What will the future look like?
Dave Eggers' dystopian "The Circle" is a chillingly prescient novel
Wandering around the Latin Quarter of Paris the other day, I stumbled upon one of the many free book depositories that have popped around town. The premise is simple: take what you want, but try and make time later to come and drop a book for someone else to enjoy. Lo and behold, what did I find? Dave Eggers’ 2013 novel, “The Circle”. So I grabbed it ;-)
Reading “The Circle” today is a nerve-chilling experience. His depiction of an über-connected society addicted to the internet is not far from what we have in 2022 (as a reminder, the “Like” and “Share” buttons were introduced in 2012, a fact that Jonathan Haidt has established as the start of the internet hysteria/psychosis stage).
The novel follows Mae, a young recruit for a mega-corporation called The Circle, as she gets dragged into the jaws of a humongous, totalitarian tech outfit. The novel reminded me of John Grisham’s “The Firm” (which was turned into a mediocre movie), thanks to its creeping suspense and claustrophobic ambiance.
We don’t know what year we’re in, but many of the features of 2022 exist in The Circle: Fitbit watches, VR contact lenses reminiscent of Google Glass and Meta Headsets, surveillance cameras everywhere…
The Circle is a Silicon Valley tech behemoth, quietly but surely taking over the world. It rises to prominence with a software, “Tru You” that collapses all your passwords into one, avoiding multiple log-ins to different websites (sound familiar?). It has now expanded to include all kind of apps, and its headquarters are immense, offering everything to their employees, including free rooms to stay the night, gym, pool, chef cuisine, swank parties and free concerts. Behind the façade of “happiness” and “caring for its employees”, The Circle starts pressuring Mae to spend more and more time at the Headquarters, since the rest of the city is described as some dirty, horrible post-capitalist hellhole full of unemployed people. The Circle even boasts stores that are better supplied than the city; so Mae enjoys her status of privilege and happily builds her life inside The Circle.
However, physical presence is not enough for The Circle. Interactions on the company’s site are also tracked and employees are ranked. Mae gets into trouble for not being active enough, commenting or sending “zings” (Eggars’ version of tweets), “smiles”, “meh” or “frowns”; so she sets to improve her ranking:
“…She embarked on a flurry of activity, sending four zings, thirty-two comments and eighty-eight smiles. In an hour, her PartiRank rose to 7288. Breaking 7000 was more difficult, but by eight o’clock, after joining and posting in eleven discussion groups, sending another twelve zings, one of them rated in the top 5000 globally for that hour, and signing up for sixty-seven more feeds, she’d done it” (p. 190).
The mass hysteria of the current state of social media is depicted impeccably in The Circle. Mae and the “circlers” are outfitted with a mini-microphone earpiece, which allows them to be on social media almost permanently, answering questionnaires to help the company and gaining points:
“His fingers were typing furiously, fluidly, almost silently, as he simultaneously answered customer queries and survey questions. “No, no, smile, frown”, he said, nodding with a quick and effortless pace. “Yes, yes, no, Cancun, deep-sea diving, upscale resort, breakaway weekend, January, January, meh, three, two, smile, meh, yes, Prada, Converse, no, frown, frown, smile, Paris” (p. 440).
However, Eggers doesn’t stop at the bone-chilling description of this social media hellscape. The Circle’s strength is its exploration of the consequences our current predicament will lead us to.
We can trace the resurgence of the surveillance state debate to 9-11 and the rise of “war against terrorism”. The attacks on the World Trade Center sent a panicked population in search of security and protection, at almost any cost. As any human endeavor has it, we tend to overcompensate and then try to dial back our exaggerated reaction. Think about the hysteria of masking against COVID-19 in an open beach with people well apart. We did that, fuelled by the panic the media instilled in us through clickbait fearmongering.
After 9-11, many short-sighted people had no qualms whatsoever with the State combing through their emails with the Patriot Act or having the US execute “extraordinary renditions” all around the world. However, we never dialed back surveillance methods, even when they proved useless (why do we still take our shoes off at the airport? Why can’t we carry water past security? It was all caused by 2 unstable weirdos: the shoe bomber guy and another dude trying to mix nitroglycerin in the bathroom). I know it’s banal to point this out, but this is another case where we, the citizens, lose freedoms and never get them back again. If you put metal detectors in schools, you’re never going to get rid of those, ever again, no matter how peaceful students get.
Many people fail to see the precarious balance you need to master between control and surveillance, on the one hand, and privacy and security on the other. These are inscribed within a profoundly ethnocentric and frankly imperialistic worldview (let’s call a spade a spade) according to which the US and its allies can spy on whoever they want as long as they don’t spy on first-world citizens. If you know anything about Snowden, you know he had no problem (or minor critiques and details) when they were spying on the rest of the world: the Snowden scandal erupted when he realized they were also spying on US citizens. That’s when all hell broke loose. Spying on Guatemalans? Fine by us; spying on a Soccer Mom in Idaho, what on earth were you thinking?!?
It’s within this framework of omniscience and eternal surveillance that the end game of “The Circle” unfolds. The justifications for a perennial panopticon tend to hover around some form of moral grandstanding, the “I don’t have anything to hide” argument. We’ve been here before: groups advocating for privacy during the Patriot Act days were constantly reassured only terrorists had something to worry about. However, anyone coming from Venezuela will automatically be skeptical about handing the government sweeping powers to spy on our private communications. This realization is slowly sinking in for our North American brothers, who are starting to see the consequences of a surveillance state that controls the media (see Hunter Biden’s laptop coverage, for example).
In “The Circle”, the characters reach the nec plus ultra of surveillance as citizens with “nothing to hide” sport a camera 24/7 and are broadcasting a live feed at all times. This state of affairs, known as “going clear” percolates all spheres of society, reaching politicians who are connected permanently. Under the guise of “transparency” the characters forfeit their privacy and hand it over to the corporation.
“What if we all behaved as if we were being watched? It would lead to a more moral way of life. Who would do something unethical or immoral or illegal if they were being watched? If their illegal money transfer was being tracked? If their blackmailing phone call was being recorded? If their stick-up at a gas station was being filmed by a dozen cameras and even their retinas identified during robbery?” (P. 290).
Herein lies the crux that signals the shift in our zeitgeist through social media: the voluntary enrollment in the surveillance state. Whereas the dystopian approaches to control in the XXth century (Orwell, Ziamatine) presuppose the imposition of surveillance by force on an oppressed citizenry, the evil genius of setups like Facebook or Google is convincing us that we should voluntarily give up our privacy. We don’t need a Patriot Act anymore because everyone is already posting their thoughts, opinions and content on social media.
This has been the most important pivot for contemporary society: while “1984” has a current of revolt and freedom running through the book, “The Circle” presents a sterilized society, where people have given up their freedom willingly and now embrace the totalitarian ideal with glee. Some contrarians continue to exist, of course, but they are slowly shunned from society when they don’t exclude themselves from the totalitarian panacea.
We’ll keep on talking about transcendence, meaning and control in upcoming posts; I don’t really have a structure to all this in my head, so I’ll just keep on banging out the ideas in hopes that they’ll coalesce at some point.
Interesting stuff. Seems like you’re exploring ideas similar to those Adam Curtis has been developing in his recent documentaries. Specially in “can’t get you out of my head.”
However, his theory seems focused on the effects of societies centred on the individual. Curtis argues that individualism (while responsible for great achievements like the concept of universal human rights) has turned societies into large groups of squealing piglets, less likely to gather around big narratives.
In his view, these much more complex societies led politicians to delegate their responsibilities on, first, the financial sector. Hoping they’d allow individuals find “happiness” via endless consumption.
Now, according to this theory, Governments seem to be turning to companies like Google and their “big data” hoping they’ll help them figure out what people want/need. Curtis believes that politicians and bureaucrats have fallen into the fantasy that big data and algorithms will help them predict the future and steer our societies.
And, as a bureaucrat myself, I tend to agree. There seems to be a lot of excitement among my colleagues about all the opportunities that “big data” offers and not a lot of concern about the (very big) risks (privacy, cyber crime, etc). Nowadays most governments (at least in the developed world) have “behavioural insights” units using data to inform policy development and implementation, under the assumption that we’ll know what people want and we’ll even be able to find effective ways “nudge” them into compliant behaviours.
Anyway, fascinating stuff. Looking forward to reading your upcoming articles.