In December 2019, the German newspaper Spiegel Online declared The Circle even to be one of the ten novels that shaped and influenced the bygone decade (cf. F. Bayer). Eggers’ texts must therefore be treated seriously even if their literary quality may not compare to the works of the Grand Dame of dystopian fiction, Margaret Atwood, or those of the Nobel laureate, Kazuo Ishiguro.
The second point of criticism focuses on the plausibility of the novel. Particularly those working within the tech industry have accused Eggers of naivety and ignorance: Laura Bennett, for instance, discredits Eggers since – according to her – he has not understood how an operating system works. Furthermore, Graeme McMillan and Felix Salmon criticise Eggers’ technical illiteracy, claiming that his lack of facts makes “it all too easy to dismiss his whole book as the work of someone who hasn’t got the faintest clue what he’s talking about.” The question arises, however, whether an author must necessarily be aware of the technical details in order to aptly interrogate and provide adequate commentary on the thematic complexity of technology and society. In fact, the entire discussion is reminiscent of the accusations directed at Kazuo Ishiguro for not providing enough background information on the donation system in his dystopia Never Let Me Go;2 just as the critique against Ishiguro, the criticism focused on Eggers is unsubstantial, missing the point in question entirely.
Despite minor inaccuracies regarding the depiction of technology, The Circle can be read as an up-to-date representation of a thriving company in Silicon Valley, holding up “the mirror of art in order to show us ourselves and the perils that surrounds us” (Atwood, “Privacy”). Ron Charles, for instance, reminds the readers of his Washington Post review that “we’re already living” in that world. As Gwyneth Jones writes, “at this particular moment in time, reality and science fiction are moving into such close conjunction that science fiction is no longer the strange reflection and artistic elaboration of current preoccupations: the mirror and the actuality have almost become one” (vii). The Circle is definitively one of the more recent dystopias that bring the perils of the future closer to home, refraining from projecting the despicable dystopian world decades into the future, instead providing an accurate reflection of the now. The novel latches on to the extraliterary reality of its readers, grounding its tale in plausibility, common knowledge, and popular discourses of the early 21st century. Set in contemporary California, Eggers’ novel focuses on the rise of the eponymous tech giant ‘the Circle,’ which emerges as the sole survivor of a cutthroat capitalist competition, having subsumed “Facebook, Twitter, Google, and finally Alacrity, Zoopa, Jefe, and Quan” (TC 23).3 The novel adopts the perspective of the 24-year-old protagonist, Mae Holland – like Winston Smith an Everyman character standing in for the average reader (cf. Gellai 299) –, and accompanies her from her first day in her new job. Recently ‘escaped’ from a mediocre position with neither career opportunities nor health insurance for family members, Mae is overwhelmed by the seemingly eutopian opportunities at the Circle. But “as the story advances, our view of the Circle moves from bright to dark to darker” (Atwood, “Privacy”), prompting us to reconceptualise the initial impression.
The Circle has been read as an exploration of technologically-induced identity models (cf. Halfmann; also Gellai) and as an enquiry into corporate responsibility (cf. Martin). What makes the novel interesting for the current analysis, is the absence of rebels: The Circle is a dystopia largely void of rebellion and without a totalitarian state apparatus. In fact, it demonstrates how people can ‘crowd-found’ a dystopia through their combined free albeit involuntary decisions. After investigating the decidedly neoliberal setting of the novel, this analysis will shed light on The Circle’s depiction of network power, which operates via the fear of social exclusion as a direct result of not accepting a standard, before commenting on the specific role technology plays in establishing said standard. As a final step, the fourth subchapter will focus on the formulation of critique within the text, demonstrating that external criticism is explicitly marked as a non-option by and within the novel, while immanent criticism emerges as the only viable option for fostering social reform.
1. Corporate Dystopia – The Rise of the Circle
Eggers’ The Circle seems to resonate intensively with classical dystopian fiction, above all with George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Virginia Pignagnoli, for instance, claims that Eggers constructs his narrative in “plain Orwellian fashion” (“Surveillance” 151), while Joseph A. Domino claims that Eggers’ novel “is a version of Orwell’s 1984 [sic!]” (“Privacy”). At first glance, these observations seem valid: insisting on being called “Uncle Eamon” (TC 25), the CEO Eamon Bailey taps into the same family discourse as Big Brother; besides, the companies’ maxims, “Secrets are Lies,” “Sharing is Caring,” and “Privacy is Theft” (ibid. 305), are stylistically and structurally reminiscent of Nineteen Eighty-Four’s party slogans, “WAR IS PEACE,” “FREEDOM IS SLAVERY,” and “IGNORACNE IS STRENGTH” (31, emphasis in the original), inviting a direct comparison between the two novels (cf. also Galant). Yet to evaluate Eggers in terms of the standards set by Orwell et al. alone would deeply wrong both him and his novel. While The Circle is arguably the novel closest to traditional dystopian structures of all those discussed in this analysis, comparisons focused purely on the close textual and structural proximity between the novel and classical dystopian fiction do not do justice to Eggers’ text since they ignore the substantial differences between the two novels in both content, narrative structure, and type of criticism employed.
As Andreas Bernard has already pointed out in his FAZ review “Der Dritte Kreis der Hölle” (2018)1, many aspects of the novel differ significantly from the tropes and topoi prevalent in classical dystopian fiction. For example, while the traditional dystopian novel as popularised by Orwell, Huxley, and Zamyatin constructs an estranged, authoritarian world state, Eggers describes a fictive tech company in an all too familiar contemporary world, which slowly but steadily supplants the state as the prime engine of social reform.2 Indeed, The Circle narrates the success story of a shiny, super-hip corporation, constantly highlighting the fact that in a capitalist and globalised world state structures have served their time. As Tom Moylan diagnosed, “[i]n many works of the dystopian turn […] portrayals of the state disappear” (“Moment” 138), until eventually “the power of the authoritarian state gives way to the more pervasive tyranny of the corporation” (ibid. 135). Emphasising “the complex interconnections between corporations and government” (Galow 123), the novel thus partakes in the ongoing discussion about the influence of the economy on politics. For instance, when Mae arrives on the campus and reads through the schedule of Circle activities for the day, she discovers that a “congressman [she] hadn’t heard of, grey-haired but young, was holding a town hall at six thirty” (TC 6). His speech is advertised on the elevator doors and Mae watches him “talking at a podium, somewhere else, flags rippling behind him, his shirtsleeves rolled up and his hands shaped into earnest fists” (ibid.). Yet the staged election campaign performance displayed by the US politician comes to an abrupt end: “[t]he doors opened, splitting the congressman in two” (ibid.). Not only the apparent disinterest with which Mae registers the politician (she had never heard of him), but also the fact that his image is split in two by the company’s elevator doors, foreshadows the minor role politics and its representatives will play in Eggers’ novel. This section at the very beginning of the text paves the way for a narrative centring around the slow descent of political power into irrelevance, and the concomitant ascent of corpocratic power. As Darko Suvin has commented in a different context, “the partnership and collusion between the capitalist global corporations and the nation-States [sic!] seems […] finally [be] dominated by the former” (“Reflections” 73). In Eggers’ world, chances are that eventually states will be bereft of all power.
The novel regularly features examples that remind the readers of the dominance of capital and companies, establishing neoliberal capitalism as the sole paradigm that governs both politics and business as well as any other aspect of human life. “There were notices about each day’s campus visits: a pet adoption agency, a state senator, a Congressman from Tennessee, the director of Médecins Sans Frontières” (TC 102). The senator’s position on the list of people to visit the campus is paradigmatic of