I remember the buzz
The Circle caused when it first came out. I don’ t know why I
didn’t read it back then. I was probably busy with uni.
It’s a science
fiction novel, that hasn’t aged well. Let’s just say a lot of
what’s described there, was visionary in 2013 but is completely
normal in 2016.
It’s a book about
social networks and surveillance going extreme and even towards
totalitarianism, all in the name of security, of transparency.
Through the eyes of a cast of characters we experience the moral
conflict, or lack thereof related to this process.
Mae Holland starts
working at a up and coming San Francisco Tech Company called The
Circle. The workload is tough at first, but everything around her is
high end, innovative, promising and exciting. The Campus is
impressive. Possibilities are endless, the future big, glass and
steel. The pay and benefits are huge, there is health insurance,
after work entertainment like Ted-talk-events and parties. Even gyms,
shuttles and dormitories. No one is over 30 years old. Mae enjoys
herself, although it becomes clear that the company asks more and
more from her. In a corporate culture life-work-balance unwritten
rule, after-work activities become mandatory and so are several
suggestions the company brings on to her. She is being manipulated
and almost blackmailed but she doesn’t realize it one bit. To the
reader, however, it is painfully obvious.
Mae starts out in
Costumer Experience and in the first week on campus she meets two
men. Having separated herself from her last boyfriend for him being a
bit too much of a boring country boy she finds herself excited and
open to new connections. Each of those men represent a moral stance
or attitude to what is happening, Francis working at the Circle as
well, is the inventor of chips that are implanted in children's’
wrists in an effort to prevent abduction. He is the anxious type who
would do anything in the name of security. In an attempt to be funny
the author describes him as a premature ejaculator who asks Mae for a
rating (100 out of 100) after each intercourse. Then there is Kalden
who is much more attractive to Mae but who seems to be a bad boy, he
shows her around the data center cellars and seems to be a kind of
spy or hacker, because she’s not able to track him through the
internal network and find his socials, nor location. He seems to be
the only resistance or critic to all this. And there’s Mercer her
ex who is still in good contact with her ageing parents and who
writes her letters to warn her. He doesn’t even use the internet.
Little throwback:
Back in 2013, I was 25 years old, I owned a Laptop, but Internet at
uni never worked and I didn’t own a smartphone until about 2017 or
so and taking photos in public was always a bit shameful, to me, at
least. I am sure I would have enjoyed the novel a lot more had I read
it back then. Not only because the science fiction part still being
fiction, but also because I was a much less exigent and easy to
please reader.
The company uses
slogans much like the regime in Orwell’s 1984:
SECRETS ARE LIES
PRIVACY IS THEFT
SHARING IS CARING
As a promotion, they
make her an influencer with a camera around her neck at all times,
counting live viewer numbers and commentaries. She is “going
transparent”. The only place to talk is on the toilet where the
audio gets turned off for 3 minutes. Soon privacy, anonymity, or
off-grid living becomes a crime. Even voting the president has to
occur through the verified social media identity. Will the Circle be
completed, will Mae chose to be in it or out of it?
Now my take on this.
There’s about 200
pages (out of 500) we could simply cut out and the book would be so
much more fluid and readable. All the times someone comes in and adds
another screen to Mae’s desk asking her to also tend to the
messages coming through on those, and she just sits there and
compulsively answers client’s queries and surveys, striving to get
approval ratings of a 100 percent, and comments 23493 comments on all
the mandatory social media networks, all those pages could have been
shorter, she has 9 screens, the work and the ratings give her
dopamine, we get it. Even when Mercer and the hacker-spy try to
explain to her why they think it is bad to ”complete” the circle,
we get pages of explaining like we would explain totalitarianism to a
child, but in a boring, non creative way.
The amount of
foreshadowing or foreseeing is still scary. Today, mostly in the US
but increasingly world wide, we have normalized to have:
- AI everywhere,
controlled by private companies
- data centers
- being asked to
review and give 5 stars (even to our Job center counselors)
- health trackers on
our wrists
- Meta sunglasses
with invisible cameras
- small cameras
everywhere
- Manhunts, wars and
violent attacks that are broadcasted live (f.ex. the ICE killings in
the US)
- Influencers who
have social media as “a job” chasing likes and views and
monetizing them
The Circle is lead
by “The three Wise Men” who are idolized and would be something
like Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. Even people like me,
who is always with one foot on the anti- side of things, I find
myself addicted to daily Instagram stories and my Garmin. But still, even at 24 I
knew that a kind of mass participation democracy (only seemingly,
because in reality it’s the three wise men who hold all the power
in their hands) would lead to death penalties without due trials in
justice.
Its hard to identify
with Mae because she seems so naive and simple. I mean it’s normal
to be like this at 24, acting seemingly in the name of idealism and
democracy, but I think the novel would have been a lot more
interesting had she not been so one dimensional, or if there was a
second point of view, maybe Mae looking back, or maybe narrated in
the voice of another character.
So, in summary, I
think it’s quite badly written, I didn’t really enjoy it, but I
think the idea is good and those kind of books are an important
thought exercise.
Lastly, I feel I get disappointed quite frequently by The New York Times book recommendations. It's a bummer because I enjoy their journalism.
