The Circle

This book resonated with me on so many levels. I first read it in 2015 while working at a tech company, and the novel gave me the language to express the unease I felt about Big Tech’s relentless push for “transparency” and “sharing,” often at the expense of privacy. In many ways, the book is an argument about trade-offs—the perks of working for a Google-like company versus the torture of being overly connected.

Eggers also offers one of the most accurate portrayals of life as a Silicon Valley tech worker. The overwhelming barrage of pings and constant demands for feedback… show more.

I really like this book because it shows the downsides of being too optimistic about technology. It makes you think about the moral issues and social effects of artificial intelligence.

The story is interesting because it looks at how much privacy we have and what we should know in this age of digital spying. It's a warning about these things, and I found it thought-provoking.

This is easily Dave Eggers’ best novel. It is a terrific and fast-moving story of what can happen when rapidly developing technology combines with a leader who possesses a very loose moral sense and the ability to inculcate such morals in underlings.

Eggers is wonderful at creating believable characters who have a lot at stake from the story’s challenges and outcomes. In this case, the primary challenge is being forced to live in a world of round-the-clock surveillance of all one’s activities. The CEO bases his desire to create (and profit massively from) this world on the always-flawed notion that… show more.

In researching this list, I was surprised to learn it had been over a decade since this book's release. At the time, in 2014, I'd never read anything that had so accurately captured the madness of social media and how it might be affecting our psychology and the world. It perfectly captured my own anxiety about the changing nature of the internet. 

Some dinged the book for not accurately portraying Silicon Valley, but like many of Eggers's books, it is more of an allegory. It has as much to say about online status seeking and groupthink as it does about… show more.

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.”