[Week 11] FEED

MT Anderson's 'Feed' is a great novel to summarize a good deal of the Information Society Reader we have covered during this semester. It is a kind of "Clockwork Orange meets Neuromancer meets Futurama". Though the author extensively warns the commercialization of information that govern everything in our daily lives, the really important notion of his vision is that (almost) everybody is perfectly content with it. This could be effectively shown by laying out the whole story in the protagonist's view. Nobody does, or can, raise any question about the commercial information regime any more.

Would it be possible to resist - or at least reconsider - that huge inevitable mainstream of voluntary stupidity? Well, the author is not very optimistic about it, and does not hesitate to kill off the only sane protogonist at the end of the story. In fact, he does not suggest any concrete idea to topple at least a fraction of it, unlike the predecessors of cyberpunk. But then again, most of the researches we have been reading in the book were not different. Describing the problems, invoking the need for reconsideration, but that's pretty much it. No experiments of e-democracy, no account on the rare moments of civic success in the online struggle against the commercial or governmental sector. Maybe we'll have to anticipate for a sequel to the book - maybe it could be titled 'Feed 2.0 - The Revolution of Titus' or something like that.