Against the Trendsetters from Silicon Valley

The totalitarianism of transparency: In his angry novel “The Circle,” author Dave Eggers has written the “1984” for the Internet era.

Dave Eggers is the proud owner of a pirate supply store. Eggers, also a well-known author in Germany and publisher of the trendsetter magazines McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern and The Believer, wanted to open up a school to help students with their writing skills on Valencia Street in San Francisco. The location was intended only for retail stores. So he opened up a fake store — the pirate supply store — and the writing center was held in the back.

By now the prank store has been outdone by absurd new neighboring stores. The surrounding streets are jammed with private Google buses, which bring young, beautiful, meditative people to the company’s campuses in Silicon Valley. The army of these young, well-paid and successful dot-com people has turned San Francisco and Valencia Street into a sin-free luxury habitat. Eggers’ eye patches seem to be a more simple and essential option when compared to scented candles that can be used as massage oil or chili marmalade for $12 per jar.

“The Circle” is Eggers’ first novel about these changes, about the culture and power of Silicon Valley. On second glance, the novel is very trendy, but isn’t a stereotype that throws everyone who wears horn-rimmed glasses and likes Weezer into one category. It is about two types of trendsetter, the pirate store ones and the ones from the Google buses. However, Eggers’ novel has a different trendsetter attitude: He presents a dystopia, a furious satire, which knows exactly what is right and wrong.

The novel tells the story of the resistible rise of Mae Holland. She is hired by the gigantic enterprise [known as] The Circle, which will take over Google, Apple and Facebook in the near future and completely centralize their services. Like the obvious example of Big Brother from Orwell’s “1984,” The Circle has three slogans too: “Secrets are lies,” “Sharing is caring” and “Privacy is theft.” More transparency is always good. The more people watch, whether in Tahrir Square or on KONY 2012, the better for the world.

At the beginning of the novel, The Circle company introduces its newest product: SeeChange, a tiny camera which can be placed or hidden anywhere. The live images are streamed online and can be viewed there by either a network of “friends” or the whole web community. The reader discovers, with horror, that the product could be used very practically in their own life. Mae is willing “to go transparent,” as it is called in the novel: She broadcasts her entire life while the rest of the world hits “like” or gives comments.

Between Crucible and Montessori School

Soon enough, politicians are inspired by her and follow her example into “transparency.” Everything they do, say and see is broadcast by a tiny camera and citizens can give their opinions live. Secrets, scandals and corruption are suddenly part of the past.

Mae seems like Little Red Riding Hood, entering the woods of The Circle’s campus — a mix between crucible and Montessori school — without realizing the danger. Before you know it, Mae turns out to be a willing follower, maybe even an accomplice. She has the intuition that watching politicians and giving comments or opinions could really mean that the private sector is more democratic than Washington: “No more lobbyists, Sunday opinion polls, maybe even no more Congress.”

The way to corruption cannot be described — probably a key point. Mae sees herself denounced during a new app presentation. Her anger is at first toward the invasion of her privacy, until she sees the truth of what really bothered her. Her ego, the self that was presented, did not correspond to the original. Everyone who has seen young people furiously upload their private lives onto social media sites has witnessed it: If you are living transparently, then at least be presented accurately.

The figures in the novel are trendsetters who passionately curate their own interests, from canoeing to crafting antler chandeliers — and who always broadcast [themselves] on the web for everyone to see. Eggers does not blame the characters in his novel for this contradiction or present them unrealistically, which normally happens in satires that engage in “hipster-bashing”. On the contrary, this contradiction in his characters hides the desperate wish to believe in something — a wish the technology industry knows all too well how to use to its advantage.

“The Circle” Is about Beliefs and How Trendsetters Can Be Seduced

“The Circle” is thus about beliefs, and the ways trendsetters can be seduced to enter the quasi-religious mania of the substitute utopias of techno-barons. The scenes in which the charismatic managers of The Circle present new products to their enthusiastic followers, as if they were revealing Heaven, are horrifically real satires. Whether the empty phrases and the deceitful cockiness in these scenes are taken directly from Steve Jobs’ presentations, can’t be known. But anyone who has ever had a chance to listen in on an Apple developer’s conference would recognize the effects of cheap showmanship and false informality immediately.

Why is it, asks Eggers’ novel, that their famous sense of irony is suppressed in these moments? Why let yourself be lulled by such an empty chorus, which barely conceals the capitalism of Silicon Valley? Eggers, the ultimate trendsetter, asks his readers with the utmost seriousness to dare to be even more ironic.

Interestingly, the novel is not ironic at all. As in his book “Zeitoun,” which tells the true story of Hurricane Katrina and the fear of terrorism of the George Bush era, “The Circle” also shows Eggers as simultaneously angry, political and dead serious. It is fairly clear that the book wants to say something about Internet culture, Internet companies and the general change we have undergone because of the openness of the Internet.

Deliberately Painted Black

Sometimes it seems a bit embarrassing — if every fool already knows about George Orwell, then why continually point out “1984”? On the other hand, the novel fails to be ironic directly because of ironic sleight-of-hand. Mae is not like Winston Smith. The novel deliberately paints things in black and white. Eggers’ novel possesses what other contemporary literature normally disapproves of — characters who drip pure gospel from their mouths, who speak in sentences that could be straight from Eggers’ own essays. Eggers wants and needs this group of skeptics to shout out the nonsense slogans that The Circle trumpets out into the world.

There are hopes that this novel, which has its finger on the pulse of our manically connected world, will soon be translated into German. “The Circle” is a novel about enterprise culture, something which isn’t as widespread in Germany yet, at least not as dominantly as it is in the Bay Area. Eggers’ gloomy visions still seem to be an American problem, the country of data-privacy officers and over-pixelated Google street views.

But that would be to underestimate it: The reward of Eggers’ novel is that he does not differentiate between good and bad on the web. The Circle in the novel is obviously [meant to refer to] Facebook and Google, but the zealous enthusiasm with which Mae Holland exemplifies “transparency” as a value in and of itself exceeds Google’s inflexibility by far.

The actual model of transparency is Julian Assange, with his basic assumption that every secret is immoral and in contrast, every transparency is good. The model could well be called the pirate party, as the questions which get discussed in online meetings — “Should the U.S.A. send a drone to kill a specific terrorist in Pakistan?” and “Is Mae Holland super, or what?” — seem to be related to the decision-making process of pirates.

“The Circle” is a novel about totalitarianism and transparency. It is the public web and not the National Security Agency that acts as Big Brother. The thesis of the novel is that not knowing, ignorance and looking away has its own ethic. Where there is transparency, there are also redeeming virtues growing: distortion, disguise, misconception and irony, which are all accepted as given. Simply, the irony of the hip.