A review by piburnjones
The Circle by Dave Eggers

2.0

First off, I think you have to read The Circle as satire. Eggers is stretching things to the extreme in order to make his points. (This explains why his characters are two-dimensional mouthpieces, though it doesn't entirely excuse it.) And those points are something like this:

- Privacy is both inherently valuable and under siege.

- We are too eager to trade privacy for safety or convenience.

- We should be very cautious about any steps that give more information about ourselves, our lives, and our whereabouts to any government or corporation.

- The U.S. government and large corporations are decidedly too cozy, a trend we should not encourage.

- We spend way too much time worrying about whether other people like us.

I agree with all of those, and I certainly think all of those ideas came across loud and clear, so in that sense, I think we have to say that this is generally a successful satire of social media and current attitudes towards privacy. But I also don't think Eggers is saying anything particularly new or fresh. Eggers is not Orwell or Bradbury or Atwood, much as he might like to be. Discussions of privacy and surveillance and corporate ownership of government happen. This book is not subtle in making its points, but I don't think it adds anything to the ongoing dialogue.

And while Eggers was beating me over the head with the I HAVE A POINT sledgehammer, he did a bunch of things I found really obnoxious.

First, there were the things that felt like bad writing. The protagonist, Mae, isn’t so much a person as a collection of traits -- less three-dimensional than your average sheet of paper.

But most of them are cases where it seems that Eggers hasn’t thought things through all the way:

-For example, we're explicitly told that as a direct result of having to use your real identity for everything, the internet is now a friendly, civil place. Has Eggers never seen fights break out on Facebook? ...Or, for that matter, in real life? I call total BS on this one.

-Or, take Mae’s first weeks at the Circle (that’s a company -- think Google+Facebook+any other super fancy tech company with a spotty record on privacy). Mae goes through a combination of weird things that show you this is a quirky tech company and weird things that logistically make no sense for a company of the size and sophistication that we’re told this one is. There are multiple instances where Mae is told “Wait, you haven’t done X yet?!” about things that any half-competent HR team would have guided her through. And this HR team is portrayed as bizarre and thin-skinned, but not incompetent.

-Actually just about everyone at the Circle is absurdly thin-skinned -- presumably because everyone's so gosh-darned nice on the internet now. Which is still BS.

-Or, take Mae's workstation. Every time she gets a new task, she also gets a new screen on which to do it. One for internal company communication. One for customer communication. One for answering questions from her teammates. Etcetera, up to eight or nine screens. Maybe that's meant to sound all high tech and futuristic, but seriously, this is what windows are for. Old news.

-And then there are the broad assumptions we're asked to swallow. Really, enough people are interested in watching someone’s every waking hour that this will keep corporate and political leaders honest? How long do people stay interested? (Isn't it more dramatic to watch people being bad? See: recent surge of dark, morally ambiguous TV protagonists.) Also if ALL your leaders agree to this, at what point do you not have enough watchers for each one of them?

-And there's the absence (with very few, very sledgehammer-y exceptions) of public debate over things that would prompt huge public debate in real life, which I felt he left out because it would make things too complicated and cloud his message.

So no, I didn’t especially like The Circle, even where I agreed with it.