The Circle

Google’s London HQ: ‘Eggers's innovative optimism has paused at the frontiers of social media, looking forward to an encroaching nightmare.' Photograph: Penson/ Rex Features Google’s London HQ: ‘Eggers's innovative optimism has paused at the frontiers of social media, looking forward to an encroaching nightmare.' Photograph: Penson/ Rex Features It wasn't long ago that Dave Eggers appeared at the cutting edge of American literature, breaking new ground with his meta-memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius , while his McSweeney's publishing enterprises spawned magazine offshoots in online, DVD and app formats. His pioneering literacy programmes and human rights themes have kept him as socially engaged and culturally connected as any novelist currently writing. Yet with his new novel, Eggers's innovative optimism appears to have paused at the frontiers of social media, looking forward, not to a world of open potential, but to an encroaching nightmare. Mae is a twentysomething naif, journeying into the brave new world of a vast info-tech enterprise – the Circle – which has amalgamated the functions of Microsoft, Google, Apple, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter into a unified corporation with seemingly beautiful ideals. Customers buy into the Circle with a single identity, their TruYou, which grants them access to every operation and social connection conceivable in the digital universe. Deep within the organisation, an inner circle of bosses – the Gang of 40 (lest readers miss the looming Maoist analogy) – fuses technological and human rights idealism into a vision of perfect democracy, transparency and knowledge; one with which they aim to unite private and public spheres and perfect the operations of government. The Orwellian references scarcely need spelling out. But the Circle's central slogan – "All that happens must be known" – springs less from political ideology than the kind of callow info-utopianism espoused by Julian Assange (who gets a sardonically ambivalent mention in the novel), or the dreams of social connectivity realised by Mark Zuckerberg (lightly referenced in the Circle's founder, Ty Gospodinov). Mae rises through the ultra-meritocratic ranks of the company to emerge as its leading promotional light, devising some of the key maxims of its credo: "Secrets are lies"; "Sharing is caring"; "Privacy is theft". Along the way, she is offered – and ignores – increasingly obvious glimpses of what is wrong with all this. One night, she takes an illicit kayak ride to an uninhabited island, momentarily liberated from her hyper-connected world, only to be forced into a session of self-criticism before the assembled staff of the Circle. On a Steve Jobs-style company platform, Mae confesses to her crime – failing to stream her every private experience for the benefit of the community. It's not clear whether The Circle is intended as a satire of the present or a dystopian vision of the near future. Eggers's writing is so fluent, his ventriloquism of tech-world dialect so light, his denouement so enjoyably inevitable that you forgive the thin characterisation and implausibility of what is really a clever concept novel. As soon as the novel appeared, corners of cultural chatter-sphere lit up in typical, fissiparous mode: commentators both "smiling" and "frowning" (to borrow Circle terms); some happy to take the ride; others perplexed that an author as hip as Eggers should be conservative on social media; others still mocking the daft idea that the infinitely disputatious internet might be subsumed into any unified programme. It would be daft to compare today's online corporations, or the current surveillance scare, to the real-world totalitarian forces (Nazi, Stalinist, Maoist) evoked by Nineteen Eighty-Four . But Eggers's novel doesn't demand to be read so weightily. Instead, it's a nicely caricatured vision of hi-tech, soft-touch totalitarianism, a narrative thought experiment in which it's liberal idealism (r