The Circle
By Dave Eggers
Hamish Hamilton, 2013
491 pages
The Circle is a novel for our times. It is an indictment of Big Data and surveillance society, and also speaks to the difficulty many white-collar workers face in the digital age, in maintaining a separation between their working and private lives.
The narrative follows the career progression of Mae Holland, an impressionable recent recruit to the Circle, an internet company that aspires to be much more. The company鈥檚 founder, Ty Gospodinov, complete with hoodie and a borderline case of Asperger鈥檚, is clearly modelled on Mark Zuckerberg.
The Circle inspires nothing less than complete devotion in its employees. The vast campus offers meals, medical services, a thriving social calendar and even dorm accommodation all for free, so employees need never go home.
On a personal and a societal level, however, the costs are immense. A complex process of mind control ensures that employees submit willingly to ever-more-invasive monitoring.
As an employee of Customer Experience, Mae receives continuous feedback, in real-time, of her level of productivity. As she sits at her desk, a vast surveillance apparatus monitors her heart-rate and facial expressions.
Even her level of social engagement is aggregated and ranked, much like Facebook encourages its users to forge connections with relative strangers, in the interests of padding out their 鈥渇riends鈥 list.
As Mae merges more of her life and personality into the Circle, she becomes unrecognisable to family and friends. One tries to reach out to her: 鈥淓very time I see or hear from you, it鈥檚 through this filter. You send me links, you quote someone talking about me, you say you saw a picture of me on someone鈥檚 wall ... It鈥檚 always this third-party assault.
鈥淓ven when I鈥檓 talking to you face-to-face you鈥檙e telling me what some stranger thinks of me. It becomes like we鈥檙e never alone. Every time I see you, there鈥檚 a hundred other people in the room. You鈥檙e always looking at me through a hundred other people鈥檚 eyes.鈥
In real life too, many of us have allowed communication technologies into the very interstices of our lives, to the detriment of real understanding and connection.
A brief sexual encounter with a co-worker is recorded without Mae鈥檚 consent and cannot be deleted from the 鈥淐loud鈥. Mae鈥檚 despair invites comparison with the 鈥淪kype scandal鈥 that rocked the Australian Defence Force Academy. In that scandal, 鈥淜ate鈥, a female cadet, was unaware that her sexual encounter with another cadet was being viewed live on the internet by a group of male cadets.
Media reports often pointed to the need for 鈥渃ulture change鈥 within the male-dominated military environment, but this incident is arguably also an indictment of the technologies that make this kind of humiliation possible.
Outside the campus walls, the Circle is rapidly remaking the world in its image. It is powered by the goal of 鈥淐ompletion鈥, a point in the not-too-distant future when the Circle closes in on every last citizen. There is almost no corner of the Earth outside the reach of the Circle鈥檚 ubiquitous 鈥淪eeChange鈥 cameras and fleet of drones.
Even the most reclusive members of society can be located (and if need be, interrogated) within minutes. And, as in real life, some of the most ardent advocates of 鈥渢ransparency鈥 are able to shield their own day-to-day lives from public scrutiny.
The Circle has rightly been compared to 1984, but while the latter is an Orwellian dystopia, the former in many respects reflects the Orwellian here-and-now.
It was recently reported that British supermarket chain Tesco is installing hundreds of high-tech screens that scan the faces of shoppers as they queue at the checkout, to detect their age and sex for advertisers.
The Circle is a chilling read that invites us to look critically at the technologies which increasingly structure and mediate our engagement with the world.