Booking It: The Circle

Dystopias seem to be “in.”

The Giver, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, The Maze Runner and Divergent have all been adapted into films within the past twelve months, and plenty of other novels of similar themes populate the shelves, from 1984 to Clockwork Orange to Oryx and Crake. They often include adventure, sometimes romance; they cover the range from fantastical futuristic technology to worlds eerily close to our own, and they end with anything from a total reshaping of society to a return to the status quo. But they all imagine a dismal future for the human race.

One of the major themes of dystopian literature is to provide commentary on current government and social structures and a warning to society: this is what we could become. While there is nothing wrong with leaving out that message and choosing to read and write adventure or romance novels that use dystopias as nothing more than a setting and a plot device, you lose some of the depth of the genre in doing so. Books like Divergent – a less original version of The Hunger Games trilogy with more sci-fi – are not truly believable futures. It requires a great suspension of disbelief to envision this society existing at all, let alone in our future. For a more compelling dystopian novel, it is typically more effective to have a society one can imagine came out of our present world. Dave Eggers’ The Circle has all of the commentary and believability of some of the best dystopian literature; but, rather than being set in a dystopia, it explores the transition to one.

There is only one major difference between the world of The Circle and the real world: the invention of the company Circle, which has erased anonymity on the Internet. The creation of an algorithm by a young genius who wanted to combine his online accounts so as to stop remembering twelve different usernames and passwords led to Circle, an online account now necessary for any Internet activity. Everyone online now has a single account, and they must be honest. There can be no more anonymous hateful messages or trolling, because everything links back to your true identity. It is not a huge jump to imagine this occurring in the real world; it could happen in less than five years.

The Circle follows the character development of Mae, a new employee at Circle. Her change over the course of the novel is chilling. Circle changes her incrementally, so that the differences are often hardly noticeable until the reader stops to compare her to an earlier point in the book. The foreshadowing appears in the tour on her first day. There are glass walls everywhere, and dorms on the “campus” of the offices so that employees never have to leave. She is slowly pulled farther and farther into the life of Circle and their social media, and slowly loses her privacy entirely. It is written with finesse: she pauses and backtracks and is reluctant, and yet continues forward. This is what makes her development terrifyingly believable; this is how you make someone build a dystopia. It happens in bits and pieces, and most importantly, Mae and everyone else at Circle believe they are creating Utopia.

It is a key element of The Circle that many of the ideas put forward seem like good things theoretically or in moderation. Mae’s boyfriend is working on a system that would protect children from abductions; a student presents a method that would alert the police to cases of domestic abuse. The world of The Circle is puissant because you catch yourself agreeing and struggling to articulate why the citizens’ ideas are wrong and what, exactly, should be done instead. The problems they are addressing are all real problems today, and they believe they are providing solutions. In case you were not clear on the book’s moral stance, however, Eggers makes it just extreme enough, and just obvious enough, to show that their solutions may be worse than the original problems.

There are two struggles in The Circle. One is the right to privacy and anonymity – at what point is the surveillance too much? If the tradeoff for more privacy is more homicide, rape, kidnappings and abuse, then where should we draw the line? The other struggle, exemplified by the isolated living conditions, is remembering a life outside of the Internet, where you do not need to document and share everything you do with the world.

I am no snob about technology. I certainly spend more time on Facebook than I should. What Eggers does best, though, is acknowledge the value of the very things he condemns. There is value in instantaneous communication across the globe, and there is value in sharing your experiences for those who cannot have them. There is value in a more open world, where information is public. However, Eggers says, some things ought to be kept to yourself.