The Circle by
Dave Eggers
My rating:
3 of 5 stars
"The Circle" is a book that has gotten a lot of buzz. Several schools made it required reading for incoming freshmen. It's getting a movie starring Emma Watson, Tom Hanks, Karen Gillan, and John Boyega. It's written by Dave Eggers, whose short stories I have read and enjoyed in the past, and who is generally an acclaimed author. And it's a literary novel with a sci-fi genre coating, which usually appeals to me, so I took it on with some enthusiasm.
Mae Holland begins work at a giant company called The Circle that is an amalgamation of Facebook, Google, Twitter, and any other site you can think of - an account with the company unifies all of a person's online accounts and ties them to their real names, which has the effect of making the entire internet polite. But despite the grandiose, heartfelt, well-intentioned projects spearheaded by the company, something feels wrong to Mae. She believes that the company's philosophy - and I'm paraphrasing, but it's generally 'knowledge solves all problems, so if everyone knows everything, then all problems will go away' - is right, but she doesn't understand why they question her initial lack of participation in company social media, or post about her occasional kayaking trips. It feels, at first, invasive.
This book wants very much to be the modern "1984." And, on the surface level, it is: it's a dystopian near future concerned with the privacy, independence, and rights of the individual citizen under the power of a powerful super-entity that controls behavior (though in this case, instead of hiding information from the masses, they share everything with everyone). The Circle's slogans, including "Sharing is Caring," are deliberately constructed to mirror the infamous "War is Peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is Strength." Mae's initial resistance to and eventual complicity with the Circle's endeavors follows Winston's path. Even her relationship with Kalden, who urges her to break free of the Circle's grasp and work against them, is similar to Winston's relationship with Julia.
The striking, damning difference, though, is that "1984" contains compelling arguments against totalitarian government and obfuscation, while "The Circle" simply asserts that voluntary surveillance and always-on internet culture is bad, because privacy is good, with no explanation as to why privacy is good beyond 'surveillance is bad.' I'm not saying I disagree with Eggers, here - I think he's generally right, that people are too willing to hand over freedoms for convenience, that people should be able to opt out and increasingly are unable to do so, that privacy is a good thing. But he relies entirely on my a priori idea that privacy is good, and his few attempts at conveying *why* it's good are flimsy and shallow. Mae likes her private kayak trips because they make her feel connected to the world, yeah, but she likes keeping up her internet presence for the same reason. (We're supposed to believe that the former is more fulfilling because while doing the latter, Mae often feels a gaping emptiness inside her, but you can feel that gulf sadness and unfulfillment no matter where you are or what you're doing, and Mercer, her anti-tech ex, tries to go off the grid and tells Mae that the Circle is bad because it doesn't let you opt out or have real privacy, and suffers for his attempts, but this is again the circular logic (pun fully intended) Eggers uses: surveillance is bad because privacy is good because surveillance is bad.
My other huge gripe with this book is how whiny it sounds. It's saying the same things that anyone who doesn't 'get' technology says, a litany of complaints and accusations with little evidence - we're addicted to technology, there's no such thing as privacy anymore, we spend all our time staring at screens. So many screens. Every time Mae gets promoted or funneled into a new program, she gets a new display screen added to her computer; I think she totals 8 by the end, and each scene is increasingly absurd. But it's not an effective, message-bearing absurd. Instead, it reminds me of parents who grumble that their perfectly normal children spend too much time online and not enough connecting with people or reading books (not understanding that many younguns use the internet primarily *for* connecting, for which it is an effective tool, or reading and research). Because regardless of whether there's truth to Eggers' and grumbly parents' complaints (and I do feel there is truth there), and even considering that this is a dystopian satire where things are purposely taken to their logical extremes, the fact that it feels driven by pathos instead of logos and the sheer amount of absurd and ironic but repetitive sequences of 'this technology is presented as good but is obviously an atrocity' make it feel like we're reading a rant, a litany of Eggers' personal annoyances and nightmares.
(Also, because the progression to absurdity follows a pathos instead of a logos or ethos, many of the doomsday-inducing scenarios fall apart with a little thought. Yes, again, it's satire and exaggeration, but it's tough to swallow some of the bigger assumptions the novel makes - not the least of which is that the culture and dominance of technology in America will take hold in the exact same way globally.)
Despite its logical and tonal problems, the book does work, to a degree, as an indictment against a sometimes mandatory plugged-in culture that is prevalent in some circles (again, the pun is definitely intended). I think more now about *why* I want to post things, and what I gain versus what the company whose platform I'm using gains. And that's really Eggers' point, so it's successful there. Still, I'd give my firstborn and probably most of my rights to privacy to work at a campus like the Circle's. And its prose is strong, if incessant and not particularly beautiful. While I read, it was a page-turner, but the minute I put the book down I didn't want to ever pick it up again because it didn't give me anything new after the first hundred pages.
Overall, it's a too-long tirade against technology, but a well-written one that has some valid points and definitely instilled a bit of fear or caution in me.
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