The Every

by Dave Eggers

The device was so many things: it was a television, a telephone, a research tool, a limitless archive, a stereo, an arcade, an extraordinary still camera, a competent video camera, a portal to political movements, pornography and pederasts. Her parents later said—and they were not prone to exaggeration—that in the first month, Delaney spent eighty hours a week using it. Delaney explored only a fraction of its capabilities, first watching the entirety—thirty-three hours—of a vintage show called Riverdale. She watched six seasons of another, even older, show, called The Office. She finished Friends, Outer Banks, iCarly and All American. She discovered music, curating a playlist that soon grew to 1,130 songs. Her friends were not frequent texters yet, so the phone did not have any immediate effect on her social life. But instead of spending time on her bridge over the river, Delaney spent those hours in her room, rarely sleeping but never quite awake.

In a few short decades they’d transformed proud and free animals—humans—and made them into endlessly acquiescent dots on screens. Citizens in cities had given up their liberties early in the twenty-first century, but the natural world had remained wild, and people could stay hidden, could move freely. But the last vestige of freedom—the ability to move through the natural world unobserved—fell away on a Friday, and no one noticed.

“We are a species in contraction. The age of exploration has given way to the age of introspection.