The Circle - Dave Eggers

An excerpt of this was edited for the NYT about 3 weeks ago and discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6461893

I picked up the book and read it today. In toto, this book is a satire and should be read as hyperbole. The precise behavior is not a simulation, nor, in my opinion, is it a reliable forecast. It is a very thought-provoking read, I would judge.

However, several themes are clear: the Circle company is a parody of the Amazon/Google/Apple/Facebook style culture. I draw a linkage of the Circle uptopian mindset back to the Cyberia culture described in the early 90s. Succinctly described, it is the belief in technology as the solution to social problems; sufficiently advanced technology will usher in the (Rapture | Singularity | Kingdom of Heaven | Ultimate Rain of Marinara Sauce).

Another key theme is the lack of self-reflection and philosophy of the protagonist: she is not reflective upon consequences. A simple idealism allows her to be led by the nose to the end-game; this is something one sees time and again in people, and not a particularly new theme.

The protagonist is described in a way that is very similar to the "Millenial" generation's mindset. This leads to a question: is the current zeitgeist particularly malleable in certain kinds of ways (E.g., green, social actions, tweet-for-justice, etc). It's something I hadn't thought about before. Certainly the theme for most marketing in my region is "Do Good by (buying|using product X), Feel Good about Doing Good This Way". A sort of moral marketing, if you will.

Another theme, which perhaps is the most obvious to Hacker News readers, is the corrosive effect of mass surveillance. I won't spare much time to address it - that's an old story here. But as part of that theme, The Circle asks the quasi-provocative question, "Which data should be shared?", which is something that is not often publically discussed by startups looking to get profitability. Aggregation of quantity heaped on quantity has quality all of its own, as Google has found to its profit with machine learning algorithms. Sending heaps of our personal data out to different servers may well prove to have tradeoffs that are problematic as startups with our data are aquired and datawarehouses of our personal data are formed.

Part of the philosophical question posed by Eggers is the ethics of secrecy and privacy. Do we have a right to secrecy? Is it most ethical to ensure total knowledge of all things? Is it selfish to have unshared experiences? These are questions being discussed at length today in one form or another.

I found that one of the more remarkable and believable characterizations of the protagonist was the forming groupthink based upon the hypothetical Circle Corporations Twitter clone tied to the "real world" identities. Dissent was quickly suppressed in the adulation of the Circle Corp policies. This isn't entirely realistic, but group think is a known problem on many online forums.

The more literary critic would likely find Eggers writing to be heavy handed, the romantic interests not particularly plausible, and the scene transitions jarring. Regardless, I did not read The Circle for its literary merits, but rather for Eggers' critiques of the society we live in. I found the Circle satisfactory, and a good reaction to the utopian discussions we find frequently bandied about in our tech bubble.