The Every Quotes

“Capital-P Play was last year’s management theory, following multitasking, singletasking, grit, learning-from-failure, napping, cardioworking, saying no, saying yes, the wisdom of the crowd > trusting one’s gut, trusting one’s gut > the wisdom of the crowd, Viking management theory, Commissioner Gordon workflow theory, X-teams, B-teams, embracing simplicity, pursuing complexity, seeking zemblanity, creativity through radical individualism, creativity through groupthink, creativity through the rejection of groupthink, organizational mindfulness, organizational blindness, microwork, macrosloth, fear-based camaraderie, love-based terror, working while standing, working while ambulatory, learning while sleeping, and, most recently, limes.”
― Dave Eggers, The Every

“Subjectivity is just objectivity waiting for data,” Delaney said.”
― Dave Eggers, The Every

“When you do things, you risk doing them incorrectly.” “Because she fears doing anything wrong, she’s intellectually celibate. Never had an original idea.”
― Dave Eggers, The Every

“You have to understand, they have the best people on the planet working on it. And the AI is fine-tuning itself every hour. It grabs every available piece of information. Body language in videos, photos. It sees things you can’t even personally control. You can’t train yourself like you could with an old-time lie detector test. It’s measuring minute muscle-indicators on your face you have no way of suppressing.”
― Dave Eggers, The Every

“the inexorable rise in suicides these last twenty years is so obviously a result of two entwined products of the digital age—the catastrophic health effects of manic (and largely meaningless) mental activity, and the lack of real purpose. No one is resting, and no one is accomplishing anything of real worth. It is, instead, the endless churning of middlebrow nonsense, of smiles, frowns, Popeyes, How U/Me fine, that keeps us from meaningful contemplation, or any hope of a new idea.”
― Dave Eggers, The Every

“And even the most enlightened environmentalists close their eyes to the damage they do when they fly around the planet, often in private jets, to warn the public about the dangers of fossil fuels. It is beyond hypocrisy.”
― Dave Eggers, The Every

“Now, the decline of God and the imminent collapse of so many faiths seems tied directly to the rise of surveillance, and the collective enforcement of social norms through instant global shaming. God promised punishment after death. Now it’s meted out in minutes. Karma was vague; digital shaming is specific. And I would argue people prefer the reliable nature of morality-through-surveillance over the ephemeral promises of the gods/Gods of the past. Prayers to God were rarely answered, while shouts into cyberspace always receive a response, even if misspelled and hateful. Everything God offered—answers, clarity, miracles, baby names—the internet does better. Do you know how many times What is the meaning of life? was searched on your platforms last year? Twenty-one billion times. Every one of those queries got a reply. The one question that could not be answered, until now, is Am I good?”
― Dave Eggers, The Every

“God is not old. He/she/they were invented, all across the world, not more than ten thousand years ago. When human societies were small, they were close-knit and moral boundaries were clear. In a tribe of twelve, if you stole your fellow caveperson’s favorite club or wheel prototype, it was known and could be rectified. You were always seen, and all was known. But as societies grew, the wayward could do things unobserved, and crimes could be committed. So it became necessary to invent a being who saw everything. Watch out, God’s creators said, you are being watched by a morally righteous eye in the sky—even when no one else is around. (The concept of Santa works in a similar way.)”
― Dave Eggers, The Every

“The unmeasured life is not worth living,”
― Dave Eggers, The Every

“Copyright © 2021 by Dave Eggers All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by McSweeney’s, San Francisco, in 2021. Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC. This is a work of fiction. Nothing described herein actually happened, though much of it likely will. At that point, this will be a work of nonfiction.”
― Dave Eggers, The Every

“technoskeptical”
― Dave Eggers, The Every

“Prayers to God were rarely answered, while shouts into cyberspace always receive a response, even if misspelled and hateful.”
― Dave Eggers, The Every

“Delaney suggested something she called FictFix, expecting, correctly as it turned out, that Alessandro would claim it. The main thrust of FictFix was to take old novels and fix them. Unsympathetic protagonists were made likeable, chiefly through aggregating online complaints and implementing suggestions; problematic and outdated terminology was changed to reflect contemporary standards; and superfluous chapters, passages and anything preachy was removed. This could be done instantly in e-books, even those purchased long before. When FictFix rolled out, it was done gingerly, Alessandro assuming the blowback would be extreme. But there was not much, and it was confined to a few irrelevant academics, whose own back catalogs were soon fixed by their former graduate students.”
― Dave Eggers, The Every

“If you’re humble before the numbers, the rewards are significant.”
― Dave Eggers, The Every

“If you are being surveilled,” Agarwal was roaring through her megaphone, “you are not free! A human being watched cannot be free!” Students hustled past, earbuds installed. “There is no safe amount of asbestos or surveillance,” Agarwal yelled. A graduate student, studying anthropology, began filming her. “This college has no right to film you, anywhere or anytime!” Agarwal implored. Now students were making a wide berth around her. “Students, I beg you to wake up.” No one woke up.”
― Dave Eggers, The Every

“Kiki’s fingerprint opened a heavy steel door and they entered a kind of library, if that library were designed by robots and for dinosaurs.”
― Dave Eggers, The Every

“The world is undergoing a movement toward authoritarianism, Delaney, and this is about order. People think the world is out of control. They want someone to stop the changes. This aligns perfectly with what the Every is doing: feeding the urge to control, to reduce nuance, to categorize, and to assign numbers to anything inherently complex. To simplify. To tell us how it will be. An authoritarian promises these things, too.”
― Dave Eggers, The Every

“He was forever trying to find ways to stay inside and avoid engagement with humans in real space. And though he carried a low-intensity outrage about privacy issues, he prized convenience above all,”
― Dave Eggers, The Every

“(All the dorms were named after dissidents, freedom fighters, revolutionaries.) “The Vaclav Havel is between the John Brown and the Cesar Chavez. If you get to Michael Collins,” Rowena said, “you’ve gone too far.”
― Dave Eggers, The Every

“In an effort to appease the EU, the Every’s braintrust invented a new social media platform, Blech, which was designed as a home for all things ugly and antisocial. The hope was that the trolls and sociopaths would go there, would self-select and be contained in a festering netherworld of misspelled insults and cancellation-lust. One or two percent of users, Bailey theorized, were spoiling the web for everyone else. But when Blech went live, seeded by a host of the web’s worst offenders, millions, then billions, of seemingly normal humans followed. It became more popular than the rest of the Every’s platforms combined.”
― Dave Eggers, The Every

“It’s a reprehensible idea that seems, on the surface, virtuous.” “That describes almost everything the Every does.”
― Dave Eggers, The Every

“for there was no local news, there were no journalists—all of that wiped out by social media, the advertising apocalypse and, more than anything else, the war on subjectivity—”
― Dave Eggers, The Every

“For the bus ride, which Delaney estimated would be ninety minutes, she had prepared a mix of happy journeying music, which she activated as they pulled out of the campus gate. The first song was by Otis Redding, and the first message came via her phone. Woman-hater, it said, with a link to an unsigned and evidence-less post hinting that he had been unkind to an ex-girlfriend who he’d met shortly before the bay and the dock and the sitting. Thanks for the early-morning pick-me-up! the writer said, meaning that Delaney had ruined the day and tacitly endorsed Redding’s newly alleged misogyny. Delaney skipped to the next song, Lana Del Rey’s “High by the Beach,” and then quickly figured it was too big a risk so skipped ahead. The third song, the Muppets’ “Movin’ Right Along,” was unknown to most on the bus, and survived its three-minute length, during which a handful of passengers furiously tried to find a reason the song was complicit in evil committed or implied. Delaney skipped the next song, by Neil Diamond, thinking any Jewish singer dubious in light of the Israeli sandwich debacle, skipped songs six and seven (from Thriller), briefly considered the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” but then remembered Phil Spector, and so finally settled on a young Ghanian rapper she’d recently discovered. His first song was hunted down quickly in a hail of rhetorical buckshot—as a teen, the rapper had zinged a borderline joke about his female trigonometry teacher—so Delaney turned off the shared music, leaving everyone, for the next eighty-one minutes, to their earbuds and the safety of their individualized solitude.”
― Dave Eggers, The Every

“How is freedom best exercised?” he asked. He hadn’t looked down at his screen. This seemed to be an improvised question. “Willfully,” she said. “Irregularly. Through the refutation of custom. The breaking of patterns. The rational flouting of irrational rules. Keeping secrets. Being unseen. Solitude. Social indifference. Fighting ill-wrought power. Irreverence for authority. Moving without limit or schedule through the day and the world. Choosing when to participate and when to withdraw.”
― Dave Eggers, The Every

“When it was revealed that the manufacturers had in fact hired 10,000 humans, whose only purpose was to listen to, transcribe and analyze the private conversations that had been recorded by these smart speakers, the manufacturers were amazed at the outrage, as muted as it was. Yes, they said, we have all along been recording and listening to your conversations, they said to their customers, but none of these 10,000 workers know your names, so what possible difference would it make that we have all of your private conversations recorded, and that we could with one or two keystrokes de-anonymize your conversations at any time? And, given the fact that every database ever created has been hacked, these recordings could be accessed by anyone at any time who had will enough to get them? What, the manufacturers asked, are you getting so worked up about? In fact, no one got worked up at all. Lawmakers were mute, regulators invisible, and sales skyrocketed.”
― Dave Eggers, The Every

“And for a while the users, though feeling wary and burned by the series of revelations, looked askance at their smart speakers, wondering if the tradeoff was actually worth it. 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.”
― Dave Eggers, The Every

“When you were asking before about whether we were recording conversations, they said, we didn’t quite understand what you meant. We thought you meant recording and listening to these conversations, and that of course we would never do. We would never. We record the conversations of hundreds of millions of users, yes, but no humans ever listen to any of these conversations. Conversations in the home, between family members, are private, are sacrosanct! they said. We simply record these conversations to improve our software, they said, to optimize our services, to better serve you, the customers, better.”
― Dave Eggers, The Every

“I don’t understand,” Joan said. “I thought he was a Democrat. Since when do Democrats denounce Communists?”
― Dave Eggers, The Every

“No one wants to be judged by a human. Too painful,” Delaney said. Baseball umpires had been replaced years ago, given computers were better at calling balls and strikes.”
― Dave Eggers, The Every

“This is another purging,” Wes said. “That’s the thinking among the leadership—that these moments are necessary cleansings. That the improvement of the species, its perfectibility, is only possible by shaking off all our frailties and deviances. And anyone who can’t adapt is part of the culling. The brash or incautious are eliminated, and the species moves on, only tamer. Step back.”
― Dave Eggers, The Every