About the book
After a journey along American roads and the inhospitable lands of Alaska in the novel Heroes of the Frontier, Dave Eggers returns to Silicon Valley, the setting of his celebrated work The Circle. Set in the near future, The Everything takes up the story of the company The Circle at the time when the internet giant has become a corporation that, due to its size and concentration of power, far exceeds everything known in the history of monopolies since the times of colonial companies. Technology, hyper-connectivity, corporatism and the cult of data and algorithms govern a future where many believe they see a better world in which CO2 emissions can be reduced, education is streamlined through screens and objectivity is, at last, a goal within everyone’s reach. Between technological thriller and satire, Eggers, however, shows the dystopian reverse of an imaginary reality in which many features of our present are recognizable.
Suspense, absurdity and terror feed a plot that develops with the same dynamism with which applications proliferate and small companies are absorbed in The Everything. But Eggers’ novel is not limited to comedy and the formulas of entertainment literature. On the contrary, the American writer deploys a pertinent reflection on the drifts of capitalism and our species under the leadership of Silicon Valley corporations. In light of classics of dystopian fiction such as George Orwell or Aldous Huxley, but also in dialogue with contemporary thinkers such as Shoshana Zuboff and ByungChul Han, The Everything investigates a society that, in the name of security, ecology and the optimization of private and work life, accepts total surveillance and the reduction of its experience to data without questioning mechanisms that imply, on the one hand, a consumption model designed in the image and likeness of created desires, and on the other, a dangerous loss of freedom, autonomy and critical awareness. While subjectivity is fought with data, inside and outside the fences surrounding the corporation’s campus, points of view are diminished, experience is impoverished, memories end up in artificial intelligence and individuals are faced with a gradual process of dehumanization.
The monopoly of technology and the Internet is thus revealed as a new form of totalitarianism, more subtle and disguised, and for that very reason, more dangerous. Do we really want to be free? is the question that Dave Eggers poses in a novel that imagines disturbing future scenarios whose foundations are already being laid.
About the Author
Dave Eggers (Boston, 1970) is the author of A Moving, Amazing, and Brilliant Story, Now You Will Know What Running Is, What’s the What, Zeitoun, A Hologram for the King, The Circle, Border Heroes, and The Monk of Moka, among others. He is the founder of the publishing house McSweeney’s and the co-founder of Voice of Witness, a collection of books that shed light on humanitarian crises through oral histories. In 2002 he co-founded 826 Valencia, a writing center for young people that has inspired similar programs around the world. This program led to ScholarMatch, which connects donors with students to facilitate access to university for those who have difficulties doing so. In 2018, Eggers co-founded the International Congress of Youth Voices, a global gathering of writers and activists under the age of twenty. He has won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Muhammad Ali Humanitarian Award, and the Prix Médicis Étranger, and has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Eggers is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He currently lives with his family in San Francisco.
Source: https://algunoslibrosbuenos.com/el-todo
