Book Report #138 - The Circle

The Circle by Dave Eggers

Pulitzer Prize winner Dave Eggers takes on corporatocracy and dwindling privacy in his futuristic novel on the life of an employee at the world's greatest tech company.

The Circle is a vastly wealthy company staffed by 10,000 of the greatest minds in the world. They are overseen by The Wise Men, The Circle's three co-founders. Employees are required to participate in constant social networking amongst themselves. They work in a space that's grand, cutting-edge and filled with entertainment and fun. There's always a concert or a party, and they have the best shopping and facilities in the world on-site. They can crash in the beautiful, well-equipped dorms on campus for free. Why would they want to be anywhere other than work?

The Circlers believe they are creating a utopian society and solving all the world's problems through total transparency. They believe secrets are the problem and all information should be public. Everything about everyone should be known because that is a human right.

Through this transparency crime will be stopped. No more children will be kidnapped. Politicians will be held accountable. People will no longer suffer from doubt. It will create the perfect world.

The novel has a creepy vibe because these Circlers are dead certain about what they are doing. They live through technology, and have a tendency to reduce themselves to numbers because they are so concerned with converting phenomena into data points. They don't see the negative in being a corporation that holds all the data of the world. They don't see the danger in recording everything happening everywhere. They don't think there could be any evil intent behind this level of control.

Eventually there is a fervency in completing The Circle, even though employees are unsure of what this means. There is an effort made to stop it. But can it be? Or has The Circle gained the power it needs to see this through to the end?

General consensus: It wasn't super well-written but it was readable. The dialogue is flat. The provocative content and its implications keep spurning the reader along.

The most interesting aspect of the novel to me is that due to social networking, we no longer have to be concerned about Big Brother monitoring us. Instead of one government entity watching us, we'll all voluntarily watch each other under the heading of a corporation that has benignly won control of the government.