The Circle, BE, Glenn Greenwald, Edward Snowden

[Joseph Tracy]

I just finished Dave Eggers's The Circle, a page turner whose strength is more in the story than the poetry or depth of the writing. Essentiallly there is an immediacy that knocked me to my seat every so often just to think about the issues raised.
Have only read some of his  short works before this and enjoyed  the  literary mag he edits - McSweeny's. I found The Circle to be  powerful, dark and all too credible in overall movement. The characters are a bit thin but that is largely a function of the digital groupthink world they embrace. He is covering much the same terrain as Pynchon's BE, and as the Snowden Revelations show, a process that seems to have moved further toward a global police state than we seem able or willing to face.  

Eggers's writing tactic is to put the best arguments for a kind of utopian transparency as the leading edge by which a google like entity is introducing global surveillance( for example how it could stop child abduction,  make politicians accountable, keep you honest or tell you if the surf's up) The main character begins as a sympathetic sensitive college graduate named Mae Holland who, through a close friend, gets a chance to work at The Circle. It is the step-by-step process through which she is lured from her own humanity into a cult of commoditized"friendship" and self deception that Eggers develops the narrative. He is looking at something  we know about from the news; the dark potential of the invasive collection  of information is no longer theoretical. And more disturbing, he is looking at something most people are experiencing intimately: the world of online information exchange and personal image-making. By merging the NSA with google and facebook  he points toward the urge to make one's online existence  virtually constant and to preserve more and more digital data as if by proper binary coding we could finally create a perfect and eternal self. By this means he asks  many questions about whether a person  can operate as genuine in an environment  with no privacy  while constantly processing commercial interests, false choices, ridiculous nonsense and Orwellian propaganda?  Do you 'like' something because you like it or because you see the benefits of that choice. Success in such a world is likely to destroy true character and ethics, and invites totalitarian pressures into the fabric of our lives. The current status of that fabric is a weird blend of Orwell and Huxley, which casts privacy and personal freedom into a shadow world.

If the CIA  and  MIC and friends did not  kill Kennedy when he tried to de-fuse the Cold War, and if they did not  seize power then to take up the role of military empire, it is now clear that such a seizure has taken place, and that much of it's paranoia and predations are now directed at the dazed citizens of the political heartland.  That Apple and Google and facebook etc. have created the technology to do this while seeming to open the world to ever greater freedom of information may be ironic and shocking, it  also fits with the origin of computers to break codes in a world-wide war. Anyway, what now is the real question?  


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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l