The era of the early internet was full of dizzy dreams about the world-changing potential of global communication and the breathtaking possibilities of creating a ‘world brain’ of readily available information. Few commented, at first, on the unrealized surveillance dimensions of the internet, although two decades in, jaded jeremiads became much more common, especially focused on the transparency of billions to the gaze of a group of global corporations and agencies. Few technological developments – atomic bombs excepted – have unmitigated negative consequences for humanity. So how to discern a dystopian from a utopian situation is an ongoing challenge.
Historical philosopher Michel Foucault had a keen sense of, and a disdain for, utopia: ‘It was the dream of a transparent society, visible and legible in each of its parts, the dream of there no longer existing any zones of darkness, zones established by the privileges of royal power or the prerogatives of some corporation, zones of disorder.’1 Here he deplores Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s democratic dream that once everything was in the open, as it were, there would be equality and freedom. Foucault contrasted this with Jeremy Bentham’s equally utopian scheme of the all-seeing place, the panopticon, with its opposite outcome of perfect control, through self-discipline. In each case, transparency was seen as the cure of social ills, the panacea for human problems. In one, public opinion would play its part. In the other, a sort of social engineering would ensure the smooth working of society. Utopian transparency takes different forms.
Any discussion of surveillance culture also has to confront the issue of transparency. Twentieth-century critiques of surveillance often complained about the secretiveness of surveillance, on the one hand, and its capacity to bring out into the open matters that were properly private, on the other. They also lamented the lack of transparency on the part of those doing surveillance. But the culture of surveillance, in which the ambiguity is augmented, not only allows for more transparency, but also judges it, either as an inevitable if regrettable product of our engagement with new media, or as, once more, good in itself.
How to get a handle on transparency today? It raises questions of how people relate to each other in everyday life, what they are prepared to divulge or show to others and what anyone may know about them if they so wish. But it also concerns how far there should be expectations of transparency. Is it acceptable that any photo taken of me can appear without my knowing on Facebook or Instagram and be identified as my likeness by facial recognition technology? I recently saw a photo – that I didn’t know existed – in the Washington Post of myself sitting behind Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in a town-hall meeting. But I have also seen photos from Facebook in which I was tagged, completely without my knowledge.
Enter Eggers. The Circle is a 2013 novel by Dave Eggers about technologically enabled transparency.2 If Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four offered us the concepts – ‘Big Brother is watching you!’ – with which to assess twentieth-century state surveillance, The Circle is an apt candidate for evaluating twenty-first century surveillance culture. It concerns a Silicon Valley company with a lush campus and laidback lifestyle that is completely enamoured of transparency, from its symbolically glass-clad buildings to its 24/7 participatory monitoring and exposure of all that goes on. Forget Big Brother; ‘Everything That Happens Must Be Known’ is one of its soothingly reassuring slogans – until you ask, why or by whom?
Novels play an important role in shaping a common cultural understanding of social phenomena and indeed in fuelling our social imaginaries. Among a number of others, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four has done sterling service in informing surveillance imaginaries for many decades. But this is an invitation to turn to a contemporary novel for fresh insights. While it is difficult to squeeze into one book an overview of surveillance culture, informed by contemporary social sciences, a novel offers a different view. It is complete in itself but – in this case – intended to throw into sharp relief some key features of the new surveillance condition, including its imaginaries and practices.
If such an imaginative novel or film does its work well, its audience has the task of deciding what is really going on and, in this case, where the truth about transparency lies. As Gary Marx reminds us, ‘Stories along with images and music are one component of the culture of surveillance that so infuses our minds and everyday life.’3 The Circle is offered as one such story; Black Mirror, a TV series taken up by Netflix, offers some parallel insights. Readers will think of other popular cultural offerings, too. So the point of this chapter is to bring into focus some of the contradictions and conundrums that have been explored in earlier chapters and to permit readers to work out where they stand and how they participate in the culture of surveillance.
‘My God,’ Mae murmurs at the start of The Circle, ‘this is heaven’; 491 pages later, the reader should be ready to say if she is correct. The experiences of Mae Holland, the Circle’s newest employee, lead us through the book. Her growing enthusiasm for being perpetually present, constantly on display and her rationalizing of each surveillance practice as necessary and beneficial is telling. She keeps the lid on her unease. The novel portrays in playful, funny and always satirical ways what it is like to be permanently available, always performing. But there are also shadows cast by her inability to switch off, unplug from the grid and by the fact that all data are retained indefinitely and may return to haunt her.
The Circle concerns the culture of surveillance. While readers are invited to judge whether the Circle is utopian or dystopian, one makes parallel checklists throughout because the answers are not offered on a plate. It is science fiction, sort of, but it is so close to our world that it feels as if the future has arrived. The fact that it takes place in Silicon Valley underscores that sense. Utopian and dystopian literature is meant to help us to see the world differently, to recognize ourselves in the plot and to empathize with the characters that most match our perspectives, our practices. At the same time, it is a dynamic process – we pursue a plot, after all – and we may find ourselves uncomfortably, or surreptitiously, siding with someone we at first thought we disapproved of or doubted.
After sketching the storyline, and discussing some aspects of Eggers’ work, this chapter reviews key themes: one, the rise of social surveillance and its merging with state, corporate and workplace surveillance and how this shapes imaginaries and practices; two, the ambiguities and contradictions of visibility in everyday life; three, the corporate ownership of ‘private’ spheres, and the associated emerging imaginaries and practices; and four, the coded construction of the novel itself as a vehicle for dystopian critique, a segue to ethical and political analysis.
Mae has found what she is looking for at the Circle. She has arrived, after having desperately wanted to participate in this, the world’s leading internet company. She thinks that working for this company – which resembles, and is, Facebook, Yahoo, Google (often voted the world’s best company to work for)4 and other internet companies rolled into one – is the greatest opportunity she can imagine. The messiness and uncertainty of life seem to be a thing of the past. She wallows in the Circle, sometimes gushes. It contrasts profoundly with the drab and routine job she had with a utility company, which seemed to suck out her soul. She has found her dream.
At the Circle, Mae is part of the future, in a bright, green environment with a relaxed ambience, in buildings where everyone can see what is happening and where many social events and even overnight accommodation for late workers are freely available. Because Mae believes the Circle is heaven she successively shuts out other thoughts, including doubts sown by her ex-boyfriend Mercer, whose troubled comments she finds increasingly annoying – especially when they question her utopia. When challenged by colleagues who demand to know why she is not participating more fully, she deliberately suppresses her initial responses that suggest she has a life of her own and acknowledges her failure to give herself fully.
Mae soon meets two of the ‘three wise men’, co-founders and directors of the Circle, but for Eggers their epiphany is questionable. As one of them, Bailey, launches the ‘SeeChange’ cameras, Steve Jobs style, to an enthralled audience of thousands, he intones, ‘we will become all-seeing, all-knowing’. Do we sense that the biblical serpent speaks here? Not merely because if we heed it we might inadvertently expose our nakedness – that happens later – but because it is actually a ‘knowing’ and a ‘seeing’ shrivelled down to data. That is the star guiding these wise men, which is why the Circle’s quantified selves seem so content and why Big Data has the aura of the Holy Grail.
Mercer creates some tension over against Mae’s acceptance of the Circle, by inserting some nagging doubts. He urges that she try to assess the spirit of these new times before being sucked into the vortex of ‘sharing’ everything. He tries to remain off the grid …
Mercer: Mae, I’ve never felt more that there is some cult taking over the world.
Mae: You’re so paranoid.
Mercer: I think you think that sitting at your desk, frowning and smiling, somehow makes you think you’re actually living some fascinating life. You comment on things, and that substitutes for doing them.
But Mae only fleetingly feels doubts about the Circle. So much pleasure, warmth and performance reward pulsates here that there is no going back. The brightness of the buildings, the sense of inclusion; why would one hesitate, hold back?
Enabled by the digital, sci-fi and real life merge in The Circle. When Steven Spielberg made Minority Report – another strongly surveillance-themed story – for its 2002 release, he carefully researched emerging technologies and built them ingeniously into the plot. His Pre-Crime Department seemed to come spookily to life in the Department of Homeland Security, founded in the same year to secure the US after 9/11. Eggers, too, must have done some tech homework. The Circle sounds like sci-fi but many of its referents are already available off the shelf – which may distract or distress those in the tech field. Above all there are the ways that personal data spell power and profit in a world saturated in social media. The future is already here.
Take the tiny, cheap ‘SeeChange’ cameras that may be deposited unobtrusively in any location, to send back constant feed through the internet. This is indeed occurring today and small webcams appear – if that is the right word for something you might not notice – everywhere. Take – real world, now – ‘Dropcam’ for instance – cheap, easy-to-install cameras that capture crime, views and intimate moments at a rate that vastly exceeds YouTube’s 100 hours per minute upload rate. These devices are uploaded at 1,000 hours per minute. Their price and ease of use make for rapid proliferation.5
Not only are movements tracked and traced using phones, in this smart-city style campus the everyday environment is increasingly surveillant. Many devices and apps in The Circle speak to this, including the ‘TruYou’ system that features a one-stop ID for every purpose. Vehicles have also become logjects6 – objects that record and log their own use and frequently also transmit those data elsewhere. Cars with GPS, internet connections, data recorders and high-definition cameras are becoming standard.7 And when in the real world you lose things, people or pets, you already have choices of ways to find them again, such as the tiny Bluetooth ‘Tile’ app that can be stuck or attached to almost anything for easy short-range retrieval or, beyond range, crowd-sourced back to its owner or family member.8
That Eggers wants his readers to see this as a surveillance novel is clear from his dependence on pithy Orwellesque slogans such as ‘Secrets Are Lies’, ‘Sharing Is Caring’ and ‘Privacy Is Theft’. In The Circle, these ideas are warnings but come attractively gift-wrapped; ‘Sharing Is Caring’, for instance, appears to be a virtuous, desirable condition. It chimes with Mark Zuckerberg’s remarks: ‘If people share more, the world will become more open and connected. And a world that’s more open and connected is a better world.’9 ‘All that happens must be known’ sounds like a nugget of wisdom, a quote from some sacred text, perhaps, that gives a cosmic context for increasingly transparent lives. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Big Brother’s slogans jar and grate against the lives that Winston and Julia wish to lead, whereas in The Circle they seem so natural, so acceptable, so virtuous that Mae has but brief moments of uncertainty before allowing herself to sink into their comfortable common sense.
Why does Mae permit herself to become so fully absorbed in the Circle? For one thing, it is gently but strongly demanded from her. She is supposed to post ‘zings’ all the time, and about everything, including the quiet, solitary hour paddling her kayak in the bay. Details are fed into her gamified ‘participation rank’, which in turn, after her initial hesitation, impels her to keep zinging with the best of them – or to be the best of them.10 Despite the odd ‘blasphemous flash’, a deeply embarrassing sex scene featuring her parents, and the annoying warnings about tech addiction and totalitarian tendencies from former boyfriend Mercer, Mae manages to maintain her commitment to the Circle’s transparency policy. Eggers’ message is as subtle as headlines: Mae is us.
In the end, she’s a true believer. In an exchange with Kalden, she affirms:
‘I think everything and everyone should be seen. And to be seen, we need to be watched. The two go hand in hand.’
‘But who wants to be watched all the time?’
‘I do. I want to be seen. I want proof I existed.’11
Of course, Mae is young, idealistic and, like many others in Silicon Valley, a visionary who believes she is contributing to a better world. The Circle’s vision becomes Mae’s mission but, as portrayed by Eggers, her experience almost resembles absorption into a cult. So is Mae really us? That is the question the rest of the chapter pursues.
No reader of The Circle can fail to recognize that social media are one of its key themes. Everyone is constantly connected through multiple platforms, ‘zinging’ each other and sending ‘smiles’ and ‘frowns’ to indicate approval or disapproval. Eggers acknowledges the reality of the urge to maintain the flow of messages, along with the desire to be seen and to be affirmed by others. At the same time, he cannot but insert some literary cautions, not only about the possible risks of being embarrassingly exposed to family, friends and authority figures but also about having one’s freedom compromised by the flow of personal information through channels unseen and unknown to the individual.
How can the dynamics of the social life of today’s internet and especially the phenomenon of social media best be understood? When so many are immersed in the daily round of sharing, posting, emailing, following, tweeting and updating their status it is hard to detach yourself for long enough to get a sense of what this world means. How did it come into being and how does it differ from earlier forms? How is it structured and what are its basic values and norms? We can engage usefully in historical and sociological studies, but a film or a novel are other good ways to hold up a mirror so that we can catch ourselves at work, at play in our burgeoning digital domain.
Ethnographic studies offer much by way of parallel analysis where the author is positioned as an anthropologist getting to grips with a little-known culture. One of the best is Christena Nippert-Eng’s Islands of Privacy. This connects nicely with Mae’s subjective experiences of negotiating surveillance. Nippert-Eng’s fine-grained study covers aspects of the offline world as well, but what she says about digital communication is very telling, especially in the light of The Circle. Her understanding of ‘privacy’ as ‘the amount of control people want over their communication’12 is appropriate for today’s conditions in which privacy is persistently mutating.
For many, the idea of privacy connects our lives as members of social units with our lives as ‘unique individuated’ selves.13 Indeed, the idea of ‘islands’ of privacy in a sea of the public world gives way today, Nippert-Eng suggests, to constantly negotiated boundaries. This is where the ‘work’, the practice, happens, of trying to maintain some sense of privacy or to limit who may impinge upon it and under what circumstances. Spam filters and special email addresses may help make such boundary work lighter, but the real issue for people interviewed by Nippert-Eng was keeping personal information safe, rather than just keeping things to oneself. Such insights help to frame the issues now experienced in social media.
Mae quickly catches on to the fact that others are constantly checking on her, as she in different ways checks on others. This parallels Marwick’s work on ‘social surveillance’,14 that is, how users of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and other platforms check to see what others are up to. It may be dubbed innocently as ‘looking’, but also as ‘creeping’ or ‘stalking’, and whatever it is called it may have panoptic-like effects. Watching and being watched are taken for granted in such spaces and may also be discussed as ‘lateral’ or ‘participatory’15 surveillance.
Marwick concludes: ‘Social media has a dual nature whereby information is both consumed and produced, which creates a symmetrical mode of surveillance in which watchers expect, and desire, to be watched themselves.… In the absence of face-to-face cues, people will extrapolate identity and relational material from any available digital information.’16 The watching is two-way, however. She notes that an expectation of surveillance among users is an ‘intrinsic aspect of the medium’. As well, she adds, this can also create anxiety and conflict.17 The latter are far from absent in The Circle. Mae’s relationships with bosses, friends and her parents are destabilized more than once by personal information flows.
Marwick also observes that social surveillance differs from more conventional kinds; power is involved in every social relationship, surveillance is between individuals, rather than being weighted towards organizations, and it is also reciprocal, with both parties being watcher and watched. But, she says, the effects are to domesticate surveillance practices more generally. The primary concern of social surveillance is other users – especially parents or bosses – rather than surveillance by government or corporations. Given this, the experience of ‘context collapse’ is highly significant, seen in the increasingly blurred boundaries between work and home, school and private life or friends and family.18
Thus Marwick finds that although hierarchy is apparently flattened through the use of common categories – such as Facebook friends – the hierarchies reappear within local relationships, showing how power is still present. Indeed, the very practices of social surveillance are geared to a quest for power, such as compensating for perceived weakness by obtaining knowledge or as a way of trying to regain lost control in romantic relationships. Importantly, Marwick argues that people use social media in order to be seen – to show they exist, as Mae puts it. In the quest of status or attention, people perform deliberately to an unseen audience. As Marwick crisply comments, ‘Social media has a dual nature in which information is both consumed and produced, which creates a symmetrical model of surveillance in which watchers expect and desire to be watched.’19
As for the panoptic effects to which Marwick alludes, she shows that while surveillance in general acts to manage, control or influence populations, social surveillance produces self-management and direction. The surveillance gaze is in this case internalized, thus modifying the practices of involved users. In terms of Foucault’s work, this surveillance occurs at the micro-level, capillary scale, ‘at work in the mundane day-to-day activities that make up human life’.20 Thus self-discipline and impression management are at the core of social surveillance, something that is eminently clear in Mae’s experiences at the Circle.
The same is true of the Black Mirror series, especially the ‘Nosedive’ episode in season three (2016). Charlie Brooker, its writer, clearly has social media in mind for his searing satire. Validation-seeking users now discover that they themselves are involved in the rating and ranking game – anyone can contribute their assessment of the other, with repercussions extending far beyond ‘likes’. Rather like the Circle, all interactions are now in one ubiquitous platform that allows anyone to rate and rank anyone else on a five-point scale. The results, transmitted to corporations and government, determine who may do what. The protagonist, Lacie Pound, tries jealously to boost her ranking, only to fail, spectacularly and terrifyingly. As in the Circle, social approval is power. Crowd-sourced review systems, like Yelp, become the judgement of the world.
In what follows we look more closely at two aspects of The Circle – transparency and visibility – to suggest sociologically what is going on and to show how these concepts are a tremendous help in getting to grips with contemporary surveillance. By transparency I mean how contemporary surveillance exposes in unprecedented ways the details of our lives to large organizations and also, through social media, to each other. This is a major theme of The Circle and is a development that naysayers such as Mercer find deeply troubling. By visibility I refer to the experience of being transparent to others, and how people may contest but also be content, comply with or even covet transparency. Mae allows herself to become increasingly visible; her earlier denials give way to desire.
They would find each other, soon enough, in a world where everyone could know each other truly and wholly, without secrets and without shame, and without the need for permission to see or to know, without the selfish hoarding of life – any corner of it, any moment of it. All of that would be, so soon, replaced by a new and glorious openness, a world of perpetual light.21
These words appear on the last page of The Circle. One of the capitalized slogans, dispersed like Orwellian codes throughout The Circle, is All That Happens Must Be Known. Invisibly inscribed in the very architecture of the corporate campus but also hammered home to Mae by her colleagues, total transparency is the goal and, for some, the challenge. After only a week at The Circle, Mae is obliged to realize that what she thinks of as extracurricular is viewed by the Circle as intrinsic to work. Gina informs her: ‘We actually see your profile, and the activity on it, as integral to your participation here.’22
Gina helps Mae set up her three screens on her desk. There is one for her Customer Experience work, one for her contact with the team. This includes CircleSearch, which allows her to see where anyone is at any given moment, with an app that documents the history of each person’s movements during the day. A third screen is for her social and Zing feeds, which connect her immediately with the other 10,041 people at the Circle, but divided into Inner and Outer Circle contacts. By the end of the novel she has no fewer than seven screens at her work station. All work-time activity is recorded, but is this also true of her leisure?
Mae is a kayaker, but one day, after her innocent paddle out into the bay, she discovers that this, too, should have been reported. Initially she baulks at this. Paddling through water glinting with the warm light of the setting sun is a personal pleasure, she thinks at first. After enduring an uncomfortable interview with her immediate superior, she finds out that it is not only against company policy but – a dimension that had not previously struck her – against her best interests as a human being both to seek solitude and not to share everything. Such sharing is vital if the overall company goal of total transparency is to be realized.
Mae is eager to merge with the Circle’s philosophy of total transparency, but in many scenes, such as this event, that process includes friction, if not abrasion. She sometimes struggles to keep up with the pace and pressures of participation, feels intense shame at missing a co-worker’s party, and experiences data overload, especially when she is the ongoing object of observation and measurement. But the high-pressure metrics act as an urgent incentive to achieve rather than a warning that all is not well at the Circle. And even what she does outside of worktime now has to be shared.
Eggers signals his own unease with this through the coded nickname given to Mae for her Zings: MaeDay. As Margaret Atwood wryly observes, although Mae is told, erroneously, that the homonym ‘MayDay’ is a national holiday, it is in fact a distress signal, not to mention a Stalinesque holiday satirized in Nineteen Eighty-Four.23 What thrills Mae as she grows to accept that all that happens must be known also comes with a small print authorial health warning. Eggers has penned a morality play for the social media era. Conformity may have unpleasant consequences.
Transparency is thus a key concept that connects The Circle with social analyses of surveillance. Of course, in the latter, the term may refer to the very positive demand that those who gather and process data be clear and open about what they are doing, why and with what desired outcomes. We ask or demand of organizations and governments that they be transparent. In the twenty-first century this becomes more urgent, because the organizations that monitor and profile our lives have made our activities, friendships, connections, preferences, beliefs and habits more transparent – to them – than ever. Our research team gave our cumulative work on major current trends of surveillance the title of Transparent Lives, in order to foreground this feature of surveillance today.24
Sometimes, transparency has been seen as a good thing and, of course, in an ideal world, as with nothing to hide and thus nothing to fear, it might appear as a legitimate good. Back in the 1990s, David Brin argued for it.25 He suggested that a way to overcome imbalances of information access is to create situations of ‘reciprocal transparency’ – sharing information with others if they do the same in return. The electronic village. Then we could no longer hide our dark sides; deception would be harder. Transparency would undermine surveillance.26 In principle, this sounds plausible.
And this, as other researchers have shown, is still part of the Silicon Valley – young white male pioneer – dream; transparency along with openness.27 Alice Marwick says, ‘The tech scene idealizes openness, transparency, and creativity but these ideals are realized as participation in entrepreneurialism, capitalism, work-life integration, heavy social media use and the inculcation of large audiences.’ Thus engineers and programmers guide social media development after their image. ‘Status is crucial but it must be the right kind of status.’28
Would this radical transparency work? The most prominent problem with this idea is that while smart Silicon Valley entrepreneurs may imagine that the rest of the world resembles them – young, white, male and well-off – the differences are in fact considerable. The main differences have to do with power and access, which in most cases of everyday surveillance such as credit ratings, job applicant pre-screening, police checks or airport security are very unevenly distributed. If ordinary citizens, consumers or employees were to ask for reciprocal full transparency from police officers or security agents, marketers or managers, the chances of receiving it would be pretty slim.
What is needed to contain and curtail total transparency, argue others, is the protection of legal measures to prohibit certain kinds of surveillance and to impose penalties on those whose watching transgresses acceptable transparency. Brin wrote as someone who shared the Silicon Valley dream that more technological affordances could create a world of freedom – before it became clear that corporations as well as government departments do surveillance and before social media allowed millions of others to join them in social surveillance. Brin wrote before 9/11 and its surveillance aftermath and before Snowden and the shocking revelation that new technologies were already being permitted – yes, encouraged and facilitated – to make visible to security agencies more details of everyday life in ways that go far beyond what most had imagined.
Interestingly, Dave Eggers responded to Edward Snowden’s disclosures about the National Security Agency in 2013, the year that The Circle appeared. As he wrote:
Think back to all the messages you have ever sent. All the phone calls and searches you’ve made. Could any of them be misinterpreted? Could any of them be used to damage you by someone like the next McCarthy, the next Nixon, the next Ashcroft [former US Attorney General, under George W. Bush]? This is the most pernicious and soul-shattering aspect of where we are right now. No one knows for sure what is being collected, recorded, analysed and stored – or how all this will be used in the future.29
Clearly, this was a Kafkaesque moment for Eggers but his purpose was clear. He wanted to rouse writers and journalists and remind them of their crucial role in speaking out. It was easily understood by Wajahat Ali, an American lawyer and playwright who said of the outrage about Snowden’s revelations – ‘welcome to our world’. American Muslims had gotten used to being thought of as potential suspects for more than a decade: ‘We’ve had to assume that all our phone calls, emails, social media and text messages are being monitored in some way.’ For Ali, as for Eggers, the message is starkly clear – resist, resist, resist! Their ally in this would be law, and the pressing need for assurances of privacy and the protection of data.
There is, however, a crucial aspect of contemporary transparency that we have not yet discussed fully: namely, that the process of our lives being laid bare for many unknown others to see is not one that simply happens to us. Crucially, users participate in the process, both knowingly and unknowingly, willingly and unwillingly. After all, many social media users rate and rank each other through likes, as Mae does through zings, but consumers also rate and rank others through Airbnb, Uber or a host of other systems – that are not yet officially reduced to one mega-platform, but that share data in ways to which ordinary users are not privy.
To focus on transparency alone, however, is to miss some of Eggers’ message. True, ‘Everything That Happens Must Be Known’ seems like a recipe for a potentially fearful omniscience, but Mae does not see it that way. She negotiates this new world like a novice; she wants to be part of it and is determined to overcome whatever fleeting doubts or even lingering hesitations she might have. By the end of the novel, she speaks as an insider, an ambassador, a believer. She is living the Circle, 24/7. To grasp how this happens, we must hear how she experiences the multi-screened life of constant audience awareness.
As we noted earlier in this book, there has been a steady switch from the employment identities of the twentieth century, focusing on ‘discipline’, to the consumer identities of the twenty-first, characterized by ‘performance’, that is transparent to all. So it comes as no surprise that this is reinforced by social media, to the extent that very little space remains, if any, in Goffman’s ‘backstage’ of life. Where can we really be ourselves? ‘What happens to us if we must be “on” all the time?’ asks Margaret Atwood. ‘Then we’re in the twenty-four-hour glare of the supervised prison. To live entirely in public is a form of solitary confinement.’30
Mae is an earnest wannabe who divulges more and more over time, with less and less apprehension. Though Mae occasionally has ‘impure’ thoughts about whether to keep to herself instead of hopping into the Circle, as employees are expected to do – with feeling! – she strives to post more. In doing so, she ‘feels a profound sense of accomplishment and possibility’.31 The desire to achieve is fuelled by the constant expectations of online platforms of every sort. It is not hard to guess that Eggers is implicitly endorsing ‘impurity’ – and while some of his references are slyly subtle, others are strident. He wants the satire to strike home.
At the same time, Mae is a slow learner in some respects. When she goes out for that solitary kayaking evening in the bay, she finds that the rental agent is no longer there, so she removes the craft without permission. Later, she has to make a public presentation back at the Circle and she confesses her lapse. One of her bosses, Bailey, asks if she thought she was protected, ‘enabled by some, what, some cloak of invisibility?’32 As the conversation continues, she is shamed into saying that not only should she not have taken the kayak out, but she should have ensured that everything she saw was recorded. Because ‘Sharing Is Caring’.
Visibility – especially social visibility – is, as we have seen, important as a sociological category. It is a site of strategy where we try to choose how we present ourselves and contest how we are seen, in our effort to shape and manage the process. It is essential for a politics of recognition, to obtain fair treatment for differences. Being visible or invisible involves moral as well as practical skills but in itself does not signify oppression or liberation.33
Focusing on negotiated visibility means thinking not only about protection – such as privacy – but also about skills to do with our responsibilities to ourselves and each other. Not withdrawal, but our movements in many directions.34 This is how we organize social relations through visibility arrangements. Invisibility questions which data should be collected. One could say that it is part of a critical ethics of care,35 a practice of liberative potential towards human flourishing.
‘Wise man’ Bailey knows nothing but data; using data, everyone will become all-seeing, all-knowing. This pretended omniscience is in fact tightly circumscribed, as Eggers demonstrates repeatedly. Even ‘sentiment analysis’ cannot plumb emotions and neural scans cannot capture thought. The attempts to do so are limited by the algorithms, which have only pragmatic purposes. This, of course, makes some real-world reliance on data dangerous because it often gives the impression that data can do much more than the results demonstrate.
Mae finds out the hard way that data do not tell all. Her friend Annie, who helped land her the Circle job, falls ill and is in a coma. To her chagrin, Mae cannot communicate with her. Language is not in Annie’s gift at that moment and Mae finds herself frustrated. What could have been sympathy rises as irritation; data alone will not do what Mae now expects. Data dependence, Eggers seems to say, may miss some crucial clues, rendering it not only inadequate for some circumstances but perhaps an altogether misleading approach to the enterprise of life.
Today’s inflated talk of Big Data builds on this. It is clear that those who enthuse about its capacities believe there is an analytic future in sucking up all the data available and keeping it forever, just in case. Big Data surveillance involves ‘increasingly automated forms of data mining, sorting and analysis … finding patterns, trends, correlations’.36 More and more, those with access to databases will create a new digital divide, something also hinted at in The Circle. Population-level intelligence gathering becomes central to security regimes. Track first, target later – which reverses all earlier modes of surveillance practice. All data are potentially relevant. As Mark Andrejevic puts it succinctly, if sarcastically, ‘We’re not collecting data about you because you’re a suspect but because you can help us identify who the real suspects are.’37 With Big Data there is no anonymity; all too often, interest slides seamlessly from causes to correlations.
What we discover about the culture of surveillance in a Big Data era, however, is that what is known about us is also provided by us, and the primary system for so doing is social media. So what is shared may, as in Mae’s case, bring personal desire and gratification. At the same time, recall the ambiguity of what was discussed in relation to Kirstie Ball’s work on exposure. The concept draws attention to the ways in which a combination of media cultures and psychotherapy imperatives may encourage subjects to believe that they ought to divulge things about themselves. As she says, ‘the giving of data satisfies individual anxieties, or may represent patriotic or participative values to the individual’. Also, ‘the pleasures of performative display override the scrutinies that come hand-in-hand with self-revelation’.38
And as Gary Marx asks, ‘Where is the notion that personal exposure and the capturing of ever more private aspects of the self is desirable, normal and harmless, located?’ His reply is that ‘soft surveillance’ from the consumer realm, which is a less intrusive means of personal data collection, makes the giving of body data less controversial when couched in particular languages and a particular media and cultural climate.39 At the same time, such exposure is actively sought by the Circle and all mega-corporations that aspire to the same goals.
Mae’s understanding about why she should expose her life to others comes from the expectations of her employers, in relation to rewards and satisfactions of a consumer kind and also because of the ‘therapeutic’ impulse of being accepted by her colleagues and workmates. Of course, this also means that each employee’s utility is measured according to their contribution to company profits and they are also in competition with all other co-workers, indeed, everyone in a given team.40
Unsurprisingly, this connects with Zuboff’s Google-based analysis of surveillance capitalism dependent on Big Data.41 If for the purpose of analysis data are treated as if there were no embodied person generating them, then why reconnect the two in the human resources or marketing departments? Here again is Zuboff’s ‘formal indifference’, seen in the new business model, towards both employees and consumers or users. There may be employer expectations that workers will check in 24/7, but it is not reciprocated by any kind of care for the same workers. In 2014, for example, a Gallup poll showed that around a third of US employers expected workers to keep in touch by email in non-work time.42
Jodi Dean mentions the well-worn phrase, ‘if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear’, suggesting it resonates with the notion that if it is not public then it has been withheld.43 As Ball says, ‘some individuals explicitly perceive themselves as surveillance targets, required to reveal more about themselves in order to avoid further scrutiny or to promote their own “truths”’. And Dean again: ‘Technoculture materialises the belief that the key to democracy can be found in uncovering secrets.’
The Circle is what one might call a utopian-dystopian novel. Is it one or the other, or both? One of the three wise men, Bailey, sounds like Mark Zuckerberg, complete with a hoodie, who is a total believer in total transparency. Bailey also sounds suspiciously like Jeremy Bentham, who created the famous panopticon prison design, when he says: ‘We can cure any disease, end hunger, everything, because we won’t be dragged down by all our weaknesses, our petty secrets, our hoarding of information and knowledge. We will finally reach our full potential.’ Bentham himself said of his plan, ‘Morals reformed – health preserved – industry invigorated – instruction diffused – public burthens lightened – Economy seated, as it were, upon a rock – the Gordian Knot of the poor-law not cut, but untied – all by a simple idea in Architecture!’44
Long before The Circle appeared, Bauman once mused: ‘This seems to be a dystopia made to the measure of liquid modernity – one fit to replace the fears recorded in Orwellian and Huxleyan-style nightmares.’45 But his phrasing fits The Circle perfectly. What he had in mind was the disintegration of the social, the melting of ‘bonds which interlock individual choices and collective projects and actions’46 due to the changing relationship between space and time. New technologies enable not only speed but also acceleration, which in turn makes mobility a basic feature of life. Everything is short term, until further notice, disposable, now including social relationships. Bauman sounded perhaps more pessimistic than in his earlier phase of enthusiasm for ‘socialism, the active utopia’. But Bauman still quotes the Apostle Paul: ‘hope that is seen is not hope; for who hopes for what he sees?’47
In contrast, Margaret Atwood, in reviewing The Circle, avers, ‘Some will call The Circle a “dystopia”, but … we are in the green and pleasant land of a satirical utopia for our times, where recycling and organics abound, people keep saying how much they like each other, and the brave new world of virtual sharing and caring breeds monsters.’48 Her take, then, is that The Circle is not so much a dystopia as a ‘satirical utopia’. Of course, much dystopian writing is satirical as well, so the fact that The Circle oozes with satire does not decide the case. Atwood’s status not only as an astute literary critic but also as the acclaimed author of several bestselling dystopian novels49 should maybe give me pause if I differ. My best hope is that readers make up their own minds – based hopefully on reading the novel, not merely my summary notes on it.
The Circle is a novel with a strong storyline about everyday life in the digital age. You do not have to be a student of surveillance to realize this – subtlety is not Eggers’ strong suit here, deliberately so, as I see it. Indeed, not only does the Silicon Valley mega-corporation aim at total transparency, which creates the taut tension throughout the book, but its author takes pains to reference several other surveillance dystopias, from Zamyatin’s We to Huxley’s Brave New World as well as Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Eggers reveals Mae’s own rootedness – if that is the right word – in consumer culture because she is employed in ‘Customer Experience’.
Eggers’ descriptions are dramatic and sometimes distressing. I believe that Eggers’ own view is that The Circle is dystopic. Dystopia, as I understand it, is an undesirable but avoidable future, often described in fictional terms. In the realm of surveillance, the most famous in the West is Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four but many others also exist as both novels and films. They draw attention to the negative logic of present trends, warn about where things are heading and about what could happen if a change of direction does not occur.
To count as dystopian they must also contain clues about ways out and alternatives. Margaret Atwood would say that I miss the point: The Circle is a satirical utopia. True, the founders of the Circle see it as a place of light and love, and even Eggers’ description locates all poverty, disease and degradation outside the Circle’s campus. And although Mae’s own life finally merges with the Circle, Eggers more than hints that this was both undesirable and avoidable.
Surely this novel is dystopian in the sense used by Bauman when he describes life in Liquid Modernity and in Liquid Surveillance.50 In the former book, Bauman saw the ‘end of the Panopticon’ as ‘the end of the era of mutual engagement’.51 Now the settled majority, he says, is ruled by a nomadic and extraterritorial elite with its light and fluid – even pleasant, I might add – practices of power. Any tight or solid network of social bonds must be dissolved by the disposable and the fluid. That is why he perceives another era taking shape than that of Orwell or Huxley.
The Circle still has an edge over the irritated, grumpy critique; it tells a story, draws you in, helps you to recognize what is going on, assess unfolding plot and locate yourself in relation to one character or another. Of course, Eggers himself is not immersed in Silicon Valley. Is he, as Mercer said of Mae, also commenting from outside, rather than living the world he describes? People working in Northern California may well be dubious about his description and may object that he doesn’t understand them. But does one have to be part of the situation to describe it accurately? Is it not enough to wade into the edge of the ocean to get the feel for its waves and tides, its currents and its cold?
Margaret Atwood states: ‘The critical dystopia is the dark side of hope, and hopes for a way out; anti-utopia attributes the darkness to the utopia itself, and tells us the exits are ambushed.’52 Those grand twentieth-century dystopias from Zamyatin, Huxley or Orwell, Ursula Le Guin or Margaret Atwood dump the reader right into a world where it does seem that the exits are ambushed. The cold darkness presses in, oppressively. But Eggers signals only the trail that ends in tyranny. Much of today’s everyday reality is there, albeit in compressed scenes and vivid metaphor. He is nervous lest we miss the message. He asks that we pull back the wool, open our eyes, do differently.
Can one go beyond this, to a more critical utopian vision that explores alternatives to current social, political, economic and cultural arrangements such that they might catalyse social transformation? Snowden might be said to attempt such a shift, with reminders about the original values of the internet. As a thoughtful technical expert, he believes in the potential for democratic development and human flourishing in the internet, responsibly opened up. Snowden says less, however, about how the world of internet surveillance is a product of and expresses neatly a neoliberal political economy and a culture of consumer surveillance, with all that entails.
It is all too clear to many that current political-economic arrangements spell poverty for the global majority, and produce alienation, repression, competition, conflict, friable relationships and separations for all, rich and poor alike. And today’s surveillance undoubtedly contributes to and facilitates this world. And in the way surveillance develops today, suspicion supplants trust, categorization produces cumulative disadvantage and people are treated according to their characterizations as disembodied, abstract data. Is there really an exit? What does Eggers say?
Does Eggers’ novel suggest a way out, or does he too succumb to a paralysing anti-utopianism rather than a hopeful dystopianism? The Circle may be unsubtle in some ways but it is never trivial or superficial. Eggers’ aim is to show us how surveillance society arrived rather than to propose a way out. In a sense, recognizing how people – you and I – comply, how common it is to go with the flows, may be the first step to more critical and cautious involvement in the digital world. His point is that the world that Mae is so enamoured with – and in the end won over by – appears utopian but is in fact dystopian. By indicating how it may appear attractive to Mae but by heavy-handedly labouring the downsides his satire becomes sarcasm. He wants the reader to wake up but, appropriately for a novelist, he does not prescribe what she should do when she does.
There is a moment, however fleeting, when it seems that the dominant culture of the Circle is threatened by a lurking fifth columnist. Kalden, with whom Mae has secret trysts and with whom she shared her confession that ‘everything and everyone should be seen’, appears to be less than convinced: ‘But who wants to be watched all the time?’ When it turns out that Kalden is none other than Ty Gospodinov, one of the three wise men, the extent of the reversal becomes clear. The new convert rhapsodizes to a corporate senior who is having serious second thoughts. He eventually tries to enlist her as a co-conspiratorial ally in undermining what he now fears is the totalitarian Circle. Mae feigns agreement and things start to unravel …
The utopian-dystopian viewpoint thus stimulates awareness of our current choices, whether just in the world of social media involvement or more generally in relation to surveillance in a post-9/11, post-Snowden world. To set the tension as Eggers does raises the question of whether things have to be thus. To show, ironically, that the apparent ‘heaven’ is, in its least attractive aspects, closer to hell – understood as the full realization of the consequences of everyday choices – is Eggers’ contribution. The narrative has to be unsubtle at times in order to make this more subtle point. If Eggers’ The Circle is a dystopia, as I suggest, do we need more than dystopian views of ‘surveillance society’ in which the utopia turns out to be anything but?
Perhaps there is also a need for a robust utopianism to indicate some alternatives. Not an imaginary society, some impractical proposals or an escapist fantasy so much as a description of some real alternatives to the present. Something which might fuel desire for something different, something better, which goes beyond variations in the content, form or function of utopias.53 I have in mind Eric Stoddart’s haunting question about whether we can go beyond ‘surveillance of’ others to consider the possibilities of ‘surveillance for others’.54 Or Julie Cohen’s proposal that we appropriate Amartya Sen’s concept of ‘human flourishing’ for the world of surveillance and privacy.
‘Human flourishing requires not only physical well-being but also psychological and social well-being, including the capacity for cultural and political participation,’ claims Cohen.55 How should surveillance be considered in relation to the common good?56 Eggers, like these theorists, goes far beyond an approach that merely minimizes harms towards a more careful interpretive approach that considers people in their real daily practices. The imaginaries and practices of surveillance culture do not have to remain the same, Eggers hints, heavily. The final chapter explores some of these plausible futures of alternative possibilities.