the Circle neither with respect to money nor influence, politicians seem to occupy a similar position of minor importance only, if any at all. Indeed, the novel downgrades the importance of politicians in comparison to the company CEOs on multiple occasions, for example, when introducing Tom Stenton, the CEO and one of the Three Wise Men, the Founders of the Circle.
To the lower left […] was Tom Stenton, the world-striding CEO and self-described Capitalist Prime – he loved the Transformers – wearing an Italian suit and grinning like the wolf that ate Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother. […] He was more in the mold of the eighties Wall Street Traders, unabashed about being wealthy, about being single and aggressive and possibly dangerous. He was a free-spending global titan in his early fifties who seemed stronger every year, who threw his money and influence around without fear. He was unafraid of presidents. He was not daunted by lawsuits from the European Union or threats from state-sponsored Chinese hackers. Nothing was worrisome, nothing was unattainable, nothing was beyond his pay grade. (ibid. 23f., emphasis in the original)
Described as “dangerous,” “wolf,” and “aggressive,” that is to say, as a character outside of accepted social behaviour delineated by society and state, Tom Stenton acts as the poster boy of unleashed neoliberal power. Although his preferred nickname ‘Capitalist Prime’ alludes to the fictional leader of the alien race which features in the Japanese comic book series Transformers (humanoid robots with the ability to turn into cars, lorries, or planes, which are usually described as morally impeccable and socially committed), Stenton is nothing like the heroic Optimus Prime. While Stenton admires the physical strength and leadership qualities associated with Optimus Prime, the substitution of “optimus” by “capitalist” suggests that Stenton prioritises money over ethics: his name translates as ‘capitalism first.’ With literally “nothing beyond his pay grade,” again an allusion to the influence of money, the lingua franca of free-market capitalism, Stenton has managed to withdraw himself from the power of states and thus serves as a symbol for the entire company. Moreover, his characterisation reads like the rhetoric employed by Thomas Hobbes in his thought experiment Leviathan (1651), which describes the natural state of war individuals find themselves in before agreeing on the state monopoly on legitimate violence (‘homo homini lupus’). Characterised as a “global titan” – a mythological association that, like the descriptors “wolf” and “dangerous,” catapults him beyond man-made rules and thus society – in his function as CEO, Tom Stenton has surpassed not only single states, like China, currently one of the big players in the global market: he floats on top of multiple nations, the European Union, which, despite the combined powers of more than two dozen states, cannot threaten him. In fact, the example suggests that “the state does not represent even the smallest of hurdles to the Circle’s efforts” (Martin 61). Stenton and the corporation “seemed stronger by the year” (TC 23), foreshadowing its dominating role by the end of the novel.
Having established the setting as decidedly capitalist, the novel presents its readers with the consequences of modelling all social interactions according to the rules of business transactions: The Circle criticises the overwhelming power of corporations in particular and the capitalist paradigm more generally by presenting the Circle and its employees as pseudo-eutopians whose real interests lie in the erection of a system that commodifies life, a “monetized […] [e]utopia” (TC 489). The novel deconstructs the company’s marketed self-image (seemingly dedicated to the ideals of sharing, community, and stabilising democracy) by highlighting that the Circle is actually all about earning money and generating profit (cf. Lascalles): for instance, the company encourages its employees to foster an atmosphere of consumerism, advertising certain products on their social media channels. Their work performance is also evaluated and assessed in terms of their ‘Retail Raw,’ a scale that indicates how much money they encouraged their followers to spend:
So every purchase initiated or prompted by a recommendation you make raises your Conversion Rate. If your purchase or recommendation spurs fifty others to take the same action, then your CR is x50. […] Okay, so your average Conversion Rate so far has been x119. Not bad. But on a scale of 1 to 1,000, there’s a lot of room for improvement. Below the Conversion Rate is your Retail Raw, the total gross purchase price of recommended products. So let’s say you recommend a certain keychain, and 1,000 people take your recommendation; then those 1,000 keychains, priced at $ 4 each, bring your Retail Raw to $ 4,000. It’s just the gross retail price of the commerce you’ve stoked. Fun, right? (TC 252)
As Mae soon learns, “the minimum expectation for high-functioning Circlers is a conversion rate of x250, and a weekly Retail Raw of $ 45,000” (ibid. 252f., my emphasis), meaning that the employees of the Circle are expected to stimulate consumption and function as a vehicle for advertising.3 Algorithm-based tracking programmes control whether the employees fulfil their quota. This marketing strategy, which anticipates the methods employed by contemporary influencers and Instagram stars, is an integral aspect of their job, proving the Circle to be not a humanitarian project for achieving eutopia but a hipster marketplace for collecting customer data and selling goods to users (cf. Halfmann 275). Examples like these demask the company as a generator for profit which reduces its employees to online peddlers.
Understanding and processing life as a single cost-benefit-analysis, the majority of characters exemplify how familiar neoliberal thinking has become. Regina Martin labels this logic Stenton’s ‘economic efficiency argument’ (cf. 62), thereby commenting on the state of mind necessary to express value solely in economic terms. Based freely on Oscar Wilde’s famous aphorism that these days people “know[…] the price of everything and the value of nothing” (Lady Windermere’s Fan 82), Eggers’ novel illustrates the inhuman consequences of thinking only in economic terms. In the words of The Guardian journalist Ben Tarnoff, The Circle shows how “[d]ecades of neoliberalism have corroded our capacity to think in non-economic terms” (“Privatization”). The characters are firmly situated within the paradigm of capitalist realism, having been taught “that all fields of human life should be organized as markets” (ibid.). All decisions made at the Circle are legitimised by economic deliberations, for example, by referencing the savings incurred by introducing this change or that initiative. For instance, health insurance and health care are primarily thought of as initiatives to save money, rather than as a measure to save human life. When asked why the Circle is providing free but extensive health care for its employees, the chief physician, Dr Villalobos, explains, “prevention is cheap. Especially compared to finding some Stage-4 lump when we could have found it at Stage 1” (TC 154). Treating its employees as a resource, the Circle shows how cost-benefit-analyses can permeate various discourses.
The insignificance of individual human lives, already suggested in the example of Dr Villalobos, becomes painfully clear in the next example, which marks a caesura in Mae’s development as a character. Crashing off a bridge after being chased by high-efficiency drones working with geolocation, Mercer, Mae’s ex-boyfriend, becomes the object of a discussion in which both Bailey and Mae demonstrate how much their way of thinking and processing of the world has been colonised by neoliberal ideas of profit maximisation and cost reduction. Having staged his grief for Mae and “her twenty-eight million” watchers (TC 466), Bailey changes the subject of the conversation, exclaiming “not that it’s about money, but do you know how much it’ll cost to repair that bridge? And what it already cost to clean up the whole mess down below? You put him in a self-driving car, and there’s no option for self-destruction” (ibid. 467). Although Bailey states that this is not “about money,” it is obvious that it is all about money indeed. The CEO successfully turns Mercer’s suicide/death into a benefit-cost analysis, circling around the maintenance of infrastructure. Wasting this opportunity to critically reflect on the reasons for Mercer’s actions, both Bailey and Mae deteriorate further, legitimising another company innovation, self-driving cars, by re-introducing a neoliberal cost-efficiency argument to open up new markets. This direct comparison is explicit, opening the readers’ eyes to the fact that the company is not about establishing eutopia but rather about marketing goods.
As already hinted at, The Circle describes the slow descent of the nation state and democracy as we understand it and substitutes the former with the corporation. Concomitantly, the plot climaxes with the