The Every by Dave Eggers (Penguin)

The Every is a follow-up to Dave Eggers' Sunday Times bestseller The Circle.

The Every - social media company + planet's dominant e-commerce site + the largest search engine and much more = the most beloved monopoly ever known.

But not for all. Delaney Wells, tech sceptic and former forest ranger gets an entry-level job in Every with a plan to kill the company that had stolen her childhood and the will of her parents. With her friend Wes, they try to find company's weaknesses, suggest wild ideas and hope that people will reject them because they restrict their freedom even more.

Only that most of the people show low-intensity outrage about privacy issues, prize convenience above all, and readily use dozens of Every tools without any security protections, especially if that tool is new.

Humanity is fundamentally changed. We are moving from an idiosyncratic species that coveted our independence to one that wanted, more than anything, to shrink and to obey in exchange for free stuff. We just don't want to be free, we actually prefer to be told what to do.

The observed world, the filmed world, the recorded world, is a safer world.

Even paper books provide no useful data and should be abolished. “For environmental reasons alone!”

The Every dictates human behaviour, feeding the urge to control, to reduce nuance, to categorize, and to assign numbers to anything inherently complex. To simplify. To tell how it will be. You can get anything you need here. You just can’t get everything you want. Or anything you think you want. The Every is a closed ecosystem, and a closed ecosystem is wary of, or even hostile to, anything that might upset that equilibrium. And Delaney soon realises that the danger is real.

Brave New World of almost idiotic, infantile and helpless civilization that can live only with non-stop surveillance, measures and instructions from different AI algorithms. It’s a relief not to have to think. Orderly system, dangerous and harmful, but orderly.

The novel is timely, gripping and frequently unsettling to read. I just hope that is not an accurate prognosis for human race and that homo sapiens will not become homo numerus.

We have to fight every day to stay alive in a world that loves monopolies.

“Go forth and stay human!”

4/5