OK, so I was supposed to go to Chinese class this morning, except I started reading the last chapter of this book and Jesus freaking Christ if I wasn’t completely shocked out of my mind by this ending.
The Circle is a story about a young woman named Mae Holland who is introduced into the world of The Circle, which is an Internet company that has begun a cleansing of sorts of the Internet through projects like TrueYou, which makes it so that all of your Internet accounts are tied in with your identity. The Circle was started by the “Wise Men”, of which Stenton is the economic brains, Bailey is the empathetic face, and Ty is the boy-genius creator. Mae slowly becomes part of the insider circle in the Circle, and finds out about this idea of “Completion,” which is basically the Circle eliminating all private information in the name of the greater good.
I’m going to be honest with you, I didn’t get much of the beginning of this book. It wasn’t necessarily boring; it was just slow, and as an outsider, you don’t see Mae being corrupted, you just see her making decisions that don’t make logical sense. But at the same time, you also are confronted with a question, and this question is honestly the reason why I continued to read: is privacy really important?
Bailey’s arguments that complete and total information access would lead to better treatment makes sense, logically, to me. It is true that if all the countries could watch one another, then there would be no Mutually Assured Destruction, because people’s every move would be watched and matched by the other countries. And it is also true that if you don’t want to commit a crime, why would you need privacy? If you’re not doing anything wrong, why not show what you’re doing to the rest of the world? At the same time, as a deeply private person, I don’t want people to know what I am doing. I don’t want to walk the world without an ounce of mystery, flayed naked for all those who want to see me to see me. But is my own personal abhorrence towards this type of information sharing the right response when this knowledge could be used to save the rest of the world, save children who are kidnapped and hurt, save rebels who are captured and tortured?
I still don’t have an answer to that question. And that, I think, is what Dave Eggers, the author of this book, does best. I remember Evelyn Hugo from The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo saying something along the lines of, “She always made sure the good outweighed the bad. I was cruel: the good and the bad weighed equal with me, so she doesn’t want to leave but she wants to leave simultaneously.” I think that is exactly what Eggers manages to do. It’s obvious that the complete transparency of this world is hurting people: Mae stands by, indifferent as she forces the death of Mercer, a person that even if she didn’t admire was still a fixture in her home; Mae watches, as her parents’ sexual acts are broadcasted to thousands of people; Mae watches as her best friend Annie is forced into a coma by the stress and horror of having her family’s horrid past lain in front of her. Yet at the same time, through the different policies that the Circle is encouraging, Egger paints the picture of a world in which, although people have no privacy, everything is safe. Children are no longer kidnapped, voting becomes nearly universal, and governments are no longer corrupt. This is what makes the world of Mae Holland so compelling, and her story so much of a tragedy. She fails, and we can do nothing except watch her fail, and wonder if we were in her position would we do the same things.
The character development of Mae is incredibly interesting. From the very beginning, she is terrified of offending. She has a pronounced case of imposter syndrome because she believes the already established Annie pulled strings to get her into the Circle, and she is terrified of losing her position in the Circle, forced to return to a life that is monotonous and robotic. She has ambition, she wants to leave that life, and so she is pushed forward into the Circle’s arms with a fear of the past and a hunger for the future, combined with imposter syndrome. All of this makes it so that when the time comes, she is the perfect chess piece for the Wise Men. What better player for them to manipulate than a person as willing and desperate as Mae? Mae barely puts up any resistance against the intrusive policies and fake kindness of the Circle. Sure, Dan is “sincere”, but when he admonishes her and dismisses her, it isn’t hard to tell that he isn’t the sincere person Mae perceives him to be. Yet Mae continues to do everything in her power to satisfy them, spending hours on an arbitrary rank that feels reminiscent of the social media ranks of TikTok and Weibo. She allows them to walk all over her, and in the end, she manipulates herself into accepting what they say. She feels uncomfortable with the way Francis records their sex without her permission, but Bailey comforts her, and before long she is telling herself that her feelings were stupid and that she shouldn’t have felt them. She really is a character study of the type of follower that is the most dangerous: the type that is smart, ambitious, but not wise enough to think for themself.
She even begins to doubt Annie, the friend that got her into the Circle in the first place. I don’t know how much of what she believes about Annie is true and how much is just Mae being an unreliable narrator, but regardless, it is evident from the moment Annie gets back that she is exhausted, and maybe just a little sick and tired of the whole “transparent” (wearing a camera around your neck at all times so everyone can see what you’re doing) thing. Still, she succumbs to the same curse that Mae does: caring too much for what other people think of her. Annie breaks down and cries when she finds out that her family owned slaves and that people online are calling her names, and this feels eerily similar to the way Mae was uncomfortable and sad when she found out that 3% of the Circle members didn’t like her. Like Annie, Mae’s first thought finding this out was to decide on how she could make these people like her– the ultimate people pleaser.
The discussions surrounding social media are also incredibly potent in this story. Mercer, in particular, says something along the lines of, “You people manufacture an unhealthy need for social interaction, when you don’t need it,” and that really stuck with me. It made me wonder, how much of what we share on social media is something that we really need to share, and how many of our interactions there are really just meaningless and bland, things that we condition ourselves into believing we need but we don’t really? What is good social interaction? Anyway, would definitely recommend this book to just about everyone. I don’t think the beginning was the best, but that ending really made this book on a whole other level for me, so overall would definitely recommend this book.
Happy Thursday!!
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