Riot Gear

I just finished Feed by M.T. Anderson.  I really liked the book.  What really stuck out to me though was Riot Gear.

On page 159 of the book  Titus and Violet go to a party at Marty's house.  At the party some of Titus's friends are wearing Riot Gear.  In the book, Riot Gear is clothing that is stressed and faded in a way that simulates what protesters clothing would look like in after a riot.  One of these lines of clothing is WTO Riot.

This is what happened at the WTO (World Trade Organization) Riot

All the WTO Rioters did to provoke this violence from police was hold a march near the Washington State Convention Center where the WTO Conference was held.

Feed brings up a practice that has been going on for decades.  Groups of dissident people like punks and hippies seem to create a style of clothing that is stereotyped mainstream fashion designers.  Below is an example.

People that are not part of that dissident group but want to seem edgy demand this fashion so they too are edgy.

In the dystopic future that exists in Feed fashion designers have removed themselves so far from reality that they market a brand to the entire world called WTO Riot Gear to a global community.  The WTO Riot was against globalization and everthing that the "feed" is.  M.T. Anderson did a great job of making painful irony in Feed.

- Jason McCoy

To All Those Who Resist the Feed- M.T.A.

          For my blog post this week, I wanted to talk about M.T. Anderson’s Feed. For those of you who have not had a chance to read the novel, it begins with a group of teens flying to the moon for their Spring Break. The main character, Titus, and his friends belong to a society in which people are connected to the internet through a ‘feed,’ or a chip that is implanted in their brains. While on vacation, Titus and his friends meet Violet, a strange but beautiful girl who has traveled to the moon by herself. Violet decides to join the kids in their plans to go to a night club, where they are attacked by a ‘hacker’ who essentially disrupts their feeds and implants a type of virus to corrupt their connections. As Titus and Violet begin to grow closer, he learns that she is home schooled by a single father and that her father’s income and personal beliefs prevented her from getting her feed installed until she was older. Because the feed was implanted in Violet’s brain so late, she is unable to fully recover from the hacker’s attack and it begins to have a detrimental effect on her body physically, as the technology has become connected to the natural bodily functions of human beings.

            This story basically illustrates all of our current fears of the affects modern technology will have upon our society in the future. The characters chatting through instant messaging instead of speaking out loud. The Earth being essentially destroyed and overpopulated to the point that people have built outward from the surface and fly through the vertical levels of neighborhoods in their ‘upcars,’ which have replaced contemporary automobiles. It is easy for the reader to get caught up in all of the futuristic aspects of this story. I was interested to read in “A Conversation with M.T. Anderson” in the back of the novel that the story was not written with the intention of being solely classified as a ‘futuristic novel.’ Anderson explains,

             “I think of it more as a novel that uses images from an imagined future in an almost allegorical way to discuss things we’re dealing with now.”

             In the interview, Anderson talks specifically about how are society is manipulated by the media and how we have a responsibility to be aware of the complexity of the world we live in and the issues and events occurring every day. He encourages teens to use Violet’s character as an example and to develop a healthy sense of curiosity and individuality. In the novel, Violet comes to the realization that the advertising and media companies controlling the feeds are targeting consumers based on their demographic, which is in turn causing the interests of each group to become more and more similar, and therefore losing their individuality in the process. She makes an attempt to confuse the feed by expressing interest in a long list of random and obscure products, so that the technology will not be able to figure out how to market to her. Anderson encourages his readers to explore themselves and their interests and not be so influenced by trends in the media.

-Katie Durkin