In the thirteen years since Own Your Unconscious had been released, one of its ancillary features—the Collective Consciousness—had gradually become central. By uploading all or part of your externalized memory to an online “collective,” you gained proportionate access to the anonymous thoughts and memories of everyone in the world, living or dead, who had done the same.
This is one of the most important expository passages in the book. It serves to elucidate exactly what Bix's company has developed as well as how it functions. The Own Your Unconscious program allows its users to view the thoughts and feelings of any other user who has also uploaded their memories. Interestingly, the book notes, the appeal of the product to Mandala's customers is less the ability to go back and view their own memories, but instead to gain insight into the lives of others. As the book reveals later, many characters are more drawn to the idea of looking at a scene through the eyes of someone else. This also sets up a parallel between Mandala and the project of the book itself, which jumps around in time and perspective.
Proxies: vacant online identities maintained by a third party in order to conceal the fact that their human occupants have eluded… most proxies are animated by “hermit crab programs” that maintain the established patterns of an individual’s online activity—communication, commerce, and social media—as a way of hiding the reality that the original occupant of that identity has vacated it. Most proxying is orchestrated by Mondrian, a not-for-profit based in San Francisco. Mondrian’s most sophisticated proxies are live professionals—usually fiction writers, I’m told—who impersonate multiple identities at once.
This is another crucial bit of exposition. Lincoln, a "counter" at Mandala, describes both the company's data mining practices and the individuals who seek to outsmart them. Because Mandala has such intimate information about its many customers, a group of "eluders" has pursued ways to confuse its information collection. One of these is the use of "proxies," fake identities that replicate the online persona of an individual, allowing them to disappear off the grid. These workers attempt to recreate the patterns of a particular person. This sets up important developments later in the book, when the reader learns more about the eluders' mission and methods.
We contemplated a nationwide billboard campaign to remind people of that eternal law, Nothing is free! 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?
This moment gives the book its title. It is spoken by Lana and Melora, daughter of Lou and Miranda. She is describing the moment in which Napster, the online file sharing service, toppled the music industry, sending her father's business into financial free fall. She uses the phrase "never trust a candy house" to refer to the fact that people are taking the immediate benefit of free music at the sacrifice of their privacy. She also makes allusions to various fairy tales that have been making this point for many years. The symbol of a "candy house" describes a bargain that is too good to be true, resulting in one party's eventual downfall. In this way, Melora prefigures the exploitative relationship between Mandala's users and its technology.
Or maybe the stars were x, in which case you could argue that the window was x for the second time. Madeleine says that for her, seeing me with Alison was x. For me, “Peekaboo” will always be x.
Not that it matters; it’s all just retroactive math. The random walk of a drunk is of geometric interest, but it can’t predict where he’ll stagger next.
In this moving passage, Lincoln comments on the nature of love, finding it impossible to pinpoint exactly what was x, or the point of origin, for his relationship with M. He refers to various important moments in their courtship, from their first meeting to finally realizing their romantic connection. It is particularly emotional, given Lincoln's earlier inability to understand the world beyond repeatable, quantifiable phenomena.
And on this one, a secret new life known only to herself, Roxy will go to D&D and say, to Chris and Molly, “I’m ready to make my character. Will you help?”
This moment occurs at the conclusion of Roxy's story, as she is enthralled with the process of having uploaded her memories and gained access to her father's. It is a tragic line, as the reader already knows she will die shortly after this moment, and never live out this future. Having relived one of her only happy memories, Roxy is able to imagine a future in which she joins the Dungeons and Dragons games hosted by Chris and Molly and actually participates. It is affecting in that it shows her in her last moments, finally able to move on from the past and envision a future.
We seized our father’s legs, and he put a hand on each of our heads, cupping Rolph’s and holding it against him. Then he looked up at our mother, Christine, who smiled at him from beside the front door in a blue sweater, her dark hair falling from a clip. All around her were the spindly saplings they’d chosen together at a greenhouse and planted outside their brand-new California home, assuming they would live there forever.
This scene is an emotionally complex one, as it shows Lou returning home from his weekend trip to his family. They are elated to see him and his return evokes a moment of domestic bliss as his kids and wife are thrilled to see him and his home is beautiful and well-kept. However, as the phrase "assuming they would live there forever" subtly implies, this happiness will not last long. As Charlene describes in this chapter, Lou's trip has already put his mind elsewhere, shifting his focus to the music business. As the reader learns later, he is already beginning to pull away from them. Her newfound knowledge redefines this moment for her.
“The Dissociation Technique is like a parachute—you must pull the cord at the correct time. Too soon, and you will hinder your ability to function at a crucial moment; too late, and you will be lodged too far inside the action to wriggle free.
This moment occurs during Lulu's chapter and depicts her ability to disassociate from herself during difficult moments in her mission. As the passage notes, doing this too quickly will hurt her ability to carry out her mission, but if too much time goes by, she will be drawn too deeply into this world she is momentarily inhabiting. This technique also suits the overall tone of the chapter well, as it explains why she uses the second person to narrate these events. She has disassociated from herself so strongly that she no longer uses the first person, as she is not experiencing these moments as her normal self.
The secret to a happy ending, Mom used to tell us, is knowing when to walk away. Once I’ve seen Mom leaning against the fence with Jules, I force myself not to look again.
In this moment, Hannah makes a comment that reflects one of the book's recurring ideas: the placement of an ending. The reader knows that Hannah's parents will get divorced, as they are informed of this in Molly's earlier chapter and get a window into their marital discord throughout Hannah's chapter. Still, this moment is fleetingly hopeful, as it shows her mother, Noreen, providing Jules, Chris's uncle, with surprising words of encouragement, even after their tense feud over their respective property lines. She chooses to "walk away," in her mother's words, in this moment because it leaves the story in a good place.
Gregory gazed, transfixed, as snow swarmed down upon him like space junk; like disarranged flocks of birds; like the universe emptying itself. He knew what the vision meant: human lives past and present, around him, inside him. He opened his mouth and eyes and arms and drew them into himself, feeling a surge of discovery—of rapture—that seemed to lift him out of the snow. He wanted to laugh or shout. Finish your book! Here was his father’s parting gift: a galaxy of human lives hurtling toward his curiosity. From a distance they faded into uniformity, but they were moving, each propelled by a singular force that was inexhaustible. The collective. He was feeling the collective without any machinery at all. And its stories, infinite and particular, would be his to tell.
This excerpt meaningfully shows how writing can beautifully capture the multitude of individual lives without sacrificing their uniqueness. Throughout this chapter, Bix's son Gregory ruminates on his father's legacy and his painful feelings of loss, as he never got the reconciliation he wanted with him. Yet here, at the end of the chapter, as he looks up at the snow, he has a moment of clarity. He realizes that he can portray the inexhaustible variations in human lives with his writing, building on his father's project in a way that does not cause the same harm. This moment functions as a kind of thesis statement for the book's project.
Eleven years old, a little shrunken-looking in his beige uniform, nothing to hook your gaze if he isn’t your brother or son, but all eyes on him now because he’s the one at bat, bases loaded, his parents and two brothers in the stands, his mother wringing a lump of yarn because it’s agony watching him hit (or try to hit, he never hits), her emotions cliché to anyone who’s read a book or seen a movie about children playing sports and how their mothers feel, and yet—how is this possible?—fiercely specific: a wish to pluck him from that spot and spirit him away to a place where she can protect him.
In this scene, Ames, the middle child of the Hollander family, gets up to bat. His mother feels anxious for his sake, while the narrator notes that her feelings are immediately legible to anyone who has ever consumed media about children's sports. Still, as the narrator says, her feelings for her son are intensely individual and overwhelming. This moment also highlights an important aspect of the book: a belief in its characters' essential individuality. For all of its predictable elements, Egan still shows us its vital, emotional core in the form of a mother's love for her son. She simultaneously reveals the artifice while still making the reader feel emotionally invested.
