Celebrating 25 Years Of Feed By M.t. Anderson

In 2027, the iconic YA dystopian novel Feed by M. T. Anderson will turn 25 years old, and today, Book Riot is revealing the new cover!

Check out the high-resolution version, plus some behind-the-scenes insight into its design, in the What’s Up in YA newsletter.

We also interviewed M. T. Anderson about the impact of his novel 25 years later. Here’s what he had to say.

In earlier editions of Feed, you discuss the events of the novel as allegorical and satirical—not as predictions. But 25 years later, the feed feels closer to reality than ever, between social media feeds, AI, and technology like smart glasses. How has your perception of the feed of the novel changed since it was first published?

When I wrote Feed, back in 2001, I really didn’t take the tech literally. The feed directly implanted in the brain was just supposed to evoke what was already true and what had been true even when I was a teen: the voice of advertising was in our heads, making demands, distorting our sense of possibility and our view of who we wanted to be. I felt it was obliterating our sense of self, our eccentricities, and perhaps most importantly, our understanding of how the world we relied on actually worked. 

Of course, in many ways, the speed of tech development and the reluctance to intelligently regulate it have made all those problems even worse. We rely more deeply on systems of incredible complexity that are beyond our control. But also, our relationship to consumerism has changed in an era of consolidated corporate power and stunning wealth inequality, and that wasn’t something I fully predicted in Feed.

Feed was about a world where we’re being sold things all the time; but now it feels like we live in a world where we’re the ones having to sell ourselves, market ourselves, all the time. Social media, the attention economy—which was only an idea when I wrote Feed—started that trend, but the costs of home and health care and even just food have made us all aware of the fragility of our economic lives in a world where money always seems to drift upwards, out of our grasp. The false sense of security in Feed has given way to a generalized anxiety. 

In 2017, I wrote a kind of follow-up to Feed—not in the same world at all, but an updated vision of this situation where we’re all intent on selling ourselves, called Landscape with Invisible Hand, about a kid who wants to be a landscape painter doing Hudson River School paintings after an alien invasion. Earth has become a sort of economic backwater in someone else’s empire. In that book, I made some predictions about the economic and social effects of advanced AI (and useless AI packages in devices that don’t need them). I never would have predicted, though, that we would really have credible AI in place as rapidly as we did. I believed I had to create aliens to introduce it. 

To predict the future, you don’t need to know much about tech. You just have to know about capitalism. 

Feed is dedicated to “All those who resist the feed.” What does resisting the feed look like in 2026?

It’s harder now than it was then! So much of the way we live our lives and conduct business has been subsumed by the algorithms. Seriously, the other day I was trying to buy some bed pillows, and I was exhausted by looking online for something that you really need to handle to judge appropriately, and I thought to myself, I wish there was just like some PLACE where you could go and there’d be a bunch of pillows and you could compare them. For a millisecond, I literally found myself reinventing the store. (One old-fashioned note in Feed, by the way, is that you can detect that I myself am not fully able to shake the centrality of the mall as the place we go to buy. Now, of course, I’m nostalgic for malls!) 

Resisting the feed means being aware of all the choices we’re actually making, even the ones we’re not invited to recognize. At this point, for example, we should all be aware of the way that the cognitive off-loading onto AI has a very real neurological cost. Without literally inserting any feed-like device into the wetware, we’re in danger of rewiring ourselves even further for corporate subservience and the kind of blindness that comes of accepting a corporatized reality. Considering the other dire issues that face our world at the moment, that blindness will be absolutely disastrous. AI, as in Feed, is always willing to whisper to us, “All shall be well. All manner of things shall be well.” 

There are references to U.S. American politics woven throughout the novel. Is Feed is an allegory specific to the United States?

It was at the time. It was begun in August 2001, just weeks before 9/11. The United States seemed unassailable, the world’s great unilateral power, for better or worse. I used to say that the world is always already dystopian: it’s just that we happen to live in the shining capital. That’s no longer so true. The lessons of the last twenty-five years have shown us our fragility. Even the white middle class in America can feel that systems are falling apart. That’s a difficult thing, but ultimately a good thing. 

By the way, because the president in the book is the crapulent, foul-mouthed President Trumbull, I’ve been asked if, in 2001, I magically predicted that Trump would be elected. 

No. I did not. 

Though he did, a few days ago, attempt to annex the moon. 

[SPOILERS FOR FEED] The relationship between Titus and Violet is very different than other YA “sicklit” novels of the 90s, or stories like A Walk to Remember. Titus is not the romantic hero we have come to expect. Was that a deliberate response to these kinds of stories?

That wasn’t really a conscious decision on my part. Just a sense that this boy, Titus, is self-involved and has been trained to focus on positive selling points. I didn’t know where the novel was going when I started writing it, and I just found him naturally behaving badly as Violet deteriorated. He doesn’t want to confront what’s going on with her. But I wonder if I would have done any better at his age. The discomfort of others’ suffering is something we often turn away from. I wanted to make him a somewhat torn character: he has sudden impulses where he’s wishing to be better, but he’s formed entirely by this stultifying world where no one is being encouraged to really think for themselves if it’s uncomfortable. 

What are some of your favorite sci-fi/dystopian novels of the past 25 years?

Some old stand-bys: Shaun Tan’s picture book The Rabbits is one of the best, most chilling, and most succinct dystopian texts on imperialism that could be imagined. His wordless graphic novel The Arrival was one of the best books of the Noughts and forces the reader to experience what it’s like for a refugee from a dystopian nation to try to resettle in another, alien nation where the rules are all different. Please get this into the hands of teens as we debate asylum-seeker and refugee status in this country.

For a lusciously written, wildly colorful sci-fi romance that takes place across many war-shattered dystopian times and worlds, check out Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s This Is How You Lose the Time War, about two military assassins who fall inconveniently in love while hunting each other.

If we can sneak one in from just before the turn of the millennium, Ben Marcus’s Age of Wire and String is a set of missives from a mind-bending, Dadaist dystopia, at once banal and yet utterly unfamiliar.

For a more realistic dystopia, Lily Brooks-Dalton, in The Light Pirate, has written a convincing and sobering portrait of how climate collapse could play out in a small Florida town.

And finally, if you want a truly dismal dystopian reading experience, just read any high-school-level world history textbook from cover to cover in one sitting. We have got to be better. I believe we can be. 

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