Review of Feed by M. T. Anderson written by Abida Younas

M.T. Anderson tells a tale of Corporate America and present day society. He creates a futuristic account of society that seems painful and credible at a time. His book is a sheer satire on excessive consumerism and our dependence on technology that creates dark and at the same time believable, frightening and terrifying vision of future corporate world.

He presents a futuristic apocalyptic society in which human brains will be replaced by a device called feed. He shows that feed is implanted in the brains of being, which connect them with internet every time. The users of feed continuously barrage by advertisement, entertainment and other kind of consumer media. Consequently literacy rate are sharply declining due to the conquest of corporation. It is because, as Anderson shows that schools are run by corporation and they are merely concerned with consumerism. Therefore in Anderson’s dystopian society, schools are concerned with teaching of shopping.

The invasion of corporation though at one hand makes us the inhabitant of ultra modern society but at the same time it brings the deterioration of environment and speed up the activity of consumerism. The inhabitants of this corporate society are rapidly losing their cognitive abilities of thinking because of feed. It is ultimately feed, which is in the possession of corporate industry, controls its users rather than beings’ own brain.

In the middle of this apocalyptic society, Anderson throws a love story of titus and violet. There is a group of teens in Feed, and all of these teens have implantation of feed in their brains. Readers are shown that these teens performed well their activity of life in the presence of feed, but at the moment their feeds are get hacked by hacker, they lose their ability even to move. This shows that technology even take possession and control our limbic system as well.

Furthermore Anderson shows the two opposing attitude in a corporate society. At one hand he shows titus and his friend, who are comfortable with feed, whereas at other side there are people like violet and his father who resists the use of feed. When titus falls in love with violet, so he and his friend begin to spend more time with violet, and at the end he learns to observe the world the way violet sees. Soon he also starts questioning about feed = tech and no longer believe on feednet. This book provides an apathetic and lethargic picture of plausible future – a future where technology will be everything and corporation will own everything even school.