The Circle

Dave Eggers

Do you know how you interact with a horror film, watching the teenager hear a strange noise in the dark basement of a secluded cabin in the remote part of the forest? You yell out "Do NOT go down there!!!". And then they do. This was my interaction with The Circle, but the topic is not teen slasher horror, but modern internet privacy. "Do NOT go down that road!!!". The Circle is everyone's worst fear of Google. They develop all kinds of apps and connections that allow everyone to be connected all the time. Retinal display (e.g. google glass), friend circles (e.g. facebook), zings (e.g. twitter), etc. to start. They have an awesome campus that employees never want to leave. Enter Mae, young new hire in Customer Experience. She (like most of the millions of digital natives in this novel) drank the Kool-aid and has no concern about privacy. In fact, she comes up with Privacy is Theft. Withholding anything from the public domain is theft from the betterment of humanity. You can see where this is going (but she can't). Eggers continually releases new Circle apps and products to take the reader well beyond any grey area, showing his agenda and hoping (I am sure) to be a prophetic voice in warning against the dangers coming our way. While reading, I also picked up a distinctly Brasil vibe, which was quite fun. Lots of small screens with various inputs, each a uni-tasker. The entire privacy discussion is extremely fascinating and just to show how subtle the questions are, just this week Sciam publishes a short article on privacy apps that sound remarkably like Eggers' (The Circle's) TruYou. So are they privacy enhancing, or just a short step away from privacy obliterating. Or how do we know?

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