The Circle (SF) - Dave Eggers ****

This near-future dystopian view of a tech giant taken to the extreme still has the power to bite thirteen years after it was first published, though some flaws are now more obvious. Central character Mae gets a job at the Circle, a sort of Google+Meta+Musk. To begin with all is wonderful, though even early on she gets a shock when she is disciplined for not RSVPing an invitation to something she wasn't interested in, sent simply because her socials said she had once visited a country.

As things get more intense, Mae (who frankly can be a little slow on the uptake) becomes a key figure in the Circle, wearing a streaming camera all day and taking viewers around the campus showing what's happening. The message of the company is no secrets, no lies - with everything in the open the world will be better. This may seem a naive view, but it's interesting that in 2009 the then CEO of Google (referring to the Glass product) said ‘If you have something you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.’

Meanwhile a mysterious character called Kalden attempts to persuade Mae to lose faith in the company's plans, especially when it seems likely to take over all voting in the US. To be honest, who Kalden is should be pretty obvious to the reader, as there is someone mentioned regularly through the book we never see. But Mae can't work out who he is despite searching for every possible spelling of Kalden beginning with K. (I don't know why she doesn't try C. It may be a US thing - my dad once came back from Chicago with a name badge reading Kleg.)

Overall, it is an excellent exploration of the dangers of both the narcissistic nature of social media and the excessive intrusion of IT companies into everyday life. One way it's a little dated is that it predates the AI revolution. Clearly the Circle is using AI as it has facial recognition etc. - but customer queries are answered by human beings (Mae's first job there), responding using tweaked boilerplate replies, something that (despite the company's people first ethos) would inevitably have been handed over to AI. And in general there is way too little pushback from ordinary people. Where are the civil liberty organisations? Why when there's a demand that politicians live stream their lives isn't the same demanded of the Circle top management? How can they say there should be no secrets but still expect to defend their intellectual property as they stringently do?

It's also a little frustrating to read. There are no chapters, just section breaks, which makes it hard to break off. It's also very long (my paperback copy is still 491 pages despite being in quite small print). This is mostly because it can be painfully slow - I did occasionally feel 'get on with it' - and Kalden's introduction has way too big gaps in it - if he was taking his message seriously, he would have been talking to Mae every day when she wasn't surveilled. 

It's those faults that drag it down a star. I'm very conscious that rating things is a major part of what happens with the Circle's systems, incidentally. One distinct difference between US and UK culture that this supposedly worldwide corporation seems to miss is that when they fix a customer's problem, they expect their response to be rated, and are upset if it's less than around 95%, using a follow-up to try to push the rating up to 100. I can't imagine ever doing a first rating of more than 80%, and if given a follow-up would drop it to 40. Like the aspects mentioned above, there is not enough cultural pushback. 

However, that doesn't stop this being an excellent novel and still a recommended read (far better than the TV movie).

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here