Dave Eggers’s new novel The Circle follows a young woman named Mae who works for “The Circle,” a massive social-media conglomerate:
Though The Circle’s just four years old, 90 percent of all searches on earth go through it. The company owns 92 percent of all text messaging and controls 88 percent of the world’s free-mail (think Gmail) market. But the killer app that secured The Circle’s fortunes is TruYou, the online identity that is required of everyone who wants to use any of The Circle’s array of indispensable Internet tools. Give just a smidgen of personal information — your real name, which is then tied to your bank accounts, your credit cards, your email accounts, and all of your social media profiles — and “anytime you wanted to see anything, use anything, comment on anything or buy anything, it was one button, one account, everything tied together and trackable…”
Edward Docx hails the novel “a work so germane to our times that it may well come to be considered as the most on-the-money satirical commentary on the early internet age”:
There is much to admire. The pages are full of clever, plausible, unnerving ideas that I suspect are being developed right now. “SeeChange” is one such: millions of cheap, lollipop-sized “everything-proof” high-resolution cameras with a two-year battery life that can be taped up anywhere so that the video streams can be accessed by all. “This is the ultimate transparency. No filter. See everything. Always.”
Jason Diamond finds the novel “very real, and very necessary.” Lydia Kiesling remarks that “a lot of it feels farcical, but when you invoke 1984, the implications are deadly serious”:
Orwell wrote 1984 from a knowledgeable position, as a person who had invested himself corporeally in the political system that he was later moved to skewer in his writing. Eggers, meanwhile, has been very open about his position vis–à–vis the facts of tech culture, a position that might be stated as IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. There is some merit to the idea that the public perceptions of a company, particularly the storied, insular, tech giants, are as good as reality, but we wonder if Eggers is the right person to explain the specifics of why technology is scary. …
There’s are noble impulses behind this novel–to prophesy, to warn, and to entertain–and it basically delivers on these fronts. But The Circle boldly asks us to reckon it alongside one or more of the most, to use the odious word, impactful, novels of the 20th century, and it’s not bold enough to carry that weight. It seems to hedge its bets, so that it is just a little bit sad, a little bit funny, a little bit scary, and a little bit thin. A little bit beta, if you will.
Hillary Kelly fails to see the appeal of The Circle, writing, “Paging George Orwell: Someone’s gone and made a mockery of your masterpiece”:
The premise is terrifying; the execution is absurd. Eggers’s vision is so clouded by righteousness that he fails to provide his characters with any sense of humanity; instead, he’s created cardboard cutouts representative of Our Scary Internet Future. Mae, The Circle’s protagonist, is mealymouthed and naive. Other Circle employees wander about the page in raptures, gleeful about their Elysian employment. One has a hard time imagining why they’d be hired in the first place—their vision and intelligence is sorely limited. And the more knowledge-hungry The Circle grows, and the more the company exposes its dastardly plans, the more comical the novel feels.
But the most galling aspect of Eggers’s unsubtle pen is the disservice it does to the very real threat that digital conglomerates pose. Eggers’s monster is a lumbering Godzilla, easily seen for miles. The real invasions to our privacy are small, creeping, and slipped into our bloodstreams with a series of small pinpricks.
Recent Dish on the book here.
The Dish 