Big Brother is Watching. . .The Circle by Dave Eggers

The most recent New York Times Magazine included an article about Google’s ability, with 97% of the browsing market, to bury competition.  It featured the story of a couple who designed an app that was superior to one designed by Google and they quickly discovered that no one could find them; Google had changed its algorithms to prevent the couple’s business from taking off.   It eerily connected to The Circle by Dave Eggers, a novel I just finished, which portrays a tech giant that’s a lot like Google with some Apple and Facebook thrown in.  Whether you buy into this book may depend on how much you embrace social media and whether you question the pervasiveness and power of these companies who, in their quest to connect everyone all of the time have created a generation of people suffering from FOMA and given bullying a whole new platform. 

The titular company is located in Silicon Valley on a large campus that sports a series of modern buildings arranged – you guessed it – in a circle.  In addition to office space, there are dorms, gyms, restaurants, a health center.  It’s essentially an enclosed community.  Enter Mae Holland, a 24-year old college graduate still living with her parents and working at a mind-numbing job in a call support center for a local utility company in her home town.  She escapes to a nearby lake to kayak, a pastime that later figures into the story.  She is released from this existence when her college friend Annie, a member of the inner 40 at The Circle contacts her and arranges an interview.  Soon Mae is awestruck by the amenities of her new gig, cooing to her parents, “I never want to work anywhere else.”  Although her new job is very similar to the old one – responding to customer queries, the customers of the Circle rate the quality of the response.  If Mae gets less than a 100, she sends a follow-up query and often the score is raised.  Her numbers are monitored by her boss Dan, who communicates regularly on a second screen, congratulating her on her average or providing encouragement to raise her score.  After her first weekend on the job during which she goes home to visit her parents, her father, an MS sufferer having had an attack, she returns to find herself reprimanded for having not participated in Circle weekend social events and receives surprisingly little sympathy for her reason for leaving. Two employees provide her with a third screen for her desk on which she can follow her social media.  To their horror and hers, in the first week she has neglected over 8,000 messages, some of them invitations.  Doubling down, Mae stays late, responding to most of these while working on answering still more customer queries.  Soon Mae has given up her new apartment and moved permanently into a dorm room on campus.  She wears a bracelet that monitors her health (think FitBit) and another that lets her know every time someone zings her (think Tweeter).  The reader recoils in horror as Mae drinks the Kool-Aid at the Circle, eventually agreeing to go “transparent,” which involves wearing a camera around her neck that captures every conversation and interaction that she has and which generates her millions of followers.  This is a consequence of her public shaming by one of the company’s “wise men” because she went kayaking without documenting her experience, an act he gets Mae to agree is selfish. 

Counterpoints are provided by Mercer, an ex-boyfriend, and Kalden, a mysterious figure at The Circle with whom Mae has occasional conversations and passionate sex.  Mercer points out that he can no longer have a face-to-face relationship with her without having everything he says getting zinged and then commented on by others.  When she thinks she is doing him a favor by promoting his business (creating chandeliers out of antlers) to all of her followers, he starts receiving hate mail.  Likewise, later on she does a similar thing to her friend Annie having not learned from her mistake with Mercer.  Mae seems oblivious to the dangers of the Circle’s plan to have cameras everywhere and its slogan of “Secrets are Lies.” 

Despite my increasing dislike for Mae, the novel was engaging and thought-provoking.  Written in 2013, many of its fictional company’s characteristics seem to have already manifested themselves in our world.