My sister bought me The Circle by Dave Eggers for my birthday. I would never have bought and read this myself so I am very glad she gave it to me. It is excellent and the word that sums it up for me is chilling, as it describes a very scary future world, that more scarily still, doesn’t seem that far away.
The Circle is a Facebook/Google/Twitter style corporation changing the way we live, work and interact with each other. The main protagonist Mae is a naive Californian delighted to get a fairly menial job at one of the world’s most important companies. Through her eyes we are slowly sucked in to the hyper version of what I sometimes come across through my work – the view that all digital technology is inherently good and any privacy or social downsides are far outweighed by the upsides of this brave new world.
Not only does everyone have to do their actual job, to be seen as really contributing they have to constantly use what is essentially an extension of today’s social media to rate, comment, like, and review absolutely everything that they do. I was reading this as I was failing as usual to keep up with twitter and was being inundated with emails every time I bought anything online (and I buy most things online) asking me to review it (I never review things – I am one of those dreadful free-riders who just find other people’s reviews helpful but don’t contribute myself). This world of constant bombardment didn’t seem very far away at all.
We often talk about open as a great quality in my work – open data, open hardware, open software, open networks – but here having to be constantly open and having no privacy at all means that all meaningful human interaction is replaced by a superficial openness where no one can say what they really think anymore.
What is extremely clever about this book is that some of what is described is just one small step beyond today’s reality, which keeps you believing in the progression of events as they get darker and darker. As one small step leads inevitably to another we enter a place where there is literally nowhere to hide for those that want to opt out of this brave new world.
Read this book. If you read one book this year, this should be it.
