Bookmark: Books for when the 'feed' goes dark

One of the hardest books to track down over the holidays this year was M.T. Anderson's "Feed."

Anderson's cyberpunk dystopia sketches a near-future world where climate change has degraded Earth's surface, forcing humans to live in climate-controlled cities. Most also have an implant that feeds them a steady stream of data, chat threads, videos and highly targeted ads.

I wanted to give a copy to my 12-year-old nephew, a once-avid reader who was now slipping away into a world of online gaming and pre-adolescent drama.

A decade ago, when I was teaching mass communication at a local community college, my students introduced me to "Feed."

With its tone of gleeful cynicism about Big Tech, "Feed" spoke to both their rueful addiction to their smartphones and knowledge that large corporations were mining every communication — and their "can't live with it, can't live without it" attitude toward that brave new world.

Two decades after its 2002 publication, "Feed" still hits a nerve.

In December, I brought my nephew with me on a reconnaissance mission to Magers and Quinn. I hoped that the tall, narrow aisles — with whole sections devoted to graphic novels and science fiction, a corner full of young-adult and middle-grade books — would spark his curiosity.

That he would lift the cover of "Dune" or "Wonder," or even a new installment of Goosebumps, and fall into the world of the story the way my siblings and I had fallen into stories over and over in the downtime of our adolescence.

As I watched him wandering the stacks at the bookstore, randomly pulling down titles, I felt an urgent need to put Anderson's doomsday prophecy into his hands.

This, I wanted him to know, this is what happens when you stop reading print books. When a smartphone pings every few minutes, interrupting your attention before you can finish a paragraph, or a page. It's a slippery slope from that to climate collapse and a chip in your head — and M.T. Anderson is clever and funny enough to say that in a way you might hear it.

Luckily for both of us, the book was sold out.

Because I'm not sure a novel about the dangers of Big Tech (though prescient and realized), is the best way to hook a pre-teen about to fall off the cliff of hormones and peer group dynamics. Or that dystopias feel urgent when you're figuring out how to be the hero of your own tale.

In a forward to the original edition of "Feed," Anderson said that he is now less worried about the impact of the Internet on our attention span and more worried about how our media diet insulates us from understanding the world around us.

But two years into a pandemic that has narrowed our circles and made social interaction more fraught, our screens and online communities may be one of the few things keeping us connected.

We're still writing our own stories, feeling our way forward, whether on social media, family group chats, in interactive online games or by simply picking up the phone.

Books will be there for us when the feed goes dark.

Trisha Collopy is a Star Tribune copy editor.