Summary | The Circle (2013)

The Circle (2013)

What is it about? The Circle is a fiction book by Dave Eggers. The book creates an imagined world without privacy and pulls us back to reevaluate the technology's impacts on people's lives. 

Why bother? The book worths challenge our limits on data privacy through an imagined yet detailed story.

Key Ideas The book talked about a Facebook+Google-like company that provides search engines and social media platforms built on the three mantras: "SECRETS ARE LIES. SHARING IS CARING. PRIVACY IS THEFT." In this fictional world, the Circle company advocates for everyone to share every moment of their life with no privacy is kept. Surveillance is set up to collect and analyze people's lives without restriction.

The loveliness of fiction books uses imagination to experience a world that might not happen, or we might want it to happen in real life. The story depicts the conflicts and results of voluntarily giving up our privacy. It makes us remember a similar word in George Orwell's 1984.

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“We are not meant to know everything, Mae. Did you ever think that perhaps our minds are delicately calibrated between the known and the unknown? That our souls need the mysteries of night and the clarity of day?” 
― Dave Eggers, The Circle