Data-driven Public Sphere and Homogenized Wave-Particle Subjects—Dave Eggers’ The Every

Although it is widely assumed that data capitalism fragments individuals into isolated “echo chambers” and “filter bubbles,” it paradoxically appears to produce extreme homogenization. This article examines these tendencies toward sameness and standardization in data-capitalist society through Dave Eggers’s The Every (2021), a realist tech-fiction sequel to The Circle (2013), and explores the vision it presents through its narrative form. Drawing on Antoinette Rouvroy’s concept of “algorithmic governmentality,” the analysis investigates the formation and operation of data subjects—understood as quasi-subjects and wave-particle subjects proposed by Stephen Shapiro, unlike liberal subjects—through the themes of the “loss of critical capacity: the formation of the data public sphere” and the “future that preempts the present: the craving for certainty.” In data society, the individual is reduced to an infra-individual data point, or a “dividual,” while simultaneously reconstituted as a supra-individual aggregate that claims the status of perfect objectivity, reproducing the system by adjusting to algorithmic directives and relinquishing opportunities for subjective meaning-making. In addition to its satirical aesthetic that refuses to reconcile literary realism with social reality, the novel intensifies its irony by juxtaposing the protagonist’s social growth (Bildungsroman) with personal downfall (anti-Bildungsroman), ultimately presenting a dystopian vision of data-driven society.