The Feed

In the novel Feed, the author M.T. Anderson gives his take on what he believes will
become of our consumer culture. He does this by taking the world we live in now and
accelerating it into sometime in the nearby future. Within this futuristic world described by
Anderson, you can find many underlying criticisms that are directed right at consumer culture.
In the novel, it is made very obvious that Anderson believes that our consumer culture, our
consumers and our world in general are heading for disaster. It is also very obvious that many of
the authors criticisms on consumer culture can be traced back to several popular consumer
culture writings. In the following paragraphs the criticisms made on consumer culture in the
novel Feed will be analyzed by taking specific situations within the novel and applying them to
ideas stated in consumer culture writings by authors such as Kalle Lasn, Joseph Heath, and
Andrew Potter. In conclusion to that analysis it will be determined if M.T. Andersons criticisms
on the future of consumer culture are correct or simply crazy.
The first criticism that will be analyzed has to do with the idea that everything we
experience in life is in a way fake, a replica, or unauthentic because of advertising and the media.
On page 217 of the novel Feed, you will find Titus and Violet having a conversation at Violets
fathers house. Violet states, Everything I think of when I think of really living, living to the
full-all my ideas are just the opening credits of sitcoms. See what I mean? My idea of life, its
what happens when theyre rolling the credits. My god. What am I, without the feed? Its all
from the feed credits. My idea of real life. You know? In this quote, Violet makes the point
that her idea of real life is based off what the feed shows her and alludes to the fact that her idea
of real life is in no way based of real authentic experiences. This idea of unauthentic experiences
can be applied to Kalle Lasns Culture Jamming. In the writing Lasn states, Everything human

beings once experienced directly had been turned into a representation, a show put on by
someone else. Real living had been replaced by pre-packaged experiences and media-created
events. Immediacy was gone. (Page 416). After reading the just stated quote it becomes
evident that Anderson is making the same criticism on consumer culture that Lasn made. In
specific, Anderson is making the point that the ad and media filled feed is taking over real life.
In his future world, no one will experience any part of life authentically because the feed will
have already suggested or showed them how to experience it.
The second criticism that will be analyzed is the idea that there is a cycle of cool. Being
more specific, the cycle of cool is the idea that there is a never ending cycle in which products go
through. The products begin as cool because they are new and hip. Once the products are no
longer new and hip they become not cool to consumers. When that happens companies will
simply come out with another product that is better than the last which will in turn complete
one full cycle of cool. This criticism can be found in the novel Feed on page 77. In this
situation Titus is talking about his little brother Smell Factors mechanical bird toy. Titus states,
Stuff always starts with people who are cool and in college, and then works down, until when
the six-year-olds get it, its like, who cares? The birds must have been yesterday for a while,
because I didnt see them in any ads, and even Smell Factor was leaving his around and not
clutching it. In this quote Titus takes the idea of a cycle of cool a step further than its previous
explanation. He not only talks about a product becoming not cool, but that it also moves through
groups of people in the process. In his case, it moved from college kids all the way down to sixyear-olds until the mechanical bird was finally not cool. This idea of cool products moving
through groups of people can also be found in a writing called From Status-Seeking To
Coolhunting by Andrew Potter and Joseph Heath. In this writing they take a more general

approach at categorizing the order of which cool products flow through. The order begins with
innovators who are the first people to consume a certain product. It should be noted that these
are considered to be the very cool people. It then moves on to the early adopters who wait to see
if the innovators approve of the product. After that you have your early and late majority and at
the bottom of the order you find the laggards who are the last to consume the product. You can
consider the point in which a product reaches the laggards to be the point in time that the product
itself becomes not cool. After that description of the order of product adopters from StatusSeeking To Coolhunters it becomes evident that Anderson, in the situation mentioned from the
novel, was categorizing college kids as the innovators or maybe early adopters and the six-yearolds as the laggards. This would perfectly explain why nobody cared about the mechanical bird
once it reached the six-year-olds.
The third and final criticism that will be analyzed is the idea that consumers have been
manipulated and brainwashed so much by advertisers and the media that they have been tricked
into desiring products that they have absolutely no need for in an attempt to be cool. This
criticism can be found in the novel Feed on page 48 when Titus is talking about the feed. Titus
States, But the braggest thing about the feed, the thing that made it really big, is that it knows
everything you want and hope for, sometimes before you even know what those things are. Is it
possible that something or someone can know what you want before you even know? Or is it
possible that they are making you believe that you want it? Another example of this from the
book occurs on page 31 where Titus and his friends go to the mall to find cool stuff to wear out.
Titus states, I wanted to by some things but I didnt know what they were. After we walked
around for a while, everything seemed kind of sad and boring so we couldnt tell anymore what
we wanted. Our feeds tried to help. Titus and his friends end up all buying things that they

either didnt want or didnt end up liking. Both of these previous quotes really show the effect
the feed has on consumers in their society. The feed is able to create desires within consumers
with the use of advertisement in order to manipulate them into buying products that they really
dont want. This criticism can also be applied to writings by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter.
Heath and Potter state, it is not just that corporations are exploiting our desires to be cool by
selling us cool products; it is that they are actually creating the desire for those products. We
are being systematically duped, manipulated, programmed into the consumerist cool mindset,
tricked into buying products we otherwise would not really want. (Page 205-206). This quote
elaborates on the point Anderson is making in the first two quotes of this paragraph. It would
seem that the feed just like corporations and advertisers today are manipulating us the consumers
into making purchases that are unnecessary and wasteful.
Now that three main criticisms made by M.T. Anderson in the novel Feed have been
analyzed, it is time to propose and answer some crucial questions. Before these questions are
proposed and answered it may be helpful to quickly summarize the three criticisms. It would
seem that according to Anderson the future of our consumer culture is destined to create a world
full of unauthentic experiences in which consumers dedicate their life to buying products that
they do not need or even know that they want because of the manipulation of the feed
(advertisers, media, corporations) in an attempt to chase cool. With that said, the first question
that must be addressed is whether or not these criticisms are valid? Taking into consideration the
information from the novel itself, the consumer culture writings, and daily experience in the
world we live in today it would seem apparent that these criticisms of consumer culture are very
valid. With the ever evolving internet and social media corporations, advertisers, and the media
have found and continue to find more ways to invade our personal space in order to shove more

products down our throats. It would be nave to think that this process will not continue to get
worse and worse as time goes on. The second question that must be addressed is whether or not
his overall vision of the futuristic consumer culture is genius or just flat out crazy? The answer
to the question in short is no. He is neither crazy nor a genius for predicting the future. It
becomes apparent while reading the novel that his futuristic vision of consumer culture is
extremely farfetched, especially when you think of the idea of feeds being implanted into
peoples brains. However, this farfetched attempt to predict the future can be seen as an
exaggeration in order to make a point. This point being that our consumer culture is heading for
disaster if we do not do something about it. Therefore, it can be concluded that M.T. Andersons
negative criticisms on consumer culture in the novel Feed are proven to be very valid and are
made valid with the use of exaggeration when telling the story of our futuristic world that is
inevitably heading for disaster.