Do It Yourself Dystopia: The Digital Future in Dave Eggers’s The Every

Abstract

ABSTRACT The article analyses the nightmarish vision of the near future in Dave Eggers’s 2021 novel The Every as a digital dystopia. Read as a dialogue with George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Every is shown to update and revise the main premises of totalitarian dystopias by focusing on the contemporary forms of power rooted in platform capitalism. Eggers’s representation of information society is interpreted in relation to Shoshana Zuboff’s notion of the unprecedented, her conceptualization of instrumentarian power as well as Zygmunt Bauman’s and David Lyon’s theorization of digital surveillance. It is argued that dystopian signals in Eggers’s novel are more equivocal than in Orwell not only because it presents a different form of power but also due to the principal ambiguities of the novel. Examining the dystopian character of the near future inscribed in the unprecedented growth of platform capitalism and the threat of the environmental catastrophe, Eggers pits saving humanity against saving human nature and confronts the reader with an impossible choice. In the conclusion, it is suggested that the exploration of the interface of capitalism and environmentalism can be seen as a way of probing the limitations of contemporary dystopian narratives, hovering between bleak despair and entertaining spectacle.