The following post contains spoilers for the novel The Circle by Dave Eggers.

I used to work for a tech company, somewhere over 1000 employees. I did a bit of coding, a bit of problem-solving, but most importantly a whole lot of messaging other people. There were a million different channels for a million different things. Some niche, some broad, but every one of them had new posts each morning.

When I first started, I tried to keep up with everything. It made me a nervous wreck. Then I tried to ignore everything, and I’d miss key announcements. I’ve always disliked those big messaging systems, and I’m glad I’m free of them.

Reading The Circle by Dave Eggers was like being dumped right back into the worst of it.

The book tells the story of Mae Holland, an eager-to-please young woman hired into the biggest social media company in the country, The Circle. She starts her job by constantly monitoring and posting to every little channel in The Circle’s network. The chapters when she’s posting, reading, and responding to surveys stress me out. It highlights early The Circle’s attitude towards information. Any moment not gathering or generating information is a moment wasted.

But it’s not all posts and likes. The story’s true plot is a battle for Mae’s soul. 

At work, the executives and the employees make the argument for all the good social media is bringing to the world. No more secrets. No more backroom deals. All the world a friend.

At home, Mae’s parents and ex-boyfriend strive to protect their privacy. They don’t dare put down Mae’s achievements, but there’s a quiet reticence from her family to hop on board the information bandwagon.

But The Circle isn’t about Mae, and the fight for Mae’s soul is allegorical. The true fight is ours.

The Products of The Circle

We see a dozen different products from The Circle over the course of the book. Tiny cameras planted on every street corner, centralized identity systems to tie every post to a single person, complete catalogs of a person’s history. Each product helps build The Circle’s philosophy. Any information that isn’t recorded is information wasted. We even see 1984 style slogans like “All that happens must be known”.

But it comes from a good place. One of The Circle’s employees Francis Garaventa is out there inventing new ideas with the goal of protecting children. The kind of respectable, un-debatable goal that justifies putting chips in kids’ arms.

Later in the book, we see politicians wearing body cameras for their conversations. We see The Circle ask their users all kinds of questions and use those polls to push their political influence forward. The novel asks its readers hard questions. Is it so wrong to want to live in a transparent world? Is it so wrong to want to protect everyone? Aren’t you tired of the secrets and backroom deals of today?

Of course, with each product, we see both sides. All the good it could do, and all the privacy we’d have to surrender.

The Three Wise Men

In the back half of the book, we meet The Three Wise Men. These are the founders of The Circle. One a tech genius, one a product guy, and one a salesman.

Here, the book poses its second debate. If the products of The Circle didn’t send a shiver down your spine. If you find yourself drawn in by the products, happy to surrender a little privacy for a little more safety, Dave Eggers presents the flaw in making such an exchange.

The scene is presented as a meeting of three aquatic animals. A reclusive seahorse, an ever-stretching octopus, and a shark. The Three Wise Men. The meeting ends the way it always had to end. A shark is the only thing left in the tank.

A decade after the whole world joins The Circle, who will control the company? And how long do good intentions last?

Guided Into Their Arms

Mae’s journey into the inner sanctum of The Circle is one filled with tricks and manipulations. As she embraces the philosophy of The Circle. Her relationship with her family weakens with every visit. Her ex-boyfriend’s diatribes in favor of a less connected world feel more out of place with each speech. Mae’s embrace of the “Privacy is Theft” motto enables her to post his heartfelt hand-written letter online, a place where an echo chamber of commenters reinforce her every bias.

Then Mae makes a mistake. One with mild police involvement. The Circle is benevolent, it’s understanding, it helps Mae find freedom through confession of her mistakes.

A friend of mine pointed out The Circles tricks were exactly what a cult does to ensure its members stay with them forever. Cut off family and friends, take away Mae’s identity outside The Circle, let the social network fill her with all the love she’s losing without her family.

With Mae secure in The Circle, the evil plot is revealed. It’s not enough that all Circle users surrender their data. Everyone needs to be a part of it. A friendly invitation to be enforced on every citizen.

Tragedy and Hard Decisions

Major spoilers below.

Mae embraces it all of it, and The Circle’s influence is pushed to its limit, to tragic results. We see the cost of total transparency when one character’s historical ancestry is revealed to be a long line of monsters and criminals. We see the cost of enforced participation when Mae targets her ex-boyfriend to be brought into the fold.

This is the bucket of cold water, the moment of lucidity in Mae’s data-mining fever. She’s given a chance to change course. An opportunity to tear The Circle down before it’s drawn around the entire nation.

And she doesn’t.

Because it’s not really her choice to make. The book isn’t about Mae Holland saving the world from the dangers of social media. It’s about society’s enthusiastic surrender of our freedoms, about our call to lift every rock and shine a light down every alley, disregarding any notion of ‘privacy’.

So when Mae makes the wrong choice at the end of the book, she only does it because it’s what we’ve all been doing. Each time we make a new profile, refuse to delete an old one, dig up an old mistake to tear a person down, and offer a new picture for verification, we move one closer to closing The Circle.

The battle of The Circle is far from over. There have been some real victories for privacy in the last decade. Victories that probably looked impossible when this book was written. But if you want a clear picture of the sides and of what could be at stake, The Circle makes an extremely compelling case.

My debut novel, THE HUMAN COUNTERMOVE is now available for pre-order!