The Circle

In Dave Eggers' The Circle, we're ever-so-slightly in the future, and one large umbrella company has taken over most of what happens on the internet: all your social media and e-commerce goes through a TruYou profile, a product of The Circle. When Mae Holland, a recent graduate of an East Coast private liberal arts school who grew up in working class California, is able to get a job at The Circle through her friend Annie, she's thrilled. The sprawling and luxurious Bay Area campus is beyond her wildest dreams and the company is at the forefront of every breaking new development in internet technology. She's increasingly drawn into the world of The Circle as it encroaches further and further into formerly private arenas of life, and can't understand her family and friends who resist the shifting landscape of the world.

Theoretically, this is a really good book, a modern 1984. When you hear about things like the lawsuit in Spain about the right to be forgotten, it really makes you think about how deeply the internet has enmeshed itself in our lives. The Circle illustrates how slippery the slope could be for it to completely invade all aspects of our existence...microchipping and GPS tracking children to prevent kidnapping, very small constantly streaming webcams to open up closed regimes, politicians livestreaming their professional duties to make government transparent. All of these things sound like they're positive developments on the surface, but it creates a culture of constant surveillance.

Where the book fails, though, is the execution. Mae (short for Maebelline, which I thought was a nifty way to communicate what kind of people her parents were without having to spell anything out) is obviously meant to be an audience-insert character, like Twilight's Bella. But it doesn't work here to the extent it works for Twilight...the characteristics Mae is given, ambition and a certain amount of selfishness, render her mostly unpleasant. She needs to be a compelling character to have us follow her down the proverbial rabbit hole, but she has no real personality. She seems close to her family in the beginning, but drafts away from them easily and without apparent regret. She has “relationships” with peers like Annie and her ex-boyfriend Mercer, but we're not given any sense of history or any reason to believe that she's actually emotionally connected to other people. The writing is clunky, with awkward phrasing all over the place. It's extra disappointing because the ideas behind the book are there, and if it had been rendered better it could have been amazing. I understand why it flopped, and I wouldn't recommend it.

My feelings about this book are difficult to separate out from a few facts:
1) I think we are entering the era of backlash against Dave Eggers but I still just love him, like, as a person and as an author who has written works that are important to me, as a person
2) I am an avid user of social media

Okay. So. I think this is sharply-observed and honestly some good technological guesswork. It's not too hard to imagine a world where Facebook has been replaced by the Circle. And I do think the privacy issues raised by social media, and by The Circle, are very important to consider.

It's not quite as Jonathan Franzen-y as, um, Jonathan Franzen, but it still feels a lot like it was written by someone who doesn't use or understand social media trying to explain the appeal of social media? Like, guys, it is possible to have meaningful connections over social media. It is! Stop acting like it isn't. That said, of course, it's also good to step back and think about what role social media is having in your life, and the difference between sharing voluntarily and the kind of dystopian total transparency that ends up happening.

It's a bit heavy-handed, as I think his fiction tends to be. I guess maybe his nonfiction is too, but it has a different feel... I guess by virtue of being “true” you can get away with more. Still, an overall good read and more of a page-turner than I expected.

I highly recommend reading this. Utopia and dystopia are some of my favourite genres, but reading this book, which is both fascinating and at the same time creepy, does not feel like reading about a dystopia, because we already have most of the technology necessary to build the “totalitarian nightmare” (as one of the characters calls it) installed by The Circle. We also already can see in our reality some aspects criticized by the book, the “fake friendships” via social network, the culture of oversharing every moment of our life to obsessively seek approval via likes and comments. And all of this is just the surface of the book, I will not write more detail about the plot and topics in order non to spoil stuff.

Regarding the pace, the first half of the book is quite slow-paced, but I encourage everyone to be patient and go through it; after the first half things start to become very interesting and scary.

Ketika Mae Holland diterima bekerja di The Circle, dia merasa telah diberikan kesempatan emas dalam hidupnya. The Circle merupakan perusahaan internet dan teknologi paling berkuasa di dunia. Mereka menyatukan akun penggunanya dengan surel pribadi, media sosial, internet banking, dan lainnya ke dalam sistem operasi mereka. Sehingga, satu pengguna hanya memiliki satu identitas dan satu akun universal. The Circle merevolusi transparansi dunia digital.
Akan tetapi, di balik itu, The Circle ingin masuk sepenuhnya ke semua aspek kehidupan manusia. Mereka berambisi mengawasi setiap langkah, merekam setiap percakapan, dan meneliti seluruh gerak gerik manusia. Di dunia yang telah terintegrasi dengan The Circle; privasi, rahasia, serta identitas anonim adalah kejahatan berat. The Circle perlahan berubah menjadi tiran yang mengontrol penuh hak dan kebebasan manusia.
Sesungguhnya aku mengharapkan suatu cerita yang bagus, mengingat sdh difilmkan & hamper 600 halaman. Namun aku di awal2 saja sdh merasa ngantuk & bosan dengan alur yg sangat lambat.

An interesting take on the needy culture social media is creating. The need to know everything and to share everything. But above all the need to rate and be rated (just like I'm doing here on Goodreads).

The story is just not that convincing, it was ok, but not great. I have never read anything by Eggers, but my expectations were quite high, because of my friends. They are really into him. I also really enjoyed McSweeney's. Maybe this only enlarged the dissapointment.

Nevertheless it is an interesting read and just makes you think again about the overly-shariness we've grown accustomed to.

I would not recommend that anyone hire Dave Eggers as a futurist, or even a present-ist.

The key to good speculative fiction is sustaining an understanding of how humans behave - otherwise it is too far removed from the human experience that it is boring. Dave Eggers fails to do so; in particular, he seems not to know how real life people use the Internet or relate to each other in general. Or if he does, he asks far too much of us in terms of suspending our disbelief. In the first 20 pages, he asks us to believe that society has done away with online trolls and anonymity. Over the course of the next 400, we are to believe that no one (except for two characters, maybe) has ever studied or achieved any level of understanding of sociology, law, political science, or history. Somewhere along the way, the Constitution and rule of law have mysteriously poofed out of existence. It's just too absurd to take seriously. To be fair: it takes until about page 400 for Godwin's law to manifest itself.

Also, I am highly skeptical of his representations about marine ecology but I am less qualified to rant about that.

I can't even get into the gender dynamics.

Not to mention that the speculative technology is not even novel! It's like, 2005 telegraphed and wants its cutting edge technology back, Mr. Eggers.

I wouldn't be so outraged about this book except that I suspect that the people who are currently, in real life, throwing bricks and vomiting on the tech worker commuter buses in the Bay Area seem to have read this book as if it were unadorned fact.

And it is not even well-written. An example I could not resist taking note of: “There were old printers, fax machines, telex devices, letterpresses. The décor, of course, was for show. All the retro machines were nonfunctional.” Wait, Dave, I still don't get it. Can you hit me over the head about it one more time?

It's weird, because I remember his first two books as being really well-written. So, in sum, I like his older stuff better.

While much of this book is extremely on-the-nose (the aquarium scene near the very end comes to mind) I still really enjoyed it.

I found it interesting that even though The Circle is certainly a Brave New World style dystopian entity that often oversteps its idealism into obviously creepy and invasive areas, the arguments they make for their actions are pretty darn compelling. I found myself wanting to hear more of what the “Wise Men” had to say about the world. Maybe I just like the way Eggers writes. Even the early parts of the book that are just setting up the world I found very interesting just because of the way he describes it.

Though yes, there are lots of problems. Mae feels like a plot device masquerading as a character. She does whatever is needed to serve the direction the story/The Circle is going in, with no real consistency to her. I found most of other characters to be pretty well fleshed out though (okay maybe not Kalden).

I still found this an enjoyable page-turner and I'm glad I read it.

With a lack of subtlety that would make Ayn Rand proud, this book never ceases to pound home it's theme of lack of privacy as a result of technology.

The characters are all completely unlikeable and even the ones who are supposed to represent the “normal” people behave as if they have some kind of brain damage.

It was a real trial working through the repetitive dialogue that goes on for pages after the reader has gotten the point.

Kind of a ridiculous story and heavy handed, but fun to read regardless. I expected a lot more from this book based on the NY Times excerpt. Being a fan of whole dystopian, world going to hell in hand basket genre, I expected a lot more out of this book but nothing new was really added to the conversation. It was just a Corporate Big Brother, rather than the Government overstepping it's power... a counter to the libertarian movement maybe?

It was essentially an extended version of the rant from Johnathan Franzen in the Guardian this past year about how technology is ruining our lives. Is any of this possible? sure, why the hell not. But the idea that everyone was so bendable, and Mae, good god MAE! How easily she adopted everything THE CIRCLE was pushing, without an ounce of critical thought was just...ridiculous and hard to believe.

“Prophetic” is the most apt and eerie way to describe this book. Eggers creates a futuristic world that revolves around the campus of a company not unlike the Googles and Amazons and Facebooks of our day. ‘The Circle” has essentially monopolized the internet and created a culture best described as a “pics or it didn't happen” culture, calling out the danger of social media compressing our private lives until they cease to exist at all. Well-written and terribly thought-provoking, this book had me hesitating before my social media apps. Definitely worth a read.

Good, but not brilliant.

In my opinion, this book has two layers. The characters remain rather flat, I've seen some more comments on that. But the underlying movement the book describes, the gradual decline of privacy and personal space, gives me the creeps. In this, the author captures the current developments very well.

So 5 stars for the story, and 1 star deducted for the characters.

A modern 1984, nothing less I'd say. If you're sometimes scared by Facebook or Google, try to picture even bigger, beyond your wildest nightmares and you've got the Circle. It reminded me a bit of Black Mirror in the ways it sees humanity, and can hardly be proven wrong. A must read and soon to be classic I think

Wanted to read this before the movie came out, and I got to the final 100 pages before I saw the movie this weekend. The movie followed the book closely in many respects, but differed in many also. I enjoyed this book, although the lack of chapters bothered me a bit for the first part of the book. After a while I didn't notice anymore. The subject of the book is very thought-provoking, and would make for a great book club discussion. Although the book is almost 500 pages, it is a quick read and didn't really feel like a huge book.
The author did a great job of helping the reader understand what the main character was feeling, and that added a lot to the storyline. Would definitely recommend!

Before I began this book, I was already grappling with the effect that mass communication technology has had on what it means to be a person.

Starting with cell phones, the communication expectations of most humans fundamentally changed. Most people are assumed to be “always available”. This means that if you are texted or called, it is expected that you will answer your phone or quickly respond to a message.

Social media intensified these expectations, with the creation of a permanent avatar that was some reflection of yourself that could be accessed by anyone in your network at any time.

For someone socially detached such as myself, these expectations are a nightmare.

This book takes the nightmare to its logical and awful conclusion.

How much privacy and identity will be lost as social media and Ultra powerful corporations - Google, Apple - control or have access to every data point on you and every aspect of your personality? Could we cease being individuals altogether and simply blend into a collective community?

In this book, Eggers guessed at just how much will be lost and lead me down an engaging tunnel of madness on the way there. I was actually afraid to read Book III, and had to take a deep breath before I did, a rare emotional reaction for me.

This is a great, scary book. I'm not going to go live in the woods, but I will at least continue to be cognizant of the changes that new media and communication enact on my existence.

“It doesn't work that way!” Technology, business, biology, society. The Circle was sloppy. Eggers was going for creepy; due to haste or carelessness he ended up with farce. It just doesn't work.

The business model doesn't work. The vapid protagonist, part Mary Sue and part Candide, never actually does anything: events simply happen to her and she docilely keeps the plot moving. The Marianas Trench metaphor is just plain embarrassing: a transparent shark that eats ravenously, digests and shits in minutes/seconds, and can somehow survive unaffected at surface-level pressure. I mean really cringeworthy. I feel sorry for his editors: they must've tried really hard to talk him out of that.

I dunno. It just feels like Eggers is that angry uncle who won't stop talking about [insert topic here]. Yeah, it's an important subject that merits careful attention (online privacy, that is) but semicoherent rants help nobody.