'I see everything clearly now'

The Circle by Dave Eggers, Part 4

On February 28, I’m taking part in a live event in Austin, TX: KILL THE INTERNET. It’s a night of philosophical discussion.

I’ll be giving a talk called ‘The Dignity of Darkness,’ on the role of privacy in human flourishing.

You can purchase tickets here.

(You can use the code LONESTAR to save 20%)

Welcome back to our 2026 book club on the philosophy of technology. Throughout the year, we’re exploring questions like:

• What effect has the rise of digital technologies had on the human condition?

• What do we lose – and what do we gain – when we live our lives online?

• What do conventional narratives about technology (techno-optimism, techno-pessimism, fatalism) miss? What facts do we need to consider? What alternative narrative about technology do we need to construct?

This is our final discussion of The Circle by Dave Eggers. You can find the recording of yesterday’s Zoom call here.

Next month, we are reading You and Your Profile. Here’s the reading schedule:

• March 2: Chapter 1 of You and Your Profile

• March 9: Chapter 2 of You and Your Profile (note: this is a long chapter)

• March 16: Chapters 3 & 4

  • March 13: Members-Only Zoom Call, 8 PM Eastern

• March 23: Chapter 5

  • Supplementary Reading: ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ (link to PDF)

• March 29: Members-Only Zoom Call, 3 PM Eastern

• March 30: Chapters 6 & 7

This book explores identity and authenticity in an age of ‘profilicity,’ the authors’ term for how we think of modern identity.

We’ll have two Zoom calls: one on March 13 and one on March 29. There’s always a Zoom call at the end of the month, but I’m trying to host a second one on months when my schedule allows. Those calls are available to paid subscribers.

Before we get to The Circle, I want to ask everyone a question! In May, we are scheduled to read Turkle’s Alone Together. I would like to replace that with C. Thi Nguyen’s The Score, which came out this January. Nguyen’s book is more directly relevant to the book club, and I think everyone will find it insightful. Since I announced the schedule so far in advance, I worry that people have already bought Turkle’s book, and so I am hesitant to unilaterally change the schedule. So, I’m asking for your feedback.

The pinned comment in this post will be a place to tell me if you are OK with replacing Turkle’s book with Nguyen’s.

We read The Circle early in our book club this year for two reasons.

First, I liked it when I read it years ago — so much so that I deleted my Facebook account. It was a novel that had a lasting impact on me.

Second, because my relationship to privacy has become rather complicated. I am now a semi-public figure; I get noticed when I go out in public (sometimes), and (sometimes) my videos are seen by millions of people. I am now living in public, and this has caused me to reflect on the power of privacy.

I assume this was Eggers’ struggle. Before The Circle, Eggers had written a number of acclaimed books: What is the What, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and so on. He’d founded McSweeney’s, and he had become the sort of author people like to talk about. Given that he doesn’t appear primarily on camera, perhaps he could walk around in public without being recognized, but he would certainly be a person who is known by millions of people. People have thoughts and feelings about him — including people that he has never met and never will meet.

What makes The Circle so interesting is that everyone experiences, to a greater or lesser extent, when they get online. By connecting to the internet – or, now, choosing not to disconnect – you are exposing yourself to any number of people, and the range of people is largely beyond your control. This means that our relationship to privacy has changed dramatically. Infamously, in the United States we say that we have no reasonable expectation of privacy when we leave our homes and go out into public. But now, we have no reasonable expectation of privacy in our homes in another sense, because we are encouraged to share anything and everything. This is why The Circle still intrigues me. It isn’t the story of a government or corporation stealing your privacy – though there are some elements of that in the story, particularly near the end – but rather the story of a culture giving it away.

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There weren’t many scenes in The Circle that I remembered a decade after reading it, but I did remember Mercer’s final scene. I vividly recalled Mae yelling ‘Release the drones!’ and a man telling Mercer, through his own drone, ‘Mercer, you motherfucker! Stop driving, you fucking asshole!’ Reading it a second time was even more dreadful, because I knew how this scene would end. Mercer drives off a cliff, deciding that death is better than the world Mae and the Circle are building.

It’s all done in the name of friendship. That was Eggers’ prediction: we’d give away our privacy in the name of social niceties. He was on to something at the time — you have to remember that Eggers’ model, back in 2013, was Facebook and Instagram. He tried to anticipate a world of YouTube, Twitch, and TikTok, and he got some things right, but I think he got some things wrong, too. Eggers thought that the loss of anonymity would strip away antisocial behavior, but a kind of malignant prosocial behavior would take its place — I think of it like our manners and expectations become a tumor that eventually kills the host. What he missed was that a world of 24/7 video would also not particularly care about antisocial behavior. On platforms like YouTube, Twitch, and TikTok, there’s a genre of videos that is called (rather misleadingly) ‘prank content.’ These pranks range from mildly annoying to dangerous and illegal. The pranksters purposefully put someone on the street in an uncomfortable situation. They want to provoke a reaction. When asked why, they say they do it for the content. The frustrating part of this is that they’re right. They’re doing it for content, and tens of thousands of people – sometimes millions – watch these videos. They find them funny.

These pranks range from cringey pickup lines to theft to vandalism to threats of violence. Sometimes they actually do result in violence. In 2023, a YouTube prankster named Tanner Cook began filming a DoorDash driver, Alan Colie. You can still find the video. Cook approaches Colie, getting uncomfortably close. One of Cook’s companions is there, too. They’re in Cook’s face, using a phone to play sexually suggestive messages. Colie tells them to stop, tries to knock the phone away. He moves away. Cook follows him. Colie pulls a gun and fires into Cook’s stomach.

Colie was found not guilty, as the jury ruled he was acting in self-defense. After a stint in the hospital, Cook went back to filming prank content.

You find hundreds of other examples of pranksters crossing the line. Some end up in jail – one is on trial in Korea as we speak, I believe – but most just make various individuals’ lives moderately worse for the day while other people laugh through their screens.

What is going on in their heads when they do this? Some are motivated by money. Others are motivated by the possibility of fame. Some of them are just assholes. But what binds all of them together is the desire to create content and a willingness to impose themselves on others to make that content. Other people are no longer human beings to interface with, to get to know, to care about. They’re props for the content.

And this is basically what happens to Mercer, right? Mercer isn’t a person anymore. Mae doesn’t really want to reconcile with him. She hates him. All the talk of Mercer being her friend is a rationalization. If she reflected – if she were capable of reflection, at this stage of things – she would know that she’s lying to herself. She picks Mercer because she doesn’t care what happens to him. She needed someone for her presentation, and she decided to teach Mercer a lesson: whether you like it or not, you’ll be on camera. You’re content now.

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Cameras do not depict. They interpret — often, they distort. The angle, lighting, choice of lens, and framing of the shot, along with a number of subtle factors, create an image. This image is not the thing that is depicted. It is a representation. Using Han’s terminology, it could be a non-thing.¹ But there is no identity between the representation and that which is represented.

I’ve talked a lot about The Circle as a privacy novel, and partly as a novel about corporate control. What I haven’t mentioned so far is how the Circle’s technologies affect the human psyche. (This topic was raised in the Zoom call, and I knew I needed to address it here.)

Two scenes in our final selection of readings really illustrate these effects.

First, the sex scenes with Francis. Mae’s encounters with Francis leave much to be desired: he films her while she gives him a handjob, and he regularly prematurely ejaculates. He asks her to rate him, just like people rate each other on TruYou, and he’s bothered when she says he did fine. Fine is not good enough, and ‘fine’ is not precise enough. He wants a number. He isn’t happy until he’s given a 100. Francis’ satisfaction is derived from Mae’s quantified assessment of his sexual performance. A 100, of course, means there is no room for improvement. If Francis were to reflect, he would know that the 100 couldn’t be right. But he seems happy once Mae says that his performance received a rating of 100.

Mae doesn’t receive sexual gratification from their encounters. He never lasts long enough for that to happen. What she does receive, though, is psychological gratification. She likes the control she has over Francis, and it turns out that the real control she has is when she rates him. Mae could ruin Francis, could absolutely devastate him, by giving him, say, a 50, maybe even a 94. Francis’ neediness gives her control over him. This is the source of her pleasure. It’s a strange pleasure, coming at a great cost, but it is a kind of pleasure. Francis, like Mae, has started to think of the world in terms of the numbers given to her by the Circle.

Second, Mae’s reaction to the Demoxie trial run. When Circlers are asked to vote on whether or not Mae is awesome, she is devastated by the fact that 368 people frown at her. Keep in mind that there are over 12,000 Circlers at this point, and all of them voted. Her approval rating is over 97% — the sort of rating Bashar Al-Assad would have been happy with, as he won the 2012 Syrian elections with a mere 95% of the vote. But she convinces herself – no, she’s been convinced – that these people hate her. They probably want her dead.

There’s a persistent neediness that has been inculcated amongst users of these technologies. Every single metric tells them their value, and their self-esteem is entirely dependent on the judgments of others. Mae eventually decides that she’s grateful for these Demoxie results and for the transparency of everyone’s voting because now she has a clear plan of action: she’ll befriend all 368 people, as she eventually decides that she has failed them in some way.

So, it’s not just neediness. There’s a sense of obligation that goes along with it. I need your approval. I must earn your approval. And you can expect the same from me.

Suppose we rewrote The Circle and took out all the stuff about privacy — no SoulSearch, no going transparent, no revealing of dark family secrets. It would still be a haunting picture of social media’s effects on the soul. That is because Mae, Francis, and everyone else have been convinced that the metrics are all that matters. The representation is, or might as well be, the thing itself.

Emma Watson as Mae in The Circle

We haven’t talked much about the plot so far. We see some major developments: Mae’s relationship with her parents is destroyed by her transparency, Annie is rendered comatose from stress, and Mae betrays Kalden/Ty (we learn his real identity in the final pages). She ends the novel sitting by Annie, who is still recovering, happy that she has fully committed to the Circle and its mission. She can see everything clearly now — though of course, we should ask what the hell it is that she’s seeing. Perhaps it is a mission, a new way of reshaping the world. The Circle will remake the world. It wouldn’t be a world I want to live in.

I admit that I lost interest in the larger story — on my second read, I knew where it was going, and I was paying attention more to the psychological transformation of Mae than I was to the workings of the Circle itself.

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Thank you, everyone, for reading The Circle with me. I’m looking forward to reading your final thoughts, and I’m looking forward to reading You & Your Profile next month.

Here are some of my favorite comments from last week.

Chris consistently finds connections with our chosen texts and many other books. He’s the one who pointed out the significance of Mercer’s name. He expanded on that:

If you’ll permit me to chase my own trails with respect to what’s cooked into Mercer Medeiros’s name, it illustrates the kaleidoscopic character of variation. I was not previously aware of PKD’s 1964 short story, The Little Black Box, a sort of origin story for (Wilbur) Mercerism in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, filled with its own meaningful names and language enriching the concept of empathy lacking in the androids. Thank you, Jared, for inspiring a closer look. The corporation in the story is Wilcer, Inc. (then Tyrell, eventually Wallace in 2049), leaving burMer out of the portmanteau, which turns into all kinds of things like redrum in a hurry. Medeiros evokes the Portuguese fortified wine from the island of Madeira, while madeiro means wood, and madero log. Following the Portuguese theme out to Herman Melville’s short story, The ‘Gees, from The Apple-Tree Table, suggests (to me) the MM might as well be WW – the whiteness of the whale. Never mind José (de Sousa) Saramago and Paulo Coelho (de Souza). And if that’s not oblique enough yet, an intermediate typo in google translate tells me mdeiro means scumbag in Swahili, which I hope is at least good for a chuckle. Then if you take a quick look at the film, his surname’s been changed to Regalado, which is Spanish for given and which, in the sense of les données, opens up another branch of the kaleidoscope altogether.

Food for thought from The Little Black Box: -Telepathic power and empathy are two versions of the same thing.

Sean explores the connection between surveillance, intuitive understanding, and trust:

This bit of reading had a few massive scenes on the philosophy of the Circle. There was the extended discussion (private than public) between Eamon Bailey and Mae that lead to Mae going clear. These conversations result from Mae stealing the kayak and the fallout of getting caught by the Police.

The ‘theft’ shows how much the Sea Change cameras can undermine trust. I don’t see Mae taking the kayak as theft at all - maybe bad judgement, but not theft. She knew the owner and knew the owner wouldn’t mind. She had no intention of keeping it and brought it back to where she found it. She borrowed it, based on the intuitive understanding that the owner Marion was a free spirit and that Marion would trust Mae to borrow the kayak outside of regular hours. When Marion arrived to the police call, she said as much: look, Mae borrows here all the time, this was no big deal, “she has the run of the place.” (pg. 273)

But Mae’s direct boss Dan just doesn’t buy it. (pg. 274) He relies only on the images from the cameras - the explicit things he can see - to understand the situation. The intuitive understanding of the situation between Mae and Marion doesn’t count for anything - it’s seems nearly impossible for Dan to view the situation that way. Dan trusts the cameras, not human interaction or nuance. Not Mae. We come to C. Thi Nguyen’s idea that in our modern thought-world, quantified evidence always trumps qualitative evidence. Or phrased differently the explicit triumphs over the implied.

Sean’s last point is why I want to swap out Turkle’s book for Nguyen’s!

1. I say ‘could be’ because I’m still not sure if photographs are things for Han. I’m sure he would say a digital image is a non-thing, however.