– even core functions of democracy like voting:
Washington is trying to save money […] Right now it costs the government about ten dollars to facilitate every vote. Two hundred million people vote, and it costs the feds two billion to run the presidential election every four years. […] If we provide these services for free, we’re saving the government billions of dollars. (TC 394)
Mae’s proposition to conduct elections via the Circle’s channels is more than welcomed by its CEOs, since it requires “100 percent of the citizenry” to possess a Circle account: an influential step towards monopoly and a guarantee for stable revenue. In fact, as David Lascalles argues, the Circle’s power is founded on providing a single financial identity for its users “through which people can transact and lead their entire lives” (45), meaning that every bank account is connected to one Circle profile. The company is primarily interested in making money of their users. The Circlers thus expose themselves as failed idealists, upholding eutopian notions superficially but seeking true inspiration from the free-market paradigm of commodification. As Ben Tarnoff continues, “[n]owhere is the neoliberal faith […] more deeply felt than in Silicon Valley. Tech entrepreneurs work tirelessly to turn more of our lives into markets and devote enormous resources towards ‘disrupting’ government by privatizing its functions” (“Privatisation”).4 The maxim that money becomes the decisive criterion in legitimising any decision is reinforced by Mae, who states that “[t]here had been some concern […] about a private company taking over a very public act like voting. But the logic of it, the savings inherent, was winning the day” (TC 395, my emphasis). With the help of the Circle’s neoliberal think tank, stressing the “savings inherent,” democracy is “transformed from a political process […] into a consumer product to be marketed” (Martin 64). By supporting and championing this logic, the Circlers ignore that not all material and immaterial goods should be commodified and marketed in a capitalist world – a questionable process that reduces inalienable human rights to commodities. Equating citizens with consumers and vice versa negates and eradicates the categorical differences between the two concepts. As Martin writes, “[t]he government traditionally provides goods and services to groups and individuals based on a perceived social need. […] When a company worries about customer satisfaction, it is concerned that the individual will continue to purchase a product or a service, not that the product or the service meets a social need” (62).5 Eggers makes this discourse explicit, as his characters vocalise similar positions in all detail, thus tapping into a contemporary controversy surrounding the legitimisation of neoliberal discourses.
The Circle insists that too much wealth in the hands of the few can eventually corrupt people and therefore cannot be seen as a neutral means to an end but must be considered as inherently dangerous and immoral. As Kalden, the IT-wunderkind and founder of the Circle, recounts the history of the company, “[t]here was Bailey and Stenton and the IPO. And then it was just too fast, and there was enough money to make any dumb idea real” (TC 487). Too much money, according to the novel, may shift ethical and moral boundaries. As Kalden suggests, readily available funds eradicate the reflection time necessary to digest project proposals. Consequently, any number of “dumb idea[s]” are financed by the Circle, the “plan to count the grains of sand in the Sahara” (ibid. 160) being one of the most ludicrous projects. At the Circle, ideas are neither limited by financial resources nor by moral and ethical deliberations; since the former are inexhaustible, the latter shrink into irrelevance. As the novel suggests, money has successfully replaced morality and – for that matter – common sense. The text identifies the economic power of the Circle as corrupting and thus highly problematic, criticising the company for circumventing democratic decisions and destabilising entire political systems of various countries.
Eggers’ metaphor of choice to express this financial “deterritorialized power is captured in oceanic terms” (Masterson 732): The Circle employs all sorts of water imagery, symbols and associations to convey the destabilising power of the company, thereby drawing also on the symbolism of a liquid economic system as introduced by Zygmunt Bauman in his Liquid Modernity (2000):6 TruYou, for instance, one of the programmes the company sells successfully to the public, is described as a “tidal wave” that “crushed all meaningful opposition” (TC 22). Furthermore, the company’s power and influence are expressed by different sea creatures. Most often, the Circle is equated to a whale, alluding to its sheer size and importance in the economic pecking order. Other, smaller companies, hoping that they might be bought by the company, are measured accordingly: “[i]t’s plankton-inspection time. […] You know, little startups hoping the big whale—that’s us—will find them tasty enough to eat” (ibid. 28). Initiating a discourse of consumption, the simile reduces the corporate world to an almost Darwinian state of ‘eat or be eaten.’7 While the metaphor of the whale triggers associations of a peaceful, slow giant benignly ruling the sea, the shark Stenton brings back from his voyages to the Marianas Trench highlights the Darwinian associations: “[i]t was a bizarre creature, ghostlike, vaguely menacing and never still, but no one who stood before it could look away. […] It was certainly a shark, it had its distinctive shape, its malevolent stare, but this was a new species, omnivorous and blind” (ibid. 309). Interestingly, the animal is “omnivorous and blind,” thereby foreshadowing the Circle’s exorbitant hunger, with which it is about to incorporate everyone and everything into its system. The novel introduces an obvious symbolism, conceptualising the Circle as this omnivorous shark (thereby altering the associations connected to the company rather drastically), by commenting on the obvious link between Stenton and his new pet established by gazes:
Stenton was staring at the shark, […]. The shark’s nose was deep in the coral now, attacking it with a brutal force. […] The coral soon split open and the shark plunged in, coming away, instantaneously, with the octopus, which it dragged into the open area of the tank, as if to give everyone – Mae and her watchers and the Wise Men – a better view as it tore the animal apart. […] The shark ripped off an arm, then seemed to get a mouthful of the octopus’s head, only to find, seconds later, that the octopus was still alive and largely intact, behind him. But not for long. […] The shark took the rest of it in two snatches of its mouth, and the octopus was no more. […] Then like a machine going about its work, the shark circled and stabbed until he had devoured the thousand [baby seahorses], and the seaweed, and the coral, and the anemones. It ate everything […]. (ibid. 480f., my emphases)
The explicit language of this quotation mirrors the brutal proceedings inside the tank. “Circling” inside the aquarium (cf. ibid. 319, my emphasis), the omnivore rips apart other animals, creating a metaphorical template of the Circle’s own business model; no creature survives the encounter with the shark, but ends up as ash-grey “flakes that fell ponderously to the aquarium floor, joining, and indistinguishable from, those that had come before” (ibid. 320). Moreover, Stenton, initially characterised as an aggressive wolf, finds a further animal equal in the omnivorous shark, a creature that mercilessly incorporates – in the literal sense of the word – everything into its system. The Circle has become “[t]he fucking shark that eats the world” (ibid. 484). The company’s success is presented as an impersonal force of nature that literally washes away “all meaningful opposition” such as human protestors and legal barriers.
2. “Don’t You See That It’s All Connected?”– The Company and Network Standards
By stating, “[d]espotism we can understand” (History 495), Gregory Claeys summarises our familiarity with totalitarian regimes and their practices. The ability to have agent B do what agent A wants her to do – even against her will – constitutes a prime example for a simple action-reaction pattern based on the asymmetry of influence and power. This process is easily observable, and familiar to us, as it is this ability most people commonly associate with Foucault’s juridico-political form of power. According to Grewal, Steven Lukes defines this mode of power by its ability to “overcome[…] resistance” (in Grewal 123), making it the first step of his three dimension model of power. Lukes hints at the fact that the one-dimensional understanding of power is probably the one most easily observed and identified “because its exercise affects someone” (ibid.). After generations of scholars theorising on sovereign power, following