I reviewed The Circle back in 2014 and I reread it last month just before tackling its sequel The Every by Dave Eggers. It was definitely worth revisiting Eggers’ earlier novel because several of the characters return in the follow-up set nearly a decade later. The Every is the result of The Circle’s takeover of “an ecommerce behemoth named after a South American jungle”, thereby resulting in a total media monopoly. The main protagonist of ‘The Circle’, Mae Holland, has worked her way up the ladder to become CEO of The Every despite never having come up with an original idea of her own. ‘The Every’ follows the path of a new employee, Delaney Wells, who is starting out in an entry-level job while looking to take down The Every from inside, coming up with ever more ridiculous ideas that she hopes will destroy the company only to see it flourish even more. I was hoping that ‘The Every’ might expand on the main themes of ‘The Circle’ a bit more than it does, but it mostly revisits the same ideas about privacy and productivity and the negative impact of constant and intrusive monitoring of every activity. That said, although Eggers doesn’t tackle the issues in either novel with much subtlety, he does deploy humour with great effect among the more terrifying scenarios he portrays. Many thanks to Penguin for sending me a review copy via NetGalley.

Gripping and terrifying. You read it and think, this is outrageous, it couldn't possibly happen. Then you remember you own a sports watch, and set trackers for your steps and water intake....!

A great read and an interesting continuation of The Circle. The end will shake you. The concept will terrify you. And you'll speed through it, because it is unputdownable.

I loved The Circle, but this didn't grip me in quite the same way. It was compelling and full of interesting insights, but it isn't the same instant classic.

Dave Eggers returns to the world of The Circle in The Every. I thought the novel was a little overstuffed and could have been shorter, but I enjoyed revisiting this setting and there are some great scenes.

If you enjoyed reading or watching The Circle, you definitely won't want to miss out on this amazing sequel. I think I may have enjoyed this one even more than the first! It had me chuckling (to myself) multiple times through the book. The Every is absolute satire, poking fun at large part of our modern way of life. While also managing to be a warning about where things could get too if we aren't careful.

This was a RIDE. Very far fetched yet still scarily realistic developments in technology and society as a whole in this foreign world. The ideas generated and content within the book itself were absolutely brilliant! I enjoyed the different approach and characters developed throughout. However as far as actual storyline goes, I was a definitely a little disappointed and underwhelmed and I still have unanswered questions!

What can I say about this? I really enjoyed The Circle - it blew my mind with how self-aware it was and felt like a novel for now, making us aware of the dangers of allowing one company to have too much control. The Every, well, that’s about what happened next. And, well, this just isn’t good. I get it, you wrote a novel that I’ve just praised as for being self-aware. The Every though is like a novel where Dave Eggers has decided to list all of the things that could potentially happen if a company is left unchecked. Great, but you did that once and it worked. Now this just felt like a list. A long list. With little plot. It just didn’t work for me and that sucks as I was really excited for this. If you enjoyed The Circle then this might work for you. Maybe. Sometimes a good plot should be left alone.

It's a dystopia, a social satire, and a very disturbing story as it describes a future that could be not far from us.
The author did an excellent job in developing an interesting plot and the satire part made me laugh and think.
It's not a consolatory story but it's a book full of food for thought.
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine

The Every is the sequel to Dave Eggers’ novel The Circle and, like the previous book, it’s a dystopian story.
Lately I enjoy these kind of plots more and more.
Basically The Every is the biggest tech company in the world, nearly every part of people’s everyday lives. It is like a mixture of Google, Amazon, Twitter, Apple, Facebook.. you name it.
Delaney and Wes start working for the Every but not to support it's growth but rather to bring it down from the inside.
We also meet quite a lot of characters from the first novel, which I particularly enjoyed.

Even though the Every takes place in the near futur it did not feel this dystopian to me.
In my opinion Eggers did a great job, also marketing- whise, as you can read in all the other reviews, he chose a not-so- typical way to sell his book.

Thanks #NetGalley #Penguin General UK - Fig Tree, Hamish Hamilton, Viking, Penguin Life, Penguin Business, Hamish Hamilton for the ARC of this novel

I could not get into that one. Too much exposition about everything. All was explained in detail while I think many things didn't need to be, or could have been featured in a scene rather than just talked about. I lost interest and tried to keep going through the book but I ended up abandoning half-way through. The ideas are good, I mean this is so close to reality it's chilling. This is obviously a warning, but the execution wasn't very engaging. I've been reading other books lately about social credit systems and companies taking over governments ultimately sending humanity back into slavery, because money rules obviously... they worked better for me because they connected emotionally, unlike this one, I sadly didn't care very much for the main characters, and I kind of need that to stay interested and invested in a work of fiction.
This will appeal to people who are more about philo/political ideas, structure and world building, rather than characters and emotional attachment.

I really enjoyed this book. It was a great follow up to the circle that I strongly recommend for any fans of sci-fi/dystopian type novels. I would rate this four out of five stars.

I was, frankly, terrified by this book. Other reviewers have noted they found it absurdly funny in parts, but to me it was more of a HAHAHA OMFG HALP kind of desperate humour. It's a deeply unsettling and alarming read. I LOVED it, but the line between fiction and reality here is a very, very thin one. Indeed, there are plenty of references to things we already know and accept, real world events and consequences, and even some cheeky nods to pop culture including The Circle film. The Circle (the book) was gradually alarming, and seems, in contrast to this, fairly benign (or did everything in that book quietly absorb itself into our existence?). The Every, as its follow up, is immediately anxiety-inducing. It's set in the not-too-distant future, but not necessarily an alternate one.

The biggest shopping and social media sites have amalgamated into one dominant company, who use their reach and power to keep buying smaller companies and recruit the brightest minds in the world. Their products and apps seamlessly weave their way into everyday life - ubiquitous health tracking bracelets required by governments and insurance companies; built in apps on EveryPhones (which everyone has, because they're the only option after The Every buy and destroy rival companies) to track, film, rate and shame people; scores, ratings and data across every facet of life. Everyone is watched, all the time, under the guise of safety. It is obviously reminiscent of Orwell's 1984, but where we now have some distance from Communism and the associated social paranoia, the events of this book dangle menacingly and realistically in our future. TechSpeak is eerily similar to DoubleSpeak - secrets are lies, sharing is caring, that which is hidden is evil and must be rooted out.

The main character, Delaney, has a burning desire to destroy the Every, and she decides to do this from the inside out, planting ideas that she is sure must be too intrusive, too pointless, too stupid for the public not to see through and thus join her in unrestrained outrage. But, it seems there is nothing that people won't accept, won't submit themselves to, in the pursuit of convenience and the illusion of safety. Idea after idea is adopted (some of them are so basic you'd have to wonder why a company as dominant as The Every didn't think of them in the first place), with glowing praise on the surface but dire consequences underneath. The dogged pursuit of perfection means all control is ceded to the data, because it can't be wrong. Perfection is in the numbers, it can't be disputed. Books are re-written, films are remade, art is created only within the parameters of what the algorithm deems "good". Humanity itself and all it's messy, beautiful chaos is overridden in the destructive notion of constant betterment.

The ending (of the book, not humanity, but perhaps that remains to be seen) is sudden, but, despairingly, not unpredictable or surprising. It just ends, and we accept how it is, and understand that this was the obvious conclusion, and we let it be.

This book is simply incredible. A sequel to The Circle, but it builds & improves on every single facet of the original book, resulting in this masterpiece.
Equal parts amusing, thoughtful & sinister, the plots leads the reader to a point where you question every element of multinational business, corporate morality & technology as you despair for humanity.
Very entertaining & thought provoking, I genuinely hope this book is read & enjoyed by as many people as possible as it absolutely should be.
As an personal aside, the seal incident is probably the best told joke I have ever read & I'd recommend buying this book for that chapter alone. Awe-inspiring.

A close friend of mine who works in tech recommended this to me, so I picked it up even though I thought it might not be my thing. It turns out that it wasn't, and for more than one reason, so I didn't quite get half-way through. Feel free, therefore, to dismiss what follows as not having given the book a fair chance before bailing.

Dystopian, for me, is a bit like kale. I don't enjoy it, but occasionally I consume some because I feel like I ought to.

I'm not talking here about the cookie-cutter teen dystopian fiction that was in vogue for a while there, by the way, but about genuine classics like <i>1984</i> or <i>Brave New World</i>.

<i>The Every</i> is written with a lot of skill in many aspects, though it's not in the class of those two I just mentioned. It's also a satire as well as a dystopian, and it has genuinely, if darkly, funny moments, like an entire busload of people sitting grimly on their phones searching for reasons, however tenuous, to be offended by whatever was happening, regardless of what that was.

It's a satire on big tech, which means it's a satire on Silicon Valley, which means it's a satire on Northern California and the kind of people who populate it, a weird blend of hippy sensibilities with nonsensical management fads and the cult-like corporate loyalty of a 1950s Japanese salaryman. Northern California seems particularly prone to cultishness, in fact, and that's definitely portrayed here. The people of the all-encompassing behemoth of social media, personal tech, and e-commerce that is known as the Every read as if someone set out to clone Kevin Kelly, but didn't know how to implement the Wise, Humane, Sensible, Knowledgeable and Self-Reflective features, so just left them on the development backlog and hacked in a "temporary" fix of corporate surveillance and Newspeak, figuring that would be fine.

It goes, in fact, beyond satire all the way to strawman, which is my other big problem with it. The Everyones, as they are known, are remarkably easy to manipulate, but apparently only in the direction of more dystopianism. The protagonist and her friend/roommate set out to penetrate the Every from within and sow the seeds of its destruction, but their approach - obviously flawed on the face of it - is to seed it with ideas so patently ridiculous and contrary to human values that people will revolt and reject it en masse.

As far as I read (42%), this never happened; their ideas, however awful, kept getting not only adopted but extended to be even worse. I glanced at the ending, because it felt like it was heading for a tragedy but there was still some possibility of a change of direction, and confirmed that it does, in fact, have a tragic ending, so I stopped reading. As someone who has bailed out of social media exactly because it resembles what the author is satirizing, I don't find watching an unfolding disaster of people at their worst to be either entertaining or compelling. I'm also (like Kevin Kelly) a techno-optimist, and an optimist in general about human nature; not being on social media is an essential element, for me, in maintaining that optimism, and so is not finishing a book in which there are hardly any people of goodwill who recognize the problem, and they're helpless to improve matters.

Nor do I find that a particularly convincing scenario, though, of course, satires don't have to be realistic. The "if this goes on" genre, of which this is definitely a part, has always exaggerated current trends, ignoring the likelihood that they'll either self-correct or be corrected by people with a different viewpoint.

What does make the scenario slightly more believable is that, thanks to pervasive social media, in the quite-near-future setting of this book there's no more local journalism (maybe no journalism at all), and the only place that people can organize collectively is owned and controlled by what they would be organizing against, plus it possesses near-universal surveillance. Any dissent could simply be buried by the algorithm, and there are no effective competitors, US regulators having apparently failed to prevent the Every from living up to its name and absorbing any competitor or startup that comes anywhere near its space. (Something which I find unlikely in itself, by the way.) A few isolated voices are all that is speaking up, and they tend to be Luddites, like the main character's old professor, who writes to her by hand on paper. In reality, of course, there are plenty of technologists who are speaking out against exactly these trends, there are whistleblowers and former employees and people whose companies were bought who have since vested and cashed out, all of whom feel entirely free to raise criticism of the various parts of Big Tech (combined, for rhetorical purposes of this book, in the Every, even though e-commerce is very different from social media, which is very different from search, which is very different from hardware manufacturing, and all of those sectors consist of multiple players both in the US and elsewhere).

The sheeplike Everyones, while giving knee-jerk lip service to diversity, are actually participating in a huge exercise of flattening, genericisizing, and homogenizing diversity, directed by more-savvy bad actors who know how to manipulate them or are simply taking personal advantage of what, in the universe of this book, is a kind of law of gravity by which everything is set up to get worse in general while benefiting some people in particular. In parallel to that, though, is the book's flattening of the complexity of what it is parodying and satirizing, the elision of real debate within the tech sector, and the manipulation that the author has to do to drive that "inevitable" decline for purposes of (I assume) a rhetorical point.

Said more simply: I understand this is a parody, but it's parodying something dramatically oversimplified from the real world. Not only that, but it's buying into the delusion that Northern California (where the author lives) <i>is</i> the world, that if you can fool some of the people all of the time everyone else will just go along without protest.

As a matter of personal taste, I don't enjoy dystopian dark humour, even if it's well done (which this is). But as a matter of philosophy, if this is meant to be a polemic and not just a comedic parody, I think it's too much of a caricature and leaves out too much for me to take it seriously. I have reasons for optimism, and I don't see them here.

I received a copy via Netgalley for review.

Thank you to NetGalley for a free proof e-copy in exchange for an honest review.

I’m unsure how I feel about this book. I read The Circle by Dave Eggers years ago in high school for my philosophy class and remember not liking it - I re-read it a few years ago and felt sort of validated on my earlier opinion. While I could appreciate the story and moral it was trying to tell, and though the plot was compelling enough, I just was not a fan of the writing. But since Dave Eggers is such an acclaimed writer and since I was actually curious what would happen in this sequel to The Circle, I decided to give The Every a go. As I expected, the story was immediately engaging and the plot was compelling. But sadly, I didn’t really enjoy the writing in this book either. I thought it was so unsubtle - I felt like rolling my eyes a lot, like at Delaney (the main character)’s constant focus on the people around her wearing tight pants and her being afraid of accidentally staring at their penis. Though Delaney was generally a likeable character, I did think she was very naive for a self-proclaimed spy (though references to that did make me laugh), and her naivety about the way she intends to destroy the Every from within sounded implausible and unlikely to work from the beginning. A lot of the plot points I found a bit predictable (again, maybe I’m missing the point). I thought the dialogue didn’t read as very realistic and a bit stilted (though this may have been either intentional or just me not being American). I thought it was funny at times, and it definitely wasn’t an unenjoyable read. Maybe I’m just missing the point completely and it’s entirely on purpose that everything’s so ridiculous and over the top, but I guess if it is that’s just not my favourite type of writing.

The Every is the sequel to the hugely successful novel, The Circle.
It is a few years later and Mae Holland now runs The Circle which has become hugely more powerful and all encompassing; it has be renamed The Every.
Delaney Wells is on a mission to gain employment at the Every’s HQ with the sole intention of bringing it down from within. Her modus operandi is introduce more and more supposedly ridiculous and privacy limiting ideas with the hope that society will finally be inspired to rise up against The Every.
Dave Eggers has great fun with the satirical set pieces that ensue. This provides much of the entertainment in reading this book, the employees of The Every’s genuine belief in these (frankly terrifying) notions as they shut down every aspect of personal freedom and choice is jaw dropping.
As a story I didn’t find The Every as satisfying as The Circle, and the end is something of an anticlimax. However, I love Dave Egger’s writing and this is a enjoyable to read as his other novels. It is far to close to the bone in terms of how far we have let technology run our lives and how much further we could let the big tech companies take over, it sends a very stark and timely warning.
Thank you to #netgalley aand #penguinbooks for allowing me to review this ARC

I liked this book and it was very disturbing at the same time, because in my opinion the author gives too many dangerous ideas to the already problematic world of some multinationals. I have a feeling that it doesn't end here, but maybe I'm wrong.

Questo libro mi é piaciuto e mi ha inquietato molto allo stesso tempo, perché secondo me l'autore fornisce fin troppe idee pericolose al mondo giá particolarmente problematico di alcune multinazionali. Ho come la sensazione che non finisca qui, ma magari mi sbaglio.

I received from the Publisher a complimentary digital advanced review copy of the book in exchange for a honest review.

Imagine that Facebook, Google, Twitter and Amazon were all combined into one single mega-corporation. The power and wealth that such a company would have - more than many countries, with the ability to influence the majority of the world's population. That's just what Dave Eggers does in this novel, sequel to 'The Circle'. The social media company of the previous novel has undergone a merger with Amazon (all but directly named) and become the 'Every'. The main point of view character, Delaney, has spent years cultivating an image and employment history in order to get a job there, with the sole aim of taking down the company from the inside.

Delaney's modus operandi is to suggest terrible ideas that will go too far and cause people to rethink their unquestioning acceptance of the Every's invasion into their lives. However, everything she pitches is a great success. It seems that when it comes to offering people convenience and certainty, most will accept almost any price in terms of personal freedoms. But other technophobes are prepared to take more direct action than Delaney, and that could put everyone at the company in danger.

Whilst 'The Circle' was more of a psychological thriller, 'The Every' falls more into the category of a satire, albeit a disturbing one. Whilst the two books are separate enough to be read as stand alone novels, it's optimal to read 'The Circle' first, since 'The Every' contains some spoilers. Parts of 'The Every' are very funny, in the slightly frightening way that satire can be when you know it's not as much of an exaggeration as you'd hope. It also raises some very fundamental questions about freedom and privacy and how much compromise we are or should be willing to accept to our safety and comfort. It would be a good book club choice as there is plenty you could discuss and it is also very readable.

Although I enjoyed the book overall, I did find it slightly implausible that Delaney - an intelligent person - would persist so long in her attempts to push the Every into going too far. It was clear from the first couple of failed attempts that there was no such thing, and all she was doing was driving the expansion of the exact invasions of privacy and freedom that she wanted to stop. I also found it slightly implausible that all of this technology worked so perfectly. I didn't really buy into the conclusion of the book and I felt that a lot of loose ends were left.

Those criticisms aside, it's a really readable story and will certainly make you think. It's also pretty funny in parts. On the whole, Eggers has done a good job.

The sequel to The Circle treads much of the same ground, although it seems blunter and more blatantly polemical than its predecessor. Set in the not-too-distant future, America’s well on the way to becoming a full-on surveillance society, homes that aren’t connected to the network, individuals who shun social media, are all treated with suspicion, increasingly grouped together in outsider communities. Independent media has died out, investigative journalism’s a relic of the past and untaxed, barely-policed corporations rule. After the turbulent time of pandemics and other, unnamed, crises, social media company The Circle has bought up a behemoth, e-commerce site - referred to only as ‘the jungle’ - and rebranded as The Every, with its headquarters sited in San Francisco Bay. It’s here that new employee Delaney Wells is working on her plan to dismantle the organisation from within, something she’s been anticipating for years. Eggers follows Delaney’s infiltration of The Every, her progress and her thwarted attempts to undermine its machinations. But Delaney’s plan to stir up public opposition to The Every’s operations by proposing ever more extreme programmes’s greeted with indifference at best, it seems the more preposterous her proposal, the more likely people are to adopt it without question, from algorithms that test their friends’ loyalties onwards.

Eggers rehashes many of the points he raised in The Circle although there are additional prongs in terms of world-building. But his arguments are hard to follow and often surprisingly muddled. He spends more time enumerating the benefits of The Every’s supposedly insidious products than making a case for their destructive qualities, particularly when it comes to apps that limit carbon footprints, seek to halt climate change and encourage less wasteful forms of consumption. He takes his belief in the sacred nature of concepts like privacy and the right to be off-grid as a given but it’s clear this is a society in which these are the concern of the few and not the many. Nor does he present alternatives that challenge the Every’s sinister vision. The future he dreads is strikingly close to the present, one in which the tech, or the potential for it, already exists and it’s really not clear what he wants to do about that. He doesn’t seem to be taking a Luddite stance so presumably what he wants is to set limits and boundaries but it’s not evident what these might be, how they might be achieved and policed or by what institutions. And although he offers up characters, like Delaney’s former tutor Professor Agarwal, as dissenting voices in his all-too-compliant society, they’re marginal at best, faint and uncertain. It doesn’t help that Eggers presents people as the greatest problem here, happy to be ordered and organised, desperate to rate and be rated.

It’s not clear what findings support his conclusions about behaviour, and for someone like me who lives in a country where even the fairly mild-mannered have proved remarkably resistant to measures like mask-wearing or adopting apps that track Covid infections, I’d like to know why he feels that resistance to overarching control’s unlikely or likely to be futile? There are also a number of pressing issues that aren’t addressed, digital poverty for example, a major problem globally yet miraculously absent in this future America, even though lack of corporate tax revenues has intensified, already rampant, social inequality. Eggers poses important questions, and many of his concerns are ones I share, but they demand a more considered, coherent response than this one. There are some hilarious satirical, inventive elements in Eggers’s portrait of a tech-driven dystopia but the wealth of detailing around the various apps and programmes that dominate this brave new world frequently overwhelm his slender plot and overshadow his sketchily-drawn characters. It’s an awkward piece overall, fairly readable despite its flaws but as a narrative it doesn’t really work, I didn't hate it but there were times when it felt remarkably close to the experience of being held captive on a street corner by a well-meaning but long-winded, obsessive.

Thanks to Netgalley UK and publisher Hamish Hamilton/Penguin UK

The Every - social media company + planet's dominant e-commerce site + the largest search engine and much more = the most beloved monopoly ever known.
But not for all. Delaney Wells, tech sceptic and former forest ranger gets an entry-level job in Every with a plan to kill the company that had stolen her childhood and the will of her parents. With her friend Wes, they try to find company's weaknesses, suggest wild ideas and hope that people will reject them because they restrict their freedom even more.

Only that most of the people show low-intensity outrage about privacy issues, prize convenience above all, and readily use dozens of Every tools without any security protections, especially if that tool is new.
Humanity is fundamentally changed. We are moving from an idiosyncratic species that coveted our independence to one that wanted, more than anything, to shrink and to obey in exchange for free stuff. We just don't want to be free, we actually prefer to be told what to do.

The observed world, the filmed world, the recorded world, is a safer world.

Even paper books provide no useful data and should be abolished. “For environmental reasons alone!”

The Every dictates human behaviour, feeding the urge to control, to reduce nuance, to categorize, and to assign numbers to anything inherently complex. To simplify. To tell how it will be. You can get anything you need here. You just can’t get everything you want. Or anything you think you want. The Every is a closed ecosystem, and a closed ecosystem is wary of, or even hostile to, anything that might upset that equilibrium. And Delaney soon realises that the danger is real.

Brave New World of almost idiotic, infantile and helpless civilization that can live only with non-stop surveillance, measures and instructions from different AI algorithms. It’s a relief not to have to think. Orderly system, dangerous and harmful, but orderly.

The novel is timely, gripping and unsettling to read. I just hope that is not an accurate prognosis for human race and that homo sapiens will not become homo numerus.
We have to fight every day to stay alive in a world that loves monopolies.

“Go forth and stay human!”