Plot summary
Mae Holland, a recent college graduate, lands a job at The Circle, a powerful technology company run by the "Three Wise Men." Mae owes her job largely to her best friend and college roommate, Annie, one of the forty most influential people in the company. Mae starts out in Customer Experience (CE), the firm's customer service department, but quickly climbs the company ladder. From the beginning, Mae is impressed by amenities at The Circle, including access to top-notch technology, dorm-like housing, gyms, recreation activities and parties. Mae's very first day at The Circle ends with a party where she encounters Francis, who remains a love interest throughout the rest of the novel. Later, Mae encounters and quickly becomes romantically involved with a mysterious colleague named Kalden, even though she is unable to verify his status at the company, or even obtain his last name.
Meanwhile, The Circle continues to develop a range of sophisticated technologies, including SeeChange: light, portable cameras that can provide real-time video with minimal effort. Eventually, SeeChange cameras are worn all day long by politicians wishing to be 'transparent', allowing the public to see what they are seeing at all times.
Another subplot is the diagnosis of Mae's father with multiple sclerosis, which eventually leads Mae to enroll her parents on her healthcare, which in turn drives them to install SeeChange cameras in their home. After a brief incident with her own legal issues, Mae ends up agreeing to wear a SeeChange device herself (called "going transparent"), representing her own growing role in the company, epitomized by a public talk in which she insists, "secrets are lies," "sharing is caring," and "privacy is theft." Mae's job now mainly consists of touring the campus and showing customers future products; any hints of her own doubts about privacy seem dropped, in contrast to her ex-boyfriend Mercer. He dislikes the internet and eventually insists on going off the grid to escape the more and more far-reaching influence of The Circle and its technologies. Kalden calls Mae, warning her that The Circle must be stopped, but she refuses to listen. Mae's indoctrination into the company and its use of peer pressure to invoke "herd mentality" is directly contrasted by the character of Mercer. Mercer represents a small portion of the book's world that rejects The Circle's ever more intrusive technologies. Throughout the novel he goes from having a benign distaste for the ways of the present to attempting to escape from his doomed society.
Meanwhile, Annie becomes envious of Mae's success and volunteers to be the test subject for PastPerfect, a new product that tracks a person's family history and activities, to regain her standing within the company. Disturbing facts about Annie's family history come to light and she becomes increasingly stressed, eventually causing her to fall into a catatonic state. Embarrassed both by her parents' distrust of SeeChange monitoring in their home and the conduct of her ex, Mercer – all of which have been publicly accessible to Mae's millions of followers – Mae becomes upset and, while demonstrating a program designed to catch fugitives within minutes, uses it to find Mercer. He attempts to escape using his truck, but after drones prevent him from getting away, Mercer seems to make a decision and ends up driving off a bridge in front of the billion people Mae is streaming to. While initially depressed, Mae soon rationalizes Mercer's death with the help of charismatic 'Wise Man' Eamon Bailey, concluding that he was an extremely depressed, asocial human being who refused society's help, comparing his actions to a person committing suicide by jumping out of the window when being visited by a doctor.
Kalden is, in fact, the elusive "Wise Man" Ty Gospodinov, the original inventor and founder who came up with the idea for the company. Mae agrees to meet him in secret and he tells her that a totalitarian regime will soon arise if nothing is done to stop it, equating it to a surveillance society. He explains the need for privacy in the digital age and asks her to help him take down The Circle, saying he cannot do it alone. Mae thinks that he is crazy, but pretends to go along with him, but then betrays him by telling the other founders of The Circle what has happened, who ensure that Ty is silenced. The book ends with Mae looking at Annie in a coma at the hospital, wondering when the time will come that The Circle will develop enough technology to read people's thoughts, saying that "the world deserves nothing less and would not wait".
Reception
On review aggregating website iDreamBooks, The Circle has a score of 66% based on reviews from 50 critics. [6]
In the weeks before the book's 2013 release in the United States, Kate Losse, a former Facebook employee, accused Eggers of plagiarizing her memoir The Boy Kings and the media of gender bias in favoring Eggers' novel with more literary praise and attention. [7] [8] In a statement released by his publisher, Eggers said that he had not read Losse's book, nor had Losse read The Circle when she made her claims, aside from an excerpt in the New York Times. Eggers clarified that he "didn't want The Circle to seem to be based on any extant companies or upon the experiences of any employees of any extant companies." [9] [10]
Upon the book's summer 2014 release in German, the weekly magazine Der Spiegel's Thomas Andre gave a favorable review: "The Circle is a genre novel, with its simplistic fabrication meant to be obvious. The symbolism is abundantly clear, because it is Eggers' only way of bringing his message to the ear: How do we mean to handle the right to sovereignty of interpretation over one's own life in the future?" [11] On the other hand, German blogger and internet columnist Sascha Lobo called the book a "demonization" of internet companies that offers no actual arguments. [12]
Film adaptation
A film based on the novel, adapted and directed by James Ponsoldt, was released in April 2017. Emma Watson (Mae Holland), Tom Hanks (Bailey), Karen Gillan (Annie), Ellar Coltrane (Mercer) and John Boyega (Kalden) play the lead roles. [13] [14] The film made over $40 million worldwide but it received negative reviews. The film review website, Rotten Tomatoes, gave the adaptation a rating of 16/100. The Rotten Tomatoes site also offers the following quote as a critic consensus: "The Circle assembles an impressive cast, but this digitally driven thriller spins aimlessly in its half-hearted exploration of timely themes." [15]
Some plot points and characters from the book were changed or removed for the film due to a need to narrow down the story so that it fits into a two-hour film. [16] Smaller details such as Annie dressing up Mae's desk at The Circle to look identical to the one from her previous job were eliminated to make the plot come across as more serious. The character of Francis, Mae's love interest, was removed, as was the episode of Annie falling into a coma. [17] The ending's tone was also changed to make Mae appear more sympathetic as opposed to her depiction in the book, where she does not sympathize with anyone who may be impacted by her choices. [17]
Philip R. Zimmermann is an American computer scientist and cryptographer. He is the creator of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), the most widely used email encryption software in the world. He is also known for his work in VoIP encryption protocols, notably ZRTP and Zfone. Zimmermann is co-founder and Chief Scientist of the global encrypted communications firm Silent Circle.
Surveillance is the monitoring of behavior, many activities, or information for the purpose of information gathering, influencing, managing or directing. This can include observation from a distance by means of electronic equipment, such as closed-circuit television (CCTV), or interception of electronically transmitted information like Internet traffic. It can also include simple technical methods, such as human intelligence gathering and postal interception.
The Transparent Society (1998) is a non-fiction book by the science-fiction author David Brin in which he forecasts social transparency and some degree of erosion of privacy, as it is overtaken by low-cost surveillance, communication and database technology, and proposes new institutions and practices that he believes would provide benefits that would more than compensate for lost privacy. The work first appeared as a magazine article by Brin in Wired in late 1996. In 2008, security expert Bruce Schneier called the transparent society concept a "myth", claiming it ignores wide differences in the relative power of those who access information.
The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) is an independent nonprofit research center established in 1994 to protect privacy, freedom of expression, and democratic values in the information age. Based in Washington, D.C., their mission is to "secure the fundamental right to privacy in the digital age for all people through advocacy, research, and litigation."
Dave Eggers is an American writer, editor, and publisher. He wrote the 2000 best-selling memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Eggers is also the founder of Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, a literary journal; a co-founder of the literacy project 826 Valencia and the human rights nonprofit Voice of Witness; and the founder of ScholarMatch, a program that matches donors with students needing funds for college tuition. His writing has appeared in several magazines, including The New Yorker, Esquire, and The New York Times Magazine.
Mass surveillance is the intricate surveillance of an entire or a substantial fraction of a population in order to monitor that group of citizens. The surveillance is often carried out by local and federal governments or governmental organizations, such as organizations like the NSA, but it may also be carried out by corporations. Depending on each nation's laws and judicial systems, the legality of and the permission required to engage in mass surveillance varies. It is the single most indicative distinguishing trait of totalitarian regimes. It is also often distinguished from targeted surveillance.
Prey is the thirteenth novel by Michael Crichton under his own name and the twenty-third overall. It was first published in November 2002, making it his first novel of the twenty-first century. An excerpt was first published in the January–February 2003 issue of Seed magazine. Prey brings together themes from two earlier Crichton best-selling novels, Jurassic Park and The Andromeda Strain and serves as a cautionary tale about developments in science and technology, in particular, nanotechnology, genetic engineering, and distributed artificial intelligence.
Internet privacy involves the right or mandate of personal privacy concerning the storage, re-purposing, provision to third parties, and display of information pertaining to oneself via the Internet. Internet privacy is a subset of data privacy. Privacy concerns have been articulated from the beginnings of large-scale computer sharing and especially relate to mass surveillance.
danah boyd is a technology and social media scholar. She is a partner researcher at Microsoft Research, the founder of Data & Society Research Institute, and a distinguished visiting professor at Georgetown University.
Countersurveillance refers to measures that are usually undertaken by the public to prevent surveillance, including covert surveillance. Countersurveillance may include electronic methods such as technical surveillance counter-measures, which is the process of detecting surveillance devices. It can also include covert listening devices, visual surveillance devices, and countersurveillance software to thwart unwanted cybercrime, such as accessing computing and mobile devices for various nefarious reasons. More often than not, countersurveillance will employ a set of actions (countermeasures) that, when followed, reduce the risk of surveillance. Countersurveillance is different from sousveillance, as the latter does not necessarily aim to prevent or reduce surveillance.
Ghost is a musical with book and lyrics by Bruce Joel Rubin and music and lyrics by Dave Stewart and Glen Ballard.
James Ponsoldt is an American film director, actor and screenwriter. He directed the drama films Off the Black (2006) and Smashed (2012), the romantic comedy-drama The Spectacular Now (2013), and the dramas The End of the Tour (2015) and The Circle (2017).
Since the arrival of early social networking sites in the early 2000s, online social networking platforms have expanded exponentially, with the biggest names in social media in the mid-2010s being Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat. The massive influx of personal information that has become available online and stored in the cloud has put user privacy at the forefront of discussion regarding the database's ability to safely store such personal information. The extent to which users and social media platform administrators can access user profiles has become a new topic of ethical consideration, and the legality, awareness, and boundaries of subsequent privacy violations are critical concerns in advance of the technological age.
Google Glass, or simply Glass, is a brand of smart glasses developed and sold by Google. It was developed by X, with the mission of producing a ubiquitous computer. Google Glass displays information to the wearer using a head-up display. Wearers communicate with the Internet via natural language voice commands.
Katherine Losse is an American writer and was Facebook employee 51. Her memoir The Boy Kings: A Journey Into the Heart of the Social Network is an account of her time as one of Facebook's first employees. While working at the social media company, her roles included working in customer support and international development, and being ghostwriter for CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Jessica Nicole Hische is an American lettering artist, illustrator, author, and type designer. She was one of the first of a new generation of letterers and the present-day flourishing of the lettering arts can in part be traced back to her emergence.
The Circle is a 2017 American techno-thriller film directed by James Ponsoldt with a screenplay by Ponsoldt and Dave Eggers, based on Eggers' 2013 novel of the same name. The film stars Emma Watson and Tom Hanks, as well as John Boyega, Karen Gillan, Ellar Coltrane, Patton Oswalt, Glenne Headly, and Bill Paxton.
Emma Approved was an American multi-platform web series starring Joanna Sotomura and Brent Bailey based on Jane Austen’s 1815 novel Emma. The show is a follow-up to The Lizzie Bennet Diaries and is the third production out of web series company and YouTube channel, Pemberley Digital. In the series, Emma Woodhouse is reimagined as a lifestyle coach and matchmaker who is filming herself for the future documentary about her life. Emma Approved aired twice weekly on Pemberley Digital's YouTube channel starting October 7, 2013. The show consisted of 72 episodes, ranging from five to seven minutes in length. The series ended on August 23, 2014 and has accumulated over 3 million views on the Pemberley Digital YouTube channel. On September 19, 2018, a video featuring Sotomura and Bailey as Emma and Alex announced that a continuation of the series would be starting in October 2018. Due to lack of funding raised from online sources - such as GoFundMe - the sequel series ended after just seventeen episodes, with the new story left incomplete.
Finn is a fictional character in the Star Wars franchise. The character first appeared in the 2015 film The Force Awakens as a First Order stormtrooper who, shocked by the Order's cruelty in his first combat mission, flees and joins forces with Rey and later the Resistance. He is portrayed by English actor John Boyega, who reprised the role in The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker. Boyega's performance and the character have received praise. For his performance in The Force Awakens, Boyega won the BAFTA Rising Star Award and was nominated for the Saturn Award for Best Actor.
The Every is a 2021 dystopian novel written by American author Dave Eggers. The novel is a sequel to Eggers's 2013 novel The Circle. It tells the story of a woman named Delaney Wells who joins The Every, a company formed by a merger between The Circle and an e-commerce giant known as "the jungle". Wells feels the company is too powerful, and she joins with the intent of destroying it from the inside.
