How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph) or (Feed Chatter #.Paragraph)
Quote #1
There's nothing but the feed telling you, This is the music you heard. This is the music you missed. This is what is new. Listen. (1.8)
Sure, you like to keep up with your Snapchat/ Whatsapp/ Instagram business, but you'd probably get sick of it right quick if you had to hear this info constantly, like 24/7, and couldn't turn it off. At least we hope you'd get sick of it.
Quote #2
When we got off the ship, our feeds were going fugue with all the banners. The hotels were jumping on each other, and there was bumff from like the casinos and mud slides and the gift shops and places where you could rent extra arms. I was trying to talk to Link, but I couldn't because I was getting bannered so hard, and I kept blinking and trying to walk forward with my carry-on. I can't hardly remember any of it. I just remember that everything in the banners looked goldy and sparkling, but as we walked down to the luggage, all the air vents were streaked with black. (2.2)
Look, don't want to rain on anyone's extra-arm-renting parade. In fact, that could be way cool in a Doctor Octopus comic-book-nerd-chic kind of way. The point here is that the feed's constant "bannering" can make it impossible to think. Titus can't even chat with Link because he's so bombarded with ads—and it's not like they're going around having deep philosophical conversations.
Also notice the nice imagery here in the contrast between the "goldy and sparkling" banners, and the dirty air vents. This is a major hint that all this neato stuff the feed wants these guys to buy might be rotten at the core.
Quote #3
Her face, it was like, I don't know, it was beautiful. It just, it wasn't the way--I guess it wasn't just the way it looked like, but also how she was standing. With her arm. I just started at her. I was getting some meg feed on the food bar and the pot stickers were really cheap. (2.23)
Even crucial moments, the feed is there to nudge Titus toward the really important things—like how much the pot stickers in the snack bar cost. /sarcasm. This would be similar to Ye Olde Towne Crier getting all up in Romeo's face just as he spots Juliet for the first time at the Capulets' party and yelling out an ad for the bear-baiting double header on Saturday night. Which, um, actually sounds kind of awesome.
Quote #4
Quendy and Loga went off to the bathroom because hairstyles had changed. (4.5)
This is one of the more cutting moments of satire in Feed, and Anderson comes back to it a few time: fashions and styles in Titus's world come and go more quickly than the popularity of the Harlem Shake in ours.
Quote #5
We got there and it had been torn down. They had built a pretty nice stucco mall there, so Loga and Quendy said we should go in and buy some cool stuff to go out in. That seemed good to us. I wanted to buy some things but I didn't know what they were [...] Quendy bought some shoes, but the minute she walked out of the store she didn't like them anymore. Marty couldn't think of anything he wanted, so he ordered this really null shirt. He said it was so null it was like ordering nothing. (5.11)
These kids are so thoroughly manipulated by the media that they don't even know what they want. They just know they need to buy something. Ultimately, even buying things becomes unsatisfying, sort of like eating an entire bag of Doritos.
Quote #6
But the braggest thing about the feed, the thing that made it really big, is that it knows everything you want and hope for, sometimes before you even know what those things are. It can tell you how to get them, and help you make buying decisions that are hard. Everything we think and feel is taken in by the corporations, mainly by data ones like Feedlink and OnFeed and American Feedware, and they make a special profile, one that's keyed just to you, and then they give it to their branch companies, or other companies buy them, and they can get to know what it is we need, so all you have to do is want something and there's a chance it will be yours. (10.5)
To Titus, the best thing about the feed is that it creates demographic profiles and helping people to "make buying decisions that are hard." Yikes. That makes us feel a little nervous about Amazon's recommendations.
Quote #7
We were still like that, looking into each other's eyes and all, when the doctor came in and was like, What the hell had happened in the examination room, what's with all the needles? And he was upgrading to homicidal and going all, Da da da professional care unit, da da da dangerous and costly da da infection da da da, etc. Luckily, Link's mom heard him yelling at us, and she's a complete dragon, so she gave him a piece of her mind. She told him that we were all suffering from a very stressful experience and we weren't used to these kinds of stresses and he had to understand that we had to have our fun, too. (14.13)
None of the characters get that they're acting like obnoxious brats, and that this is no way to behave in a hospital. But don't blame them: they've just got affluenza from the buy-it-now-I've-gotta-have-it-now attitude that the feed promotes in this society. And the parents might just be worse.
Quote #8
We all talked about old music, like from when we were little, and all the stupid bands they had back then, and the stupid fashions we liked in middle school, like the year when the big fashion from L.A. and shit was that everyone wanted to dress like they were in an elderly convalescent home, there was this weird nostalgic chic for that, so we all remembered having stretch pants and velour tops, and Calista had even bought one of those stupid accessory walkers at Weatherbee & Crotch. (14.14)
We'd like to think that if a stupid-sounding fad like convalescent home fashion was all the rage, we wouldn't buy into it. But then we remember 80s fashion--and normcore.
Quote #9
And the feed spoke to me real quiet about new trends, about pants that should be shorter or longer, and bands I should know, and games with new levels and stalactites and fields of diamonds, and friends of many colors were all drinking Coke, and beer was washing through mountain passes, and the stars of the Oh? Wow! Thing! had got lesions, so lesions were hip now, real hip, and mine looked like a million dollars. The sun was rising over foreign countries, and underwear was cheap, and there were new techniques to reconfigure pecs, abs, and nipples, and the President of the United States was certain of the future, and at Weatherbee & Crotch there was a sale banner and nice rugby shirts and there were pictures of freckled prep-school boys and girls in chinos paying on the beach and dry humping in the eel grass, and as I fell asleep, the feed murmured to me again and again: All shall be well . . . and all shall be well . . . and all manner of things shall be well! (29.35)
So far, so feed—until we get to the ironic quotation at the end, which comes from Julian of Norwich, a woman religious writer from the Middle Ages. Where'd that come from? Well, the original quotation tells us that, even though we're all big fat sinner, God loves us anyway, and everything is going to work out just fine. But here, the spiritual meaning is replaced with consumerism: God isn't going to fix everything; buying stuff is going to fix things.
Quote #10
It was like I kept buying these things to be cool, but cool was always flying just ahead of me, and I could never exactly catch up to it.
I felt like I'd been running toward it for a long time. (55.7-8)
Oh man, Titus, we feel you. Even with a feed—maybe because of the feed—being "cool" is harder than ever. You can never quite catch up with it because once you do, it's no longer cool.