Feed

Most people have the feed installed at birth, and it integrates into their neurological and biological systems until it cannot be extracted. This is a metaphor for how reliance on technology functions psychologically in the novel. Titus and his friends are essentially uneducated. They know how to use their feeds, but they can’t read or write. They don’t know anything about subjects like history or science because they have been taught that the purpose of the feed is to replace learning. They can only look things up using the limited and unreliable internet that is controlled by the corporations. Titus doesn’t even know how to access correct information about the world around him, settling at the end for telling Violet the snippets that he can find. The feed offers corporations and the government easy access to users’ minds, as demonstrated when Titus and Violet experience their surveillance through a dream. Through data mining, corporations are taking over users’ personhood to shape them into better consumers. Link, for instance, should have the intelligence and abilities of Abraham Lincoln since he is the former president’s clone, but he demonstrates no more aptitude than any of the others.

For Violet, the feed destroys her brain physically. Violet notes that the feed doesn’t quite fit correctly when installed later in life. By age six, Violet had developed her own personality. Her homeschooling cultivated her individuality, which leads her to use uniqueness to rebel against the feed. When her feed is damaged, it starts to destroy the memories from when she was an independent person. Notably, her feed could be repaired. The degradation doesn’t need to be permanent; however, because Violet hasn’t been molded into someone who the feed can sell to easily, she is discarded as a person. Smell Factor demonstrates the opposite issue. Although Titus and his friends have grown up to be somewhat functional teens with the (albeit damaged) capacity to make connections with each other, Smell Factor seems to have no personality outside of the feed. Presumably, technology has advanced since Titus’s feed was installed, and Smell Factor is fully consumed by the feed. He ignores people around him and sings along loudly, raising the question as to what atrophy is occurring in his growing brain that will limit who he becomes.

The logistics of manufacturing new technology has also corrupted the environment and the human bodies that are subjected to the Earth’s atmosphere. Elements of nature that are a part of normal life on Earth are recreated through artificial means, and poor facsimiles become products for sale and consumption. Presumably, there are no (or at least very few) birds left, given the harshness of the environment, and the trendy product at the start of the novel is a metal toy bird. The sunrise and sunset as well as the changing seasons now occur in residential areas through machines. The Clouds™ are also artificial and trademarked, as is School™ since it has been reinvented by corporations. To Violet’s dismay, an air factory replaces a forest because, as Titus’s father argues, a factory is more efficient at producing breathable air. Titus and Violet go out to the country for a rustic experience and walk around the beef fields, which are slabs of meat grown as a replacement for raising cows. Violet, who was raised to keep touch with the real, craves a real experience before she dies. However, nearly everything she wants to see and feel has been destroyed by technology, including the experience of true love.