My Feed

...... Shop till you literally drop at the grand re-opening of Bass UltraPro Shop! Trained nurses are at hand to administer care for advanced shopping exhaustion!...



....... Need more black hoodies? of course you need more black hoodies! How many would you like to order?.....

...... Hey unit! Want to be in the musical know? Then listen to our new elctro wytch speedcore mixtape? Its a custom made mixture of your favorite witch house and dark electro interspersed with ZEF South African rap rave Die Antwoord! Wat Kyk Jy my bru!.....



  
     Choice is not liberty.They certainly have a lot of correlation, but to conflate one with another is extremely dangerous. The characters in Feed have a ridiculous amount of choice. They can take weekend trips to the moon, alter their appearance in drastic and scary ways, and design their own babies. But they live a vapid lifestyle based on oppression of others and the natural world. Part of the problem with thinking choice is the same as liberty lies in the bourgeoisie understanding of freedom. From that point of view freedom is thought of as a positive existing condition rather than a negation of any form of coercive authority.

    Although this book is the most likely scenario for our generation that we have read it reminded me most of 1984, which was probably the least likely. The big similarity is that in both dystopian worlds society has reached a point where resistance is impossible. The authors of both of these books seem to believe that once the trajectory of society down any authoritarian path has been followed through, be it state socialism or industrial capitalism, you reach a point of no return where nothing can stop it. It can either end in horrific collapse like Feed or it can reach an equilibrium that could possibly just go on forever, like 1984. I don't know how realistic the whole "point of no return" thing is, but it is always something to consider.

     Would I resist the feed? It wouldn't really be my decision. With the exception of Violet the young characters in the book didn't choose the feed. Considering that public school has been privatized and no longer teaches reading and writing or any other non-feed skills, there would be no way to get information outside of what you get from the feed. Although resistance movements are mentioned in the book none of them pose any real danger to the social order.


     I don't think that any significant resistance to the feed was meant to be possible, just like any attempt to resist the Party of Oceania is useless. But does resistance have any value if it is in the end entirely futile?  I think so. Many of those who have lost their lives resisting oppression think so. If an oppressive society follows a disastrous path that ends up destroying the natural world like in Feed, then those that survive (if any do) will know that at least some tried to fight back.