In M.T. Anderson's dystopic young adult novel, everyone has a feed, a digital implant that streams media 24/7 to users, rendering critical thinking and articulateness obsolete. Titus, the novel's protagonist, has spent his entire life dependent on the feed, but when he and his friends take a lunar trip for spring break, he meets a subversive, Violet, who makes him question the status quo for the first time. Wickedly satirical, Anderson extrapolates on current 21st century realities, including environmental degradation, digital dumbing-down, targeted marketing, and materialistic, self-indulgent teen lemmings who mindlessly adopt the latest fashion trends, no matter how fatuous (hey, check out my cool lesions!). He does a particularly masterful job skewering linguistic deterioration: adolescents utilize a superficial, minimalist, neo-California style sociolect, chock full of fillers, profanity, and hedges, and devoid of any lexical richness or edge, e.g. "Unit! She's meg-youch!", while government officials spout political doublespeak to obfuscate cruel truths and conceal lies. Naturally, the novel's lone radical stubbornly resists the societal language trend, protesting the debasing of English by speaking "entirely in weird words and irony, so no one can simplify anything he says" (137). Provocative and relentless.
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