While spending their spring break on the Moon, Titus and his thrill-seeking teenaged friends meet Violet Durn, whose critically questioning attitude is completely new to the others. Throughout the book, corporations appear to hold the true power in United States, leaving the president virtually helpless as the Global Alliance, a coalition of other countries, begins contemplating war with the U.S., due to the worsening worldwide effects of American mismanagement of the environment. The corporations responsible for the feed have immense power and even run the school system, which is now known as School™. As a result, women undergo in-vitro fertilization and have their children custom-designed. Human sexual reproduction appears to be no longer possible through natural means.

Bodies of water have become acidic and toxified. Natural clouds have been replaced by trademarked Clouds™, implying artificial replications due to atmospheric pollution. The setting of the novel is depicted as ecologically devastated. The feed allows people: to mentally access vast digital databases (individually called 'sites') to experience shareable virtual-reality phenomena (including entertainment programs, music, and even others' memories) to continually interact with intrusive corporations in a personal preference-based way and to communicate telepathically on closed channels with others who also have feeds (a feature called m-chatting). The novel portrays a near-future in which the feednet, a huge computer network (apparently an advanced form of the Internet), is directly connected to the brains of about 73% of American citizens by means of an implanted device called a feed.

Feed anderson novel