The Circle

This novel is a wild dystopian ride through a tech company that is so powerful it verges on a corporatocracy. I really relished it!

Everything that has ever made me uncomfortable about the digital age is magnified here and then pursued to its ultimate conclusion. The book is both a thriller and a novel of ideas. The author carries off all of the different elements brilliantly.

This story is almost too close to reality, but that is what made it so engaging for me.

Mae begins as a very relatable and down-to-earth college graduate who is thrilled to be offered a job at the Circle – a tech behemoth. She is blinded by reverence and ambition as her job quickly sucks up her every moment with demands for pseudo-social interactions through the Circle’s constantly evolving network.

A commentary on all of the privacy issues we already face, this novel pushes them to their limits. The question is whether Mae will continue to bend to her new… show more.

This one’s darker than the others on my list. I’ve worked in high-tech for years and the world of the Circle is far too close to my working life. The dystopian story of a young woman who stumbles into a dystopian world filled with surveillance and the eradication of privacy is chilling. And the veneer of toxic positivity that the Circle presents to the wider world is too familiar to ignore. I’ve worked at places that are only a few small steps removed from the one in this story, and I worry that we will all end up living in… show more.

The book is far superior to the dumbed-down movie version. We live today in a society willfully ignoring how much of ourselves we voluntarily give away to tech companies and what they do with it. The concept in this book that large corporations collect and sell data on all of us isn’t Sci-fi, it is our reality. It was proven in 2013 that internet and phone companies were selling our information to the government. Either no one noticed, or no one cared because regardless of if people are aware we are all living in the Circle now.

Sometimes fiction can do a better job of illuminating the stakes of our current moment than even the most in-depth reporting and factual analysis. In this fun and fast-paced novel, Eggers describes the activities of the Circle—the world’s largest search engine, social media platform, and e-commerce site all rolled into one. The book is filled with a battery of hilarious yet simultaneously chilling proposals for new apps that carry forward current trends while stripping away any notion of privacy, competitive balance, or trust in each other. Eggers’ Orwellian vision is laugh-out-loud funny yet all too real.

Forget the crappy reality TV show on Netflix, I’m talking about the book in which an intelligent young woman is slowly indoctrinated by a cultish social-media company and becomes the spokeswoman and chief advocate of life in a voluntary panopticon (a prison wherein everything you do may or not be watched all day, all the time), destroying any concept of freedom and privacy. “Secrets are lies, sharing is caring, privacy is theft.”