116 pages • 3 hours read
M.T. AndersonFeed
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2002A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Symbols & Motifs
The Feed
The most significant symbol in the novel is the feed, which is the technological advancement that has changed the way the world functions. Although Feed was published before smartphones and social media became widespread and addictive, the feed represents the way technology can be used to push people into being complicit in the destruction of their own personal agency. For instance, in 2021, nearly two decades after the novel was published, a whistleblower who was formerly a data scientist at Facebook, revealed that the social media giant had created algorithms that maximized engagement at any cost. This includes targeting kids as users for addictive social media apps despite the knowledge that using Facebook and Instagram (which is also owned by Facebook) increases mental health issues, such as suicidal thought and eating disorders in children and teens, and even using their algorithm to exploit their mental illnesses and insecurities for the sake of increased engagement. Feed predicts this use of technology by depicting a technology that cultivates insecurities and an addiction to consumerism in users to push them to spend as much money as possible at the large corporations that endlessly advertise on the feed.
Feed amplifies the potential of technology as a means of manipulation by presenting a device that is implanted in the brain. Certainly, the level of convenience is maximal. Titus sees Violet’s father with his early version of the feed, a system that is carried in a backpack and immersive through special glasses, and is horrified at the idea, considering it to be like trying to breathe while carrying your lungs in a separate briefcase. The feed is implanted at birth, allowing corporations access to brains from their first moments of development. Moreover, there is no parental control over the feed. Parents of children and teens in the 2020s struggle—and often fail—to monitor their children’s internet and social media activity and protect them from certain content. The only effective form of protection is often to remove access to technology entirely, although kids often ways to access it. The feed is impossible to regulate or limit, as is demonstrated when Titus’s father yells at Smell Factor to stop singing and reminds him that he isn’t allowed to use the feed for anything other than family networking at mealtime. Smell Factor ignores him and carries on.
Users of the feed also walk willingly into the destruction of society and the compromise of their sense of self, driven by their addiction to consume. Titus, for instance, is unconcerned—even angry—when Violet tells him how the feed is manipulating him because he enjoys the manipulation. Titus even believes the fact that the corporations took over the schools means they have some level of interest in their customers as humans, even though the school only teaches them how to use their feed and to become good consumers. The feed also has instigated the decline of education and intelligence even though it was first marketed as an educational tool. Reading and writing have become categorized as unnecessary, as have studying subjects that enrich critical thinking. Yet, those with the feed and the money to buy things are bored and dissatisfied in endless pursuit of their next possessions. The feed serves as a metaphor for the petty, shallow distractions that draw the world’s attention away from serious problems, and the ease with which humans can be molded and led.
Lesions
At the beginning of the novel, Titus and his friends have skin lesions, and Titus notes nonchalantly that everyone has them. Although they are common, they are still a cause for some dismay. At the club on the moon, Titus notices that his has broken open and started to weep fluid, so he tries to keep his arm away from others. Quendy goes to the bathroom and returns distressed and embarrassed that the lesion on her face has also begun to leak. When they meet Violet, she reframes the idea of the lesions as something that can be attractive depending on placement. Indeed, Titus finds Violet’s lesion to be attractive and perfectly placed, almost like jewelry. The others are impressed by Violet’s creative thinking, which is a skill they are not raised or educated to perform. At the time, Violet’s idea sounds like a kind gesture, a way of comforting Quendy in her anxiety about something she can’t control. The girls help Quendy to cover her lesion with her hair, suggesting that it isn’t truly attractive, but Violet’s comment foreshadows the way the corporations will manipulate people into not only accepting the lesions but celebrating them.
In one of the feedcast excerpts between the chapters, the president of the United States promises that the lesions are not caused by anything that the American industries might have unleashed on the environment. Of course, the catastrophic environmental damage that has been done by industry makes it obvious these lesions must be from the same source. The oceans are empty and dead, and the beaches are too toxic to visit without protective suits. The animals are all (or nearly all) dead, and much of nature has been replaced with artificial substitutes. Space around the planet is full of trash. Offspring must be created in a lab due to the levels of ambient radiation in the atmosphere. Certainly, the planet is beyond saving, but continued consumption will only speed its destruction, yet Titus and his friends don’t talk or think about it. Lesions are an obvious, visible sign of the planet’s decay and degeneration, but their impulse is to ignore it. When the stars of the most popular show on their feeds start to show visible lesions that are unignorable, the corporations use their power of manipulation through the feed to make them fashionable.
Although Titus and Violet recognize that turning lesions into fashion is absurd, the girls in their friend group buy into it immediately. Calista spends money on an enormous fake lesion on her neck that is created with a real incision but made to look infected using latex. Desperate to keep up, Quendy takes the trend so far that it even horrifies Titus’s friend group by having small fake lesions incised all over her body. Violet is especially disgusted because she knows the process for both was certainly extravagantly expensive. The corporations have not only convinced people to accept the lesions but are further profiting from persuading people to beg for more. For Violet, this display of class disparity is bitter, as her feed needs an expensive repair she and her father cannot afford, and although her life is at stake, none of the wealthy families in Titus’s friend group offers to pay. By the end of the novel, lesions have progressed to disintegrating skin and balding. Titus’s mother, for example, has lost so much skin that her teeth can be seen even when her mouth is closed. Additionally, the United States is on the brink of war with the rest of the world, yet Titus’s friends and family continue to consume and ignore the blatant signals that humanity will soon be extinct.
Protest and Resistance
Most of the characters in the novel are docile and accepting of the feed’s manipulation and reassurances about the destruction of the world around them, gladly focusing on the petty selfishness of their own lives. They sit in the back seat and watch movies, complacent and ignoring that the government and big corporations are driving the car over a cliff. Titus feels reasonably content at the beginning of the narrative. He ponders his feelings of loneliness and longing but allows the feed and the company of his friends to continue distracting him. Violet’s presence on the moon is an act of resistance against systemic oppression that Titus doesn’t even know exists. Violet’s parents are intellectuals who don’t have feeds. She was raised by her father, who goes against social norms and has a strong, loving relationship with his daughter that involves communication outside of the feed. She grows up with a real education, ideals, and an interest in knowing about the world around her, but without the money to participate in society and create havoc. However, Violet’s father managed to save the money to give Violet a feed as a child and to send her to the moon, where she meets Titus and his wealthy group of friends. Violet becomes an emissary from the vastly divided worlds of the oppressed and the privileged, although she only wants to feel normal for a moment.
The author, M.T. Anderson, dedicates the novel “[t]o those who resist the feed.” Most of the resistance in the narrative occurs on the periphery of the main storyline. They hear protestors on their way to the club, and Titus hears reports of protests all over the world, mostly from Violet. One night, Titus has a disturbing dream that turns out to be a projected sensory experience of protest and war. The largest and most central moment of protest occurs when the hacker touches Titus, Violet, and 11 other people at the club. He warns, “We enter a time of calamity!” (30), before hacking their feeds so that those he reaches are forced to repeat the phrase over and over, but the attack is largely ineffectual. The hacker is quickly beaten to death by the police and neutralized. Titus, and presumably his friends, are shielded from that information, and once their feeds are repaired, Titus and the rest of the group are content to return to their normal lives. Only Violet is permanently affected, which is ironic since, as Titus points out, she is most sympathetic with the hacker’s cause.
As Violet’s damaged feed starts to destroy her quality of life, she is excited to bring Titus into her project to resist. Knowing the feed is always watching and data mining to inform consumer profiles that are constantly honed for the purposes of targeted advertising, Violet decides to confuse the feed by pretending to shop for things that don’t make sense for the same profile type. It works, and the feed is confused, but it also causes Violet’s downfall when the corporations decide they aren’t interested in keeping her alive if they won’t be able to make money from her. Titus plays along and has fun, but he isn’t interested in confusing his feed or resisting at all. Violet wants to have a genuine emotional connection with Titus and experience living her life, which is another act of resistance against the feed that dulls their connections and relationships. Throughout most of the novel, Titus refuses to think about the issues Violet presses, and his small breakthrough is a crack in the wall of ignorance.
