M.T. Anderson (Matthew Tobin Anderson, born 1968) published Feed in 2002, one year after the September 11 attacks, during the period when the internet was transitioning from novelty to infrastructure. He has spoken in interviews about writing Feed as a response to advertising, the early internet, and what he perceived as the voluntary surrender of attention. He was working as a children's book editor and had already published picture books when Feed appeared. The novel was a National Book Award finalist. Anderson has noted that he wrote it quickly, that it came from a place of genuine alarm, and that he was surprised and disturbed by how quickly the technology it satirized became real.

How the Era Shapes the Book

Anderson wrote Feed before smartphones, before social media, before the algorithmic feed was a thing that existed. He was extrapolating from early internet advertising models, the normalization of corporate presence in schools (Channel One, etc.), and the environmental degradation that was already visible. The novel's prescience is not technological — he did not predict specific devices — but structural: he correctly identified that consumer attention was becoming the primary commodity and that the infrastructure for capturing it would become indistinguishable from daily life. Reading Feed in 2002 felt like warning. Reading it now feels like description.