in the solar system and underground. It’s trendy to have your skin falling off or be covered in massive lesions. Consumerism is a cult, and everyone’s part of it.

To us, this is all disgusting. To Titus and his friends it’s normal, everyday life-including being bombarded by the feed every second of every day-even in your sleep.

The feed, a brain computer interface similar to Elon Musk’s Neuralink, but incredibly further advanced, is implemented when you come out of the test tube; a perfect designer baby. It’s tied into every function: eating, breathing, movement, vision. Life without the feed is scary. It’s silent. No one lives without the feed and it’s personalized advertisements.

Except Violet, who spent the first seven years of her life without it. She knows silence. She’s broken her advertiser profile.

On a trip to the moon, a hacker invades Titus’ & Co.’s wetware and the technicians are forced to turn it off. For two “horrible” days, he and his friends are forced to talk to each other and socialize. Oh, the horror!

But something is wrong. After Violet’s feed gets rebooted, her body begins glitching out. Body parts freeze up. And over time, as she and Titus fall in love, everything else falls apart.

Feed is not a happy book. In the end,(spoilers) Violet dies. And as she does, the country falls into turmoil and dies. It’s like she and her father(a history professor) were the last shred of dignity and hope for the old age. And as the story ends, so does the country.

Post-apocalyptic technological dystopias like Feed and Ready Player One make you pause and wonder: Is this where we are headed? We are at an advent of technologies like personal VR headsets, BCIs, and artificial(though not yet “general”) intelligence, which are coming at risks of increasing privacy concerns; Facebook data collection methods are already disturbingly identical to those shown in Feed. Yes, I think we are nearly at a point that we can say “we are living in the future,” but at what cost will that come at?

How much further will we ostracize ourselves and others for not being up to date on the latest fashion trends the last post from this celebrity? How much bombardment of advertisements can our brain take? Feed presents a simulated, forestless, manufactured-air reality, where everything is made-to-order, quickly and easily. How far away is that from being our world today?

And can we break away?

M.T. Anderson certainly seems to think so. The longer Titus spends with Violet, the more refined his vocabulary becomes. By the end of the novel, gone are sentences like “Our feeds were going fugue with all the banners…there was bumff from like the {meg} casinos and mudslides.” Instead, it’s “You could stand there and you would feel completely alone.” Violet tells Titus, “You’re different from the rest.” And the slang he uses reflects that. He is able to break away from the brainrot. He’s able to live more in the moment, without the feed, despite the feed presenting the present and the most up to date information.

It turns to us, then: How do we, living centuries before Titus and Violet, do that? We have even more control over what we input than they do. What habits can we build? How do we break the cycle so our kids and grandkids aren’t even ever introduced to it?

That will take some time and pondering.

"that's a wrap for now—we'll see you in two weeks, nerds."