Within the first few week’s of Mae’s arrival at the company, a local congresswoman decides to use the Circle’s technologies to go transparent. Her own self merges with the technology that monitors her, and what happens is the Silicon Valley version of 1984 or Brave New World or A Clockwork Orange or any other story where the human race loses what it gained in that first lesson of the Bible — its choice. The Circle’s dystopian take on the transparency movement is refreshing. Summary. The Circle is led by the Three Wise Men, of whom the original is a college dropout named Ty. Due to these same qualities, however, The Circle succeeds as commentary on the era of big data and transparency. He would solve the problems of homelessness, global poverty; even, he said, “Egypt.” And in his solutions lay massive profit. We must, so the argument goes, not fear conditioning. The Circle’s users condition one another. There were over ten thousand employees on this, the main campus, but the Circle had o }ces all over the globe, and was hiring hundreds of gifted young minds every week. �=Fk����Q{������+A{k�\�c,�wp�. Eggers lives in Northern California, witnessed the dot-com era and the evolution of the tech boom, and needed to write this book. Getting to “No”: Snowball’s Chance, Animal Farm, and “Exemplary Truth”, The Scorched Earth Solution: Solitary Confinement in America, The Networked Frontier: Kim Stanley Robinson and Our Connected Universe, Subverting Our Expectations: The State of the Short Story, The Thrills of Miscellany: David Foster Wallace, Nicholson Baker, and Supplemental Work. Everyone sees with the eyes of God, aided by technology and informed by vast stores of knowledge disseminated through social networks. Head to Silicon Valley and tour its incubators, accelerators, hubs. From the time she wakes up to the time she goes to bed, she’ll wear a camera around her neck so that constituents can join any closed-door meeting, witness every signature, listen in on every phone call. Mae is fresh and naive, hired by the Circle thanks to her best friend from college, Annie, who has risen to the envied position of sleepless executive. The unification and standardization of the world through tech have become a big problem, and maybe the only solution is what is wrong in the first place: the endless messiness of the human race. This didn’t matter. In it, Burgess refers to the psychologist B.F. Skinner, whose belief in the importance of improving human behavior plays out in A Clockwork Orange: What [Professor Skinner] wants to see is more positive reinforcements. Mae has a boyfriend from her past, Mercer, her main antagonist. Imagine data sorted; knowledge accessible to all; each human being transparent to any other. Eggers struggles here and there to balance psychological plausibility with the outlandishness of his satirical flourishes; he sometimes needs his characters to behave in ways that seem – certainly when you put the book down – to be wholly implausible. Jonathan Franzen published an essay in The Guardian that uses the work of Austrian satirist Karl Kraus to rant about the increasingly dystopian prospects of a connected world. Reading is valued by the tech innovators and thought leaders I’ve met. But for those of us who remain hopeful about our hopelessness, there is good news: now, more than ever, it pays to be an optimist among the depressives. Twitter was credited for the Arab Spring, which didn’t turn out to be the new, pure democratic movement possible only through social media. Its subject — big data collection, surveillance, transparency — is in the ether and on our collective mind these days. It becomes standardized and boring just as Mae, absorbing the ethics of her company, goes from bland to blander to brainwashed.
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