The Every and What We Trade to Belong

I recently finished reading The Every by Dave Eggers. I could say it was a very timely read, that would have been true at almost any point in the past five to ten years. While the novel centers on a tech monopoly, it’s a book about how power actually works. From the use of soft and hard power and through a power system that’s often overlooked: cultural hegemony.

Cultural hegemony is a form of power that doesn’t rely on constant force or coercion. Instead, it shapes what people accept as normal, moral, and inevitable through subtle cultural levers and everyday power dynamics. Systems don’t need force when participation can be framed as virtue. And when force comes into play, it’s often not because it’s necessary, but because cruelty has become part of the point.

That’s the crux of The Every. The novel mirrors the oligarchic control we’re watching erode democratic norms in real time. It’s especially sharp in illuminating what we willingly trade for convenience and inclusion. I remember a conversation I had with a friend in 2018, after a story broke about Google reading users’ Gmail content. He believed we were approaching a breaking point, that widespread crossing of privacy boundaries would finally produce meaningful consume pushback. I disagreed. I argued that if the benefit was clear and the convenience compelling enough, people would willingly give up the privacy they claimed to value. 

And they did. 

Shame plays a larger role in system adherence that we like to admit. The fear of being outside the moral ingroup, paired with ease and functional benefit neutralizes resistance. Even when rights and freedoms are stripped away wholesale, participation still feels safer than refusal. We’re seeing the effects everywhere. Deeper disconnection from one another, from nature, from art and history, from sustained attention and reading. All of it traded for perceived certainty, comfort, and frictionless living. 

With these conditions resistance becomes ineffective by design. The only  “acceptable” resistance is the type the system can absorb and rename and thus the system is strengthened by it. The result isn’t rebellion, it’s passivity. Confusion. Exhaustion. A focus on survival. And a slow erosion of hope. I struggle with this personally. I struggle with how easily I can diagnose the problem while failing to respond with forceful defiance. With how often I accommodate systems that are diminishing humanity in people and in very real ways, killing people. Because opting out feels unclear or costly. The hardest systems to fight are the ones people insist are helping them. The ones where alternatives feel unimaginable, because there’s not an alternative other than “fixing” the existing one.

But what if the system’s not broken? 

W. Edward Demings said, “Every system is perfectly designed to get the results that it gets.” If that’s true, then the task isn’t repair, it’s reimagination.

We can’t afford to lose hope. We have to elevate our thinking. We have to articulate a vision of the possible beyond what we’ve inherited. Systems that reconnect us, to each other, to meaning, to dignity. We have to give people something real to move toward, not just something to endure.