Dystopian reading: "The Circle" by Dave Eggers

Two or three weeks ago, I attended a rather flashy conference in Brussels. It was the annual "communication summit" organised by the European Association of Communications Directors, and it was heavily themed around technology and how it is affecting the work of communications professionals. At the end of the first - fascinating - keynote session, by Jimmy Maymann, CEO of the Huffington Post, a questioner from the audience piped up: "Have you read The Circle by Dave Eggers, and what implications do you think it has for us?" The question was at least a little different from the others and the audience - most of whom, like me, had probably at least heard of the book - waited for the answer. But sadly Jimmy Maymann had not read the book and declined to comment. Oh well, nice try.

However, the questioner was not so easily put off. She asked the same question of the next speaker too, who similarly had not read the book and was not to be drawn. Over the rest of the two day conference I heard the questioner ask the identical question to various panels and speakers, and I am sure I wasn't there on every occasion she did. As she repeated herself, and nobody, but nobody, she asked had read the book, the reaction of the audience evolved. There was much discreet eyeball rolling, some less discreet sighing... Our questioner was gradually becoming a bit of a freak, some sort of obsessive in the desert, for pointlessly insisting with her question about internet technology getting of of hand. Perhaps if the conference had lasted longer, she would have been openly heckled, discouraged, marginalised, even excluded? 

Apart from the fact that it is surprising to me that not one of the speakers had read the book - perhaps they are simply all too busy tweeting to read books any more - there now seems to me to be a surprising message in the treatment of the obsessive questioner. She implicitly challenged the groupthink of a tech-enthusiast consensus and rather than being engaged with on the substance, she became boring, irrelevant, just a bit weird. Something similar happens to a character in The Circle, a man who rebels against the encroachment of the internet on every aspect of life, ranting about its erosion of privacy and its negation of the possibility of solitude. He too becomes a figure of fun, ridiculed for not "getting it", and his attempts to opt out simply considered weird. In the end, his fate is rather more dramatic than that of the conference delegate, who probably just left rather frustrated, but bears comparison.

Perhaps though I should backtrack a bit. What is The Circle about? 


It is the story of a keen young twenty-something, Mae Holland, who escapes her tedious job in her hometown utility company to take up a job in the world's leading tech company, the Circle. The company, which seems staffed almost entirely by sub-35s (and over thirty is already "old"), operates out of a glitzy "campus" headquarters in Silicon Valley, and is basically an amalgam of everything you think you know about Google, Apple, Facebook and co., just a lot more so. We learn early on that the Circle has bought out and subsumed these early internet companies, and did so through its invention of "TruYou", a single, universal (and real) identity for every internet user, through which all online actions and interactions take place. From there, the Circle has become, on the one hand, a near-monopolist, with over 80% of the world's internet use transiting its servers, and, on the other, a genuine powerhouse of ideas and innovation.

There's no doubt, the Circle is seriously cool, and Mae loves it, as most young people would. She works hard and diligently, throwing herself into the Circle, and its relentlessly exciting work-and-play ethic. All around her, people are developing great new ideas which will make life easier, better, more democratic. There can be no better, no more cutting edge, place to be.

And here lies, to my way of thinking, the central idea of the novel: how thousands of great, well-intentioned, world-improving ideas and add up to one Terrible Idea. We gradually, creepily, see the effects on Mae herself, as she gradually buys into the ethics of the Circle, sociability, community, transparency. She works tirelessly, encouraged by reproofs she earns for her tendency to enjoy a little solitary kayaking once in a while, to improve her social ratings, by interacting furiously online, posting, "zinging" (tweeting), "smiling" (liking), "frowning" (disliking), posting photos and videos. A life not shared is, in the world of the Circle, a life not properly lived; transparency - meaning every aspect of life being recorded, available, open, online - is the new morality. This is made explicit by one of the three "Wise Men" who run the the Circle, Eamon Bailey, an openness radical, who sincerely believes that total openness, the end of all secrets, will transform the world. One of his pet projects, which takes on a crazed momentum as the novel advances, is to persuade elected officials to "go clear", that is to record every waking moment of their day, every interaction, every discussion, by way of an always-on hi-def camera worn around their necks. As the idea spreads, those who refuse to join in are attacked inevitably as having something to hide and either conform or are driven from office. 

The novel is at its best when it shows the effect all this has on Mae, who battles her own inherent resistance to such transparency to become its greatest ambassador, when she too "goes clear" opening up her life to the online public and in effect acting as super-saleswoman for the Circle and its projects. It is Mae herself, who, in one of Eggers' several nods to Orwell's 1984, comes up with the slogans adopted by the Circle to sum up its ethic: 

SECRETS ARE LIES 

PRIVACY IS THEFT 

SHARING IS CARING

Paradoxically, Mae, although she becomes the Circle's greatest ambassador, with her every move followed by online millions, she is also a point of contact and a point of hope for those who come to question the system. The least of these is her resolutely offline hometown ex-boyfriend, Mercer, referred to above, who raves explicitly against the Circle and all its works, and is rewarded with little more that Mae's sincere attempts to help him understand. More insidious are two Circle insiders, her friend Annie, a highly-placed staff member who got her the job at the outset, acts as friend, cheerleader and mentor, until, ironically, Mae's increasing "transparency' essentially destroys their friendship, and the altogether more mysterious Kalden, who nobody seems to be able to pin down and who might be some kind of disruptive infiltrator, but whom Mae accommodates, not least because of the powerful sexual chemistry between them. 

Perhaps more than any of these outsiders, though, it is in Mae herself that the doubts well up. Her unrestrained enthusiasm for her work and her true believer ethic coexist with an increasing interior desperation which tries to tell her that this is all so wrong: the pathological need for validation through sharing, the belief in the right to know everything, the substitution of online emotion and contact for the human kind... Eggers does this well, and one follows Mae's struggle with sympathy but also a growing sense of tension.

Other things, he arguably does less well. Some question whether he really understands the technology enough to write this book, but I find most of the developments he posits, taken one by one, as eminently plausible, even if the sum of their parts is perhaps less so. There are other points at which he is perhaps a little too unsubtle, in the rather-too-evident machinations and manipulativeness of another "Wise Man", Tom Stenton, the Circle CEO, and, even more so, in the brutally-obvious but still powerful metaphorical scenes in which Stenton's (transparent!) deep sea shark is given a shared environment with various other forms of ocean life. (No accident, by the way, that the independent developers pitch their ideas to the Circle at monthly sessions in the hope of being bought out are called "plankton".)

Dave Eggers, wearing a hoodie like a "Wise Man"

On the whole though, for all that this is not a book without faults, it is by one of the world's most interesting contemporary authors (though he writes a very "straight" untricksy, page-turning book here) and contains genuine issues and worries. No-one who steps back and looks at the way Facebook, Google and co. collect information about their users, and even how human behaviour is visibly being affected by online media, can deny that. Whether Eggers, any more than Orwell, is actually predictively accurate in terms of outcome is perhaps less important than the fact that he, like Orwell, has issued a warning which we would do well to heed.

Why, my Facebook feed yesterday, just after I finished this book, was full of stuff about online privacy. Could it because I posted a while ago I was going to read this book soon (and 1984 into the bargain)?

The woman at the conference was right: those people on stage should have read this book and should have thought about it for a minute. If you have any interest in this subject, I would recommend you do the same.