The Every

by Dave Eggers

“Give the people a new word, and they think they have a new fact.” —Willa Cather

Any comparison, even in drunken jest, between Jim Jones, or David Koresh, or Keith Raniere, and Eamon Bailey—the Circle’s co-founder—was considered in poor taste and not remotely apt.

shouldn’t we be measuring not the quantity of friends, but the quality of those friendships?”

“Under the Soviets, all people wanted was more than one kind of bread. But now that we have choices, we are oppressed by them.”

When viewers get what they expect to get, when they expect to get it, that’s comfort.” “It’s really the essence of art!”

“Constraints are the key to liberation,”

She communicates daily with at least forty-nine people. That is manifestly a form of madness, of monomania. And yet this level of contact and availability is seen as a prerequisite to participating in society.

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

“Too much nonsense,” he said dryly. He held Hurricane’s snout and locked eyes with the sick dog. “She thinks there’s a limit to nonsense. Isn’t that interesting that she thinks that?”

In a few weeks there were hundreds of humans living in tents in a ragged ring between the Bay’s rough and rising sea and the Every campus, providing the starkest reminder of what happens when a society has a threadbare safety net and no plan for those who fall through it—and, more pointedly, what happens when the largest companies in the state and the nation and world somehow find ways to avoid paying taxes.

a closed ecosystem is wary of, or even hostile to, anything that might upset that equilibrium.”

“When you do things, you risk doing them incorrectly.”

The prosaic part is that most people simply don’t have time to care or fight.

It takes time, and money, and gumption, to even undertake the project of accessing prohibited information.

They wanted to be told what to do. They were free from freedom.

all of it lessened the chance at harm, the perception of harm, the possibility of momentary discomfort.

“We’re always worried about the number of friends we have, when we should be assessing the quality of those friendships.”

shame was the internet’s currency and lever for change.

Sometimes she felt for him. He had been born annoying, and seemed to know it.

that having them scared into compliant behavior was better than having them knowledgeable about the precise effects of their actions.

God is not old. He/she/they were invented, all across the world, not more than ten thousand years ago.