The Every and the Importance of Privacy
Hailed by Rebecca Makai, author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Great Believers, as “equal parts terrifying and human and hilarious,” Dave Eggers’s latest novel, The Every, is a compelling blend of moral thriller and satire. This follow-up to the award-winning bestseller The Circle follows Delaney Wells, an unlikely new hire at The Every, who aspires to take the world’s largest search engine/social media company down from the inside.
Author Dave Eggers recently sat down for an interview on Amanpour & Company, where he expounded upon the dangers of monopolies, humanity’s compliance, and, most notably, the importance of privacy:
“Without privacy I don’t think we have a democracy. I don’t think we have a safe space for dissent. We don’t have a safe space to think contemplatively, to create. . . . Creativity comes from an anachronistic place of the mind. You have to have a place where you can not worry about what someone is going to say or think about some bad idea or some idea in development. Or, how do we improve our democracy, how do we fight against monopoly; all of these things require a private space. But the more we give it up, the more we give ourselves into tyranny, autocracy, and we make it impossible to fight back. So, privacy is the beginning of what makes us human.”
We can’t think of better fodder for reading group discussion than the issues at the heart of these two timely novels. Enjoy the interview below and click here to find out more about The Circle and The Every!