In response to Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing on the use of mass surveillance techniques by the NSA and GCHQ, 500 leading authors including Martin Amis, Margaret Atwood, Don DeLillo and Arundhati Roy have signed an international bill of digital rights. The declaration calls for, among other freedoms, the right of humans to “remain unobserved and unmolested” in their thoughts, personal environments and communications. “This fundamental human right has been rendered null and void through abuse of technological developments by states and corporations for mass surveillance purposes.”
In The Circle, Dave Eggers’ novel about privacy and democracy in an internet age, if you aren’t transparent, what are you hiding? In a near future, an omniscient tech-company has superseded all other internet and social media titans. The Circle wants to see your past, your present and your future. What’s more, much of the personal data is freely volunteered and the march toward total transparency is embraced by populist governments and the online population alike. The company’s intentions are to further ‘human rights’ and ‘democracy’ and its language is that of overarching rationality and progress. Tracking children from birth to make sure one never goes missing again. It just makes sense, right? The purpose of The Circle the novel, rather than The Circle the company, is to show the soft-totalitarian nightmare that waits at the logical extreme of this thinking. It is an extreme metaphor about transparency as a virtue, but maybe not extreme enough.
The Circle follows the fortunes of Mae Holland, our innocent conduit on the sprawling campus of the world’s most powerful internet company. Used to the drudgery and chicken-coop work of a call centre, at first The Circle’s amenities and open plan, superficial freedom are enticing. The medical care extends to her parents (and sick father). The Circle’s tools are the best tools, the most dominant, ubiquitous and free. They begin voluntary and become mandatory. Privacy is theft. Caring is sharing. Secrets are lies. The first book is mostly made up of a leisurely and undramatic introduction to The Circle’s Californian campus with its zones named after historical eras and the odd synergy between upbeat, blue sky thinking creatives and the underlying need for rapacious expansion and intrusion, the institutionalisation of suspicion, conformity and mutualised invigilation.
The Circle is managed by ‘Three Wise Men’. Tom Stenton, ‘world-striding CEO and self-described Capitalist Prime’, Eamon Bailey, the loveable, witty face of the company and enigmatic, Ty Gospodinov, The Circle’s ‘boy-wonder visionary’ and founder who somehow manages to remain unseen and anonymous despite The Circle’s insistence on ‘community’ and ‘sharing’. Ty’s first sea-change was to simplify the internet. He has devised a ‘Unified Operating System’ which combined everything online: social media profiles, payment systems, passwords, email accounts and interests into TruYou, ‘one account, one identity, one password’. TruYou changes the internet, ‘in toto’, within a year. Overnight, all comment boards and trollers are supposedly held accountable. The Circle’s innovations are the best and TruYou is followed by SeeChange (small cameras that can be planted everywhere and stream direct to The Circle) and Demoxie – a system that makes Circle membership and direct democracy mandatory. Mae, along with numerous desperate and popularity-hungry politicians, volunteer themselves to ‘go transparent’.
There’s an amusing silliness belying a deeper point with much of this. There are a lot of good ideas, YouTru not being too far away from what would happen with blanket social log ins and the ‘closing’ of The Circle is skilfully played out. Where Eggers is strongest is critiquing existing trends through the exaggerations of his near future liberal utopia. The vapid nexus of endorsements. The elevation of self-expression as an achievement in its own right. As one Circler says, “You’re here because your opinions are valued. They’re so valued that the world needs to know them – your opinions on just about everything. Isn’t that flattering?” This is typical of the Circlers mindset. A sort of heady, feel good vision of things that sound progressive juxtaposed with an unconscious acceptance of the authoritarian mechanisms supporting it. The utopianism may be a necessary delusion, a self-anointing disconnect, while such companies urge people to share more in order to mine their personal information for commercial and now, political, purposes.
Do novelists now have to be technologists to write contemporary fiction? Of course not. But intentionally not researching your milieu or inventing more convincing fictional technologies is a failure of craft. For such a contemporary novelist, Eggers’ prose lapses into primness and old-fashioned phrasing that takes some of the edge away from The Circle’s silicon-gloss. Hats are worn ‘atop’ heads and his sex scenes are cringe worthy. The two main opponents to the closing of the Circle are both fairly unappealing, didactic, moralists who spout Eggers’ anti-modern humanism. Mae is absurdly passive. Which, presumably, is Eggers’ big idea? But it lacks narrative drama. In 1984, Winston Smith’s re-education is all the more tragic because he resisted. Mae will go along with anything and is easily persuaded by loaded arguments. There’s mockery of the herds who like to share selfies and post status updates about food. But this distance keeps Eggers away from engaging with how social media works. Young people are already leaving Facebook and too much social networking is not just alienating, it’s unpopular.
We don’t yet live in a panopticon of co-opted mass surveillance where somebody watches everything we do. The information mined by the NSA and GCHQ has been user-generated for semi-public viewing. But how much freedom should we have over our own data? How public is private? The Circle will make you think twice about how much you do share. After all, sharing is caring. Right?
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