The construction begs for comparison, and yet “The Circle” is no “1984.” In the future, according to Dave Eggers, one mega social-network corporation, the namesake of his new novel, has become the technological architect of daily life—arranging conversations, restocking pantries, making payments, and ranking human beings. The company’s leaders wear zip-up hoodies, of course, and enjoy surfing, yet they are known with reverent remove as the Three Wise Men. It’s serious business—so serious that even the parties are work, since attendance is monitored by your boss—and Eggers emulates this sobriety in his writing, which plods across the corporate campus resentfully. New hire Mae Holland, the novel’s protagonist, bounds forth into the communal ethos of her overlords, embracing her first assignment, answering e-mails that provide a “human experience” to small advertisers. Eggers seems bored by the task—Oh, must we spend another day at the Customer Experience desk, minutiae un-inspected, e-mails unread? He doesn’t want to be in the grind, or even playfully tease it. Disclosure is the story of “The Circle,” yet Eggers hardly tells enough.
But even without the searing wit of “1984,” the book is capable of landing on point—when it’s at its most irksome. Where “1984” has the vigilant Police Patrol and Thought Police, “The Circle” has SeeChange and Clarification. Surveillance isn’t a bad word; it’s a gift, even a human right. “I truly believe that if we have no path but the right path, the best path, then that would present a kind of ultimate and all-encompassing relief,” Wise Man Eamon Bailey, standing in for the role of Internet missionary, tells Mae. “We can cure any disease, end hunger, everything, because we won’t be dragged down by all our weaknesses, our petty secrets, our hoarding of information and knowledge. We will finally reach our full potential.”
The speech has a familiar ring: in September, 2006, Mark Zuckerberg wrote an open letter about the launch of News Feed, and the note resurfaced with this week’s unveiling of
The Zuckerberg Files, an archive of his every public utterance catalogued by Michael Zimmer and a small team at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Digital Commons. (Zuckerberg, the social wizard who likes to keep to himself, has fittingly been made all the more transparent now that his transcripts have been neatly collected for viewing.) “When I made Facebook two years ago my goal was to help people understand what was going on in their world a little better,” Zuckerberg wrote. “I wanted to create an environment where people could share whatever information they wanted, but also have control over whom they shared that information with.” He also said that a week prior, “I created a group called Free Flow of Information on the Internet, because that’s what I believe in—helping people share information with the people they want to share it with.”
Katherine Losse, Facebook employee number fifty-one and the author of “The Boy Kings”—which,
she has unsatisfactorily argued, Eggers ripped off—worked in customer support before becoming Zuckerberg’s speechwriter. By 2009, as Losse was writing e-mails on behalf of her boss, Facebook was working on adjusting its privacy settings. “We are pushing the world in the direction of making it a more open and transparent place,” she quoted Zuckerberg as saying in meetings. So, too, transparency is the guiding principle of the Circle; the company’s mantra is “
ALL THAT HAPPENS MUST BE KNOWN.” (Deletion is outlawed.) But Mae, unlike Losse, is not quite a skeptic. Rather, she’s an earnest wannabe who divulges more and more over time, with less and less apprehension. Though Mae occasionally has impure thoughts about whether to keep to herself instead of hopping into the Circle, as employees are expected to do—with feeling!—she strives to post more. In doing so, she “feels a profound sense of accomplishment and possibility.”
Last year, Diana Tamir and Jason Mitchell, of Harvard’s department of psychology, published a paper titled “Disclosing information about the self is intrinsically rewarding.” As part of their study, they asked participants to undergo fMRI scans while stating opinions. The researchers found that “humans so willingly self-disclose because doing so represents an event with intrinsic value, in the same way as with primary rewards such as food and sex.”
“The sites make the process so easy, and people see their friends sharing, and that encourages them,” Jessica Vitak, an assistant professor at the University of Maryland College of Information Studies, told me.“So it’s kind of like ‘Hey, join this party.’” In research released last week, to be presented at a conference in February, Vitak and her co-author, Jinyoung Kim, followed Facebook users as they decided what to post. They found that, through “an often-complex thought process,” users weigh the pros and cons in deciding what to share, as a way of replicating the boundaries of offline conversation. As one participant, Zara, reflected of facing her invisible audience:
If you post this, are you okay with people, everyone seeing this? Is that okay with you? I think twice about it. And if I think it’s not a big deal, then I’ll go ahead and do it. But if I’m thinking about the repercussions of it; if I can think of a few, then I won’t do it.
Among American adults on Facebook, forty-four per cent update their status at least weekly, fifty-three per cent comment on a friend’s status, and forty-eight per cent comment on a photo. Sites that tell users they’ve only filled out a limited percentage of their personal pages—Where did you go to high school? Are you in a relationship?—encourage more disclosure, no matter how seemingly mundane. “Any piece of information that people share benefits these sites, because it gives Facebook, or whatever company, a more accurate profile of the user,” Vitak said. “They say there’s no such thing as bad publicity. Well, there’s no such thing as bad information, in their mind. It’s adding information that’s valuable to them.”
That data collection, of demographic details, is only half of the equation; Facebook also tracks behaviors. On Tuesday, the company announced that it would start monitoring stats like how long your cursor hovers over something on the site, or whether your News Feed is visible on your screen at any particular moment. There’s no opportunity to pause for self-censorship here, it’s just seamless sharing, along the lines of an automatic Foursquare check-in or a Google Now update to let people know you’re running late. More passive modes of personal data-gathering turn up in “The Circle” more subtly, as in a silver bracelet Mae is given at the health clinic, where a message is engraved in steel above the cabinets: “TO HEAL WE MUST KNOW. TO KNOW WE MUST SHARE.” The band monitors her heart rate, blood pressure, caloric intake, digestive efficiency, and so on. Elsewhere, in the ChildTrack lab, biochemists are working out a way to implant a chip into children’s bones, a permanent G.P.S. (They succeed.)
Not everyone in the Eggers dystopian near-future wants to be sucked up into the social vortex. Mae’s ex-boyfriend Mercer does what he can to stay off the grid, so he can focus on his antler-chandelier business. The novel’s extremes are laid out in the dialogue between the two characters. Condensed highlights from one scene:
Mercer: “Mae, I’ve never felt more that there is some cult taking over the world.”
Mae: “You’re so paranoid.”
Mercer: “I think you think that sitting at your desk, frowning and smiling somehow makes you think you’re actually living some fascinating life. You comment on things, and that substitutes for doing them.”
The Circle is as much Google as it is Facebook (though it officially stands in for neither, as the Circle is supposed to have succeeded them). Google’s motto, “Don’t be evil,” is upended in Eggers’s telling: these companies may not have started out as the clubhouses of moustache-twirling villains, but, he writes, in a return to Orwell, “We’re closing the circle around everyone—it’s a totalitarian nightmare.” The Wall Street Journal compared “The Circle” to “The Jungle,” with the caveat that the former is “not great literature. But it is a great warning.” Other critics, including Losse, have pointed out that Eggers can’t be held up as the revelatory chronicler of an industry that he isn’t immersed in; his ominous depiction isn’t backed up by thorough inquiry. It’s a novel, though, his novel, with his anxieties. It’s the account of an observer, not a participant: maybe even the kind who comments on things, which substitutes for doing them.
Losse wrote, “We film and we post and read social media constantly in order to capture something, some exciting moment or feeling or experience that we are afraid to miss, but the things about life that we most want to capture may not be, in the end, capturable.” Whether it’s a status update or a novel, the good ones can grasp hold of their subject—if not with the completion of a circle, then at least by delivering an essential sliver of truth.
