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Book Review: The Circle , Dave Eggers’s Chilling, New Allegory of Silicon Valley

McSweeney’s founder and former Pulitzer finalist Dave Eggers today publishes his latest work of fiction, The Circle (Knopf). In it, the famously staunch defender of the printed page allegorizes the Digital Age as a pseudo-theological cult, issuing a grave—and page-turning—warning about the perils of a society obsessed with technology.

The story follows young and impressionable Mae as she navigates a new job at The Circle, an eerily familiar-sounding Silicon Valley corporation that’s known for its immense resources and relentless ambition. At The Circle’s sprawling campus—which Mae considers a “utopia” where “all had been perfected”—employees are indoctrinated in the company ideals of constant connectivity, transparency, and accessibility.

At first, The Circle’s mantra of an inclusive community sounds nurturing and forward-thinking, particularly compared with the dreary job Mae has left behind in her hometown, at the cement building of a utility company, which “felt like something from another time, a rightfully forgotten time.” But as our starry-eyed heroine makes her way around The Circle, the reader begins to sense Eggers’s implicit denunciation of the company culture: boundary-less communication can cause paranoia and hypersensitivity among those who attempt it, and can give the people who facilitate it utter control. The social message of the novel is clear, but Eggers expertly weaves it into an elegantly told, compulsively readable parable for the 21st century.

Mae’s official role at The Circle is in its so-called customer-experience department, where she answers clients’ questions and is expected to aim for a satisfaction rating of 100 percent. But, as Mae soon learns, her duties at the company extend far beyond this job description. Punished for traveling home for the weekend to visit her ailing father without keeping the Circle community constantly apprised of her whereabouts via social media, Mae naïvely acquiesces to the new demands, not worrying, as the reader does, that she’s putting her basic human autonomy at risk. Later, she fails to notice when her closest friend and co-worker Annie cracks under The Circle’s unrelenting pressure and the humiliation that can come from complete visibility. And, most tragically, her ex-boyfriend meets a horrific fate after Mae rejects his skepticism about the company’s vision.

Mae, meanwhile, walks the line of indoctrination and disillusionment until the novel’s closing pages. The protagonist is at last forced to choose between the prospect of “completing” the Circle and recognizing its hollowness when she discovers the truth about a mysterious and alluring fellow Circler, Kalden.

What may be the most haunting discovery about The Circle, however, is readers’ recognition that they share the same technology-driven mentality that brings the novel’s characters to the brink of dysfunction. We too want to know everything by watching, monitoring, commenting, and interacting, and the force of Eggers’s richly allusive prose lies in his ability to expose the potential hazards of that impulse. There might be hope for us after all, though, for the simple fact that we’ve just been reading a work of literary fiction and not a 140-character tweet or zing. Even if some of us did download it on an e-reader.

Lauren Christensen

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Dave Eggers' The Circle : What the Internet Looks Like if You Don't Understand It

How you react to The Circle -- the new book by McSweeney's founder, novelist and occasional screenwriter Dave Eggers -- will doubtless depend on your own relationship to technology. If you're someone who remains skeptical about the blogging, tweeting, Tumbling and Facebooking that have shaped society in recent years, The Circle may seem like a work of brilliant satire that suggests a chilling potential future for us all. On the other hand, if you're someone who's actually familiar with those online communities -- and since you're on WIRED reading this article, I'm going to guess it's the latter -- The Circle will likely sound more than a little tone-deaf.

Spoilers for the plot of The Circle follow.

The plot of The Circle is simple: In the near future, Mae Holland -- an ambitious college graduate who's unsure about her place in the world -- lands a job at The Circle, a groundbreaking tech company that created an all-in-one password solution and revolutionized the Internet by pushing users to adopt their real names online. One revolution wasn't enough for The Circle, however, and Holland soon becomes involved in the roll-out of an inexpensive, high-quality camera that streams HD video to the Internet and leads to a new golden age of honesty and crime-free living -- all for the low, low cost of individual privacy.

According to The Circle's corporate slogan, "ALL THAT HAPPENS MUST BE KNOWN." Or in a more Orwellian turn: "SECRETS ARE LIES, SHARING IS CARING, PRIVACY IS THEFT."

While the book is fiction, the world it presents is similar enough to our own that its notion of how the Internet works seems incongruous and out of touch. Take TruYou, the password product that made The Circle so powerful. "TruYou changed the internet, in toto, within a year," the book tells us. "Though some sites were resistant at first, and free-internet advocates shouted about the right to be anonymous online, the TruYou wave was tidal and crushed all meaningful opposition. It started with the commerce sites. Why would any non-porn site want anonymous users when they could know exactly who had come through the door? Overnight, all comment boards became civil, all posters held accountable. The trolls, who had more or less overtaken the internet, were driven back into the darkness."

Yes, that's right: In Eggers' world, only trolls and porno fans want the right to remain anonymous on the Internet. When forced to use real names, "all comment boards became civil, all posters held accountable" because, as we all know, there's no way that boorish arguments could possibly start between people who know each other's names! That would be ludicrous ! He goes on to explain that, after tying everyone's online accounts, credit cards and bank accounts together, "the era of false identities, identity theft, multiple user names, complicated passwords and payment systems was over." Problem solved, Internet . Except that it only makes sense in a world where it'd be much easier to commit identity theft because you could access all that information in one central location.

Eggers, who has given interviews boasting about the lack of research he engaged in before starting the book, writes about technology and the tech world with the air of a man who's just, like, not sure about what the Internet really means . All throughout the book, there are strange moments that demonstrate his lack of research, like supposedly tech-savvy characters who don't understand that information "in the cloud" doesn't need server storage.

The problem isn't just that Eggers doesn't understand how technology works; it's that he also doesn't seem to realize how people work, either. At one point midway through the book, we're told that the idea of transparency has become so viral that politicians start wearing cameras that transmit an audio and video feed for every waking moment of their lives. This idea becomes so successful that 90 percent of U.S. politicians -- yes, U.S. politicians -- follow suit within three weeks. (Some politicians balk at the idea, but they quickly fall away from the narrative thanks to political scandals engineered, we're told in an off-hand aside, by The Circle.)

In his desire to create a world where The Circle rules all, Eggers creates so many extremely unlikely or outright impossible scenarios that happen simply because he needs them to happen. As they stack up through the course of the book, it gets harder and harder to take it seriously even as satire until finally it becomes outright fantasy, with only a tenuous connection to reality as we know it.

Eggers' distrust of the digital future is represented by Mae's ex-boyfriend, Mercer, a character who gets to give numerous speeches about the ways in which technology is dehumanizing everyone. "Even when I'm talking to you face-to-face you're telling me what some stranger thinks of me. It's become like we're never alone," he tells her at one point. Later, he is literally * driven off a cliff* by robot drones piloted by social media hordes.

An unsubtle fate, sure, but subtlety is a surprisingly rare commodity in the book. For example, after The Circle is referred to as a shark, there's a moment where Mae -- and millions of people on the Internet -- watch an octopus being torn apart by a shark in an aquarium, because it had nowhere to hide . "We saw every creature in that tank, didn’t we? We saw them devoured by a beast that turned them to ash. Don’t you see that everything that goes into that tank, with that beast, with this beast, will meet the same fate?" someone says after the shark/octopus scene, in case anyone had missed the point. Eggers bludgeons the reader with these moments, as if he's afraid that they wouldn't understand him otherwise.

The book's biggest fault, however, is that it's boring. Unrealistic tech and lack of subtlety can be forgiven if you're invested in the story; just ask anyone who's enjoyed a Dan Brown novel, or a Star Wars movie. For all of Eggers' gifts as a writer, including some lovely prose and surprising humor that surfaces here and there, The Circle lacks anything resembling tension or excitement. Every plot development is telegraphed, every mystery obvious. If you've ever wanted to see what Dave Eggers would sound like channeling Michael Crichton, then The Circle is for you.

It's a shame, because The Circle raises questions that are worth discussing. A theme Eggers returns to throughout the novel is that people aren't inherently good, but become good when others are watching; a benevolent big brother, if you will. Although the book spends a lot of time foreshadowing that The Circle as A Bad Company Up To Bad Things For Humanity, it actually accomplishes a lot of good: eradicating crime, quashing despotic regimes, deterring election fraud and making healthcare more available to Americans. The debate over whether such changes would be worth surrendering some level of privacy, freedom and individual responsibility could have been an interesting one -- if only characters had been allowed to see things in anything other than black and white.

Ironically, The Circle comes across like one of the Internet trolls that Eggers promises no longer exists in his fictional world: Entirely convinced of its righteousness, unafraid to use straw man arguments to "prove" its points, and completely disinterested in dialogue when polemic is easier. It's something that will be gratefully received by those who already agree with the arguments it put forwards, but met with disappointment and disinterest by everyone else. Perhaps the most appropriate response is that favored by many online trolls: The Circle ? Meh.

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by Dave Eggers ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 8, 2013

Though Eggers strives for a portentous, Orwellian tone, this book mostly feels scolding, a Kurt Vonnegut novel rewritten by...

A massive feel-good technology firm takes an increasingly totalitarian shape in this cautionary tale from Eggers ( A Hologram for the King , 2012, etc.).

Twenty-four-year-old Mae feels like the luckiest person alive when she arrives to work at the Circle, a California company that’s effectively a merger of Google, Facebook, Twitter and every other major social media tool. Though her job is customer-service drudgework, she’s seduced by the massive campus and the new technologies that the “Circlers” are working on. Those typically involve increased opportunities for surveillance, like the minicameras the company wants to plant everywhere, or sophisticated data-mining tools that measure every aspect of human experience. (The number of screens at Mae’s workstation comically proliferate as new monitoring methods emerge.) But who is Mae to complain when the tools reduce crime, politicians allow their every move to be recorded, and the campus cares for her every need, even providing health care for her ailing father? The novel reads breezily, but it’s a polemic that’s thick with flaws. Eggers has to intentionally make Mae a dim bulb in order for readers to suspend disbelief about the Circle’s rapid expansion—the concept of privacy rights are hardly invoked until more than halfway through. And once they are invoked, the novel’s tone is punishingly heavy-handed, particularly in the case of an ex of Mae's who wants to live off the grid and warns her of the dehumanizing consequences of the Circle’s demand for transparency in all things. (Lest that point not be clear, a subplot involves a translucent shark that’s terrifyingly omnivorous.) Eggers thoughtfully captured the alienation new technologies create in his previous novel,  A Hologram for the King , but this lecture in novel form is flat-footed and simplistic.

Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2013

ISBN: 978-0-385-35139-3

Page Count: 504

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013

LITERARY FICTION | DYSTOPIAN FICTION | THRILLER | TECHNICAL & MEDICAL THRILLER | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE

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New York Times Bestseller

by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020

A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).

A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.

Pub Date: June 16, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine

Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020

GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SCIENCE FICTION

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THEN SHE WAS GONE

by Lisa Jewell ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 24, 2018

Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.

Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.

Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s ( I Found You , 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.

Pub Date: April 24, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Atria

Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018

GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | SUSPENSE

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The Circle by Dave Eggers – review

I t wasn't long ago that Dave Eggers appeared at the cutting edge of American literature, breaking new ground with his meta-memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius , while his McSweeney's publishing enterprises spawned magazine offshoots in online, DVD and app formats. His pioneering literacy programmes and human rights themes have kept him as socially engaged and culturally connected as any novelist currently writing. Yet with his new novel, Eggers's innovative optimism appears to have paused at the frontiers of social media, looking forward, not to a world of open potential, but to an encroaching nightmare.

"My God, Mae thought," The Circle begins: "It's heaven."

Mae is a twentysomething naif, journeying into the brave new world of a vast info-tech enterprise – the Circle – which has amalgamated the functions of Microsoft, Google, Apple, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter into a unified corporation with seemingly beautiful ideals. Customers buy into the Circle with a single identity, their TruYou, which grants them access to every operation and social connection conceivable in the digital universe.

Deep within the organisation, an inner circle of bosses – the Gang of 40 (lest readers miss the looming Maoist analogy) – fuses technological and human rights idealism into a vision of perfect democracy, transparency and knowledge; one with which they aim to unite private and public spheres and perfect the operations of government.

The Orwellian references scarcely need spelling out. But the Circle's central slogan – "All that happens must be known" – springs less from political ideology than the kind of callow info-utopianism espoused by Julian Assange (who gets a sardonically ambivalent mention in the novel), or the dreams of social connectivity realised by Mark Zuckerberg (lightly referenced in the Circle's founder, Ty Gospodinov).

Mae rises through the ultra-meritocratic ranks of the company to emerge as its leading promotional light, devising some of the key maxims of its credo: "Secrets are lies"; "Sharing is caring"; "Privacy is theft".

Along the way, she is offered – and ignores – increasingly obvious glimpses of what is wrong with all this. One night, she takes an illicit kayak ride to an uninhabited island, momentarily liberated from her hyper-connected world, only to be forced into a session of self-criticism before the assembled staff of the Circle. On a Steve Jobs-style company platform, Mae confesses to her crime – failing to stream her every private experience for the benefit of the community.

In atonement, she turns her life into a model of relentless visibility and her family's into a version of The Truman Show . An ex-boyfriend provides plodding speeches about the nightmare she is fostering, to which she responds by pursuing him through online networks as he seeks to escape to some last, non-mediated corner of wilderness.

It's not clear whether The Circle is intended as a satire of the present or a dystopian vision of the near future. Eggers's writing is so fluent, his ventriloquism of tech-world dialect so light, his denouement so enjoyably inevitable that you forgive the thin characterisation and implausibility of what is really a clever concept novel. As soon as the novel appeared, corners of cultural chatter-sphere lit up in typical, fissiparous mode: commentators both "smiling" and "frowning" (to borrow Circle terms); some happy to take the ride; others perplexed that an author as hip as Eggers should be conservative on social media; others still mocking the daft idea that the infinitely disputatious internet might be subsumed into any unified programme.

It would be daft to compare today's online corporations, or the current surveillance scare, to the real-world totalitarian forces (Nazi, Stalinist, Maoist) evoked by Nineteen Eighty-Four . But Eggers's novel doesn't demand to be read so weightily. Instead, it's a nicely caricatured vision of hi-tech, soft-touch totalitarianism, a narrative thought experiment in which it's liberal idealism (rather than the fascist or communist kind) that reaches a final solution.

There may be some self-mockery in this. Eggers, in his 40s, is no longer a young innovator. He may in fact represent the last generation of major American writers to have emerged entirely from the old values of print. The Circle may be what social media idealists look like, viewed through the form of the traditional, sceptical novel .

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Book review: The Circle by Dave Eggers

Eggers's satire of social media, which might be his 1984 or Brave New World, touches us IRL.

By Dave Eggers. Knopf, $28. From his breakout memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius , to last year’s National Book Award finalist A Hologram for the King , Eggers’s works pulse with life. His latest novel, The Circle , pushes his art even further; this dive into technology’s intrusive ubiquity is his Brave New World or 1984 . Mae Holland, a 24-year-old idealist working at a gloomy utilities company in her small Californian hometown, calls in a favor with her college roommate and gets a job working at a utopian tech company called the Circle. Think Facebook or Google or Apple, but more impressive and intrusive than all of them combined. As the company asserts its disconcerting global omnipresence, Mae becomes more and more involved until she finds herself the Circle’s head cheerleader. Eggers’s work, part dark comedy, part sobering glimpse into the near-future, stuns for two reasons: Mae’s humanity and compassion are apparent even as she helps erode our civil liberties; and two, it doesn’t feel like science fiction. It feels like the next horrific—but very plausible—small step for mankind.

Been there, done that? Think again, my friend.

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Book Review: The Circle by Dave Eggers

Dave Eggers’ novel about privacy and democracy in the Internet age,  The Circle,  asks, “If you aren’t being transparent with your personal information, what are you hiding?”  Set in the near future, the story revolves around an omniscient tech company called The Circle that wants to digitally record your past, present and future, allegedly in the name of  promoting human rights and democracy. Personal data is volunteered freely by the public, and so populist governments and online communities join the march towards total informational transparency. In The Circle , Eggers portends to expose the soft-totalitarian nightmare that waits at the logical end of such thinking – an extreme metaphor about transparency as a virtue, but maybe not extreme enough.

“All that happens must be known.”

The book follows young Mae Holland at work on the company’s sprawling Californian campus. Mae, accustomed to the drudgery and chicken-coop work of a call-centre, finds The Circle’s amenities and open-plan layout initially enticing – what’s more, the company’s medical benefits cover her sick father. The first part of the novel casually introduces this environment, an increasingly odd synergy between upbeat, blue-sky-thinking creatives and the institutionalisation of suspicion, conformity and mutualised invigilation.

The Circle’s digital tools are dominant, ubiquitous and free. An eager public adopts them voluntarily at first, but soon find that they have become mandatory. Privacy is theft. Secrets are lies. Caring is sharing. The company is managed by “Three Wise Men”: Tom Stenton, “world-striding CEO and self-described  Capitalist Prime ”; Eamon Bailey, the loveable, witty face of the company; and the enigmatic Ty Gospodinov, The Circle’s “boy-wonder visionary” and founder – who himself remains unseen and anonymous. Ty is the brains behind TruYou, a revolutionary system that combines social media profiles, payments, passwords, e-mail addresses and interests into one account. Following TruYou’s success, The Circle develops SeeChange, a surveillance platform where mini-cameras stream footage directly to the company, and then Demoxie, a system making Circle membership and direct democracy compulsory. Mae, along with a number of desperate and popularity-hungry politicians, volunteer to “go transparent”.

Despite flat characterisation and a reliance on overused dystopian tropes, there are many good ideas here on the danger and banality of sharing “intimate trivia”. Eggers is most effective in his critique of contemporary trends through exaggeration: the vapid nexus of social endorsements and the elevation of self-expression as an achievement in its own right. Circlers sound progressive, but this is juxtaposed against an unconscious acceptance of authoritarianism. Their utopianism is delusion: The Circle urges people to share more in order to mine their personal information for commercial and, eventually, political, purposes.

You’re here because your opinions are valued. They’re so valued that the world needs to know them – your opinions on just about everything. Isn’t that flattering?

Do novelists now have to be technologists to write contemporary fiction? Of course not. But intentionally not researching your milieu or inventing more convincing fictional technologies is a failure of craft. For such a contemporary novelist, Eggers’ prose lapses into primness and old-fashioned phrasing that takes some of the edge away from The Circle ’s silicon-gloss. The two main opponents to the closing of The Circle are both fairly unappealing, didactic, moralists who spout Eggers’ anti-modern humanism. As with Jonathan Franzen’s miserablism, The Circle is another example of a major contemporary novelist reacting conservatively to modern developments.

Mae is absurdly passive. There is a suggestion that the attitudes behind her desperation to fit in with the public’s eagerness to embrace The Circle eventually lead to totalitarianism. But nobody is that passive. The idea that society is going to the dogs because people post selfies and food porn belies a reactionary contempt for the public. It’s a basic lack of sympathy that disengages with the potential for real human subjects and instead lapses into moralism.

We don’t yet live in a panopticon of co-opted mass surveillance where somebody watches everything we do. The information mined by the NSA and GCHQ has been user-generated for semi-public viewing. But how much freedom should we have over our own data? How public is private? The Circle will make you think twice about how much you do share. After all, sharing is caring. Right?

About Wes Brown

Wes Brown is a writer based in London. He is a Co-ordinator at the National Association of Writers in Education, administrator at Magma Poetry and Director of Dead Ink Books. He is currently writing a novel based on the Shannon Matthew's kidnap and training as a professional wrestler for a book about masculinity and storytelling. His debut novel, Shark, was published in 2013.

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The Circle, book review: This way to the dystopia of your dreams

There's a thing that goes on when you're being recruited by a cult called ' love bombing '. Perhaps you're at a crossroads in your life when all sorts of things are scary and confusing, and along come these people who embrace you and fill you with light. Soon you find yourself subsumed in a whirlwind of activities, getting no sleep, barely eating, but part of this wonderful thing with a mission. One day, far along the road, you wake up and realize you're exhausted, starving and cut off from everyone else you know. Plus, they've got all your money. How can you dissent now?

To anyone who knows this, the opening chords of Dave Eggers' novel, The Circle are plenty alarming. Recruited by a friend already working there, Mae Holland, 24, arrives to take up her job at The Circle, a multiply dominant internet company. She will be a lowly 'customer experience' cog, but working at the most important and innovative company on earth has to beat her former boring, hateful job at a utility company, which she took to pay off her student loans.

Ah, life at rich internet companies! This is the beautifully padded cell in which Mae comes to work: game rooms and myriad food-filled kitchens, architecture, revered and impassioned CEOs, parties, on-site dorms — all masking the relentlessness of American corporate life. Like Joanna (played by Jennifer Aniston) in the millennial anthem movie Office Space , Mae is tormented by voluntary-but-mandatory requirements whose exact details no one will specify. Thirty pieces of flair? A hundred thousand 'zinger' likes? The best cults also know this rule: keep them insecure and off-balance, and they will be hooked on desperately trying to please.

Assimilation, with stumbles

Rapidly, Mae is assimilated. We watch nervously as she signs without reading myriad forms on arrival and tech support uploads the contents of her personal laptop and phone onto shiny latest-model replacements and syncs them to The Circle's cloud. She is signed up for the company's fortnightly medical checkups (prevention saves money!), and the medic clasps a high-tech bracelet around her wrist to monitor and report her physical parameters. As her cubicle progressively sprouts four, six, seven screens, her feedback score from customers debuts at 97 — excellent for a beginner, but she'll need to get that up to 100. (A skeptical aside: who are all these customers who not only fill out feedback surveys but answer follow-up questions?)

The best cults also know this rule: keep them insecure and off-balance, and they will be hooked on desperately trying to please.

There are stumbles. Mae's supervisor mediates a complaint by a co-worker she's never met: he's deeply hurt that she didn't attend his Portugal party. Why is she rejecting him? Haltingly, she finds an acceptable explanation. But a few weeks later, she's in trouble again: why is she rejecting the community by disappearing at weekends? Doesn't she realize that thousands of them, like her, go kayaking? And why didn't she tell them about her father's multiple sclerosis and insurance troubles? We can put him on the company plan! Why is she so selfish as not to share these things? Privacy is theft!

The joker in the pack is the cheap, light, ultra-high resolution, all-seeing camera The Circle launches. As they set off a competition among politicians to 'go clear', the novel takes on the aspect of a worked example of David Brin's 1998 book The Transparent Society . Will the day come when Mae longs for that musty, burlap-covered utility company job? Or will the 'filter bubble' of groupthink smother all opposition? This way to the dystopia of your dreams.

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The Circle Paperback – April 22, 2014

• Book 1 of 2 The Circle
• Print length 497 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Vintage
• Publication date April 22, 2014
• Dimensions 5.15 x 0.85 x 8 inches
• ISBN-10 0345807294
• ISBN-13 978-0345807298
• See all details

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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage; First Edition (April 22, 2014)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 497 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0345807294
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0345807298
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12.8 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.15 x 0.85 x 8 inches
• #227 in Technothrillers (Books)
• #577 in Dystopian Fiction (Books)
• #3,203 in Literary Fiction (Books)

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About the author

Dave eggers.

Dave Eggers is the author of ten books, including most recently Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?, The Circle and A Hologram for the King, which was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Award. He is the founder of McSweeney’s, an independent publishing company based in San Francisco that produces books, a quarterly journal of new writing (McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern), and a monthly magazine, The Believer. McSweeney’s also publishes Voice of Witness, a nonprofit book series that uses oral history to illuminate human rights crises around the world. Eggers is the co-founder of 826 National, a network of eight tutoring centers around the country and ScholarMatch, a nonprofit organization that connects students with resources, schools and donors to make college possible.

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Customers say

Customers find the content thought-provoking and entertaining. They also describe the story as funny and 24-7 entertainment. However, some find the book tedious, repetitive, and dragging in spots. They say the characters are not deeply developed. Opinions are mixed on the writing style, with some finding it well-written and fun to read, while others say it's didactic and unabashedly prone to proselytizing. Readers have mixed feelings about the plot, with others finding it compelling and refreshing, while other find the premise less than convincing. They disagree on the pacing, with customers finding it fast-paced and others saying it starts slow.

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Customers find the content thought-provoking, well-informed, and serious. They also appreciate the technological innovations, suspense, and moral questions. Readers also mention that the book is successful in showing Mae's transformation and is a riveting, chilling tale of social networking.

"...it an enjoyable read, I read this book in three days because it was so interesting ...." Read more

"...page-turner style masks its startling depth and the seriousness of the issues it raises , which go beyond questions of personal privacy and enter..." Read more

"...The Circle is accessible, entertaining, and raises issues without using a literary sledgehammer...." Read more

"...In this fascinating , visionary novel, Eggers explores the notions of technology, information, privacy, surveillance and transparency...." Read more

Customers find the story funny and easy to read. They also mention that it makes them think about how people are.

"...and opportunity for discovery?“The Circle” is part horror-story, part satire , and part philosophical journey...." Read more

"...The Circle is accessible, entertaining , and raises issues without using a literary sledgehammer...." Read more

"...It's a satire of brutal intensity which mocks the naïf geeks who populate the digital idealist ant hills of Silicone Valley...." Read more

"...His comic sense is right on the mark , and the scenes where Mae gets one new screen to watch after another are really funny; he's also got the Valley..." Read more

Customers are mixed about the plot. Some find the story compelling, poignant, and disturbing. They also say it's refreshing to see utopia from this perspective and more realistic than 1984. However, others say the plot is predictable, boring, and immature.

"...find this book to be shallow, but its easy-to-read, page-turner style masks its startling depth and the seriousness of the issues it raises, which..." Read more

"...Realistically, there are no happy endings in life , and this ending is supposed to reflect the future with chaos...." Read more

"...In this fascinating, visionary novel , Eggers explores the notions of technology, information, privacy, surveillance and transparency...." Read more

"..."It was a bizarre creature, ghostlike, vaguely menacing and never still, but no one who stood before it could look away...." Read more

Customers have mixed opinions about the writing style. Some find the book well-written and fun to read, while others say the prose is downright bad, simplistic, and dull. They also say the message is ultimately dulled and dampened by the stilted and didactic writing style, and Eggers is unabashedly prone to proselytizing.

"...A casual reader may find this book to be shallow, but its easy-to-read , page-turner style masks its startling depth and the seriousness of the..." Read more

"...And Eggers is sort of unabashedly prone to proselytizing . His protagonist is frustratingly meek. And maybe not all of his ideas are completely fresh...." Read more

"...This is a superbly written story which I found both realistic and chilling...." Read more

"...culture erodes privacy, individuality, and choice, but the message is ultimately dulled and dampened by the fact that the main character is largely..." Read more

Customers are mixed about the pacing of the book. Some mention it's fast-paced and a quick read, while others say it started slow.

"...Overall, I absolutely loved this book. The Circle is fast paced which makes it an enjoyable read, I read this book in three days because it was so..." Read more

"...But the novel is painfully slow and dull, which is hard to believe given that the concept of the Information Age spawning a new Orwellian..." Read more

"...easy to become fully immersed in this story; it was a quick pleasurable read , but I still felt like there was a lack of personal connection...." Read more

"...What did it make me think about?This book was so timely for me ! Like many of us I struggle with the role of social media in my life...." Read more

Customers have mixed opinions about the realism of the book. Some find the point well-played out and the story delivered perfectly. They also enjoy the flow of the title. However, others feel the book feels ridiculous, awkward, and frustrating.

"...The book is extraordinarily compelling. It is more realistic, and far more plausible , than "1984" was in its day...." Read more

"...this book to anyone without the patience to plow through some very awkward , non-engaging prose for at least a hundred pages, because it takes a..." Read more

"...The movie adaptation was good too ." Read more

"...(Also, I found Mercer, Mae's foil, absolutely insufferable . In my opinion he fails as a voice of reason.)..." Read more

Customers find the characters in the book not deeply developed and lacking in realness. They also say there is no sympathetic Winston Smith.

"...ostensibly abhors the Circle's mandate of domination, every female character is a caricature , a person subjugated to the desires of men...." Read more

"...His protagonist is frustratingly meek . And maybe not all of his ideas are completely fresh...." Read more

"...ultimately dulled and dampened by the fact that the main character is largely unsympathetic . She learns nothing at any point during the story...." Read more

"Half way through this book I decided I was done. The main character Mae was boring . She was passive and static...." Read more

Customers find the book tedious, repetitive, and boring. They also say the plot is implausible and difficult to stop reading. Readers also mention that the book is filled with obvious tropes and devoid of subtlety. They say the book does drag in spots and has preachy dialogue.

"...She is easily manipulated , and that of course leads to her ultimate ruin...." Read more

"...complained that the protagonist, Mae lacks depth, that the narrative is a bit facile , and these are actually reasonable criticisms...." Read more

"The book is difficult to stop reading once one has started...." Read more

"...I found the protagonist annoying and frustrating . How could the character think and act the way she did?..." Read more

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Book Review | The Circle by Dave Eggers

In the not too distant future, the Circle has replaced Google, Facebook, and Amazon to become the dominant information technology of the Internet. As the Circle becomes the central driver of content, the engine for 90% of searches on the World Wide Web, and the holder of patents for a whole host of future internet-based technologies that link email, searches, payment systems, and more, the world shrinks, transparency grows, and Utopia appears in reach. Mae Holland is so fortunate as to have found a job at the burgeoning company, and she soon becomes a true believer in the company’s vision for a new age of kindness and civility. As Mae leaps the corporate ladder from customer service rep to become a spokesperson for the “transparent” future the company is building, it becomes apparent that all may not be as it seems.

As I listened to the last chapter of Dave Eggers’ cautionary tale The Circle , I couldn’t help but feel like I was watching the replay of a video of a really bad car accident and you see it coming, but you know the people in the accident don’t, but the accident has already happened, and there’s nothing you can do. But you cringe anyway, because: it’s coming, and it’s going to be bad. And yet, at the same time, I’m in the car, as well. The social media train wreck–and the totalitarianism that it presents–is eerily credible.  Eggers is brilliant in his observations of what makes social media and the world wide web addictive, especially to the narcissist in each of us, and his powers of describing it are at times equal parts creepy and dull. The world of The Circle is so similar to ours and described in such excruciating detail that it is its very banality that makes it so horrifying.

Let me be clear (semi-spoiler alert): This is not a happy story, and the characters that populate its pages are morally gray, not unlike how many of us seem. Yet, Eggers manages to create sympathy for each, giving them pathos that allows sympathy, even while each makes choices that will inevitably carry them to the terrible car accident that apparently is approaching. I don’t know if Eggers believes in the terrible inevitability of his conclusions, but it is a depressing thought. In many ways, it is this overshadowing sense that the conclusion is inevitable that makes a number of the leaps–plot points–a little difficult to believe. The world is stumbling towards this tremendous Utopia where transparency is unlimited, where secrets cannot exist.

In this sense, Eggers seems to write with an ear towards how George Orwell or Aldous Huxley might describe the world we are moving into if they had seen and known the capabilities of the internet. Here are the utopian mottos, the guiding hand of a “benign” Big Brother, the absolute rule of the masses in the guise of democracy, and the sense that it is all for a better, more safe and civil society.

It’s scary and it’s believable if you can allow a few leaps in the process.

And yet, if The Circle is not exactly how it happens, Eggers doesn’t do a bad job speculating how it might happen.

I only gave The Circle  three stars because while I felt the power of Eggers argument, I never quite lost myself in the story, struggled to empathize or make the logical leaps that Mae needed to make to lead us down the garden path. I had to wonder at times: could anyone be so stupid, vapid, or naive as to make the choices she makes? Perhaps I am underestimating the vacuous power of the approval of total strangers as conveyed over social media? Perhaps Mae is a conglomeration of a number of individuals collected as one?

I don’t know. It’s almost a four, but while Eggers is brilliant in his insights and description, as well as his plotting and even metaphorical use of the natural world, his characters remain prosaic…but maybe that’s the point?

A couple warnings for parents: there are brief scenes of sexual nature that, really, avoidable, but used more for demonstration rather than titillation. It is likely that it was Eggers’ blase treatment of sex that dropped it down a star for me.

When Mae Holland is hired to work for the Circle, the world’s most powerful internet company, she feels she’s been given the opportunity of a lifetime. The Circle, run out of a sprawling California campus, links users’ personal emails, social media, banking, and purchasing with their universal operating system, resulting in one online identity and a new age of civility and transparency. As Mae tours the open-plan office spaces, the towering glass dining facilities, the cozy dorms for those who spend nights at work, she is thrilled with the company’s modernity and activity. There are parties that last through the night, there are famous musicians playing on the lawn, there are athletic activities and clubs and brunches, and even an aquarium of rare fish retrieved from the Marianas Trench by the CEO. Mae can’t believe her luck, her great fortune to work for the most influential company in the world—even as life beyond the campus grows distant, even as a strange encounter with a colleague leaves her shaken, even as her role at the Circle becomes increasingly public. What begins as the captivating story of one woman’s ambition and idealism soon becomes a heart-racing novel of suspense, raising questions about memory, history, privacy, democracy, and the limits of human knowledge.

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Dan Burton lives in Millcreek, Utah, where he practices law by day and everything else by night. He reads about history, politics, science, medicine, and current events, as well as more serious genres such as science fiction and fantasy.

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Book Review: The Circle, by Dave Eggers

Dave Eggers asks the right questions in the wrong ways in The Circle

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If you are under the age of 30, you will probably not enjoy The Circle . It is a book about the Internet, social media and consumer technology that is so utterly wrong , you’ll feel compelled to take to Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr to catalogue all the ways.

Book Review: The Circle, by Dave Eggers Back to video

Of course, you would also be proving author Dave Eggers’ point. The Circle is a book about a company of the same name, a sprawling, idealistic mash-up of Google, Facebook, Twitter and all of the Internet’s most popular bits, but inflated to levels of hyper-connectedness of which even the most plugged-in teen could scarcely dream.

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In this world, everything is liked, shared, commented on and captured by its users thousands of times per day, and to not swim in this constant, crashing, digital ocean is to be perceived as anti-social — as weird. On the surface, it’s a scathing and arguably obvious commentary on how we — the collective, digital “we” — apparently now live our lives. But below Eggers’ imagined deluge of likes and tweets, more interesting topics sadly remain untouched.

Our proxy for this descent into digital excess is a young woman named Mae Holland, who moves from small-town obscurity to entry-level Circle employee thanks to the influence of a Circle executive and old friend. We see Mae climb up the ranks of the company, absorbed into its culture — and as Eggers no doubt intends — witness the havoc such networks and services are apparently wreaking upon our relationships, our ideals, and our expectations of privacy and self.

Key to this vision is The Circle ’s embodiment of common Silicon Valley stereotypes and tropes. We are reminded, constantly, that most Circlers — a play on Googlers — are in their twenties. There is the Mark Zuckerberg-like autistic-savant founder, swaddled in hoodies and toques, flanked by a pair of slick co-executives that direct The Circle towards any number of eccentric, world-changing pursuits — location-aware bone implants that promise to eliminate child abductions, or deep-sea subs capable of surviving the depths of the Marianas Trench. Employees embrace the quantified self movement, using wearable technology to track their health, location history and social engagement in real time. Tablets and smartphones are always cutting-edge, employees spread data across nine screens or more, retinal computing is apparently common place and everything — everything — is stored, permanently, un-deletable, in the cloud.

There is the sprawling, self-contained campus in a fictional suburban south Californian town, with tennis courts and medical clinic and dorm rooms and concerts and kitchens staffed with professional chefs all conveniently splayed on site. And this is to say nothing of the search queries, emails, instant messages, tweet-like analogs called Zings, online payments, surveys, smiles, frowns, petitions and protests that course through The Circle’s digital, circuitous veins.

It is all perfect distillation of the promise and excess of modern industry giants — less fiction than an honest, selective portrayal of the reality of working in present day tech.

Quite early on, the subtext of this wonderment becomes clear: here is a company that does so much, controls so many things, that it has practically become the underpinning of society itself. That, Eggers posits, is what should scare us most of all. But it reads like a less compelling 1984 for the Internet set — a totalitarian future fallen victim to its own utopian ideals, where Googley mantras such as “ALL THAT HAPPENS MUST BE KNOWN” are trotted out without a hint of levity.

What is frustrating about this portrayal is that it poses a very legitimate question — what would happen if such a company were allowed to truly become so pervasive as to subsume society itself? — but goes about answering it in all the wrong ways.

Frank discussions about privacy and surveillance are well worth having, after all: We should all know, or at least consider, the implications of putting so much of our lives, our connections, our likes and habits, into the cloud. But Eggers feeds off a popular, albeit not entirely accurate belief, that technology itself is to blame for our societal ruin. Put another way, imagine being told for nearly 400 pages that cellphones are changing the way our children write and speak — a fact which has demonstrably been proven to be untrue.

This manifests itself most obviously in the way The Circle ’s central characters are portrayed. Mae, eager to please and oblivious to the company’s domineering goals, is merely a prop through which we learn about The Circle, it’s founders, its products and its plans. Later, she is quite literally turned into a lens, live streaming the company’s inner workings and minutiae for all to see. The exposition here is often dreary and lengthy, an exercise in meticulous world building that presents clunky, distorted aphorisms of how present day social networking and online interactions work.

Characters don’t merely Like things — they smile, and frown. They participate in online petitions and surveys, believing their choices hold tangible, worldly weight. They are wholly and utterly complicit in The Circle’s intrusion into their lives, and in a tired, predictable trope, it is up to a mysterious, shadowy figure to warn Mae of impending societal ruin.

There are brief mentions of resistance, a small percentage of people who seek to resist the mass surveillance and societal sublimation The Circle represents. But Eggers seems to have no desire to explore this opposition with anything more than passing derision, through an analog character named Mercer who makes deer antler chandeliers for a living.

It says nothing of the people who, in the present day, use technology against those who seek to digitally oppress — the online activists who champion anonymity, privacy and security, who are dismissed early on with an assertion that everyone in The Circle’s universe simply grew to prefer the use of real names.

Rather, technology’s ability to enable, as much as enslave, is just as worth exploring in a context such as this, but Eggers opts for the easier, more alarmist tale.

The Circle bludgeons its reader over the head — swiftly, repeatedly — with its message of societal doom and gloom. It is tedious, twice as long as it should be and reduces a topic rife for serious, smart and witty exploration into easily consumable popcorn fare. For those unfamiliar with the machinations of social media, or who grew up outside the Internet’s pervasive grasp, it may delight. But for the rest it will merely frustrate, a naive vision of pixelated ruin that could more accurately be summed up as “old man yells at Cloud.”

Matthew Braga writes about technology for the Financial Post .

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WRITERESQUE

a literary magazine

• Jan 3, 2022

Book Review: The Circle by Dave Eggers

If you thought Big Brother was bad, you’ve not heard of his teenage sister. She’s a tech-savvy queen who has perfected playing the ins-and-outs of the multi-shaded greys of girl-world. If you’re still confused what I mean, think of the two-faced games of fake smiles and back-handed compliments, paired with a network of gossipers where no stone is ever left unturned. In a world governed by social media, Dave Egger’s The Circle offers a far too accurate critique on the unyielding grasp it has wrapped tightly around our necks. As much as I’d like to tell you that Big Brother’s angelic-faced sibling has a heart that could possibly grow three sizes, unfortunately she’s as ruthless and unforgiving as her elder. Perhaps worse. The Circle unfortunately offers an unoptimistic outlook of either a complete brainwashed submission to the technological world, or a deathly escape (literally). Don’t worry, I’m not spoiling it, you’ll still never guess the tense twists and turns throughout.

Dave Eggers dystopian twist on the dangers of modern technology and social media may just be one of the most frightening and realistic worlds I have read yet, having left me – and everybody else I made read it – feeling wide-eyed and full of questions. The more I spoke about this book to people, the more I was recommended similar books, shows and movies to divulge in. The scary part: most of these recommendations have been non-fictional documentations of real-life happenings which made Eggers’ narrative seem a light fairy-tale in comparison (Adam Curtis’ six-part BBC documentary, Can’t Get You Out of My Head (2021), or Shalini Kantayya’s documentary Coded Bias (2020), if you are curious). Anyway, back to the book.

Egger’s The Circle quickly became a life-long favourite. It is an undemanding read which has you captivated from the very first page. The narrative voice flows effortlessly, with a duality of formal mannerisms with an underlying sinister tone that I had never seen work so fluently in writing. Honestly, it still baffles my mind as to how Eggers did this, although I do believe that the portrayal of surface level face-to-face relationships being contradicted with an unrelenting desire to be involved in everybody’s lives online has a large play in that. The protagonist, Mae, albeit a fairly plain and stereotypically ‘female’ role, is easy to connect with. Yet as a proud feminist myself I found it difficult to feel anger towards Eggers for this; dystopian literature makes a critical commentary on humanity and many of the best novelists – including the unbeatably acclaimed Margaret Atwood – often pick up on the qualities of cowardliness and tendencies to follow the crowd which tends to exist in many of us. It is these kinds of qualities which these novelists warn can strengthen the tightening grips of totalitarianism. And, to try not to spoil it, the end is as unoptimistic and unhopeful as Orwell’s 1984 , maybe even more so if you remember that Winston was tortured into submission. Perhaps it’s the modern age, with the younger generations having been raised with technology we know no better than to live side by side with it. Horrifyingly, yet unsurprisingly, social media apps have been proven to release high levels of dopamine in the same way as Class-A drugs such as cocaine and heroin do. A key expert in the study of addiction is Dr Anna Lembke, who recently released a new book, Dopamine Addiction (2021) on our booming media addictions, although if you would like a quicker insight, I recommend watching the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma (2020), in which Dr Lembke also appears to discuss her vital concerns.

The novel follows all the tropes of a typical dystopia: authoritarian power, a loss of humanity, surveillance and individualism, love – or the inability for it – and, of course, technological control. It hits all the right spots. Eggers’ contemporary world, however, is a harrowing and honest critique which is not at all far-fetched from the reality in which we now live, so be prepared for those aimless feelings of vulnerability and discomfort which, in my opinion, you are left with by only the best dystopian novels.

As daunting and chilling as this review is, I hope that I have not discouraged you from reading Eggers’s tale. In comparison to other dystopian narratives written this side of the millennia, Egger’s novel should go down in history alongside the classics for its ingenuity and significance in today’s rapidly evolving technological world.

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Book review: The Circle by Dave Eggers

Dave Eggers

Hamish Hamilton, £18.99

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THERE is a distinctly Orwellian aroma to Dave Eggers’ latest fiction. It edges towards a genuinely chilling dystopia, made all the more monstrous because it encourages the reader, in part at least, to identify with the utopian propensities that usher in a new form of digital totalitarianism. The eponymous Circle is a company – a kind of thinly veiled version of Google – which, through TruYou, a system which links all users’ email accounts, social networking profiles and banking and purchasing systems, has brought about a new era of internet civility. TruYou users don’t have to remember a dozen different passwords but in exchange they forgo anonymity. The trolls are put firmly back under the bridge. The protagonist of the fable-like book is Mae Holland, who gets a position in “Customer Experience” through the auspices of a college friend, Annie, a high-flyer in the Circle. Her first words, once the reader reaches the end of the novel, are ominous: “My God, Mae thought. It’s heaven.”

At least at first there is a satirical edge. The Circle calls itself a campus, not an office, and its corridors are emblazoned with slogans like “Let’s Do This. Let’s Do All Of This” and “To Heal We Must Know. To Know We Must Share”. There are showings of Koyaanisqatsi, volleyball pitches and self-massage demonstrations. Each section of the campus is named after a historical period – Enlightenment, Renaissance, Machine Age. The Circle has a triumvirate at the top: Ty Gospodinov, the tech wizard, Tom Stenton, the entrepreneur, and Eamon Bailey, the inspirational guru. Mae is gradually acclimatised to the Circle’s peculiar working practices, where employees are encouraged to use social media – Eggers invents a sort of Twitter called Zing – and are judged on their “Participation Rank”. Only slowly does the reader realise that these behaviours are shifting towards being mandatory.

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Mae becomes involved with a blue sky thinker called Francis, whose project involves GPS tracking embedded into the bones of children, and comes across some of the other, odder products – Stenton in particular is keen on developing a submersible to capture exotic lifeforms from the Marianas Trench. She also meets a strange, grey-haired employee called Kalden who seems to have ubiquitous access but no in-house profile (alert readers can probably guess Kalden’s identity fairly quickly).

We also learn more about Mae’s home life. Her father has multiple sclerosis; her mother struggles to cope and they are both fond of Mae’s ex, Mercer, who makes chandeliers from antlers and is deeply sceptical about the drift of the Circle. His concerns only deepen when the Circle announces some of its latest innovations: miniature cameras that make the world a Panopticon and which are euphemistically called SeeChange, with the motto “All That Happens Must Be Known”. Mae is encouraged to “become transparent”: everything she does and says is public. The mottos start to become deeply sinister – “Secrets Are Lies. Sharing Is Caring. Privacy Is Theft”.

In Book II of Plato’s Republic, he recounts a myth called the Ring of Gyges. The ring gave the wearer the power of invisibility, and Plato uses the conceit to discuss whether morality is socially constructed: is the fear of being found out at the heart of the decision to behave ethically? Eggers gives an inversion of this in the Circle. Central to the beliefs of the company is the idea that perpetual observation leads to moral improvement. The transparents wish to become almost godlike in their omniscience.

There is a parable-like quality to the novel. Its anxieties about the information age, the erosion of privacy and the drift towards the compulsory are handled with more subtlety than the recent jeremiads of Jonathan Franzen on the same subjects. In part, this is because Eggers gives us genuinely optimistic, utopian characters – who would argue with anything that saved the life of a child from a paedophile, he asks.

The style is crisp and limpid. There are moments of poetic reverie and astute psychological sketches such as “she threw herself into the kissing, making it mean lust, and friendship, and the possibility of love, and kissed him while thinking of his face, wondering if his eyes were open, if he cared about the passersby who clucked or who hooted but who still passed by”.

Although the concerns of the novel are signalled fairly blatantly, Eggers still manages to pull some surprises. The ending is truly shocking. The Circle is intelligent and quirky, engaged and affecting and confirms Eggers’ place as one of the most interesting novelists currently writing.

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Book review: 'the circle' will make you laugh and/or grimace but won't convince you to quit facebook.

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'The Circle' advertising targets the San Francisco crowd. Posters in The Mission.

Step back, Evgeny Morozov: The notion of Internet-as-panacea has a prominent new critic in literary heavyweight Dave Eggers. His new novel, The Circle (Knopf), set in the near future, chronicles the rise of the titular corporation, which has subsumed Facebook, Google and Amazon to become the one company tracking everything we do and buy. Including our health, with sensors inside the body, of course. It’s all seen through the wide eyes of the company’s newest liberal arts grad employee, Mae Holland.

(A real world controversy has popped up around the novel with former Facebook employee -- and now Facebook critic -- Kate Losse claiming that the character and book rip off her memoir, Boy Kings . Eggers says he never heard of her or her book while writing his own. It's not surprising in a time when our friends sometimes seem more interested in Instagramming what they're doing than actually doing what they're doing that multiple authors would come up with books that criticize the digitalization of culture and the companies behind it.)

As someone who has quipped that ' if you're not on Facebook, you may not exist ,' it wasn't hard for me to buy Eggers premise: that the world has become a place in which a "TruYou” Circle account is near mandatory for using the Internet. But in this future, everything done online is mediated through that account and thus is attached to a real identity, wiping out trolls and online crime. Sound familiar? The company’s three Wise Men founders who seem to take their personality cues from Mark Zuckerberg , Eric Schmidt and Jeff Bezos (the scary one), worship transparency like a religion, creating cheap and free products that allow millions to ‘go transparent,’ a feature Holland readily adapts by hanging a camera around her neck so her millions of Circle followers can watch, comment, and ‘Smile’ at her every encounter. (Don't worry; she gets three minutes of audio silence when she uses the bathroom.)

The Circle’s lollipop-sized, $59 “SeeChange” cameras provide real time surveillance of, well, everywhere. Politicians who cry antitrust suddenly become the targets of investigations themselves based on strange and criminal things ‘discovered’ on their computers.

Eggers isn't worried about the NSA; he's terrified of the power that FaceGoogleZon has to dictate societal norms. Unlike 1984, this book doesn't open in dystopia; instead, we witness a totalitarian future take shape with the full acquiescence of a transparency-obsessed populace. The privacy hold-outs alarmed by a cultish company with slogans like ‘Privacy is Theft’ and ‘All That Happens Must Be Known’ are doomed; in Eggers world, there is no ‘opt out’ button.

Broad but shallow (like the social media Eggers lampoons), The Circle is dark comedy for this moment in history. Will its warnings persuade readers to quit Facebook? Good luck with that.

Eggers’s amusing (if not wholly accurate ) skewering of the tech industry and a society eager to sacrifice privacy for convenience takes products like Street View and practices such as crowd-sourcing criminal investigations to their logical and extreme conclusions. But like Super Sad True Love Story , Gary Shteyngart’s novel in the same vein released last year, which imagined a society in which people’s identities are constantly broadcast by smartphone-like devices, along with accumulated ratings for everything from credit scores to ‘fuckability,’ The Circle almost feels unambitious in its forecast of the future. Given what Google X is working on, these books may catch up to reality in months rather than decades.

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“The Circle,” by Dave Eggers, was released on April 22, 2014. (Courtesy/Knopf)

The protagonist is Mae Holland, an ambitious millennial who just landed her dream job at a massive technology and social media conglomerate called The Circle, which also provides the book’s title. By the time Mae arrives, The Circle has replaced Facebook, Twitter, Google and basically all other major competitors. 

Although Mae starts out in the lowly customer service, or “customer experience,” department, she quickly rises through the ranks as she sacrifices more and more of her privacy and becomes brainwashed by the organization’s cult-like philosophy. 

Eggers has clearly read and loved “1984,” because he so badly wants to be George Orwell that the parallels are almost obnoxious. Midway through the book, Mae summarizes The Circle’s views as, “Secrets are lies. Sharing is caring. Privacy is theft.” These lines are practically begging to be compared to Orwell’s classic lines, “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”  

While Orwell focused on life in a well-established, all-encompassing dictatorship, Eggers is writing about a dictatorship that is just finding its legs and establishing itself. More comparisons can be drawn between “The Circle” and “1984,” as the role of big brother in this universe is split amongst the three big shots in the circle, collectively called “the wise men.” 

Eggers is no slouch when it comes to depicting the rise of the world’s first internet dictatorship. Although Mae is a small cog in a much larger machine, glimpses of the larger operation and what it all means are seen throughout the book. Just to hammer the point home, Eggers has a character summarize why The Circle is bad at the end of the book, in case you missed all the other hints. 

But while The Circle’s dictatorship seems plausible on its face, there are a number of questions that are never asked or answered. The circle believes that all information should be public, but never is the question asked, “what about the nuclear launch codes?” 

It might seem ridiculous, but if The Circle believes that everything should be public, surely no information can be exempt. But if it is, then The Circle’s entire philosophy implodes, because it acknowledges that some information must be kept private. 

My biggest problem with “The Circle,” and the reason that it will never hold a candle to “1984,” is the main character. Mae Holland is no Winston Smith. While Winston is constantly questioning the why of things, offering a private defiance to the rule of the party, Mae basically just does what she is told and practically brainwashes herself. 

Not only does Mae not question anything the circle does after a certain point, she also willfully ignores evidence that she is creating a dystopia. Every time Mae is presented with evidence that she is hurting her family, her friends or her co-workers, she dismisses it. Mae’s brainwashing and conversion is ultimately far less interesting than Winston’s, because it feels like Mae is brainwashed for most of the book.   

By the end of “The Circle,” the lapses in logic go far beyond two plus two equaling five. Mae basically loses all sympathy throughout the second half of the book, as most readers will find it difficult to root for a mindless drone. By the end of the novel, it becomes hard to focus on Eggers’ warning about privacy and digital rights because Mae is so annoying and frustrating to listen to. 

“The Circle” could have been a “1984” for the twenty first century. Unfortunately, it is tainted by a protagonist many readers will actively dislike and questions that are never answered. There is a good warning in this book that readers should take to heart, but getting to that message can feel like more of a challenge than any book should be.

Edward Pankowski is life editor for The Daily Campus. He can be reached via email at [email protected] .

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Review: In ‘The Circle,’ Click Here if You Think You’re Being Watched

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By Glenn Kenny

• April 27, 2017

From the drab 1995 cyberthriller “The Net” onward, mainstream American movies have been hard-pressed to pertinently weigh in on the internet and its discontents. Yes, comedies are regularly larded with “old folks can’t tweet” and “these darn kids and their ‘texting’” jokes, while espionage thrillers invariably serve up hot webcam action. But few pictures attempt to take a hard look at what it all means — perhaps because the entertainment business has some resentment about its digital usurpation.

So credit “The Circle” with ambition, at least. This film, directed by James Ponsoldt, is an adaptation of Dave Eggers’s 2013 novel, and the two collaborated on the screenplay. Mr. Eggers’s book is both a satire and a cautionary tale, grafting surveillance-state mechanisms to a faux-progressive vision with pronounced cult leanings — a lot of its “join us” vibe feels passed down from Philip Kaufman’s 1978 version of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” a tale set, like the one here, in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Mr. Ponsoldt’s movie begins with its heroine, Mae (Emma Watson), trapped in a stale cubicle doing meaningless dunning labor for a meaningless company; in due time, she’s doing much more high-tech “customer experience” work at the Circle, an internet service that seems to meld all the most annoying features of Google, Facebook, Twitter, you name it. Adding to the forced-extroversion fun is a new invention, a multipurpose webcam that’s the relative size and shape of an eyeball. “Knowing is good but knowing everything is better,” crows one of the company’s principals, a Steve Jobs-like visionary named Eamon Bailey (Tom Hanks).

That maxim also appears in the novel, and it sticks in the craw, not least because any first-year graduate student in philosophy could demolish it. At what point did the Circle put a hiring freeze on anyone conversant with epistemology? Lampooning the simple-mindedness of utopian web clichés was arguably part of Mr. Eggers’s point, but much of that point is often muddled in the book. And it’s simply incoherent in the movie. The novel is at its most trenchantly funny when depicting the exhausting nature of virtual social life, and it’s in this area, too, that the movie gets its very few knowing laughs. But it’s plain, not much more than 15 minutes in, that without the story’s paranoid aspects you’re left with a conceptual framework that’s been lapped three times over by the likes of, say, the Joshua Cohen novel “Book of Numbers,” or the HBO comedy series “Silicon Valley.”

Movie Review: 'The Circle'

The times critic glenn kenny reviews “the circle.”.

“The Circle” is based on the Dave Eggers novel of the same name about a woman whose new job at a Google-like company consumes her life. In his review Glenn Kenny writes: Lampooning the simple-mindedness of utopian web-speak is a point that was often muddled in Eggers’s book, and incoherent in the movie. The film was also left with oodles and oodles of bad acting and bad dialogue. Emma Watson’s character spends way too much screen time looking concerned while looking at other screens. Ellar Coltrane can’t find any footing in the role of the Mr. Integrity ex-boyfriend. Tom Hanks lays on an idea of avuncular visionary charm, and doesn’t have much to do beyond that. And John Boyega plays a key character in the book that’s been reconfigured for the movie so that his function makes literally no sense.

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Tears Flow And Blow-Ups Abound In Juicy Trailer For ‘The Anonymous,’ A New Show From Creators Of ‘The Traitors’ And ‘The Circle’

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In this game, dishonesty is the best policy. From the producers of   The Traitors and The Circle , USA Network recently announced a new social competition series, The Anonymous , will premiere this August.

The new show is a strategic competition played in two worlds, the “real world” and “anonymous mode.” Contestants stay popular with each other face-to-face, but behind the screen, everything is fair game.

The Digital Anonymous Networking Interface, or “DANI” for short, will host 12 players to live in her domain and work side-by-side to raise a prize fund of up to $100,000. Despite their close quarters, all players will have their own private underground hideouts, where each is completely anonymous and can say anything and everything they wish behind the mask of a unique social handle, per a press release shared with DECIDER.

In their hideouts, players can provide raw, unfiltered takes on their fellow contestants. As with all good things, there’s a catch, though — players can try to guess each other’s identities.

“Each week in the competition, DANI will conduct tests where all contestants must try and match players to their handles. The player who is best at staying anonymous becomes the one with the power to eliminate their competitors,” the press release shares.

Among the 12 contestants are some names viewers may already recognize: Xavier Prather, winner of Season 23 of Big Brother ; Nina Twine, daughter of legendary Survivor contestant Sandra Diaz-Twine; and Andy King , the event producer of Fyre Festival.

In a newly released trailer, it’s clear that drama is not an “if” in this game, but a staple in it.

“Everybody says what they want to say behind a screen,” viewers hear an echoing voice say. “But face to face, things don’t add up.”

“It’s a game, ultimately someone has to go,” viewers hear one of the female contestants say.

“You don’t know who to trust ever,” says Christopher Shulstad, a 28 year old from Charlotte, North Carolina. “I just want to survive.”

“Karma is a bitch and she’s sitting right here,” says 26-year-old Lilly Jenkins from Detroit.

Meanwhile, Jack Usher, a 31-year-old Brooklynite, asks, “How do you defend yourself without outing your handle?”

One thing is made clear: contestants can’t trust anyone. Tensions will run high as players try to defend themselves and stay in the game without outing their anonymous handle.

The Anonymous premieres Monday, Aug. 19 with a three-episode event beginning at 11 p.m. ET/PT on the USA Network. Watch the full trailer in the video above.

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