The Circle

A dystopian satire (although at times it feels barely satirical) about social media and tech companies, featuring a corporation called The Circle, which is sort of like Google, Facebook, and Twitter all rolled into one and then made even more cult-like. The folks at The Circle not only fail to value privacy and cheerfully subordinate it to the desires of capitalism, they actually regard it as something akin to a moral evil. And they see it as their mission to make the world a better place.

It's a good premise, very Black Mirror-ish, and I appreciate the way Eggers carefully avoids straw-manning his targets (even to the extent of being willing to stipulate to some of the positive effects of the Circle's approach that I really don't show more personally find particularly creditable). But I'm afraid I never liked it anywhere near as much as I wanted to. The whole thing just feels entirely too heavy-handed. Certainly we did not need 400 pages to get the point, and I can't help thinking that it would have been far, far more effective if cut down to the length of a novella. show less

Update: Life imitates art. I keep my distance from Facebook these days, and so it was only recently that I learned that Zuckerberg has rebranded his baby as “Meta”, as part of the Metaverse: It’s the metaverse — defined most simply as a virtual world where people can socialize, work, and play — and Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg believes it is the future of the internet and of his trillion-dollar company. The Circle, in other words…

This book made me very tense. Not in the way that I feel when a character in a thriller may - or may not - escape discovery, or a horrible death.

No, this was the kind of stress that, for me, comes from too little privacy and too many inputs.

At the Google-meets-1984 company that is The Circle, show more all personnel are required to integrate their personal social media accounts onto the company's network, and to actively participate on all social media platforms on an ongoing basis.

This would be the first level of hell for me. Aside from GR, any social media interaction has become unpleasant for me.

The next level would be the mandatory participation in social activities on The Circle campus. When reading about this I was reminded of the new COO at a company I worked for who insisted on participation in a company Happy Hour every Friday. At that time my work hours were 6:00 to 3:00, and hanging around for 2 hours for the opportunity of spending even more time with the people I worked with all day made me flinch. Doing that multiple times a week, regardless of the event, would have had me weeping.

Then there are the inputs and trackers. Multiple screens with multiple data feeds and earbuds with different messages and wristbands monitoring health and location. For crying out loud, there are times when I want to throw my Apple watch against the wall when it keeps reminding me to stand up. And I struggle with multiple simultaneous audio inputs under any circumstances. Open office environments make me nuts. At this point in the book I'm approaching that frozen wasteland that is Dante's 9th circle of hell.

And all this was before the main plot began.

So, not a book that I am going to be able to appreciate solely on its literary merits. I grew anxious to finish it just so that I could make the stress stop. (I am not kidding about this!)

But with all that said, the book was entertaining and thought-provoking. It is alluring to succumb to the ease and efficiency of integrating the electronic components of our lives - but how far is too far?

Four smiles. show less

This was more of a scary, creepy dystopian novel than I was expecting. The Circle is an all encompassing social media company (think Facebook combined with Google combined with Darpa). A young wide-eyed girl is hired at the Circle and becomes our narrator and main focus for a company that is gradually taking over all parts of our lives (social and otherwise). A very possible near-term science fiction/twilight zone tale.

"But secondly, don't presume the benevolence of your leaders. For years there was this happy time when those controlling the major internet conduits were actually decent enough people Or at least they weren't predatory and vengeful."

The 3-star rating does not mean it is a mediocre book. It just means that I am conflicted about it and 3 pretty much shows that.

I have a feeling that Dave Eggers tried to write a 1984 type book for the modern era. The parallels are there. However, it doesn't really hit the mark, and yet it somewhat does. Hence my conflicted thoughts.

So first off: I really enjoyed how he made the setting, the campus, the main engine that was driving the story forward, and our protagonist was mostly responding back to it. There are only a few instances where she moves the story forward but mostly Mae is a vessel to move the story of the circle forward. It's the first book I have read that does that and I loved it.

Secondly: Mae is a very well-thought-out show more protagonist which is not an easy thing to pull off in this type of book. Nothing she does is out of her character. The ending is bound to make people debate about her decision but to be honest, it follows the path she had been taking. I am glad, Dave Eggers did not go for a cheap twist.

Thirdly: The story itself is very interesting. From the get-go, the first project that the circle takes is soooo outlandish that you just shake your head and go, "No way, this is happening." But it does. And then he keeps amping the outlandish ideas up and I keep thinking where is it all going to go. It was interesting to see these many ideas flowing in the book.

So why on earth am I conflicted about it?

Well because it does not work when you step back and think about it.

1: The side characters seem like idiots when they should not have been since they are the smartest in this book's universe.

Ty chooses to trust Mae with a piece of crucial information when in reality he had no reason to do so. Mae is the person who had been forcing her parents to go under cameras within a few weeks of her working there. She was under Bailey's spell from the moment she met him. So much so that she modified her personality around his ideology and actively started wearing cameras everywhere. She led to Mercer's death and thought she was blameless. That person, you think, can take a 180-degree turn and tell the whole world how it was all evil. Really? And the reason the author gives is that she had access to a large audience watching her. Tyler was one of the 3 wise men who could come out himself and get a bigger number any day of his choosing just cause he was that important. He did not need Mae. This was stupid. So stupid that I was shaking my head like why???

Then comes Annie. Annie was literally telling everyone that Mae was going to be her colleague at a high level in just a few months. And when Mae did, suddenly the author in the case of MenWritingWomen decides to immediately go for a jealousy angle. Annie is now ridiculously jealous. Wow!
Then to make the rivalry seem obvious to us there is a to-and-fro that happens in a meeting where Annie has to be a dumb person and get schooled by higher-ups. Why would Annie ask such stupid questions when she was herself running around removing bureaucratic hurdles in countries for circle's programs? She would know the extent Circle could go for from the beginning of her career there. She was dumbed down only so she could try to win favour by offering herself for another project as a test example. Anyone who comes from Old Money esp in a country like America would not do this. You get an idea about your family's history even if it is not explicitly explained to you. You know shit had happened. Why would she do that? Why couldn't she do some other thing to win the favours? She was running around doing important tasks. One small hiccup wasn't going to ruin her. All this because Dave wanted to put her in a coma. That does not make sense, none of it does.
Introduce another character to take the test and then show how Annie realises that we are not supposed to know it all and leave the company. While Mae decides to stay. That works better, not this.

2: There is no opposition whatsoever to circle in common people. I started to think that there were bots employed to hype Mae up. Seriously! It looked like she was talking to robots. That bothered me a lot. I think the author was trying to show that when we get our name attached to our accounts, we can't criticise people or authority and have to hide our true intentions. However, one look at Facebook and you realise that is not true especially when it comes to anti-vaxxers, 9/11 deniers, Holocaust deniers, and flat earthers, and so on. There is always a rival movement going on. Mercer was not going to be a single person like this out there.

Anyway, there is a lot of interesting stuff there. The darkness that would descend upon Mae that she would try to avoid by taking more and more work was very interesting.

Overall a great book that makes for a good book club discussion.
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From the beginning, when Mae spends her first day at The Circle, on the idlyllic California campus near San Francisco, you kind of know, from the headlong pace and Mae's own delight in everything she encounters, where this is headed and it's nowhere good. This is a near-future dystopic novel and under Mae's chirpy cheerfulness it is really really creepy, the message being that you don't lose your right to privacy all of a sudden, but one gizmo cool app at a time . . . This one tracks kids, that one tracks your health, why not wear a camera all the time, why not put mini-cameras everywhere, why not track criminals, why not . . . Mae quickly becomes the 'face' of The Circle, and she thrives on all of it, on being part of something big, on show more having several million followers. Meanwhile her parents and her former boyfriend are unable to get through her enthusiastic endorsement of everything The Circle does with terrible consequences. I love Library Thing and I have many connections on the internet that I highly value, but I also know, so far, when it is time to check out, maybe even for a day or two. It's when you get on to see who has come by and you were on just ten minutes ago, or you find who's reading your blog lately and start looking at where they live. . . signing up for this and that, liking on FB . . . you can waste a whole day . . . or maybe even a whole life. The style of the writing I would characterize as breathless--any bit of independent Mae can't sustain itself against the idea of being connected to so many people and such a cool thing ..... Mae is, in fact, horribly boring and quite horrible, so there is a weird tediousness to the book, but that is the point! I appreciate The Circle. The four stars are for the perfectly pitched execution of an idea, not because I enjoyed it. It's a sobering 'it-could-happen' and well done. **** show less

Summary: Dystopian fiction exploring the potential in a digital, online age to create a world where nothing is secret, and whether that is a utopia or a nightmare.

Imagine a world where you can know anything, and nothing is hidden or kept secret. Imagine a world where every person has a digital profile that collects all your health, educational, commercial, and social data, every picture by or of you, and makes this available to all. Imagine a world where we have embedded chips so that anyone can know where we are. Imagine we all wear body cameras that record our interactions and activity throughout the day. Imagine that all the archival information in the world may be searched to put together your family history, dark sides and show more all,.

This is the world Mae finds herself in when she gets a job with The Circle with the help of her friend Annie, a higher up in The Circle. She begins working in Customer Experience, but soon discovers that The Circle wants far more of her than to get a 100 rating on every customer interaction. They want her to share her life with the rest of The Circle--to give opinions via a headset, to give them her digital life, to join groups, to interact with others in The Circle.

This alone would probably have creeped me out and had me running for the hills. But Mae has been rescued from a dead end job with a local utility. She has a father with MS struggling with his health insurer--until The Circle finds out and adds him to their plan. The hooks go deeper even as she is cut off from much of her former life, eventually moving into a Circle dorm. After an incident caught on Circle's SeeChange cameras catches her "borrowing" a kayak after hours, she meets one of the three leaders of The Circle, its public voice, Eamon Bailey. He helps her to recognize that the worst part of her act was keeping secrets, that we are better people when we do not hide but rather openly share our lives with the world. And in her "evolved" state of insight, she agrees to go "clear" and wear a camera recording all her activity, and becomes an celebrity both within The Circle, and in the wider public who love watching Mae's life.

She tries to usher her former boyfriend Mercer into the wonders of being connected with the world through The Circle. He will have none of it, and when she attempts to promote his business, he leaves the grid, writing her a long letter warning her of what she is getting into. He is not the only one. She encounters a shadowy figure, Kalden, who also tries to warn her of what would happen if they should succeed in "closing the Circle," creating a world where The Circle becomes a vehicle by which all is known, seen, and nothing remains secret. She is disturbed, and also fascinated by him, reflected in some rather kinky hookups in bathrooms. Yet she goes further and deeper into the Circle's plans. What will this mean for Mae? Her parents? Mercer? Her friend Annie?

I'll leave you to discover what happens if you have not read the book or seen the recent movie version (trailer here). I will also leave you with the thought that everything the book describes, as far as I could tell, is technologically possible today. More than that, the amount of information we voluntarily surrender about ourselves via social media, online and offline purchasing with credit cards, our banking and credit histories, the photos and files we store in the cloud, the customer cards we use at various stores and more, is staggering. Increasingly our medical records and health history is digitized and shared between providers and insurers, and we agree to it all. And the GPS chips in our smartphones track our every move. Everything in The Circle could or is being done. The only thing forestalling the tyranny Kalden and Mercer foresee is the lack of sufficient will and impetus to do it. We've laid much of the groundwork for such things either willingly or unknowingly.

More intriguing yet is the effort to usher in a utopia, the effort to perfect human nature, this time through stripping us of any secret worlds. Such a world substitutes social conformity (and who decides what conformity is?) for the harder won integrity that consists of living truthfully, living consistently with what one values when no one is looking. Instead of living one's life coram deo (before the face of God), we substitute the human god of the grid, and the much more capricious fancies of its controllers and the mentality of the online mob.

Finally, the book raises the question of whether it is really a good thing to be able to know everything. Is the steady stream of status updates, online surveys, likes, tweets, news stories really making us more informed? More wise? Perhaps if nothing else, Eggers book makes us reflect on all the information we offer up, our addiction to the little rectangles we carry in our pockets, and the illusions all this fosters of a kind of omniscience that may be too much for our little brains to handle. show less

I often feel the need to think things through slowly, to go through each step, starting with assumptions, to explore them one after the next. I know people find this annoying. What I first liked about Eggers, years ago, was a recognition of that process in his writing. I view his books as journals - he is writing it out for himself, at whatever pace it takes, working through a thought, a sloughing; and my reading of the finished work is welcome, but not the point.

So when just a few chapters into the Circle I started saying "Yes, and...? Yes, AND...?" it interested me. I stopped thinking about the narrative and started thinking about the thought process, the tangents, the triggers for further contemplation. The exasperating things about show more the story itself stopped bothering me as much.

I don't know, I don't think I have a rating yet, so I'll stick to the middle. I read a few reviews and I agree as much with the 1-stars as the 5-stars. That interests me too. There's a lot I could almost dismiss as already going over ground that's been widely discussed. But then, so many people have said to me some variation of "if you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to fear", that I want to encourage any new discussion on this topic, at whatever level. And there's a lot of fair criticism about characterization and narrative, which I won't dispute - I just feel that way about a lot of his writing, and I'm ok with it.

I'm going to let it sit for a while. I'm going to see what, if any, moments come back into my thoughts, add into other musings, wake me up in the middle of the night. Because the parts that got my mind wandering weren't about the main narrative. They were about the language of advertising, the endless search for balance between safety and freedom, the constant question of how we can know a person, and how we can know ourselves. The moment Mae deals with emotional turmoil by going back to a mindless task, the solace of routine and structure and clear answers with immediate rewards. How readers, as much as Mae, take the responses of people who comment to her as the response of all people everywhere. The interaction where a client uses the need to be positive and friendly and responsive to bully her into doing him a favor. What I would say if someone dared ask me why I thought a moment of moonlight on an empty beach belonged just to me. The memories of every moment of moonlight on an empty beach that do, in fact, belong just to me.

I read most of this book on a cool breezy day, cocooned in my garden without phone, laptop, camera, visitors. I am thankful for the book, and I am thankful for the garden. show less