SECRETS ARE LIES
SHARING IS CARING
PRIVACY IS THEFT
Whether it's the Panopticon in Brave New World or Big Brother in 1984, for decades visionary authors have been warning that the totalitarian dystopia of the future will involve some massive surveillance system, put in place to monitor the compliance of citizens. While Huxley and Orwell imagined a future where this loss of privacy is imposed by a world government, here in the present, we've been sleepwalking towards this outcome, willingly bringing the spy equipment into our own homes, thinking that our consumer choices are an expression of democratic preference. Not only do we use social media to constantly tell each other where we are, what we're doing, what we're eating, but we accept that the government is probably monitoring our phone calls and internet use and we all understand that strangers can hack into our computers and watch us through our own webcams. Now we're warned that new technology like Samsung Smart TVs and the Xbox One Kinect are constantly watching and listening to us in our own living rooms and sending the data to "third parties" to "improve our experience", but most consumers shrug and say, "If I'm not doing anything wrong, why should I care?". Maybe we're happy to have a monitoring device in our cars to reduce insurance rates, but shouldn't we be alarmed that everyone out there can track our location, the location of our children, through the pictures we post online? Shouldn't we care when some sicko can hack into a baby monitor and interact with our sleeping infants? This is the world we live in already, and the more people shrug and willingly give away their rights to privacy, the quicker we're ushering in the dystopia, and we're doing it with smiley face emoticons.
All this to say, the time is ripe for the next Huxley or Orwell -- someone who can connect the dots out into the future and ring the alarm bells -- and that's more or less what Dave Eggers has attempted with The Circle. "The Circle" itself is a Google-type internet company in Silicon Valley: a high tech campus with bright young people who energetically improve the online experience and enjoy job perks like free chef-cooked meals, celebrity concerts, and daily social events meant to strengthen their feeling of community. The Circle started with the concept of TruYou -- a single, verifiable internet presence for every person that overnight eliminated hacking, scams, and trolling -- and the initial concept is so simple and desirable that the company bought out or made irrelevant every other social medium/marketing tool/search engine; to be on the internet now pretty much required a TruYou account. The book begins with Mae Holland's first day at The Circle, and as a recent college grad, she is understandably excited to be at the nexus of so much enthusiasm and urgency.
I wish I knew if there's a term for the structure of this book (it's not quite Socratic Dialogue, not quite Straw Man Argument): Mae is the wide-eyed neophyte who initially embraces what she sees. With persistent and creeping incrementalism, she is asked to give up just a bit more freedom and a bit more privacy as time goes along, and although she makes very feeble attempts to explain why she might resist these losses, her bosses give long and pedantic speeches about the common good that break down her resistance. There is a logical progression to how Mae -- and therefore all of society -- might willingly submit to this benevolent totalitarianism, but she's such a weak character that I don't accept her as a stand-in for myself, let alone a stand-in for the billions of other people on Earth who might follow her lead, even when it's not a condition of their jobs.
When I read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, I was absolutely gobsmacked by its humour, honesty, inventiveness -- I considered Eggers a huge new voice. And since then, I haven't been very impressed with anything he's written (except maybe for What is the What, but that's another memoir-type project). And in The Circle, with cartoonish characters and unbelievable plot points, cringeworthy-clichéd phrases like "her words stabbed the air between them", and heavy-handed symbolism like a blind and insatiable shark (which, in case the reader misses it, has its symbolism explained near the end by a character), the writing just feels so amateurish. As I began with, I agree that there should be a serious examination of where our society is headed, but The Circle is not that book.
Here's Mae's argument in favour of surrendering privacy for online "friendship":
Most people would trade everything they know, everyone they know -- they'd trade it all to know they've been seen, and acknowledged, that they might even be remembered. We all know the world is too big for us to be significant. So all we have is the hope of being seen, or heard, even for a moment.And the argument against, as voiced by Mae's former boyfriend Mercer; a Ron Swanson-type who makes chandeliers out of antlers and refuses to join The Circle:
Listen, twenty years ago, it wasn’t so cool to have a calculator watch, right? And spending all day inside playing with your calculator watch sent a clear message that you weren’t doing so well socially. And judgments like ‘like’ and ‘dislike’ and ‘smiles’ and ‘frowns’ were limited to junior high. Someone would write a note and it would say, ‘Do you like unicorns and stickers?’ and you’d say, ‘Yeah, I like unicorns and stickers! Smile!’ That kind of thing. But now it’s not just junior high kids who do it, it’s everyone, and it seems to me sometimes I’ve entered some inverted zone, some mirror world where the dorkiest shit in the world is completely dominant. The world has dorkified itself."We all want to be seen" vs "That's just dorky" is the level of debate here. The Circle didn't work for me on so many levels, so to use Eggers' own rating system, this experience wasn't a "smile" or a "frown", just "meh".
And in a nice (if incredibly annoying) bit of synchronicity, just this week goodreads starting putting those cookie-tracked google ads on their site. There's nothing I hate more than visiting a site and then having an ad for it appear in the corner of every other page I'm on. I understand that goodreads (especially after being acquired by amazon) is a business -- not some purely literary nirvana floating in the ether, untouched by the crass and ugly forces of profiteering -- but these new ad spaces are distracting and an effrontery to me. Frown.
