Feed

The ur-text of pleasure-based dystopia — control through comfort, not fear. Anderson cites Huxley as an influence and Feed is in direct conversation with Soma-as-Feed.

Newspeak is the ancestor of Anderson's degraded Feed-slang — reduce vocabulary, reduce thought. Feed is what happens when you achieve Newspeak through advertising rather than government mandate.

The other canonical YA dystopia — a society that has eliminated discomfort and memory in exchange for sameness. Feed differs by locating control in corporations rather than government.

The adult predecessor to Feed — consumer culture as existential threat, the supermarket as cathedral, television as the medium of death-anxiety. DeLillo in 1985 is Anderson's literary parent.

Published 2013, eleven years after Feed — a more realistic treatment of social media and surveillance capitalism. Feed predicted what Eggers described.

Another novel about the destruction of books and the reduction of language — Bradbury's television walls are Anderson's Feed. Both novels ask what society loses when stories are replaced by content.