If you truly “love” your friends, you won’t allow them to keep secrets, not when millions of viewers deserve the truth. This is the world of The Circle. Dave Eggers’ chilling novel explores a future where humanity has eradicated mystery, become truly transparent, and finally knows everything. Published by Vintage in 2013, The Circle proves Eggers can do just about anything because he understands human nature. He gets the glory and the ugliness, the potential for beauty and the tendency toward devastating selfishness. He gets our tendencies to yearn for the transcendent, our penchant to both deny and become god. Eggers creates a society that self-suppresses humanity’s most beautiful qualities. He explores how our obsession with the self puts us at risk of losing it.
It’s that insight that leaves us astonished and wary of our phones after completing The Circle. What began as a series of brilliant social experiments and technological innovations morphs into The Circle – a social media company whose goal is collective social omnipotence. “To heal we must know. To know we must share,” say the Circlers. Echoing 1984, obsessive monitoring systems are praised, and communication is only understood in terms of public sharing that makes Facebook look archaic.
The main character, Mae Holland, loses her identity in a gradual Faustian bargain that includes a lot of smiles, frowns, zings, and likes – split-second substitutions for real relationships. In her hobbies, relationships, and view of life she slowly replaces her spirit of adventure with a compulsion to control. In an eerily familiar world, “unsubscribe” means betrayal, secrets are lies, alone time is escapism, leaving work after hours is treason, quality time is inefficient, tardy responses are attacks, and experiencing a moment but failing to live-document it is cheating humanity of information. “All that happens must be known” is The Circle’s mantra.
Mae is eventually unable to accept uncertainty. The Circle exists to put control at the Circler’s fingertips. Enamored with her popularity and influence, Mae goes “transparent” – a new experiment that allows viewers around the world to watch participants through a 24/7 live feed and comment on the participant’s activities. It’s The Truman Show meets Facebook under the guise of building trust and honest communication. Secrets are lies, after all. Such a system, say Circlers, could provide accountability for everyone from spouses to politicians. Information will thus produce peace; the death of privacy will benefit the public.
Predictably, “transparency” creates more problems than it solves. Like the soma of Brave New World, systems and practices meant to prevent the undesirable results of human passion actually suffocate passion itself. This insatiable need to know spawns an invasive apocalypse, though most of the characters are unaware. It isn’t natural resources that are scarce in this catastrophe, but individuality. On the verge of knowing everything, society has replaced God with the self and replaced the self with something viscerally sickening.
The terrifying part of the story is that it feels real. It cannot be dismissed as implausible – like other apocalyptic scares that can be ignored until evidence for zombies arises and so on – but seems to be looming at the other end of a thousand little choices we have the power to make. Perhaps in this way, The Circle is a moral tale. Egger’s point seems to be that this apocalypse is easily achieved. The Circle’s promises to do good and the cozily mundane settings shock us when we realize they were the foundations for paranoia and devastation. Eggers recreates the exasperation we endure when friends scroll Facebook during important conversations, and the jittery frenzy of people who are offended if we don’t reply in seconds.
Despite its credibility, sometimes the construction of the world seems a bit weak. Eggers uses words like “web” and “PC” to denote a primitive past. It might feel more natural to use “iPhone,” “Instagram,” or an invention we could believe emerged before his creations like CircleSearch, and TruYou. But perhaps the generic history makes the doom even more impending because it isn’t contained in specifics. The progression – or digression – of The Circle is uncannily natural. Eggers implores us to get off of our phones at the dinner table, not because he is old-fashioned, but because he is forward-thinking.
When I finished The Circle I wanted to go out on a kayak unobserved, to think about how little I know and how that is okay. Though tempting, it is difficult to categorize the book as science fiction. The Circle isn’t an alternate world, but one we must deny every day for it to stay fictional. Eggers describes a precipice – it is our choice to jump or not.