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The Circle Paperback – April 22, 2014

3.8 3.8 out of 5 stars 25,496 ratings

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INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • A bestselling dystopian novel that tackles surveillance, privacy and the frightening intrusions of technology in our lives—a “compulsively readable parable for the 21st century” (Vanity Fair).

When Mae Holland is hired to work for the Circle, the world’s most powerful internet company, she feels she’s been given the opportunity of a lifetime. The Circle, run out of a sprawling California campus, links users’ personal emails, social media, banking, and purchasing with their universal operating system, resulting in one online identity and a new age of civility and transparency.

As Mae tours the open-plan office spaces, the towering glass dining facilities, the cozy dorms for those who spend nights at work, she is thrilled with the company’s modernity and activity. There are parties that last through the night, there are famous musicians playing on the lawn, there are athletic activities and clubs and brunches, and even an aquarium of rare fish retrieved from the Marianas Trench by the CEO.

Mae can’t believe her luck, her great fortune to work for the most influential company in the world—even as life beyond the campus grows distant, even as a strange encounter with a colleague leaves her shaken, even as her role at the Circle becomes increasingly public.

What begins as the captivating story of one woman’s ambition and idealism soon becomes a heart-racing novel of suspense, raising questions about memory, history, privacy, democracy, and the limits of human knowledge.
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“A vivid, roaring dissent to the companies that have coaxed us to disgorge every thought and action onto the Web . . . Carries the potential to change how the world views its addicted, compliant thrall to all things digital. If you work in Silicon Valley, or just care about what goes on there, you need to pay attention.”
The Wall Street Journal

“Fascinating . . . Eggers appears to run on pure adrenaline, and has as many ideas pouring out of him as the entrepreneurs pitching their inventions in
The Circle . . . [A] novel of ideas . . . about the social construction and deconstruction of privacy, and about the increasing corporate ownership of privacy, and about the effects such ownership may have on the nature of Western democracy . . . Like Melville’s Pequod and Stephen King’s Overlook Hotel, the Circle is a combination of physical container, financial system, spiritual state, and dramatis personae, intended to represent America, or at least a powerful segment of it . . . The Circlers’ social etiquette is as finely calibrated as anything in Jane Austen . . . Eggers treats his material with admirable inventiveness and gusto . . . the language ripples and morphs . . . It’s an entertainment, but a challenging one.” 
—Margaret Atwood,
The New York Review of Books

“A parable about the perils of life in a digital age in which our personal data is increasingly collected, sifted and monetized, an age of surveillance and Big Data, in which privacy is obsolete, and Maoist collectivism is the order of the day. Using his fluent prose and instinctive storytelling gifts, Mr. Eggers does a nimble, and sometimes very funny, job of sending up technophiles’ naïveté, self-interest and misguided idealism. As the artist and computer scientist Jaron Lanier has done in several groundbreaking nonfiction books, Mr. Eggers reminds us how digital utopianism can lead to the datafication of our daily lives, how a belief in the wisdom of the crowd can lead to mob rule, how the embrace of ‘the hive mind’ can lead to a diminution of the individual. The adventures of Mr. Eggers’s heroine, Mae Holland, an ambitious new hire at the company, provide an object lesson in the dangers of drinking the Silicon Valley Kool-Aid and becoming a full-time digital ninja . . . Never less than entertaining . . . Eggers is such an engaging, tactile writer that the reader happily follows him wherever he’s going . . . A fun and inventive read.”
—Michiko Kakutani,
The New York Times

“The particular charm and power of Eggers’s book . . . could be described as ‘topical’ or ‘timely,’ though those pedestrian words do not nearly capture its imaginative vision . . . Simply a great story, with a fascinating protagonist, sharply drawn supporting characters and an exciting, unpredictable plot . . . As scary as the story’s implications will be to some readers, the reading experience is pure pleasure.”
The New York Times Magazine

“Eggers is a literary polymath . . .
The Circle is funny in its skewering of Internet culture. Holland obsessively tallies the reach of her Twitter-like Zings and enthuses about a benefit for needy children that raises not money but 2.3 million ‘smiles’ (think Facebook ‘likes’). The Circle's buildings are named for epochs, so at her first party Holland gets her wine from the Industrial Revolution . . . The ideas behind "The Circle" are compelling and deeply contemporary. Holland is an everywoman, a twentysomething believer in Internet culture untroubled by the massive centralization and monetization of information, ubiquitous video surveillance and corporate invasions of privacy.  Compare that to A Hologram for the King, in which a middle-aged man thoughtfully but powerlessly observes America's economic decline, realizing that his efforts to participate in globalization led to his own obsolescence. The two books together are saying something foreboding about America's place in the world: We have traded making physical things for a glossy, meaningless online culture that leaves us vulnerable to those who see that information — in the form of data, video feeds, or our own consumer desires — is power.”
Los Angeles Times

“You can’t really write a
1984 for our times, because 1984 is still the 1984 of our times. But one could think of Dave Eggers’ . . . new novel The Circle as a timely and potent appendix to it. The crux of The Circle is that Big Brother is still haunting us, but in an incarnation that’s both more genial and more insidious. We have met Big Brother, and he is us . . . In The Circle Eggers has set his style and pace to technothriller: the writing is brisk and spare and efficient . . . When I finished The Circle I felt a heightened awareness of social media and the way it’s remaking our world into a living hell of constant and universal mutual observation.”
Time
 
“You may find yourself so engrossed in Dave Eggers's futuristic novel,
The Circle, that you forget about Facebook entirely. And by the last pages, you may think twice before logging on again.”
O, The Oprah Magazine

“Bravely, audaciously . . . [Eggers] takes on the online world in
The Circle, a provocative novel named for the world’s most powerful Internet firm. Set in the not-so-distant future, the novel is part satire, part corporate thriller. But mostly it’s a cautionary tale about threats to privacy, freedom and democracy.”
USA Today

“Page-turning. . . . The social message of the novel is clear, but Eggers expertly weaves it into an elegantly told, compulsively readable parable for the 21st century. . . . What may be the most haunting discovery about
The Circle, however,is readers’ recognition that they share the same technology-driven mentality that brings the novel’s characters to the brink of dysfunction. We too want to know everything by watching, monitoring, commenting, and interacting, and the force of Eggers’s richly allusive prose lies in his ability to expose the potential hazards of that impulse.”
Vanity Fair

“In this taut, claustrophobic corporate thriller, Eggers comes down hard on the culture of digital over-sharing, creating a very-near-future dystopia in which all that is not forbidden is required. . . . Eggers has a keen eye for context, and the great strength of
The Circle lies in its observations about the way instant, asynchronous communication has damaged our personal relationships. . . . A speculative morality tale in the vein of George Orwell . . . We go on using the social media platforms that have been used against us; we post geo-tagged photos that could lead potential criminals straight to our private homes and our children's preschools, and we do all of this with full knowledge of the possible consequences. We have closed our eyes and given our consent. Everyone else is doing it. In the digital age, it is better to be unsafe than to be left out.”
San Francisco Chronicle

“Eggers surveys our privacy-annihilating, social media-infested world, recoils in horror at the inevitable consequences, and unleashes a primal scream:
Enough! Stop! Stop liking and sharing and tweeting and texting! Stop it all! Readers who share Eggers’ concerns about the Facebook-opticon, the surveillance state that leaves no shred of daily life unscrutinized, this superficial, hollow sense of community spaned by digital connectivity will flock to stand before this brave rallying flag. . . . The world that the Circle is delivering to the online masses is very much our world. This isn’t science fiction . . . We need a legion of Dave Eggers in the world today, calling out the dangers.”
Salon

“Eggers’s works pulse with life . . .
The Circle pushes his art even further . . . Eggers’s work, part dark comedy, part sobering glimpse into the near-future, stuns for two reasons: Mae’s humanity and compassion are apparent even as she helps erode our civil liberties; and two, it doesn’t feel like science fiction. It feels like the next horrific—but very plausible—small step for mankind.”
Time Out New York, five stars
 
“You can’t read
The Circle, Dave Eggers’s novel about a powerful internet company, and not recognize the book’s dystopian vision in our own obsessions with sharing and social media. The novel, set in the near future, is an engaging mix of social satire and cautionary tale . . . captures the perils of the internet — and, in particular, the over-the-top utopianism sometimes espoused by technology executives — more than any other novel of recent years . . . both hilarious and foreboding.”
The New Jersey Star-Ledger

“Ripped from recent headlines about privacy, technology and social media . . . A book that begins as a lighthearted cautionary tale grows into a claustrophobic portrait of relentless effort to achieve the culmination of ‘closing the Circle.’”
CNN

“Entertaining . . . A sense of horror finally arrives near the end of the book, coming . . . through the power of Eggers’s writing . . . The final scene is chilling.”
The New York Times Book Review

“Gripping . . . Set in the not-too-distant future, Eggers' story takes us inside a shiny-happy California-based media corporation called the Circle . . . a compelling exploration of how individuals excitedly opt into a corporately-controlled culture of complete surveillance billed as a ‘community,’ transforming ‘privacy’ into a quaint notion possessed only by the nostalgic . . .
The Circle's brilliance lies in convincingly taking us inside an extreme vision of what is nascent in the 21st century cyber-utopianism we all endorse, showing us how the visions of digital media moguls are championed and propagated by an overly-willing society . . . Eggers creates for us a surprisingly contemporary world that seems strangely familiar to regular social media users — a world into which all of us excitedly join without much prompting.”
PolicyMic

“What fuels this novel is its thunderbolt of an idea: digital culture is suffocating us and, what’s more, is doing so under the duplicitous guise of widespread human beneficence . . . This is a novel about the silence inside your head . . . a powerful argument for turning off your iPhone and going for a walk.”
Newsweek
 
“Dave Eggers is fast becoming one of our fiercest and most compelling writers on the dark side of technology. [The Circle] is a gripping and highly unsettling read.”
The Sunday Times (UK)

“It has taken Eggers the 13 years since his breakout memoir to give us a book that truly matched
A Heartbreaking Work’s gravitas — but with The Circle, Eggers has given us everything . . . when you put down the book and go to check your email, you might just realize that we are living the fiction . . . [The Circle] takes place before a fall that we might really be approaching, and it’s this compelling sense of impending, unpredictable doom that makes this work of fiction feel very real, and very necessary.”
Flavorwire

“Dave Eggers’ real heartbreaking work of staggering genius might be this one.
The Circle is today’s version of dystopian classics such as George Orwell’s 1984 or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Eggers’ novel is terrifying, funny, real, suspenseful and visionary . . . Always keeping the focus on Mae, Eggers brings up all the Big Brother issues of our time: privacy, democracy, memory, history and the quality of how we’re connecting.”
St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Eggers has updated Orwell’s vision by inverting it. In
1984, the members of the Party are watched by Big Brother; in The Circle, it is the people who watch the government . . . Perhaps our need for privacy will erode as technology continues to develop and the world continues to change. Or perhaps humans will still occasionally cling to the need for privacy simply because it is an essential quality of being ‘human.’ Either way, the fact that these questions linger long after finishing this book is a testament to the multiple layers and potential lasting impact of The Circle.”
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“The Circle is a deft modern synthesis of Swiftian wit with Orwellian prognostication . . . a work so germane to our times that it may well come to be considered as the most on-the-money satirical commentary on the early internet age . . .  The pages are full of clever, plausible, unnerving ideas that I suspect are being developed right now . . . The book is also very funny . . . A prescient, important and enjoyable book, and what I love most about The Circle is that it is telling us so much about the impact of the computer age on human beings in the only form that can do so with the requisite wit, interiority and profundity: the novel.”
The Guardian (UK)

“Eggers’s past work has tackled sociopolitical issues such as the justice system, Sudanese refugees, and the plight of public school educators.
The Circle gives him a new soapbox, and if he can convince a mass audience that Google is even a little bit evil, he’ll have produced some of the most subversive commercial fiction ever written. The novel is a pro-privacy, antitech manifesto masquerading as a Dan Brown thriller. It’s Evgeny Morozov dressed in John Grisham’s clothing.”
Bloomberg Businessweek

“Step away from whatever tweet you’re composing for your 484 followers. Don’t click “like” on that Facebook photo of a friend’s kids. Dave Eggers’ chilling and enormously absorbing new novel
The Circle, about encroaching tentacles of the world’s most powerful Internet company, demands your thoughtful and committed attention.”
Entertainment Weekly

“A fast-moving conspiracy potboiler . . . a zippy, pulpy read that puts pressing issues into sharp relief.”
Slate

The Circle is Brave New World for our brave new world . . . Now that we all live and move and have our being in the panopticon, Eggers’s novel may be just fast enough, witty enough and troubling enough to make us glance away from our twerking Vines and consider how life has been reshaped by a handful of clever marketers . . . There may come a day when we can look back at this novel with incredulity, but for now, the mirror it holds up is too chilling to LOL.”
The Washington Post

The Circle may be . . . more fable than novel, but it has all that in common with Brave New World, Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Fahrenheit 451. One hopes that it will enjoy pride of place with those books in classrooms, as a reminder that surveillance and transparency were not always judged merely by what they might do for us.”
Daily Beast

“Eggers's writing is so fluent, his ventriloquism of tech-world dialect so light, his denouement so enjoyably inevitable"
The Observer

The Circle is intelligent and quirky, engaged and affecting and confirms Eggers’ place as one of the most interesting novelists currently writing.”
The Scotsman

“Dave Eggers takes the growing inescapabilty of social media and personal technology to clever and chilling places in his new novel.”
Associated Press

“Game-changing . . . a fast-paced and suspenseful story . . . Eggers has produced
the fable for our wired times.”
AARP.org
 
“Most of us imagine totalitarianism as something imposed upon us—but what if we’re complicit in our own oppression? That’s the scenario in Eggers’ ambitious, terrifying, and eerily plausible new novel . . . Brave and important and will draw comparisons to
Brave New World and 1984. Eggers brilliantly depicts the Internet binges, torrents of information, and endless loops of feedback that increasingly characterize modern life. But perhaps most chilling of all is his notion that our ultimate undoing could be something so petty as our desperate desire for affirmation.”
Booklist (Starred)
 
“A stunning work of terrifying plausibility, a cautionary tale of subversive power in the digital age suavely packaged as a Silicon Valley social satire. Set in the near future, it examines the inner workings of the Circle, an internet company that is both spiritual and literal successor to Facebook, Google, Twitter and more, as seen through the eyes of Mae Holland, a new hire who starts in customer service . . . Eggers presents a Swiftian scenario so absurd in its logic and compelling in its motives . . . sneaking up on the reader before delivering its warnings of the future, a worthy and entertaining read.”
Publishers Weekly (Starred)
 

About the Author

DAVE EGGERS grew up near Chicago and graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the founder of McSweeney’s, an independent publishing house in San Francisco that produces books, a quarterly journal of new writing (McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern), and a monthly magazine, The Believer. McSweeney’s publishes Voice of Witness, a nonprofit book series that uses oral history to illuminate human rights crises around the world. In 2002, he cofounded 826 Valencia, a nonprofit youth writing and tutoring center in San Francisco’s Mission District. Sister centers have since opened in seven other American cities under the umbrella of 826 National, and like-minded centers have opened in Dublin, London, Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Birmingham, Alabama, among other locations. His work has been nominated for the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and has won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, France’s Prix Médicis,Germany’s Albatross Prize, the National Magazine Award, and the American Book Award. Eggers lives in Northern California with his family.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage; First Edition (April 22, 2014)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 497 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0345807294
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0345807298
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.19 x 0.86 x 7.96 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    3.8 3.8 out of 5 stars 25,496 ratings

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Dave Eggers
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Dave Eggers is the author of ten books, including most recently Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?, The Circle and A Hologram for the King, which was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Award. He is the founder of McSweeney’s, an independent publishing company based in San Francisco that produces books, a quarterly journal of new writing (McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern), and a monthly magazine, The Believer. McSweeney’s also publishes Voice of Witness, a nonprofit book series that uses oral history to illuminate human rights crises around the world. Eggers is the co-founder of 826 National, a network of eight tutoring centers around the country and ScholarMatch, a nonprofit organization that connects students with resources, schools and donors to make college possible.

Customer reviews

3.8 out of 5 stars
25,496 global ratings

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Customers say

Customers find the book engaging and thought-provoking. They find the topic interesting and philosophical. However, some readers feel the characters are not well-developed and the protagonist is annoying or frustrating. There are mixed opinions on the plot quality - some find it thrilling and far-fetched while others say it's far-fetched but with a certain ring of truth. The writing quality is also praised as well-written and readable, while others describe it as poorly written and barely decipherable. Opinions differ on the scariness level, with some finding it disturbing and realistic, while others think it's unrealistic and unsettling.

AI-generated from the text of customer reviews

1,412 customers mention "Readability"1,082 positive330 negative

Customers find the book engaging and well-written. They say it's a page-turner that keeps their interest. The story delivers a powerful message about moral majority and herd mentality. Readers describe the protagonist as remarkable and the writing as superb.

"...This is a superbly written story which I found both realistic and chilling...." Read more

"...], and What is the What were all excellent personal stories, [[ASIN:B00E31Z50M A Hologram for the King 1st (first) Edition by..." Read more

"...When I began reading it, I thought it would easily be the best new book I had read this year. As it turns out, it was good . . ...." Read more

"...The Circle is fast paced which makes it an enjoyable read, I read this book in three days because it was so interesting...." Read more

848 customers mention "Thought provoking"789 positive59 negative

Customers find the book insightful and gripping. They appreciate the philosophical themes and grand ideas. The satire is topical and refreshing to read about utopia from an alternative perspective. Readers praise the well-written story with its clear message and depiction of a company and world.

"...technologies which exist today, combined with good intentions, boundless ambition, and fuzzy thinking...." Read more

"...It is teeming with young, attractive, brilliant people with grand ideas and just enough nerdiness and ambition to pull them off...." Read more

"...SoulSearch can reveal the graphic and gory genealogy of anyone and locate anyone in a matter of minutes...." Read more

"...Hot? This book has some interesting points to make about our technology-obsessed culture and how the ubiquitousness of that culture..." Read more

758 customers mention "Plot quality"306 positive452 negative

Customers have mixed opinions about the plot. Some find it thrilling and compelling, with many cliffhangers that keep them reading. Others feel the story is far-fetched, predictable, and disturbing.

"...extension of everything that is going on today, and that direction is wholly frightening to me...." Read more

"...There were many cliffhangers that made me want to continue my reading...." Read more

"...The plot is not incredibly creative. And it is certainly predictable. But, overall, the book is fun reading." Read more

"...This is a welcome addition to the canon of dystopian literature. "Mae looked at the time...." Read more

593 customers mention "Writing quality"316 positive277 negative

Customers have mixed opinions about the writing quality. Some find it well-written and engaging with strong word choices. They appreciate the skillful and insightful writing, and the novel flows well. Others feel that the narration is barely decipherable and the writing lacks polish.

"...This is THE place to work. It is teeming with young, attractive, brilliant people with grand ideas and just enough nerdiness and ambition to pull..." Read more

"...That's just sloppy writing. Bottom line: good ideas, poor execution...." Read more

"...Even the writing is light and breezy, like the spacious atriums at The Circle, deflecting the underlying cult mentality...." Read more

"...The main character, May, is shallow and not introspective...." Read more

436 customers mention "Scariness level"247 positive189 negative

Customers have different views on the book's scariness level. Some find it interesting and thought-provoking, with a realistic plot. Others describe it as terrifying, creepy, and anxiety-producing.

"...This is a superbly written story which I found both realistic and chilling...." Read more

"..."It was a bizarre creature, ghostlike, vaguely menacing and never still, but no one who stood before it could look away...." Read more

"...gripping topic, and Eggers does alert you to that idea, and makes it delightfully creepy and unsettling, but while reading this book I wasn't so..." Read more

"...The novel is entertaining, often funny, sometimes deeply disturbing...." Read more

309 customers mention "Pacing"142 positive167 negative

Customers have mixed opinions about the pacing of the book. Some find it fast-paced and a quick read, while others feel the plot builds slowly and gets tedious at times.

"...scenes serve in only one way to advance the story: women demand humiliation and domination...." Read more

"...of this activity contributes to her participation rank, computed and displayed in real time...." Read more

"...But the novel is painfully slow and dull, which is hard to believe given that the concept of the Information Age spawning a new Orwellian..." Read more

"...Overall, I absolutely loved this book. The Circle is fast paced which makes it an enjoyable read, I read this book in three days because it was so..." Read more

155 customers mention "Detail"51 positive104 negative

Customers have differing opinions about the book's detail. Some find it clear, with straightforward descriptions and sophisticated media. Others feel the characters lack depth and are unrealistic. The narrative is described as patient and methodical.

"...The main character, May, is shallow and not introspective...." Read more

"...to be shallow, but its easy-to-read, page-turner style masks its startling depth and the seriousness of the issues it raises, which go beyond..." Read more

"...He is a man who has failed to plumb his own depths; this can only mean that whatever he has ignored will continue to plague his literary efforts...." Read more

"...In short, Mae seems a bit gullible and perhaps unbelievable as a character...." Read more

420 customers mention "Character development"91 positive329 negative

Customers find the characters undeveloped and lacking depth. They find the protagonist annoying and frustrating, with a boring main character. Many feel there are no characters to root for, and that the female characters are caricatures or subjugated. Overall, the characters lack depth and become flat and unflesh out.

"...The protagonist not having a compelling or even believable and sympathetic personality was one of my main complaints -I don't place too high a..." Read more

"...ostensibly abhors the Circle's mandate of domination, every female character is a caricature, a person subjugated to the desires of men...." Read more

"Half way through this book I decided I was done. The main character Mae was boring. She was passive and static...." Read more

"...The characters are fun...." Read more

Great Book/Service but Missing Pages
2 out of 5 stars
Great Book/Service but Missing Pages
Great book and great delivery of product but book is missing pages 149 to 180...
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Top reviews from the United States

  • Reviewed in the United States on December 1, 2019
    There have been a number of novels, many in recent years, which explore the possibility of human society being taken over by intelligent machines. Some depict the struggle between humans and machines, others envision a dystopian future in which the machines have triumphed, and a few explore the possibility that machines might create a “new operating system” for humanity which works better than the dysfunctional social and political systems extant today. This novel goes off in a different direction: what might happen, without artificial intelligence, but in an era of exponentially growing computer power and data storage capacity, if an industry leading company with tendrils extending into every aspect of personal interaction and commerce worldwide, decided, with all the best intentions, “What the heck? Let's be evil!”

    Mae Holland had done everything society had told her to do. One of only twelve of the 81 graduates of her central California high school to go on to college, she'd been accepted by a prestigious college and graduated with a degree in psychology and massive student loans she had no prospect of paying off. She'd ended up moving back in with her parents and taking a menial cubicle job at the local utility company, working for a creepy boss. In frustration and desperation, Mae reaches out to her former college roommate, Annie, who has risen to an exalted position at the hottest technology company on the globe: The Circle. The Circle had started by creating the Unified Operating System, which combined all aspects of users' interactions—social media, mail, payments, user names—into a unique and verified identity called TruYou.

    Before long, anonymity on the Internet was a thing of the past as merchants and others recognised the value of knowing their customers and of information collected across their activity on all sites. The Circle and its associated businesses supplanted existing sites such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter, and with the tight integration provided by TruYou, created new kinds of interconnection and interaction not possible when information was Balkanised among separate sites. With the end of anonymity, spam and fraudulent schemes evaporated, and with all posters personally accountable, discussions became civil and trolls slunk back under the bridge.

    With an effective monopoly on electronic communication and commercial transactions (if everybody uses TruYou to pay, what option does a merchant have but to accept it and pay The Circle's fees?), The Circle was assured a large, recurring, and growing revenue stream. With the established businesses generating so much cash, The Circle invested heavily in research and development of new technologies: everything from sustainable housing, access to DNA databases, crime prevention, to space applications.

    Mae's initial job was far more mundane. In Customer Experience, she was more or less working in a call centre, except her communications with customers were over The Circle's message services. The work was nothing like that at the utility company, however. Her work was monitored in real time, with a satisfaction score computed from follow-ups surveys by clients. To advance, a score near 100 was required, and Mae had to follow-up any scores less than that to satisfy the customer and obtain a perfect score. On a second screen, internal “zing” messages informed her of activity on the campus, and she was expected to respond and contribute.

    As she advances within the organisation, Mae begins to comprehend the scope of The Circle's ambitions. One of the founders unveils a plan to make always-on cameras and microphones available at very low cost, which people can install around the world. All the feeds will be accessible in real time and archived forever. A new slogan is unveiled: “All that happens must be known.”

    At a party, Mae meets a mysterious character, Kalden, who appears to have access to parts of The Circle's campus unknown to her associates and yet doesn't show up in the company's exhaustive employee social networks. Her encounters and interactions with him become increasingly mysterious.

    Mae moves up, and is chosen to participate to a greater extent in the social networks, and to rate products and ideas. All of this activity contributes to her participation rank, computed and displayed in real time. She swallows a sensor which will track her health and vital signs in real time, display them on a wrist bracelet, and upload them for analysis and early warning diagnosis.

    Eventually, she volunteers to “go transparent”: wear a body camera and microphone every waking moment, and act as a window into The Circle for the general public. The company had pushed transparency for politicians, and now was ready to deploy it much more widely.

    “Secrets Are Lies
    Sharing Is Caring
    Privacy Is Theft”

    To Mae's family and few remaining friends outside The Circle, this all seems increasingly bizarre: as if the fastest growing and most prestigious high technology company in the world has become a kind of grotesque cult which consumes the lives of its followers and aspires to become universal. Mae loves her sense of being connected, the interaction with a worldwide public, and thinks it is just wonderful. The Circle internally tests and begins to roll out a system of direct participatory democracy to replace existing political institutions. Mae is there to report it. A plan to put an end to most crime is unveiled: Mae is there.

    The Circle is closing. Mae is contacted by her mysterious acquaintance, and presented with a moral dilemma: she has become a central actor on the stage of a world which is on the verge of changing, forever.

    This is a superbly written story which I found both realistic and chilling. You don't need artificial intelligence or malevolent machines to create an eternal totalitarian nightmare. All it takes a few years' growth and wider deployment of technologies which exist today, combined with good intentions, boundless ambition, and fuzzy thinking. And the latter three commodities are abundant among today's technology powerhouses.

    Lest you think the technologies which underlie this novel are fantasy or far in the future, they were discussed in detail in David Brin's 1999 The Transparent Society and my 1994 “Unicard” and 2003 “The Digital Imprimatur”. All that has changed is that the massive computing, communication, and data storage infrastructure envisioned in those works now exists or will within a few years.

    What should you fear most? Probably the millennials who will read this and think, “Wow! This will be great.” “Democracy is mandatory here!”
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  • Reviewed in the United States on November 27, 2013
    Well. I was a little doubtful that I wanted to read this based on the synopsis, but I knew I was going to check it out just because it was Eggers. While A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is one of my favorite books and I thought How We Are Hungry, You Shall Know Our Velocity, and What is the What were all excellent personal stories, A Hologram for the King 1st (first) Edition by Eggers, Dave published by McSweeney's (2012) felt a little perfunctory. I enjoyed this book a little more than Hologram, but it still felt more like that book than the others which I definitely enjoyed more.

    It was incredibly easy to become fully immersed in this story; it was a quick pleasurable read, but I still felt like there was a lack of personal connection. I mostly just felt angry as the story progressed as I wanted to grab Mae and shake her after just about every decision she made. The fictional future detailed here seems like such an easy extension of everything that is going on today, and that direction is wholly frightening to me. I couldn't tell whether the author was ever making a true attempt at convincing me that what was going on in The Circle was actually beneficial or if I was *supposed* to be angry about it all. A lot of time was spent explaining what was going on and how amazing everything was, but I just hated the company and their goals from, basically, page 1, so I was never quite exactly how to navigate my feelings toward Mae or The Circle. The ending, I think, did finally vindicate my feelings and did kind of vindicate my feelings that this was to serve as a warning about, not only technology, but also the ever-present pitfall of "power corrupts."

    If only we all understood, "mistakes are made by all and that they should, if everyone is acknowledging our common humanity, our common frailty and propensity for sounding and looking ridiculous a thousand times a day, that these mistakes should be allowed to be forgotten" then perhaps the cold face of technology and the race for knowledge could retain some humanity. This, of course, was diametrically opposed to the goals of The Circle. Both Mae and Francis were quickly and completely subsumed by the allure of the power of total knowledge, and this compassionate approach to the flawed nature of all of us was buried by the inevitable march forward. Is there a tipping point it is no longer "enough to be aware of the millions of permutations possible" such they we are no longer able to "take comfort in knowing [we will] not, and really [can] not, know much at all?" Once tasted, will our thirst for knowledge ever fully be sated?

    Only Mercer remained the voice of reason throughout the novel. It was, again, ambiguous to me whether the author really wanted me to see him as an antagonist as I found it impossible not to root for him the whole time. The fear I have of falling too far of the technological cliff was made real in Mercer's thoughts. I wish we all had someone to let us know "how incredibly boring [we've] become" when we start believing that simply "comment[ing] on things... substitutes for doing them." I do not want to find myself in a world where "look[ing] at pictures of Nepal, push[ing] a smile button, and think[ing] that's the same as actually going there" is the norm. Echoing one of the themes I appreciated from The Idiot (Everyman's Library), Bailey did note that, "the individual act has reverberations that can be nearly endless," which made me happy to see. Contrary to Ippolit's thoughts regarding our inability to know the effects of everything we do and the beauty in that, however, Bailey's drive is to remove that uncertainty from our lives. I understand the attraction of wanting to know... if we are to believe Daniel Quinn's assertions from the Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit series, it is an innate human desire to KNOW and, in that knowledge gain control. This makes so much sense, but it never seems to end well, and I simply cannot acquiesce to the demands of this march when there is so much beauty in uncertainty to lose. It may be true that "all things are naked and opened to the eyes of God," but I don't want the "eyes of God." I certainly don't want you to have them.

    I want to choose the people with whom I share myself, and I'd like to think that someone would want to choose me for the same. Mae could not have been more wrong in her considerations of pain and suffering. Misery may love company, but, again, I want to choose that company. It may be true that "suffering is only suffering if it's done in silence, in solitude," but "pain experienced in public, in view of loving millions" is not "communion." That is hell. I don't want to suffer silently or alone - especially when someone else is involved with whatever pain may exist - but I want to share that with the person that matters. Not with the world. This world may prevent my inevitable solitude on one level, but I'd rather that than find myself alone in a crowd or just one of millions of voices begging to be heard by the whole of humanity. I want the "communion," but I cannot believe that exists on a worldwide scale. I am not sure why the community that we are currently building scares me so much more than Heinlein's from Stranger in a Strange Land, but it does. I am frightened, and I long for shared experiences that exist outside of like buttons and shared status updates. Perhaps that was the point all along.

    The irony of writing these words with the intent of posting them in a public forum is not lost on me... It is still exciting to see my review helped someone on Amazon or someone commented on my post on Goodreads, etc, etc, etc... I just hope that I... that we... do not all become so caught up in our digital lives and our attempts to be heard by a large number of people that I... that we... lose sight of the importance of having our voice heard by one who may truly understand what I am saying, why I am saying it, and what it truly means. In a personal context.

    Writing this review has changed my mind a bit on this book... Initially it was a 3-star read for me, but after reflection I raised it to 4. Anything that can make me think and feel about real life as much as this did is certainly better than average.
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  • Olivia LG
    5.0 out of 5 stars Interessante e assustador
    Reviewed in Brazil on June 26, 2022
    Pura ficção ou prenúncio de um futuro em que todos os aspectos da vida pessoal serão devassáveis ?
  • Joey
    5.0 out of 5 stars Gute Einführung in einen modernen Klassiker
    Reviewed in Germany on January 5, 2025
    Der Cornelsen Senior English Library - Literatur - Ab 11. Schuljahr / B2: The Circle - Textband ist eine sehr gelungene Ausgabe für alle, die sich mit dem modernen Thriller von Dave Eggers auseinandersetzen möchten. Das Buch bietet einen spannenden Einblick in die Gefahren von Überwachung, sozialen Medien und dem Verlust von Privatsphäre in der heutigen Gesellschaft.

    Positiv:
    Der Textband ist besonders hilfreich für Schüler ab dem 11. Schuljahr, da er eine klare und verständliche Sprache verwendet, ohne den Tiefgang des Originals zu verlieren. Die Zusatzmaterialien sind eine tolle Unterstützung, um wichtige Themen wie Überwachungsgesellschaft und Ethik der Digitalisierung im Unterricht zu diskutieren. Außerdem gibt es viele Erklärungen zu schwierigen Vokabeln, die besonders für Schüler auf dem B2-Niveau hilfreich sind.

    Die Kapitelzusammenfassungen und Diskussionsfragen am Ende jeder Einheit fördern das Verständnis und regen dazu an, das Gelesene zu reflektieren. Der didaktische Aufbau des Textbandes hilft dabei, die komplexen Themen des Buches zu entschlüsseln und auf eine Weise zu präsentieren, die sowohl lehrreich als auch interessant ist.

    Fazit:
    Der Cornelsen Senior English Library - Textband zu "The Circle" ist eine ausgezeichnete Ressource für Schüler und Lehrende, die sich mit diesem wichtigen Werk von Dave Eggers beschäftigen möchten. Er bietet einen klaren Zugang zu komplexen Themen und fördert die kritische Auseinandersetzung mit der digitalen Welt. Sehr zu empfehlen für den Unterricht und das eigenständige Lernen!
  • Alejandro
    5.0 out of 5 stars Genial
    Reviewed in Mexico on June 16, 2019
    Una joya de la literatura americana, un libro de ? ficción?
  • book crazy
    2.0 out of 5 stars delivered on time
    Reviewed in Japan on June 19, 2022
    A rip-roaring bore. What a disappointment.
  • Alf Salgo
    5.0 out of 5 stars Thought provoking and frightening glimpse into a possible future.
    Reviewed in Australia on November 5, 2017
    A great read, offering a glimpse into the sort of world that the technocrats are attempting to create. It serves as a warning of what could happen despite the most benign of initial intentions.