Extraction, Prediction and Compulsion: M. T. Anderson’s Feed and the Anatomy of Surveillance Capitalism

Arisha Habib; Mukesh Ranjan

Extraction, Prediction and Compulsion: M. T. Anderson’s Feed and the Anatomy of Surveillance Capitalism

Author(s)	Arisha Habib, Prof. Mukesh Ranjan
Country	India
Abstract	M. T. Anderson's young adult dystopia “Feed” (2002) imagines a near-future America in which most citizens receive a brain implant, the “feed,” that fuses commercial data collection with cognition itself. Published seventeen years before Shoshana Zuboff coined the term “surveillance capitalism” in “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” (2019) [6], the novel is nonetheless found to dramatize, with striking precision, the economic logic that Zuboff would later theorize: the extraction of human experience as raw behavioral data, its conversion into predictive commodities, and the resulting erosion of autonomous will. It is argued in this paper that “Feed” stages surveillance capitalism as a three-part process, extraction, prediction, and compulsion, that moves from the economic to the intimate, culminating in a portrait of a subject who can no longer distinguish grief from algorithmically anticipated desire. The novel is read through Zuboff's behavioral-surplus thesis [6] alongside Michel Foucault's theory of disciplinary power [4], Gilles Deleuze's account of “societies of control” [3], and David Lyon's surveillance-studies framework [5], and it is contended that “Feed” does not merely illustrate later theory but anticipates it, functioning as a work of speculative social critique in its own right. Close reading of the novel's corporate data-profiling exposition, Violet Durn's data-resistance project, and the novel's closing consumption sequence is used to ground this claim in textual evidence.
Keywords	Surveillance Capitalism, Behavioral Surplus, Young Adult Dystopia, Dataveillance, Biopolitics
Field	Sociology > Linguistic / Literature
Published In	Volume 8, Issue 5, September-October 2026
Published On	2026-09-23

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Extraction, Prediction and Compulsion: M. T. Anderson’s Feed and the Anatomy of Surveillance Capitalism

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