M.T. Anderson’s novel, Feed (National Book Award finalist, 2002) is a prescient work of young adult fiction that posits a dystopian future in which people’s social media feeds are installed in their brains. Feed is a cautionary tale that points further down the road that humanity is already on: the environment has been destroyed, the United States is on the brink of world war as other countries resent their annexation of the Moon, and people’s only value is that of consumers. This last feature of Anderson’s imagined future is the focus of this essay, in which I will argue that the race to adopt applications of generative AI, in many cases uncritically, is an extension of the consumer culture that, well, consumes us. Peter Rabinowitz’s seminal narratological essay, “The Truth in Fiction,” will help me to elucidate the narrative maneuvers at play in Feed, and I’ll make the argument that works of fiction like this one can teach us to be more savvy consumers of our information environment. “You’re feed!” This line from the novel points in two directions. Will we be feed for the feed, or will we be the conscience behind it?

Colleen Culleton, PhD, Associate Professor of Spanish in the department of Romance Languages and Literatures, has cultivated a career-long interest in the rhetoric and ethics of narrative. Her early interest in social spaces has evolved into a focus on ecology and environmental care.

Her first book, Literary Labyrinths in Franco Era Barcelona: Narrating Memory and Place (Routledge, 2016), explores how revisions of the urban landscape in Barcelona implemented by the Franco regime impacted memories of the Spanish civil war (1936-39) and subsequent dictatorship (1939-75). Her new book project, called Finding Each Other: Globalized Bodies in Twenty-First Century Iberian Fiction and Film, takes an ecological approach to the ethics of global citizenship.

Her interest in the dynamics of the post-truth era began in 2016 with a graduate course that she designed, called “Post-Truth and Hispanic Fiction.” Her first publication on post-truth fiction was “Sinister Signs: What We Can Learn from Insensatez(Senselessness),” published in Hispanic Issues in 2024, and she maintains an ongoing scholarly interest in teaching critical thinking in the context of post-truth.