“My God, it’s heaven.”
The Circle by Dave Eggers starts with this line from its female protagonist Mae Holland. This is the reaction she was able to summon upon arriving at the compound of what was going to be her new office. She is amazed at the landscape of the campus, where she could see a tennis and a volleyball court, a fountain, and a day care center where the children of the employees stay while the employees work. There are children running about when she arrives, screaming and having fun as they enjoy the wide expanse of the campus in California. Mae is 24 years old and is hired to work in what is considered to be the world’s most powerful internet company. She is able to get the job through her friend, Annie, whom she was roommates with back in college. Annie was hired by the company after she finished her MBA from Stanford, and had already been with the company two years before Mae gets in.
The company is recognized as the most influential in the world, hiring hundreds of fresh minds every year to work towards achieving the sole goal of the company: transparency. It was built by the three “Wise Men,” and lives by the slogans “Secrets are lies” (Eggers 165), “Privacy is theft” (Eggers 168), and “Sharing is caring” (Eggers 169). However, deep into the company is the Gang of 40, the inner circle where the bosses reside, working on fusing together technology and human rights in order to create their own vision of democracy and transparency. The company integrated the functions of Google, Twitter, YouTube, Apple, and Facebook, combining one’s activities online into what is called TruYou. Later on, the program started incorporating many other information about a person using further innovations in technology in order to form an efficient and accountable society. The company pushes for greater transparency in all businesses, the government, and later on, on people’s personal lives through the cameras installed everywhere which keeps track of everything a person does.
As Mae makes her way inside the impressive building, she is welcomed by the modernity of the place: the glass dining facilities, the dorms of those employees who spend their night working, and the rare fish which are all accordingly retrieved from the Marianas Trench. Later on she is even more enticed by the parties that go on until the morning light, athletic activities, clubs and brunches, and the gigantic aquarium. Mae eventually starts working in the Customer Experience department, and is initially concerned about her own privacy. However, she moves higher in the ranks through her desire to overpower her own friend, Annie, and is later on given more access to more screens of information. As she moves up the ranks, she starts shedding off her reservations about keeping her own privacy, and this raises concerns from her parents and her previous boyfriend. Mae changes drastically and gets involved with two men from the company. One of them, Kalden, is genuinely concerned about what is happening to her and the company, and warns her about the danger that the company could cause. “The Circle is almost completethis will be bad for you, for me, for humanity” are Kalden’s words of warning to Mae. She ignores it, and as she stays on in the company, she becomes the Transparent face of the Circle. People around the world knows her, and she believes herself to have “become more noble” as she resists the temptation of doing things that she used to do before, “doing away with things that she didn’t want to want” (Eggers 182). However, the more she puts herself out there where the people and the company can monitor her every move. The more exposed she becomes, the less there is left of her original self.
The novel tackles the ideas of social construction through the idea of deconstructing privacy. In today’s world of interconnectedness, information is power, and to disseminate information is to hold even more power. What these issues point to is the apparent lack of privacy of everyone, leading to the danger of having one corporation hold all that power by having control of all the information. It may appear that the novel is a dystopia, where fear reigns superior. Perhaps it is, perhaps it is not. What it lacks in the actual person wielding its power over his/her poor subjects, Mae has definitely become a subject of interest to the company. How she turns her family and herself into a true model of transparency, where she moves not because of her own accord, but based on what other people might say about her own actions. In essence, she has become a robot, moving and talking and functioning everyday by following the unspoken comments of the people watching her.
As Mae falls into the deeper circle, she is motivated by her desire to get the highest ratings, of being one of the Wise Men. Although she possesses the desire to be popular, all she wanted more was to get the approval of the Wise Men. This is strange, considering everything she has done so far to get where she is, surrendering her personal life and burying herself to the deep recesses of the Circle’s memory box. But
perhaps this is what the novel has been aiming for all along, to show that despite the grandeur and the modernity of the world which intimidates and invites fears from the people, or some Big Brother whose eyes would always be trained among us, subjects, of his absolute power of seeing and knowing, the world will end up like Mae, a trivial person who lives carrying the wrong idea of holding power, of striving towards achieving it but does not have any idea of what to do with it after it is achieved. Perhaps the novel is all about the make-believe utopia of the California campus where the Circle is found, lush with greeneries, where the children are free and the people are happy, virtually sharing everything and appears to care by showing concern to one another, when what it is really is everyone trying to know where everyone is and what everyone is about, playing like the Big Brother while holding a fake sense of power.
In a nutshell, The Circle is all a world of make-believe where interrelatedness can’t be more real than it already is, where the idea of knowing and having knowledge is merely about seeing what each other is doing and taking control of it based on what one who knows wants, but in reality, there is really nothing in it. The circle is merely a place where anyone can get sucked in, then end up remaining in the middle with nothing else to it. Or perhaps it is safer to say that one gets sucked into the inner circle, where there is really nothing, so one merely ends up walking around the circle, moving ceaselessly around chasing for something that really means nothing. Once one is inside, one is unable to go out as the self is already lost and surrendered, a ticket that allowed the acceptance inside the circle, where there is really nothing but a hollow and closed space where one is forever condemned.
Work Cited
Eggers, Dave. The Circle: a novel. New York San Francisco: Alfred A. Knopff
McSweeney’s Books, 2013. Print.
