The Circle By David Eggers

This is the first book I have read in this year and I can’t recommend it too highly. 

It is a Orwellian nightmare that occurs in the very near future. It begins with the naive Mae landing her dream job at the Circle with the help of her college bestie, Annie. She quickly becomes seduced by the powerful ideas and men who run the company. It seems like a perfect world, total participation, organic gluten-free food and total mind control. 

As Mae becomes more fully oriented to her new life at the company, there becomes very little separation between her obligations to “zing” (tweet) and answer worldwide to thousands and then millions of followers and “well wishers”. Then she meets a mysterious man whom she becomes obsessed with but then she can’t figure out his identity and that enrages Mae. 

Meanwhile, her parents who were so proud of her are now changing their tune as their privacy disappears. Closed circuit cameras are now inside and outside the home. The marketing for this is that it will prevent all crime and “secrets”. Mae gets caught on one of these cameras and is quickly called to repent by the president of the company. His solution is for her to go completely transparent, filming her whole life and highlighting products and new programs by the Circle along the way. Mae becomes a celebrity and a prophet overnight. Her words “ Secrets are Lies” and  “Sharing is Caring” quickly become the new credo of her and her followers. But not everyone is so excited to be “transparent”. Her father who is struggling with MS is now beholden to the company for his health insurance. That contract includes him and his wife living under surveillance to “assist the doctors” in his care. They try to resist and cover up some cameras only to have Mae barge in and film their most intimate moments. But according to the Circle founders, there is no removing data, ever, it belongs to all. 

The final part of the book deals with the isolation that comes from social media and the pain of those who resist it. Mae’s ex-boyfriend and mystery man both plead with her to try to stop the “completing of the CIrcle”. Real painful events follow her decision. There may be no going back to the analog world but hopefully this book will raise the deep ethical questions of what happens when we give our privacy away. What will corporations like Google do with our data, and is there any way to be a private citizen.

A must read for anyone who has a Facebook or Google account! I give it my highest rating and hope there might be a follow up with an alternate ending to this bleak version of the future.