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.
