The Joke Is Also the Product

In November 2021 you could not buy the hardcover of The Every from Amazon. That was the point. Dave Eggers's novel is about a tech giant that has swallowed the world's biggest online retailer, so his own small press, McSweeney's, sold the first edition only through independent bookshops and its own website. The Vintage paperback, which followed, was sold everywhere.

It's a good stunt, and a good stunt is a risky thing to put on the front of a novel. You start reading in a mood to agree.

The book: a saboteur, a promotion, a cliff

The Every picks up some years after The Circle. The Circle has merged with an e-commerce behemoth the novel calls "the jungle", and the combined company is the Every. Mae Holland, the convert of the first book, is now its chief executive. The new heroine is Delaney Wells, a former forest ranger from Idaho who joins the company intending to wreck it from inside. Her method is to propose ideas so intrusive and absurd that the public will finally revolt.

They don't. They love them. In Adam Roberts's review in The Spectator, her deliberately terrible apps, one that reports whether you enjoyed your meal and another that reports whether your partner did, turn into hits. Around her, the Every does what the Every does. A data programme decides promotions and firings, the company's word for which is "deëmployment". An app ranks your friendships so you can drop the low scorers. A personality test has more or less replaced psychology. An algorithm uses audience ratings to shape films and novels.

That is a good premise with a real comic engine. The idea that the saboteur's best work is her most successful work is the best thing Eggers has written about the industry, and it comes with a genuine insight: you can't parody a company whose product pitch is already a parody. A stronger novel would have built on it.

This one doesn't. Delaney is mostly a vehicle for the next idea, and her friend Wes, who helps her prototype the lie-detecting app, loses interest in resistance as his standing at the company rises. The New York Times reviewer Chelsea Leu found the story strikingly static and very little left to interpretation, and that's fair. Roberts called it The Circle "but more so". It's well over 500 pages, and a list of bad ideas, however well observed, stays a list. The ending, a staged resistance, a hike and a waterfall, turns the book briefly into a thriller. It is too little and too late for the form. Mae, who had no inner life in The Circle, gets a plan here, and the reveal works mostly because we've been told so little about her.

I'll say one more thing in its favour. Eggers is angry, and the anger is specific. The book does read like the work of a man who has actually looked at what these companies do. It's just that anger is a motive, not a plot.

The prophecy: what came true, and what the plot needed

The willing public. The book's central bet is that people will buy their own measurement. They have. By Pew's survey in 2019, 21% of American adults regularly wore a smartwatch or fitness tracker. The same organisation found that 81% of Americans thought the risks of company data collection outweighed the benefits, and 81% felt they had little or no control over it. Both numbers are true at once. Eggers saw that gap years early: people will tell a pollster they hate it and strap it on anyway. This is the one place the novel is a better prophet than satirist, because it never explains the gap as stupidity.

The score at work. In April 2019, The Verge reported on a letter from an Amazon lawyer that described how the company's warehouse system tracks "time off task" and generates warnings, and can generate terminations, at a Baltimore site. Amazon denied that employees were fired by an automatic system. The dispute is the point: the idea of a worker's fate decided by a dashboard was already contested before the book appeared. Regulators have since moved. The EU's Platform Work Directive, which member states must put into law by 2 December 2026, requires human oversight of automated decisions and bars platforms from processing workers' emotional or psychological state. The fictional "deëmployment" has a real counterpart, and a rulebook about it.

The truth app. The lie detector is the plot's trigger, and it's where the book is most fiction. A 2024 study in iScience trained an algorithm on people's true and false accounts of their weekend plans. It guessed correctly about 66% of the time. Humans, unassisted, managed about 46%. That's better than us, and nowhere near reliable. The study's real finding was what people did with it: judges shown a prediction of "false" accused the speaker more than 40% of the time, against 13% when it said "true". Only about a third asked for the tool in the first place. The risk wasn't that the machine would see through us. It was that a machine's suspicion would make us more suspicious. The EU's AI Act, in force for its banned practices since February 2025, forbids AI that infers emotions in workplaces. Whether that covers a lie detector is a question regulators haven't settled.

The merger. The book needs a retailer and a social network to become one firm. Regulators and courts have made that less likely, though not because they've broken anyone up. In November 2025 a federal judge ruled that Meta isn't an illegal monopoly. In January 2024, Amazon dropped its planned $1.4bn purchase of iRobot after opposition from the European Commission. The real tech giants have grown into each other's markets, rather than merging into one. That's a less dramatic story than Eggers tells, and a more annoying one.

The reading

The Every has one idea, a good one, and it states it on page one and then restates it. As a novel it's sluggish, and Delaney, who ought to be the anchor, is the lightest thing in it. As prophecy it's patchy in an instructive way: it is right about us and wrong about the machinery. The apps people really wear were built without any scheme, by teams who thought they were helping. Nobody had to be fooled by a villain. They only had to be offered a convenience.

That's what the book misses. A parody can't beat a product, because a product doesn't need to be believed. It only needs to work well enough to get installed.