by Thom Hamer
Rating: 2/10
Protagonist Mae starts working at The Circle, a social media company that belongs to those exponentially growing tech organizations that are so abundant in the twenty-first century. Its mission is essentially complete transparency, making available to the public eye everything, always, everywhere. Mae climbs the metaphorical ladder within the company, transforming into an unapologetic idealist in the process. An idealist, that is to say, lauding the promise of surveillance capitalism.
One interesting component of the novel is the banality, if not idealism, that is at the heart of its evil. The people working for The Circle are seldomly, if at all, malevolent. Indeed, they are not even indifferent to the effects of surveillance capitalism, but outright optimistic, bordering on the evangelical. Perhaps the pinnacle of this idealism can be found in the parental love of Eamon Bailey, one of the company’s founders. His son, suffering from cerebral palsy, is unable to see the world and immerse himself in all sorts of aesthetic experiences so commonplace in a life without disability. In order to compensate for this lack and give his son the world as demanded by the most powerful love, Bailey strives to make everything accessible with The Circle. The Pyramids of Gizeh, the Mongolian tundra, nightclubs in New York, all in the paralyzed palm of his son’s hand. Ultimately, this unconditional love leads to a totalitarian system, centering around a Proudhonian bastard of a slogan: “Privacy is theft.” The lesson is this: dystopia will not be brought about by evil, by this spiteful need to watch the world burn, but by naïve idealism.
The rationale of transparency is made excessively obvious in the parable of the fish tank, consisting of all sorts of fish, but most importantly a shark, which is genetically modified to render it utterly translucent. This is one of the central defects of the book: the writer’s presumption that his audience consists of dummies who lack the eyesight to discern the dangers of transparency. Hence, Eggers feels compelled to spell it out on every occasion. Honestly, I believe that this could have been the strength of the novel, had it been amplified by the metafictional self-awareness that we remember from Eggers’ debut, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000). This staggering genius dissecting and exposing itself is completely absent where it is most needed, amidst the obscenities of surveillance capitalism.
Furthermore, I was disappointed by the all-encompassing cynicism of the author. Having read his confessional A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, I had reason to believe that the author had moved beyond this postmodern state of resignation, toward a more affirmative, though not naïve or uncritical, disposition. Regrettably, The Circle (2013) offers little to no exploration of the possibility of opacity, no systemic alternatives to or individual escapes from dystopia.
This brings me to the final reflection upon the novel’s worth. All too often, the characters in this book seem to have fallen prey to an unlikely blindness to the problematic nature of the company’s business. Admittedly, idealism is an important ingredient in brewing submission to totalitarian ideology, but many people today maintain a more ironic stance, aware that the surveillance dynamics of social media is hazardous, all the while continuing to participate in it. By omitting a reasonable amount of awareness, Eggers turns his characters into strawpeople. In tandem with their flatness, on its own somewhat justifiable under the superficializing logic of postmodernity, the caricatural ignorance of the characters makes this book a bore.
This text was written by Thom Hamer, an existential philosopher and artist working in the United Kingdom. All rights reserved.
Thom Hamer 