"The Circle" (2013)

If A Hologram for The King seemed like an unlikely candidate for Hollywood adaptation, The Circle is exactly what one would indeed expect to be a movie. (And so it is.)  It's a technological cautionary tale, part of a literary tradition that stretches back to Frankenstein, with a dash of creepy post-Watergate corporate dystopia thrown in for good measure. (I wouldn't call it a direct influence, but if you were a kid in the late 70s, books like Coma were pretty much what all the grown-ups were reading at the beach.)

The obvious real-life analogue to The Circle is Facebook, and the constant collision of its cheery Utopian rhetoric with its unsettling erosion of privacy. (In one of the moments when The Circle verges into outright satire, the characters begin to fret about not only their own leaked sex tapes and the like, but about getting trolled over the misdeeds of their ancestors -- all of which are now searchable.) The monetization of human interaction, and the constant upkeep of one's status, are the timely surface elements of the dark satire of The Circle. But I'm not sure that they're at its core, and that might be one reason that Eggers pointedly did not even research Silicon Valley for his book.

As Eggers noted in his May 25th interview at PSU, the origins of The Circle were much more low-tech, but rooted in a fundamental set of questions. An acquaintance had attached a confirmation receipt to an email he sent to Eggers; then, when Eggers politely claimed that maybe he hadn't seen the email yet, the acquaintance replied: why yes had, and at this particular date and time. To paraphrase Eggers pretty closely, at one time, you'd have had to go to your friend's house, hide in the bushes, and watch through the window to see if they'd opened your mail.  But now, this kind of knowledge -- and the behavior that these tracking tools enabled -- was somehow considered acceptable.

While the over-the-top Circle corporate campus and its cultish machinations are the obvious elements of the story, its moral center is in the hunting down of the protagonist's ex-boyfriend, Mercer, and his destruction for no real reason other than his lack of joining into The Circle. It is a death as oppressive and ominous as that of Winston Smith or, in Brave New World, of John the Savage.

In each case, there's a fundamental lack of empathy behind the death. But maybe there's a more succinct way to express this.  Ta-Nehisi Coates, writing in The Atlantic a few years ago, defined "asshole" in a manner worthy of philosopher Harry Frankfurt. An asshole, Coates writes, is "a person who demands that all social interaction happen on their terms."

And that's why The Circle is maybe not really about technology at all.  It's about what happens when -- through technology, or any other sort of means -- we forget the humanity of others, and start acting like assholes.