Homesick on the Internet: The Candy House by Jennifer Egan
Never trust a candy house. This is the sentence in which we first encounter the title of Jennifer Egan’s novel. Its context is a reaction to the music sharing revolution of the early 2000s: Napster, Limewire. You remember it, right?
“People were letting the Internet go inside their computers and play their music, so that they, too, could play songs they didn’t own without having to buy them. The idea made us squeamish; it was like letting a stranger rummage through your house -- or your brain! Once the Internet was inside your computer rifling through your music, what else might it decide to look at?”
Remember a time when we got uncomfortable about seeing and being seen online?
This “squeamish” first-person-plural narrator is two adult daughters of a successful music producer; they work for their father’s company and are clearly dumbfounded, at the turn of the century, by what they see as an utter violation of the sanctity of the music they sell. These new forms of music consumption, the daughters agree, pose an existential threat not only to their father’s legacy, but to the music industry itself. “Nothing is free!” they want to shout at those blithely participating in these platforms. “Only children expect otherwise, even as myths and fairy tales warn us: Rumpelstiltskin, King Midas, Hansel and Gretel. Never trust a candy house! It was only a matter of time before someone made them pay for what they thought they were getting for free. Why could nobody see this?”
Never trust a candy house. That deceptive temptation, that story that draws us toward danger with its promise of sweetness. The price for the music industry is one thing, but what about the price for the consumers -- the music lovers? This is harder to put our finger on, even today. Do we recognize candy houses, when they appear, for what they really are? If the fairy tales don’t work to teach us this lesson -- that nothing is free -- then what kinds of cautionary stories do help us to see?
Egan’s novel expansively explores these dilemmas of human consciousness: our longing for cautionary tales, and our refusal to listen to them. This book lets us peer in on many, many intricate (and recognizable) people’s lives, all of whom are battling their own demons. In her elliptically connected vignettes, which come to feel like aloof (not quite estranged) cousins of one another, Egan has created an assemblage of these many human candy houses: from literal Beverly Hills houses that seem paradisiacal and turn out hellish, to imagined ideas of home that buckle under the weight of nostalgia or fade beyond recognition when held up to the harsh light of others’ perceptions. There are scenes of confrontation over the position of a neighbor’s fence; there are drug-fueled orgies in a house in the middle of a redwood forest. It’s a true smorgasbord of candy houses, each as delectable as the previous.
But the most double-edged of the candy houses in this novel is our old pal, the Internet -- and each of these other candy houses may in fact be allegories for this biggest one. For this story, Egan has invented a fictional form of social media, which involves being able to “externalize your consciousness” in the form of literal videos of your memories, which you can then watch and share. Though it is not the only driving force of conflict in the novel, it is the existential stage on which her players play out their private dramas. As I read, I was reminded of a recent, striking non-fiction portrait of the real-world tech industry: Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (2019). And as my friend Emilie also reminded me after we’d both finished the novel: the tech in Candy House is really not that far off from the tech we have -- our ‘new frontier.’
Going back through Zuboff’s book, I was struck to find that she, too, talks of houses and homes, both literal and figurative. After an analysis of the technology in the very first “Smart Home,” tested in 2000, Zuboff begins to think of the violation of the private domain by tech companies (think “Alexa” or “Siri”) as a metaphor for these companies’ other more insidious invasions. “Home is where we know and where we are known,” she writes, in a voice seemingly too poetic for a book about the history of Apple and Google. She’s talking about dislocation -- about nostalgia. She’s talking about a fundamental human longing for the place where we belong. And she’s accusing these technology products of violating our privacy so profoundly as to be producing a kind of mass, chronic homesickness: the numbing malaise of the internet age, where there is nowhere to take refuge, nowhere to safely know and be known.
In considering the conversation between these two texts, I began to notice the writers’ shared interest in the relationship between privacy and free will -- and their flipsides, community and destiny. Zuboff’s analysis of the technologies that dislocate us, that home-sicken us, could perhaps be even better understood alongside some of our other human technologies: the tools we seek out to help us escape ourselves and connect with others, but whose wages are invisible and insidious. Egan might put drugs and God in this category, but also art. Music, literature: they let us communicate with each other across vast differences. We reach for these technologies out of a place of loneliness, out of deep desire to commune. Sometimes they can help us find that place of belonging, but not always.
What happens to the chronically homesick? Those in search of a parent, of the true origin story, of an idea of family? Sometimes, when untreated, this unmet longing for home leads to addiction: that brutal, grinding technology whose product is death.
All of the technologies Egan explores in this novel, then, seem to be fueled by the same raw material: memory. Our very own stories, inside of us, that make our lives meaningful -- and our drive to preserve those stories, as a means of private and public identity both.
I. Instruments of the Tech Gods: Zuboff’s New Frontier
“‘We’re back to the problem of free will,’ Eamon said. ‘If God is omnipotent, does that make us puppets?’...’ ‘To hell with God,’ Fern said. ‘I’m worried about the Internet.’ ‘By which you mean an all-seeing, all-knowing entity that may be controlling your behavior, even when you think you’re choosing for yourself?’” - The Candy House, Eamon and Fern, p. 15-16
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is a history and analysis of the tech industry over the past 20-30 years. You could say that reading it made me feel a kind of sickness, like suddenly realizing I’d been poisoned. What Zuboff illustrates is that technology companies evolved to be able to profit off of surveillance, but not just of our consumer behaviors (e.g. you searched for diapers so we will try to sell you formula). Now, they profit off of making predictions about our behaviors (e.g. we advertise diapers to you before you know you’re pregnant). And they make these predictions by extracting data about our consciousness -- about our free will and how it operates. They can make accurate predictions because they have a TON of information, most of which we’ve (ironically) freely willed to them, in exchange for the benefits of their products -- often free of charge and highly practical, like Gmail (or Google docs, on which I’m composing this piece right now).
Zuboff’s book is fundamentally an attempt at caution, not unlike the story of Hansel and Gretel. It is a prophylactic effort to educate about the psychic harms that the tech industry is inflicting. It’s also an homage to free will, with a desire to salvage what’s left of it in a world that wants to automate us (e.g. Hmm, if they think I should buy diapers, maybe it’s time I had a baby…). As extreme as it sounds, Zuboff is genuinely concerned about our ability to think for ourselves.
“Surveillance capitalism,” she writes, “unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data.” This kind of data has given birth to a “new species of power” that companies can exert: instrumentarianism. “Instrumentarian power knows and shapes human behavior toward others’ ends. Instead of armaments and armies, it works its will through the automated medium of an increasingly ubiquitous computational architecture of ‘smart’ networked devices, things, and spaces.”
Those of us working to get out of toxic relationships (or jobs) might know a thing about being turned into someone’s instrument -- about being instrumentalized. Here, in Zuboff’s telling of our new world, tech companies instrumentalize our deep longing for home by convincing us that we can find it by freely sharing our “content.” They capitalize on our desire to externalize our experiences, our longing to be seen by a collective larger than the one physically apparent to us. They know we want to connect and feel accepted by the other; they know we want to see the world, and ourselves, through others’ eyes.
And since we’re talking about Egan’s novel, which centers in part on the music industry, maybe this is also what music moguls, like some of her characters, know we want. These producers turn rockstars into musical instruments, instruments of emotional connection and personal liberation, stars whose privacy we disdain and whose celebrity is a kind of prototype for the affect of hypervisibility that the internet generates (who but mega rockstars know best the wages of over-exposure, and the double-edge of privacy?).
But it is certainly a false choice to offer us either privacy or liberation. Zuboff understands that pitting privacy against technology is a convenient means of eroding human beings’ free will and agency. It is thus why surveillance capitalism and its instrumentarian power are oppressive and dangerous forces: “Our dependency [on these products] is at the heart of the commercial surveillance project, in which our felt needs for effective life vie against the inclination to resist its born incursions.” Her use of the word “dependency” here does not feel accidental; in securing a population of consumers dependent on their products, tech giants play god, using their omniscience to maintain their own domination.
But educating people about the dangers of something -- a drug, say, or a cult -- is one thing. Providing them with an antidote to the poison is another.
Egan’s novel, omniscient in its own way, is a different kind of homage to free will. It is a love letter to the art of fiction writing, the antidote she proposes for this homesickness. Fiction writers, too, know we long to privately commune with the collective consciousness, one beyond our own. They, too, make educated predictions about our behavior. They do it by developing the ability to see from many perspectives, channeling many consciousnesses. Writers try to make accurate predictions, achieve verisimilitude, so that we may see as both ourselves and others.
So what is the difference between Big Tech’s surveillance of our consciousness -- their playing god -- and a fiction writer’s? Are these two kinds of omniscience related?
II. Technologies of Memory & The Desire to Commune
“How could revisiting that time in its unfiltered state improve upon the story her memory has made? What if, like those vile moments inside her father’s mind, the truth disappoints?” - The Candy House, Roxy, p. 157
I’ve been describing The Candy House to people as a “tech dystopia,” but in fact Egan’s is a society that only looks different from ours because its internet innovations (and subsequent surveillance capitalism) evolved from slightly yet meaningfully different origins.
The various heroes of Egan’s story (and there’s a new one in each chapter) are certainly just like us: each is an individual in search of authenticity, in search of “home.” Some do it through research in rainforests; through drug use; as a writer seeking to avoid clichés; as an sculptor whose work is so large you have to take a hot air balloon to appreciate it; and even through more direct and controversial means, like screaming in public just to see what happens. They each seek a way to know the collective -- to commune with others, to understand our behaviors more clearly, to exist authentically with the world.
But the centripetal force of the plot is driven by dueling tech CEOs, whose diametrically opposed companies each attempt to solve the problem of “collective authenticity” at scale. On one end of the spectrum is Bix Bouton, CEO of Mandala, a company whose technology Own Your Unconscious allows you to externalize a recording of your memories. On the other end is Chris Salazar, son of a music producer mogul and former rockstar (you may remember his dad Bennie, the guy who sprinkled gold in his drinks in Egan’s 2011 novel A Visit from the Good Squad). Chris’s non-profit Mondrian leads Dungeons & Dragons games in rehab centers across the country. But all of this, while real, is also a cover obfuscating an even greater, secret mission: that of helping individuals “elude” the Internet. With Mondrian’s underground services, you can go off the grid with the help of “proxies,” whom the company employs to keep up a charade of your online existence so that you can live in peace.
In Mandala, Bix’s company, Egan imagines a more literal version of Facebook: externalize your memories! Keep a record! But I might call Bix a humane, anti-Mark Zuckerberg. Whereas (per The Social Network’s mythos) Zuckerberg thought up Facebook because a girl dumped him and he wanted to stalk her and other women (do we ever talk about the sexually violent roots of our major social institutions?), Egan’s Bix Bouton thinks up Own Your Unconscious because of a different kind of loss: the accidental death of a friend, on a drunken night that could’ve gone otherwise. The difference between technology invented in service of revenge and one invented in service of justice: Facebook steals our data without our consent, while Own Your Unconscious gives you default proprietary control over your recordings.
That is, unless you wish to share your content with the Collective Consciousness, another technology of Mandala’s. The Collective Consciousness is a kind of public database of people’s anonymous, “freely” given memories, which can be searched by date, time, longitude, and latitude. See that moment again -- not only from your perspective or that of someone you know, but from multiple perspectives, with multiple consciousnesses brought to bear on a moment. (Beginning to remind you of anything, like a book where each chapter is told from a different point-of-view?!)
In Mondrian, the other company, Egan explores the resistance we might feel to this sudden and totalizing surveillance of not just behavior but consciousness. When your public identity becomes unwieldy, due to celebrity, notoriety, or something else, eluding is a welcome death to that over-exposed self. Both of Mondrian’s services offer an exit ticket from the candy house.
Indeed, Chris and his adherents have alternative technologies of authenticity and collectivity: Dungeons & Dragons, for sure; also rehab, the collective effort toward individual sobriety. It’s also not a mistake that Chris is an herité of the music industry; think back to Napster and its role in turning that industry (his father’s industry) upside down. Mondrian is Egan’s Napster, the back door around the instrumentarian power generated by big tech. What kinds of technology will we have to invent to elude this kind of algorithmic tyranny?
So I know I called the book a dystopia, but “allegorical futurism” is perhaps the neutral term, because I really can’t put my finger on whether Egan’s vision of the early 21st century is better or worse than what we’ve got. Our tech gods may be less benevolent than hers, and our disciples -- on both sides -- less brave. All I can say for sure is that this is a book whose ambivalence is not only reserved for Big Data (or “quantification,” as some characters call it), but for any attempts to scale our collectivity, to tell stories that sweep too far. (Is this why each chapter holds its own world, like peering into the room of a dollhouse, only for the next chapter to be its own self-contained room?)
III. “Roaming the Human Collective”
“Tongue-in-cheek nostalgia is merely the portal, the candy house, if you will, through which we hope to lure in a new generation and bewitch them.” - The Candy House, Bennie, p. 299
Who did this to us? It’s a question we ask our deities. Maybe tech moguls started behaving like omniscient gods because that is the image of divinity our culture projects. Maybe if we started to value our privacy and agency, we’d be able to worship in new ways; to resist the incursions of which Zuboff warns, and with which The Candy House plays.
A Visit from the Goon Squad, Egan’s magnum opus that won the 2011 National Book Award, opens with a deeply affecting portrait of a quasi-kleptomaniac named Sasha (the bewitching candy house that lured us into that novel’s world). The story opens with Sasha eying a beautiful, “fat” wallet in a woman’s handbag in the bathroom of a restaurant, and while we could assume Sasha will steal it for its contents, we soon find out that for Sasha, the thrill of stealing arises not from the material value of objects, but from their owner’s treating them as precious and important: a child’s mitten, a special pen, a lovely scarf, all items deeply missed when lost. In other words, the objects derive their value from the irreplaceable stories they carry.
Are tech companies just scaled versions of the old Sasha, stealing our stories? And what of fiction writers? Are they, in fact, profiting off of their own version of surveillance, with what one of Candy House’s characters, a writer, calls the “machine” that “lets us roam with absolute freedom through the human collective”? What gives these writers the right to tell stories that aren’t their own?
“What is most critical,” Zuboff explains in her introduction, “is that in the year 2000, [tech companies’ visions] naturally assumed an unwavering commitment to the privacy of individual experience. Should an individual choose to render her experience digitally, then she would exercise exclusive rights to the knowledge garnered from such data, as well as exclusive rights to decide how such knowledge might be put to use.”
But that was then, and this is now. “Today these rights to privacy, knowledge, and application have been usurped by a bold market venture powered by unilateral claims to others’ experience and the knowledge that flows from it. What does this sea change mean for us, for our children, for our democracies, and for the very possibility of a human future in the digital world?”
Fiction may indeed be an invasive technology, but when we “roam...the human collective” in a good book, we don’t give up our free will in the process. Unlike with a drug addiction, or an algorithm, the ending isn’t mechanical or predestined. If it’s a good story, it’ll offer you a safe place to explore the questions that gnaw at us all. Literature might just be the only candy house where you can get out alive.
Works Cited
Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019).
Jennifer Egan, The Candy House (2022).
Special thanks to Emilie and Stephen for their editorial suggestions.
