The Circle
December 2013
Dave Eggers / Hamish Hamilton
In Dave Eggers’ new novel, the internet behemoths who today profit on monetising human consciousness and relationships have been supplanted by The Circle and its TruYou system a ‘one account, one identity, one password, one payment system, per person’ that does for one’s entire online life.
The torrent of society-changing inventions delivered by The Circle – the end of anonymous trolling and child kidnapping, the rise of transparent political processes – are sold as being infinitely more valuable than their trade-offs: the attrition of privacy, the surrender of self-worth to the need to accrete social network approval.
Eggers primes us into this world with his likeable central character Mae Holland, a young woman, not long out of college, whose problems – a dim future in a dull utility bureaucracy, her father’s MS for which his miserly insurance is shafting him – are dissolved when she takes up a job with The Circle and becomes one of its rising stars. Like everyone who has been coopted by The Circle, Mae is under a spell, sold on the organisation’s increasingly Newspeak slogans at weekly events that have the same slick, self-congratulatory and evangelical tone of a TED conference.
One of the few who are opposed to the growing ubiquity of The Circle is Mae’s hometown ex-boyfriend, Mercer, a small businessman who extols the virtues of simply making things, in his case chandeliers from deer antlers, rather than the ‘unnaturally extreme social needs’ through which Mae filters his very presence.
While Mae’s unquestioning acceptance of Circle ideology is Eggers’ way of figuring the organisation’s creepy seductions as it tilts toward the flip-side of its utopian promises, Mercer is the mouthpiece for the questions she should be asking. In many ways he echoes digital pioneer Jaron Lanier’s worry in You Are Not A Gadget that ‘The central mistake of recent digital culture is to chop up a network of individuals so finely that you end up with a mush. You then start to care abut the abstraction of the network more than the real people who are networked’. Indeed, Eggers’ novel might be thought of as the counterpart in fiction to Lanier’s manifesto.
Any speculative dystopian warning that’s not so far removed from present-day reality needs to get right the balance between basic realism and a believable extrapolation from it. On the realism score, Eggers gets the seductions of The Circle so very right while maintaining all the way through an ironic distance from its excesses. While some aspects of the extrapolation appear a little too convenient, particularly The Circle’s doing away with internet anonymity, they are necessary to Eggers’ underlying message. His fear is not so much the ubiquitous monetisation of human relations through the network, but a further extreme, that of the prospect of a techno-totalitarian state in which the ideology of transparency comes to surpass even the ideology of capital. While totalitarianism is a blunt object to use on readers, it’s excusable given that Eggers isn’t really trying for subtlety.