Reviews and Comments

Read Feed. Came in. Bought this book two days later.

What I love about this book is not just the society it has, where the Internet is a given and the house is smart enough to ask you how you'd like to be showered. It's not just that everyone, from the security guards to the truckers to the flight attendents are armed to the teeth and would be voted Most Likely To Survive The Zombie Apocalypse in any other novel.

It's about the young kids who are smart enough and crazy enough to poke zombies with sticks and post it on their blog for attention, who grow into smart and crazy adults who by their nature can't resist poking at what the government gets up to when no-one's looking.

Because the problem isn't the zombies. It's the culture of fear that surrounds the zombies. It's about what that does to society, and what society is willing to do to itself just so it can feel safer at night. And it's about what happens when there's finally someone willing to look.

Not nearly as dumb as the cover would imply -- the RSS icon on the front cover made me think that blogging somehow caused zombies to happen. The reality of the book is much smarter, in that it's about a world in which zombies are a chronic problem (virus based, with ANYTHING over 50 lbs that dies for any reason coming back bitey) and blogging is the primary means by which society communicates. Because everyone is damn terrified of going outside or travelling.

The main characters are Georgia (named after George Romero), Shaun, and Buffy. They're young but intelligent, and inclined to take risks that most of the populace wouldn't even think of taking. They exist in a society very different from our own, more advanced in places and with a degree of functioning paranoia from a world in which taking down zombies is taught alongside CPR and defensive driving. And then they get picked to cover the next presidential campaign.

The story from there is interesting, and the characters are solid and there are ZOMBIES in abundance. The actual politics is ludicrous and the villain may as well come with a "Kiss Me, I'm Evil" apron on him, but it's very nice to read a novel that not only takes the internet into account, but is based around it as a means of communication in the same way that you see cell phones in movies. The world in Feed is the Future, and they take their technology for granted and depend on it for survival, without being impressed or flashy about it. That's an achievement in itself.

Honestly, I don't know whether it's from reading way too many neuroscience books or just reading too many philosophy books, but there was nothing I felt was added to my experience from reading this book. It's a discussion of consciousness from a philosophical perspective that takes the neuroscience into account -- but having taken the neuroscience into account, there's little left to do besides document it and equate it to the "internal" experience. This is unproductive in itself, because the nature of the illusion is that it feels real, even when it is provably a neural correlate to the outside reality.

Where the book did become unexpectedly fascinating was in its discussion of the validity of consciousness to an Artifical Intelligence -- silicon based consciousness is as "valid" as carbon based consciousness, there are any number of ethical questions involved in what can "legally" be done to them.

That being said, this is a solid book that is arguably much broader than "The User Illusion" or "The New Executive Brain", and is done from a philosophical perspective that may be much easier to digest.