Feed

“The thing I hate about space is that you can feel how old and empty it is. […] You need the noise of your friends, in space.”

Titus has an unfulfilled desire for human connection, though he doesn’t understand it. He fills the empty space by buying things and surrounding himself with friends who are much louder than they are thoughtful, but all of it is only a distraction. Space is a metaphor for Titus’s life. It’s large and empty, but it’s crowded with trash from the castoffs of consumerism.

“I didn’t have a thing for Calista or Quendy or even completely a thing (anymore) for Loga. But I was watching Link slamming into them, and when he slammed, it said that he and the girls all knew what each other’s bodies would be like, and that was part of the game.”

Titus attempts to describe the ideas of intimacy and connection because he can’t quite name what is missing in his relationships. Although he dated Loga and had sex with her, he feels no trace of that intimacy left between them. He imagines that he sees Link effortlessly achieving what he can’t, but most of the people with the feed don’t seem to have the emotional intelligence to cultivate closeness or that kind of human connection. When Violet offers it to him, Titus pushes her away and calls her intense.

“I wanted to buy some things but I didn’t know what they were. […] Marty couldn’t think of anything he wanted, so he ordered this really null shirt. He said it was so null it was like he ordered nothing.”

Titus and his friends go shopping, even though they have nothing that they want to buy. The act of shopping is a ritual they have learned will lead to fulfillment. It’s an addiction just as much as the alcohol and malfunctioning they abuse to feel some facsimile of excitement and happiness. However, nothing they buy is ever good enough to legitimately make them feel good.

“So I opened my eyes.”

Waking in the hospital, Titus’s immediate response is to check his feed, which is turned off. He reaches through every mode of connection through the network before he resorts to using his eyes. With the feed, his senses have become obsolete, which means that he views the world through the lens of the feed and the corporations. While Titus and his friends are in the hospital, they only have their natural senses. Although Titus has a full journey to complete before his eyes are truly opened to the world around him, this is the moment the process begins.

“I don’t know when they first had feeds. Like maybe, fifty or a hundred years ago. Before that, they had to use their hands and their eyes. Computers were all outside the body. They carried them around outside of them, in their hands, like if you carried your lungs in a briefcase and opened it to breathe.”

The way Titus describes the feed predicts the way people will become attached to their smartphones in the decade following the novel’s publication. To Titus, the thought of having a computer that is as far away as his hand is anxiety-producing, like having to put in conscious physical effort each time you want to breathe. He sees it as an extension of his body. He uses it absent-mindedly just as smartphone users do, and it has been a part of his brain since birth. Losing access in the hospital is momentous, though he and his friends adapt surprisingly well.

“That’s one of the great things about the feed – that you can be supersmart without ever working. Everyone is supersmart now. You can look things up automatic, like science and history, like if you want to know which battles of the Civil War George Washington fought in and shit.”

To support the idea of the feed, the concept of intelligence has been simplified to mean memorizing facts. Critical thinking and independent rationale would be contrary to the feed’s ability to advertise and sell. Titus is a full believer in the notion that having a feed is the same as having intelligence. Of course, his statement is ironic, because his grammar and use of language are poor and unexpressive, and he can look up any fact he would like yet still places George Washington in the Civil War, which is about a century later than the Revolutionary War, which Washington actually fought in. Titus demonstrates that he doesn’t even use the feed to repeat facts.

“Everything we think and feel is taken in by the corporations, mainly by data ones like Feedlink and OnFeed and American Feedware, and they make a special profile, one that’s keyed just to you, and then they give it to their branch companies, or other companies buy them, and they can get to know what it is we need, so all you have to do is want something and there’s a chance it will be yours.”

One of the greatest anxieties that developed with the information age was the fear of datamining and surveillance, both of which became more and more real. Titus is in a dystopian future in which the data mining is no longer surreptitious. Titus not only has no concern for the privacy of his own brain, but he also celebrates it. He sees the attention paid by the corporations as a type of individuality—something that makes him unique and special. In actuality, the corporations are using the feed to nudge and manipulate users into fitting in consumer profiles by simplifying their senses of individuality. Titus describes the dream of the feed, which is a modified version of the American Dream to encapsulate consumerism and capitalism.

“I was thinking of how sometimes, trying to say the right thing to people, it’s like some kind of brain surgery, and you have to tweak exactly the right part of the lobe. Except with talking, it’s more like brain surgery with old, rusted skewers and things, maybe like those things you use to eat lobster, but brown.”

Titus is trying to have a conversation with Violet, and he is very self-conscious about what she thinks of him because he knows from the moment he meets her that she is more intelligent and wittier than he or anyone else he knows. Although one of the main functions of the feed is chatting and social networking, it has caused the degradation of language and communication. Face-to-face conversation has become all but obsolete. As he struggles to say the right thing to Violet, Titus realizes that tact and communication are skills he is ill-equipped to perform.

“I never heard Loga tell a story this good before, and she even used her hands and stuff, and her eyes were vacant like she was seeing some other world, which I guess she was.”

Although Loga’s feed wasn’t hacked, she finds herself in the position of needing to communicate with friends without it. It sparks a moment of creativity in her, as she negotiates the challenge of relaying a story that she is experiencing through all her senses into words that will allow her friends to experience it.

“Maybe these are our salad days.”

Violet uses an idiom that is long out of use. With her vastly different background and education, Violet has her own struggles communicating with the others, often using words and phrases that they’ve never heard, later being mocked by Calista for it. As it happens, Violet turns out to be right when she calls the hospital time their salad days. They are the happiest time that they will spend together before they must face the reality of Violet’s decline.

“You’re the only one of them that uses metaphor.”

Violet later tells Titus she was initially attracted to Link because Link is ugly, and she thought it might give him more depth as a person. She wants to fall in love with someone who lives a normal life, but she also, perhaps unconsciously, looks down on Titus and his friends. In the hospital, she has begun to bond with Titus, but she has just learned that her feed is damaged, and it could kill her. She decides to live her life, beginning with taking a risk by kissing Titus. Titus occasionally uses metaphor in his narration as a way of making sense of the world, and Violet sees this use of abstract thought and comparative language as a sign that Titus is the one who is deeper than the others. Eventually, this turns out to be true, but it takes the entire length of Titus’s journey to get to that point.

“‘We’ve all been through this big thing together,’ she said, ‘It’s got to change us somehow.’”

Violet has a more profound and complete understanding of the world around her than Titus and his friends. She understands the hacker’s reasoning and the nature of the protests and resistance occurring everywhere. Violet knows the hacker was killed in front of them, and Violet is also fundamentally changed in a literal way because the hacker damaged her feed. She now knows that her life may be running out. She hopes for a sense of human connection with the others after experiencing trauma, but all of them—even Titus—are happy to return to normal and pretend that it never happened. They are not socially acclimated to parsing traumatic experiences or sharing deep emotional connections with one another.

“We need to remember… Okay, we need to remember that America is the nation of freedom, and that freedom, my friends, freedom does not lesions make.”

The president of the United States makes a speech in which he denies allegations that the widespread skin lesions are being caused by anything that the corporations are doing to the environment through their manufacturing pollution. Of course, this is undoubtedly a lie. The president is mentioned several times in the text and is fully incompetent as a leader and seemingly in his position solely to reassure people that the corporations are good for the country. By the end of the novel, the United States is on the brink of war due to the president’s bumbling. In a leaked message, he called the Prime Minister of the Global Alliance “a big shithead” (98), and the Global Alliance is ready to obliterate the United States to stop the country from finishing its destruction of the planet. The president is clumsy and unsophisticated in the language he uses, and he invokes the esoteric concept of freedom as a nonsensical buzzword to tie the corporations and the lesions to patriotism and ideas of Americanness.

“Now that School™ is run by the corporations, it’s pretty brag, because it teaches us how the world can be used, like mainly how to use our feeds. Also, it’s good because that way we know that the big corps are made up of real human beings, and not just jerks out for money, because taking care of the children, they care about America’s future. An investment in tomorrow.”

Titus believes the corporations’ takeover of the school system is altruism, an idea that is undoubtedly pressed upon people through feed propaganda. It’s clearly a profit-making scheme since education centers on ways to become a good consumer. The use of the trademark is partially a way to delineate the corporatization of things like school and clouds, but it’s also sinister, since a trademark suggests that the idea is proprietary and protected because it is worth money if stolen or co-opted. Education is a powerful tool through which to push propaganda. By reworking the education system to benefit themselves, the corporations are also taking away any semblance of education that might teach people independent thought. It’s unsurprising that Titus and the others are thoroughly brainwashed since corporations control all of the information they access from birth. His statement about the youth being an investment in the future of the country is unintentionally apt.

“‘No one with feeds thinks about it,’ she said. ‘When you have the feed all your life, you’re brought up not to think about things. Like them never telling you that it’s a republic and not a democracy. It’s something that makes me angry, what people don’t know about these days. Because of the feed, we’re raising a nation of idiots. Ignorant, self-centered idiots.’”

Violet is correct about what the feed is doing to the country’s youth, but she very quickly realizes she has just insulted Titus. It’s a hard truth but it’s accurate, and the degradation of young minds is a malicious act by corporations who see it as another tactic to maximize profits. Violet makes an important point about putting too much trust in political representatives who make decisions for the country while its citizens are entirely distracted by the feed, especially since the president demonstrates he is only concerned with corporate interests.

“It makes good times even better when you know they’re going to end. Like grilled vegetables are better because some of them is partly soot.”

Violet has just asked Titus how he would choose to die if he had the power to decide. She has yet to tell Titus that her damaged feed could be fatal. Titus wants to die by pleasurable sensory overload, which is an interesting contrast to the fundamentally dissatisfied life he lives with the feed. Violet, who is actually facing death, sees it as what death is in her life—the burned part that eats away at the freshness of her youth but makes her youth that much more precious. This metaphor ties into Violet’s determination to seize the day and make her life count.

“You can be a little…You can…It’s kind of scary for people sometimes. It feels…It sometimes feels like you’re watching us instead of being us.”

Titus is angry at Violet for making them leave the party. Calista and Loga were showing off their “Riot Gear” (128) fashion, the latest retro clothing trend that reproduces what people wore during 20th century riots, such as Stonewall (1969) and Kent State (1970). Violet is appalled at the idea and tries to casually question them about the historical roots of their clothing, which they, of course, don’t know. They, in turn, mock Violet openly for being pretentious. Violet instigated the conflict, but she is also reasonably offended by the idea of treating deadly acts of protest as fashion, particularly considering the current state of the world and recent uprisings. Titus wants Violet to fit in and get along with his friends instead of treating them all like animals at the zoo. Violet has said multiple times in the novel that she just wants to be normal for a change, but she demonstrates that knowledge of history and the world makes it impossible for her to pretend to be ignorant.

“I make my own announcements. Into the garbage can, so it echoes. […] I tell myself to come to the office. […] Then I pace in circles, waiting for me to show up. I wait and wait, you know, I wait and I wait in the office […] but me never comes.”

Violet’s comments begin as a witty joke about being homeschooled and calling herself to the office, but it turns into something wistful and sad. Violet knows that her life is limited and that one day soon, she will no longer be there. She’s trying to live every remaining moment of her life to the fullest, but nothing is as romantic as she imagined. Even since before the hacking, Violet has been waiting for her life to start and to become herself, but now it will never happen.

“The natural world is so adaptable. […] So adaptable you wonder what’s natural.”

Violet is telling Titus about the strange genetically modified animals she has been reading about on her feed in her efforts to confuse her profile. This comment highlights the way artificiality and lab-created fabrication is so integrated into their lives that the line between natural and unnatural is unclear. All the teens in the novel, including Violet, were designer babies created in labs, but they are just as human and real as babies conceived naturally. The feed is also artificial, but after it’s implanted in the brain, it becomes intertwined with neurological systems and functions until it can’t be extracted. Humans have spent centuries destroying nature and replacing forests with air factories, but it’s not really so simple to distinguish “real” from manmade.

“It’s strange—once you start listening to the wailing that’s also singing, that’s also like a ritual, you start to wonder—how much does anyone really miss anyone else? How much are they just crying because it’s what they have to do, the song they have to sing?”

Violet has started sending Titus late-night messages that make him deeply uncomfortable because they are so emotionally intimate. She has been listening to songs from funeral rites all over the world, and she fears that mourning is just an empty ritual. Violet is losing memories, and therefore she feels like she is losing herself piece by piece. She wonders if anyone knows her deeply enough to truly care and keep her memory alive. In a world that is devoid of present, loving connections, Violet has a very human need to feel known and loved and to know that she will be legitimately missed when she’s gone. She starts leaving messages with her memories for Titus to keep for her, sending more and more until his cache is overloaded and he has a headache. Titus can’t bring himself to listen and open himself up to her so much, so in what is perhaps his most significant act of cruelty toward her, he deletes them unopened. Until the end of the novel, Titus only knows how to participate in the empty ritual of mourning.

“Are you coming or not? This is my big time. I’m going to really live. […] I’m going to fucking live. I’m going to go up to the mountains and see things, and I’m going to come home on Monday or Tuesday and be like, I’ve seen it. I’ve used every second.”

Violet has convinced herself that she can make her death acceptable if she can live a lifetime of experiences in a few days. Titus has pushed her away because he can’t handle being so significant in a dying girl’s life, but Violet won’t see him as someone who does not want to participate. For her fantasy to be complete, Titus must be the love of her life. Her expectations are too intense for him, and she convinces him to go to the mountains, but he lets her down.

“I was brought into the world in a room with no one there but seven machines. We all are. My parents watched through the glass when I was taken out of the amniotic fluid. I came into the world alone. […] I didn’t want to go out of it alone.”

Titus has finally admitted that Violet has been pushing too hard to fabricate a connection that he insists isn’t real. Violet’s description highlights the way technology has placed walls between people. Pregnancy and birth are primal, personal experiences that require intense sacrifice and pain. In the world of the novel, these experiences are replaced by the coldness of a lab manned only by robots. There is no human warmth in the first moments of life. Since a society built around the feed doesn’t encourage authentic bonding, it’s unsurprising that Violet’s father, who doesn’t have the feed, is an anomaly in the deep love that he feels for his daughter. Violet wants a deep bond with Titus, but ultimately, it isn’t something that can be created artificially.

“It was like I kept buying these things to be cool, but cool was always flying just ahead of me, and I could never exactly catch up to it. I felt like I’d been running toward it for a long time.”

After seeing Calista and Loga freeze up from the Nostalgia Feedback glitch, Titus is suddenly reminded of Violet, who he has pushed out of his mind for months, and he can’t stop thinking about her. He has discovered he chose the wrong upcar for his friends to want to ride with him, and he could buy another one, but he finally starts to realize the constant purchasing and consuming always promises fulfillment, but it never delivers. He is in endless pursuit of something he can’t reach, and that makes him exhausted.