Cnut Songs #19: The Every (1)

A few years back, I thought The Circle by Dave Eggers was the most frightening book I've ever read. The novel concerns a huge tech company (essentially Google crossed with Facebook) and its desire to control the world. Everything that happens in the novel is one step away from where we are today (actually, much of what Eggers predicted in The Circle has since come to pass), and that's what makes it so scary.

The Every is the sequel. Here, The Circle has swallowed up "The Jungle" (you can guess which company that might be) to become even more omnipotent, metamorphosing into The Every.

A young woman called Delaney goes to work at The Every with the intention of sabotaging the company from within. Her plan is to push The Every into increasing its control over our lives to the point that the public begin to object, rebel and fight back. It's hardly a spoiler to say that this isn't as easy as she thinks. Where The Circle was a novel about how big companies want to control us, The Every is more about how easily and willingly we cede control over our own lives to these big companies. The antagonist here is not a faceless corporation... it's us.

There's so much in this novel that hits home, and touches on the kind of issues that I've been writing about in Cnut Songs (like King Cnut, I want to hold back the tide... but realise I'm powerless to do so), so I've decided to run a few excerpts over the next few weeks. No further commentary is required from me: Eggers is able to express my fears and complaints about our dramatic plunge into dystopia far better than I ever could.

 

In this extract, Delaney goes to work in a department called TellTale. The manager, Alessandro, explains what the department does…

“People pick up a book,” he said, “and stop in the middle. Why? With e-books we can study all of this in aggregate. We can take, for example, two thousand readers of Jane Eyre and see who finished it. We actually did that. Turns out 188 people did finish it. That’s not good, right? People who read it all seem to like it. It’s at—” He tapped one of his screens a few times and got the answer. “It’s a 83 per cent approval, which is high for a dead author. So we dig deeper and see that of the 2000 people who started Jane Eyre, most quitters put it down around page 177. So then we look at what happens on page 177, and we see that people don’t seem to like this character called Grace Poole. They find her scary and depressing. They want more of the romance with Mr. Rochester. Now, if the author were alive, we could tell him—”

“Her,” Delaney corrected.

“Her?” Alessandro said reflexively, then went pale.

Oh no, Delaney thought. She’d seen this happen.

Alessandro stood up. He didn’t know what to do. He allowed the vines of his hair to obscure his face completely, and seemed likely to douse himself with gas and light a match.

“It’s OK,” Delaney said. “You meant Mr. Rochester.”

“I did?”

“I know you did. Like, if Mr. Rochester were alive, we could tell him that his parts of the book were intriguing.”

“Okay. Right.” Alessandro began warming to the idea, believing it his only way out of ruination. “That’s exactly what I meant. Where were we?”

“You were saying you could fix Jane Eyre.”

“Well, we could,” he said, “but because the author is dead, she”— he pressed the word so hard it erased centuries of chauvinism and ignorance, “can’t learn from the data herself.”

“Sucks for her,” Delaney said, and saw Alessandro smile.

“But a living author, or a publisher, can avail themselves of the numbers and act on them,” he said. “And this kind of data has been invaluable to publishers and some of their authors already. Just those data-points, sales versus book-starts versus completions, that’s huge. Completions, of course, convert favourably to sales of the author’s next book. So for publishers, figuring out where and why people are stopping is crucial. Sometimes it’s obvious. Like unlikable characters. We can help fix that. We’ve actually written a pretty simple code for turning an unlikable character into, like, your favourite person.”

“Wow,” Delaney said.

“The main thing is that the main character should behave they way you want them to, and do what you want them to do.”

“That’s just common sense,” said Delaney.

“Right? It kind of makes you worry about a lot of writers – the fact that they didn’t know this. But we’re making inroads with colleges and MFA programs, so now they have the information. We give it to them for free, as a public service.”

Delaney made a grateful, admiring whistle-sound.

Alessandro moves on to discuss screen-writing and the algorithms The Every has developed to “help” screenwriters create more engaging movies (“For example, 82% of the best scripts have the Catalysing Moment on page 11…") These formulas don’t just apply to the creative side of movie making, but also to the critical side…

“Remember when assessments of the quality of a movie were an unruly mess? Before critical aggregation, it was totally random. For a certain movie, you had one critic saying one thing in Los Angeles, and another one in Oslo saying something else, and there was no chance of order or consensus. But when we applied percentages to each review, we could average them together, and it became far more clear. A regular human in a fast-moving society doesn’t have time to read twenty-five, or even three, reviews of a movie before they go see it. But seeing it’s received an aggregated score of 74.61 percent – that’s clarity.”

“And clarity is objectivity,” Delaney said.

He looked at her and grinned. “You belong here.”

“As you know,” he continued,” the aggregates worked so well that they quickly moved from movies into painting, dance, sculpture, poetry. I mean, you should have seen how low sonnets scored! That’s why you don’t see those taught so much any more.”

“Sonnet? What’s a sonnet?” Delaney laughed.

Alessandro’s eyes were wild with mirth and inspiration. “Then we brought numerical specificity to so-called fine art museums. In each case there was some initial pushback, but the undeniable comfort of the numbers, of simply knowing the quality of a work of art by its percentage, was soon embraced by the overwhelming majority of people. Eighty-eight percent, to be exact.”

“That’s the only reason we finally know who the best painter was,” Delaney said. The Every had released their results a few years earlier, the product of 32.1 million respondents. The greatest artist of all time was Norman Rockwell, followed by Dale Chihuly, Frida Khalo, Pablo Picasso and Patrick Nagel.

They shared a smile. “I liked when the Louvre started showing the aggregates,” Delaney said.

“Right,” Alessandro said, “I mean, the Louvre came to us. There were all these places doing bootleg aggregates and they wanted it done right.”

“It was fascinating when The Last Supper was only a sixty-six percent,” Delaney said.

“It had been so overrated for centuries! See, that kind of thing was revelatory. We’re averaging together tens of thousands of ratings, as opposed to taking the received wisdom of a few academics. The aggregates are more democratic and egalitarian. Before the aggregates, it had all been so hierarchical and subjective.”

“Subjectivity is just objectivity waiting for data,” Delaney said.

“Right!” Alessandro said, and she saw him pause, again working out whether any kind of compliment would be acceptable. He decided not to risk it. “I mean, I think creatives are starting to acknowledge that we have a valuable role to play. This high wall that was built between art and data had to be torn down.”

The Klaxon 5 were a short-lived band on the London Pavilion record label in the mid-80s. They only released two singles, and that's a tragedy considering how good this one is... and it's about burning books too, which seems vaguely appropriate.