There are a number of parallels that can be drawn between George Orwell’s 1984 and The Circle by David Eggers, the most explicit of which is the theme of being constantly watched and observed. If Orwell used the idea of ‘Big Brother’ as the ever-present government watchdog, Eggers created ‘The Circle’, the only tech giant in the world to own a portal that records every instance of every individual’s online presence and interactions. Likened to how to how a shark stalks and hunts its prey at various points in the text, The Circle uses its technology and an ideology of ‘sharing is caring’, privacy is theft’ and ‘secrets are lies’ to justify its 24/7 monitoring of even the most intimate and personal moments of people’s lives . The novel’s protagonist, Mae, a young, impressionable girl who is lured into the world of ‘The Circle’ and subjects herself to the company’s policy of recording everything its employees do, in the guise of ensuring their safety and well-being.
However, it is through Mercer’s character (Mae’s ex-boyfriend), that Eggers has created his antagonist; Mercer is extremely distrustful of technology. Eggers has used Mercer to reveal the hypocrisy inherent in how The Circle works. Their ideology is that constant monitoring of actions and data ensure greater honesty; however, Mercer argues that always being watched induced people to create online personas and in the process, we lose our true personality in keeping up appearances.
Through his scenes with Mae, Mercer tries to explain to her that by becoming so immersed in the always active world of The Circle, even Mae has become impervious to the emotions of people close to her (this includes her ailing father and dependent mother and Mercer himself). Mercer is appalled by how people’s eagerness for approval from and popularity amongst an unknown group of people (he is referring to Mae’s online social followers, none of whom who know her personally) leads them to create artificial personas for their online accounts that may be complete opposites of their real-life personality . As the story progresses, at various points, Mercer uses very strong language to warn Mae against the dangers of having her every action tracked and shared and recorded by The Circle. The following monologue makes Mercer’s stance on how The Circle was creating a society in which people want all the information and will stop at nothing to get it, no matter how hurtful the strategies may be for the people who are being followed:
“We are not meant to know everything, Mae. Did you ever think that perhaps our minds are delicately calibrated between the known and the unknown?no time to reflect, to sleep to cool.” (Eggers, 434).
In this scene Mercer, an emotionally sensitive and perceptive individual himself, is trying to arouse similar feelings in Mae, someone he still cares about despite the cruel and dismissive behavior she has displayed towards him so far in the story.
Of all the principal characters of the plot in addition to Mae, Annie (her friend who was responsible for bringing Mae into The Circle) or any of the executives working there, Mercer is the only one who is able to resist the attraction of the Internet and social media, and understand the dangers it poses .
His distrust of everything digital goes so far that he is often shown to be thinking of ways to take his name off different subscription listings. Mercer is a representative of the old-school that believes in personalized interactions to connect emotionally with people. His dialogues often reflect the loneliness he feels from not having people who really understand him and his defiance of The Circle stems from this feeling of hollowness that he thinks the company is creating. Apps and devices that connect millions of people and record their most intimate of moves, were the real danger for people, according to Mercer .
He also attempts to make Mae see the ironic situation that ‘always being online and connected’ has created for her. He points out that she not only has lost the one friend (Annie) that she had, but the same company she so staunchly supports, is the one that drove Annie to have a psychotic breakdown, when embarrassing details about her family are discovered and revealed to millions online .
The need to ‘check-in’ where we are, to post status updates and news feeds to get more followers and more likes, has completely taken away the need to go and spend actual time with people we care . A case in point is when Mae finds herself too busy to visit her old parents. Thus, Mercer raises some extremely important questions that all of us should be asking ourselves, instead of blindly hopping onto the social media bandwagon. The following dialogue directed at Mae espouses the extent of distrust and hate Mercer feels for The Circle, and for technology in general:
"The tools you guys create actually manufacture unnaturally extreme social needs. No one needs the level of contact you’re purveying It’s not nourishing You’re not hungry, you don’t need the food, it does nothing for you” (Eggers, 134).
It is this disapproval of how The Circle hounds people everywhere that eventually drives Mercer to go completely off-the-grid but The Circle keeps tracking him with Mae’s help. In the end, as a horde of drones surround him, Mercer drives off the cliff, believing it to be his only escape from The Circle and the only scenario in which he would be able to protect himself from invasion of privacy as well as a sense of his own identity.
Works Cited
Eggers, David. The Circle. San Francisco: McSweeney's, 2013. Print.
McMillan, Graeme. "Dave Eggers’ The Circle: What the Internet Looks Like if You Don’t Understand It." 10 November 2013. Wired. Web. 22 May 2016. http://www.wired.com/2013/10/the-circle-review-dave-eggers/
Ullman, Ellen. "Ring of Power." The New York Times 1 November 2013: 5. Web. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/03/books/review/the-circle-by-dave-eggers.html
