Sci-fi comes to Silicon Valley in Dave Egger’s fifth novel, The Circle, but it is not an army of robots who threaten apocalypse this time but the CEOs of an Internet company. Set in the not-too-distant future, the Internet catchall company the Circle has subsumed not only the giants of our generation (Facebook, Google, Twitter), but those of future generations (Alacrity, Zoopa, Jefe, Quan). Eggers is (as always) confident and capable, and the characters and places of this book are so memorable and easy to read, you will rush through all 491 pages.
The book begins with Mae Holland, a 24-year-old recent graduate, hired at the Circle thanks to her friend Annie, who has already risen to a position in the Gang of 40, as in, the forty most crucial minds of the company. Let me treat you to the opening lines: “My God, Mae thought. It’s heaven. The campus was vast and rambling, wild with Pacific color, and yet the smallest detail had been carefully considered, shaped by the most eloquent hands.”
The Circle is the company behind TruYou, a service that doles out to users one and only one Internet identity for the rest of their lives. But like so many current giants, the Circle is also a company that can allow itself philanthropist airs and develop whatever whimsical or practical gadgets it chooses.
Like in all Sci-fi, architecture is important. For the first few pages, Eggers treats us to a gliding, sunny description of the Circle campus, complete with Calder mobiles, fountains, volleyball and tennis courts, organic farms, bowling alleys, grocery stores, picnic areas, undulating grass, and buildings made of glass. However, something sinister lurks behind, and it isn’t until Mae sits down at her office station, that the chill becomes clear. Superiors in offices with glass walls surround Mae at her station, and down below there are more workers, seen through glass floors. Everything and everyone is seen and tracked at all times at the Circle, so that it is always known where they are, a series of red dots pulsing on a screen. It is like this, dropping hints here and there, that Eggers contextualizes an old idea — that of the Panopticon — into the landscape of social media.
Is it life imitating art that Apple’s proposed new campus is a glass circle? The renderings were submitted to the City of Cupertino in 2011.
Mae, for one, never wants to leave the Circle. “Outside the walls of the Circle,” Eggers writes, “all was noise and struggle, failure and filth. But here, all had been perfected. The best people had made the best systems and the best systems had reaped funds, unlimited funds, that made possible this, the best place to work. And it was natural that it was so, Mae thought. Who else but Utopians could make Utopia?”