Feed
M.T. Anderson (2002)
“A love story set in a future where corporations have colonized your brain — and most people are fine with that.”
At a Glance
Titus is a teenager living in a corporate-saturated future where almost everyone has a Feed implanted in their brain — a direct pipeline for advertising, entertainment, shopping, and social connection. On a trip to the moon, he meets Violet, a girl who resists the Feed and challenges him to think. When a hacker attacks their group and damages both their Feeds, Violet begins to malfunction. Titus watches her die slowly while the corporations decide her data profile is not worth saving. He does nothing.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
Feed was a National Book Award finalist in 2003 and is now one of the most widely taught dystopian novels in American middle and high schools. Published before smartphones and social media, it described the attention economy and algorithmic targeting with a precision that feels less like speculation and more like journalism about the present. Anderson coined a vocabulary and a form for discussing what corporate technology does to consciousness before the technology fully existed.
Diction Profile
Deliberately impoverished teen slang interspersed with corporate vocabulary — formality exists only in Anderson's structural irony and in Violet's father's speech
Low in Titus's narration by design