In Jennifer Egan’s new novel, The Candy House, Bix Bouton is the world-famous founder of the tech company Mandala. He is also unsettled, restless, thinking about the past, and worried about the future; like many luminaries, he’s worried that he might be out of good ideas. In disguise, and in part out of nostalgia for his student days, he attends an academic-discussion group, where a graduate student makes a stray comment about her research into externalizing animal consciousness.
This is the origin of one of the central conceits of The Candy House: the idea of externalizing your own consciousness in such a way that it is watchable and shareable. Bouton’s next product, Own Your Unconscious™, paves the way for a “Collective Consciousness” that involves uploading all your memories to a collective server; other people’s memories become as accessible as their Facebook photos. Most people do, eventually, upload their consciousness to the collective, though some abstain. It becomes a recurrent feature of the inter-related stories in The Candy House, a sequel of sorts to Egan’s 2010 novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad.
