Book review: The Circle by Dave Eggers

My interest in consumer technology is a bit like my interest in fashion. I'm a knowing pawn of both industries but I take only a superficial interest in them. I find the business of technology and start-up culture somewhat fascinating and I am unashamedly seduced by the aesthetics of gadgetry. (I like the Nike Fuel Band even though I don't really know what it is.) It is with this attitude that I decided to give Dave Eggers' new book The Circle a go.

I was expecting a tragicomic teardown of the world run by a Google-style multinational enterprise and duly got it. Eggers takes the social, moral and political implications of a totalitarian digital utopia to the nth degree. The reader is haunted from the get-go by the distinct possibility that this is a very real prognosis of the future. It's all very cringeworthy.

Like Google, The Circle has a 'campus' that sprawls over acres of sunny verdant California and is designed so that nobody ever wants to leave it. It's like Disneyland with grown-up touches provided by star architects and art through the ages. The place is built in lots and lots of layers with lots and lots of glass. It's the ultimate candy store for geeks. Any service (clean, of course) and anything that anyone wants or didn't know they wanted is provided to employees – known as Circlers – for free. Whether it is healthcare, culinary classes with the world's most famous chefs, the latest newfangled variety of saki or talks from visiting world leaders and celebrities, Circlers have it all and the rest of the world, including the President, wants to join them. Of course, no cutting edge technology escapes the spindles of The Circle. Beyond phones and tablets, Circlers are going 'retinol'.

Different departments are named after historical eras in nature (e.g. Mesozoic) and culture (e.g. The Enlightenment). The Circle's cult-like status is reinforced by references to Communism, such as the Great Room, a giant arena for Steve Jobs-like presentations. Then there are the all-important religious references. The Circle is not only the de facto owner and generator of most of the world's data, but pitches itself as the world's ultimate saviour. It's job is to eliminate ignorance and all its unsavoury byproducts like crime and social injustice. The Circle's God-like machine is engineered by a trio of Wise Men, including a Jobs-like character in Eamon Bailey. The Circle is powered by tens of thousands of wide-eyed top percentile twenty-something worker bees, all of them vessels void of personality but full of great ambition to make the world a better place. Projects at The Circle span from the world changing (a surveillance system involving embedded chips in infants that will prevent child abductions) to the frivolous (counting the sands of the Sahara).

The reader is parachuted into this odd but scarily believable world via Mae Holland. She is a 24-year-old who is lucky enough to have landed a coveted place at The Circle after working a dull, cul-de-sac job in a small town that would rather not be there. Her rescuer is her ex-college roommate Annie, a 26-year-old charming WASP child with a sarcastic streak who is part of the 'Gang of 40' InnerCircle and therefore not far off from being a demigod. It is through her relationship with Annie that Mae fast-tracks her own ascent through the ranks of the world's most exciting company. She begins from being a Customer Experience (CE) desk jockey, answering a daily avalanche of advertiser queries in the most 'personalised' and winning way possible, to becoming a celebrity in her own right, with several tens of millions of 'followers'. Her 'fans' are kept informed of everything about her, including minute-by-minute breakdowns of her 'vitals'.

Highly ambitious but equally impressionable, Mae is first in line to be recruited to live out The Circle's holier-than-thou raison d'etre: to defend the 'human right' to know everything and make privacy a crime. One of Wise Men Eamon Bailey's pet projects is SeeChange, a worldwide network of invisible cameras capable of capturing footage at impossibly high resolutions. Plant a cluster of SeeChange cameras on Mount Kilimanjaro, and the billions who use The Circle network (imagine Facebook unbridled by pesky privacy laws) won't know a broadcast experience of being high up on a remote mountain from really being there. More relevant, still, is the revolutionary potential of SeeChange in political hotspots like Egypt and Syria to uncover violent oppression. Bailey's idea is that no corner of Earth (and perhaps beyond) will escape the benevolent glare of The Circle.

Mae herself becomes an unwitting guinea pig of SeeChange when she 'borrows' a kayak for a late night paddle in the San Francisco Bay. Mae 'repents' by becoming the poster child of crime-busting transparency. She chooses to 'go transparent' by wearing a small camera the size of a locket around her neck which sees the world as she sees it during her waking hours. And what she sees the whole world sees via The Circle network. Private moments are restricted to bathroom visits, but then only for 3 minutes at a time. If there's one thing The Circle can't do, it is to delete data.

So you get where this is going. Mae is completely hollowed out as a Circler. She is an uber-celebrity without a personality. She is defined by the social 'interactions' she participates in: the constant barrage of 'smiles', 'frowns', 'mehs' and 'zings' (akin to Tweets) she exchanges with her followers and causes and companies that need her (The Circle's) endorsement, all of which go to make up her own all-important participation rank, which she hopes will be high enough to get her into the InnerCircle. She loses touch with her parents when her digitised humanitarian interventionism goes a step too far. She is shut off from her former best friend and ex-boyfriend, Mercer, when she tries to 'save him' from the 'shadowy' analogue world.

The Circle is no piece of literary genius. The author's style is bland and journalistic (Eggers is a journalist), it's delivery can be annoyingly moralistic. Eggers does not do subtlety or humour. My initial doubts about this made me imagine a similar sort of book written by an author like Jonathan Coe in which you might get a devastatingly effective parody of a subject matter that is inherently ludicrous. But as I progressed through the book I realised that the lack of colour in Eggers' writing is deliberate and affecting in its own way. It is an unfiltered – transparent – reflection of Mae's reality, which is convulsed to its core by data and its propaganda. The need for full transparency, which results in chronic self-censorship, makes Mae's reality, her thoughts and behaviour, highly regimented. Even though she is not a cyborg in the conventional sense, her enslavement to the unfettered freedom of information amplifies her power over others to a terrifying extent. In this way, Eggers cleverly lets Mae's story speak for itself, allowing the cultish menace around her to gather pace. The reader is urged to plough through the suspense-filled second half of the book to see whether Eggers draws Mae's story to its logical end. All in all, The Circle is not a comfortable read. But it is probably essential for anyone who has ever felt jittery at going a day without the internet.