Another “had been born annoying, and seemed to know it.”Ĭringing, cringe-inducing techies aren’t really the problem, though. The novel makes much of the body odor of an employee who appears for all of seven pages.
But there’s also a touch of cruelty in Eggers’s attempts to get us to despise them. These characters are repulsive, pitiful, obvious warnings of tech’s ability to unhinge. At one point, Delaney organizes a trip up the coast to see elephant seals, and the Every employees who attend are so traumatized by the freedom, unpredictability and reality on display that they hold tearful hearings afterward. Syl, “passive and fearful,” gets his kicks from righteous shaming Alessandro, Carlo and Shireen are all filled with a debilitating terror of saying the wrong thing and losing their jobs. Kiki has automated alerts for so many self-improvement goals that she’s constantly on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The employees Delaney meets are half-deranged, readily manipulable creatures whose pupils jitter uncontrollably. Carefully disguising her anti-tech rage, Delaney begins feeding intentionally harmful ideas to the teams she rotates through, in hopes that they’ll incite mass revulsion and destroy the company.
Delaney Wells, a new hire, views this brave new world with particular horror she’s not a tech acolyte but a would-be saboteur. The Every is what results when the already ominous tech company of Eggers’s 2013 novel, “ The Circle,” finally acquires Amazon. Nothing is left to the imagination in “The Every,” which moves relentlessly from one mocking sendup of tech culture to the next, taking trends like athleisure and public shaming to their fullest, worst extent. Eye-tracking software documents his every ogling, and the resulting clips on social media sink the campaign in a matter of weeks. When an antimonopoly, anti-Every presidential candidate visits the company, he’s greeted by hordes of employees wearing skintight bodysuits that leave nothing to the imagination. But Lycra is what finally destroys political resistance to the Every, the largest tech company on the planet. Oh, sure, algorithms fire employees and judge the aesthetic value of art, and people film others performing the smallest transgressions to be factored into “Shame Aggregate” scores. In the near-future tech dystopia of Dave Eggers’s nightmares, everyone wears Lycra.
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