The Every

by Dave Eggers

Think of how much more genuine and authentic our friendships could be,” she said, “if we just apply the right metrics to them.”

Then something odd happened. Her school, which had been warning parents, since kindergarten, about the dangers of screentime and the atomization of the adolescent attention span, began an inexorable march toward full digital immersion.

On Tuesday her parents would attend a school-sponsored evening devoted to teen tech addictions and how to break them, and on Wednesday her algebra teacher would assign two hours of homework that had to be done online. At an all-school assembly on Friday, a guest speaker would exhort the students to spend the weekend offline and away from all devices, and throughout the day, Delaney’s instructors would each assign weekend homework that could not be completed or turned in without looking at a screen.

“You were saying you could fix Jane Eyre.” “Well, we could,” he said, “but because the author is dead, she”—he pressed the word so hard it erased centuries of chauvinism and ignorance—“can’t learn from the data herself.”

“Surveillance, data and shame as behavioral modifier. That’s been where all of this has been heading all along.”

“Basically,” Berit said, pulling at a stray yellow hair, “at some point, we’re drinking your shirt.” “Thank you,” Delaney said, and was instantly embarrassed. How did she not know this? And then the simplicity of AYS became fully clear. To avoid social embarrassment, to avoid complicity in the decline of the world, all she had to do was choose their chosen products. Tell me what to buy. Tell me how to do no harm.

On the one hand, their private family conversations were being recorded and stored offsite for unknown future use by a trillion-dollar private company with a limitless litany of privacy violations. On the other hand, they could find out the weather without having to look out the window.

Millions more became unemployed with every new thing the Every canceled, but there was always work in the Every warehouses, where humans were invited to work beside robot package-pickers and while monitored by AI, and be paid a fair minimum wage for it. It was an orderly system.

“And every trip is a carbon moment.” She turned to Delaney and whispered, “We’re learning.” “We’re dying,” Gwen hissed. “They have me as a suicide risk.”

Every new generation purports to be more empathetic, and yet every new generation is less forgiving. And of course, with every coming year, technology ensures that no errors go unrecorded.”