Sharing is Caring

The Circle by Dave Eggers, Pt 3, plus Lasch on narcissism

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 February, we’re reading Dave Egger’s The Circle. Here’s the schedule:

• February 2: The Circle, up to page 118 (ending at the section that begins ‘In the days that followed, Mae knew it could be true…’)

• February 9: The Circle, up to page 234 (ending at the section that begins ‘It was all easy enough to assimilate…’)

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

• February 16: The Circle, up to page 338 (ending at the section that begins ‘On a granite panel outside the Protagorean Pavilion the building’s namesake was quoted loosely…’)

  • Optional: ‘The Narcissistic Personality of Our Time’ by Christopher Lasch

• February 22: Members-Only Zoom Call, 3 PM Eastern

• February 23: The Circle, to the end of the book.

The call on February 22 is for paid subscribers; a recording will be made available to those unable to attend. These calls will include a short presentation and then a group discussion.

In March, we are reading You and Your Profile: Identity After Authenticity by Hans-Georg Moeller and Paul J. D’Ambrosio. I’ll send out the reading schedule for this book within the week. You still have time to find a copy of the book!

I want to draw your attention to two scenes in this week’s reading. First, on page 235, Mae reflects on Kalden:

The extra layer of the CircleSurveys helped distract Mae from thinking about Kalden, who had yet to contact her, and who had not once answered his phone. She’d stopped calling after two days, and had chosen not to mention him at all to Annie or anyone else. Her thoughts about him followed a similar path as they had after their first encounter, at the circus. First, she found his unavailability intriguing, even novel. But after three days, it seemed willful and adolescent. By the fourth day, she was tired of the game. Anyone who disappeared like that was not a serious person…because total non-communication in a place like the Circle was so difficult, it felt like violence. Even thought Kalden was the only man for whom she’d ever had real lust, she was finished. She would rather have someone lesser if that person were available, familiar, locatable.

And a bit later, she contrasts Francis and Kalden: ‘Kalden was a ghost, wanting Mae to chase him, and Francis was so available, so utterly without mystery.’ This availability is what draws her to Francis, what makes her willing to put up with his deficiencies. Kalden is initially appealing, but his non-communication feels like violence. Francis’s availability makes his mistakes – bringing Mae into the public eye, filming a sexual encounter, not being all that great during said encounter – feel forgivable.

Then, by the end of this week’s reading, we have the first scenes of Mae’s transparency. Mae is now available, familiar, and locatable to anyone who wants to tune in. She’s completely open. Mae becomes the thing she wants — but perhaps not the thing that she desires most.

At this point in the reading, we all know where this is going. Mae has given in to the Circle. We’re already seeing the abolition of privacy and personal boundaries. But we can also see that things are deeply unwell. Mercer thinks the Circle is up to no good — given what we’ve seen of the company so far, I’d say we have reason to think he’s right. We know how they treat employees. We also suspect, simply because of a novel’s normal dramatic arc, that something has to come crashing down.

We’ll know by the end of next week.

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We also read a chapter from Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism this week. Lasch highlights some of the characteristics of pathological narcissism: ‘dependence on the vicarious warmth provided by others combined with a fear of dependence, a sense of inner emptiness, boundless repressed rage, and unsatisfied oral cravings.’ He also brings attention to what he calls the secondary characteristics of narcissism: ‘pseudo self-insight, calculating seductiveness, nervous, self-deprecatory humor.’

It would be a mistake to think that we can neatly map Lasch’s analysis to the characters in The Circle; it’s an imperfect fit. However, there are some interesting parallels. The public speeches at the Circle deal in nervous self-deprecation, as when TruLove is introduced, leading to Mae’s humiliation. We also see the ‘dependence on vicarious warmth provided by others combined with a fear of dependence.’ I don’t know if we see boundless repressed rage or unsatisfied oral cravings, but we do experience a sense of inner emptiness.

I think you see the strongest parallels in the way that Mae and Eamon describe going transparent. Sharing is caring is a warm slogan. If you truly believe this, you are compelled to share — and if someone isn’t sharing with you, then you feel this lack of warmth. They aren’t sharing, and therefore, they do not care. This breeds dependence.¹

We see this in the interactions Mae has with her new audience. Janice, someone Mae deals with as a part of Customer Experience (a job she still has!), is hurt when Mae doesn’t immediately invite her to be a part of her professional network. There is a constant pull for more engagement, more digital intimacy, more sharing. Any boundaries are interpreted as hostility.

In a smaller scene, we see how Gina reacts when Mae messages Annie freely. As part of the high-up group that makes decisions at the Circle, Annie is important, and Mae’s intimacy with Annie – built on a foundation of friendship and experience – hurts Gina.

All of this has destructive consequences. Lasch describes a psychoanalytic view of the matter:

Internalized images of others, buried in the unconscious mind at an early age, become self-images as well. If later experience fails to qualify or to introduce elements of reality into the child’s archaic fantasies about his parents, he finds it difficult to distinguish between images of the self and of the objects outside the self. These images fuse to form a defense against the bad representations of the self and of objects, similarly fused in the form of a harsh, punishing superego.

Let me make an important admission here: I am not familiar or conversant with psychoanalytic terminology. I can’t speak to the specifics of the explanations.

But here is what I found interesting when reading this in conversation with The Circle: the users of the Circle experience reality through a screen, and this is a highly curated experience. Mae notes that when she goes transparent, she becomes conscious of all of her decisions, as she is thinking about the audience’s reactions. But there is another element to this. The people watching also have a distorted view of Mae. Could this lead them to have a faulty picture of reality as a whole? And does this mean they will create a faulty self-image as well?

Another connection with The Circle is when Lasch describes where a narcissist might thrive:

For all his inner suffering, the narcissist has many traits that make for success in bureaucratic institutions, which put a premium on the manipulation of interpersonal relations, discourage the formation of deep personal attachments, and at the same time provide the narcissist with the approval he needs in order to validate his self-esteem. Although he may resort to therapies that promise to give meaning to life and to overcome his sense of emptiness, in his professional career the narcissist often enjoys considerable success. The management of personal impressions comes naturally to him, and his mastery of its intricacies serves him well in political and business organizations where performance now counts for less than “visibility,” “momentum,” and a winning record. As the “organization man” gives way to the bureaucratic “gamesman”—the “loyalty era” of American business to the age of the “executive success game”—the narcissist comes into his own.

The Circle, as a company, is a place where a narcissist can do quite well. It is highly bureaucratic, the style of management is oddly personal, and there is an emphasis on outward appearance.

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Before we get to my favorite comments from last week, let me ask some questions.

1. I’m noticing that people find the satire of The Circle a bit heavy-handed. What do you think would make it more convincing? Does the heavy-handedness detract from the point of the novel?

2. In the Friday Zoom call, we talked about whether or not we would sign up for any of the Circle’s services. Most said no — but a few people said yes, specfically Francis’ project to end child abductions. What do you think of this? (Keep in mind that the very first scene in the coming week’s readings will address some of this.)

3. Chris, I believe, identified an interesting connection with Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and The Circle. Mercer is a prominent, messiah-like character in that novel. He also noticed that Mercer’s surname appears to be Portuguese. I missed both of those details. Has anyone else noticed these sorts of things?

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Here are some of my favorite comments from last week.

Sean comments on the ‘company store’ scene:

It’s a small thing, but the direction to ‘go to the company store’ really struck me. My dad grew up in a mining town. Late 19th and early 20th century, the miner’s HATED the company store. It was a symbol of how the company controlled way too much of your life. Debts at the company store tied you more tightly to the company. So did the fact that most miner’s lived in company housing. The Circle has both, pitched as ways to help the Circlers, but clearly a way to further dependency.

As part of a long, bitter strike in the 1920s, every company store near where my dad grew up was vandalized or burned to the ground after some rioting. One miner was killed, and 100 years later William Davis Memorial Day is still celebrated in former mining towns across the region. The stores and housing were 100% a means of control and the workers and company both new it.

This is outside living memory, or even familial memory, for most of us, but it is important to keep in mind. Company stores were a means of control. I’d also add that when Mae buys from the company store, her purchases would certainly be tracked. She may even be expected to zing about the aloe, which we might think brings us back to Han’s analysis of things vs. non-things. At the Circle, everything is processed into information, where it can be instantly and quickly interacted with, and of course, it can be quickly discarded (though never permanently deleted).

pduggan_creative left a long comment, which I’ll excerpt here:

The dawning response I had reading Mae’s interactions with the Circle was that she had joined a cult. This was predominant in the scene where she was castigated for not attending the Portugal interest group. Their demands and her responses were so stilted and inauthentic. But this doesn’t help me appreciate the book because I don’t understand how Mae is inducted into the cult so quickly, or how this Circle cult has been so successful in dominating the tech industry with a product I feel nobody really wants (TruYou: the enforcement of real name interactions on line) and the main selling point seems to be if you engage in a wildly unrealistically seeming amount of online discourse (which isn’t qualitative? Just the quantity seems to be enough?) can make you go up a leaderboard and get prestige? I feel like this has been tried and doesn’t work.

…

Harbor seals and Houseboaters are an interesting contrast to it all: they drift from each other, are challenging to approach, and have below-the-surface lives that can’t be seen

About the harbor seals and houseboaters: those are my favorite scenes of the book, including when Mae decides to ‘steal’ the kayak near the end of this week’s reading. (I put it in quotes because while it is theft, I don’t think Marion would mind, given their relationship.) They are brief glimpses of Mae’s humanity, and it would ruin the experience to bring her your phone. When Mae has to leave to return the kayak, the woman on the houseboat looks at her as if Mae has revealed who she really is — someone who is too busy to enjoy life out on the water.

The cult-like vibes are quite strong in the book. We’ve discussed it several times. They love-bomb newbies, then hold them to increasingly unreasonable standards. They use shame as a means of social control. They also use new language – some of this language, like going clear, is taken straight from Scientology – as a way of shaping the thoughts of newbies and users.

From Tabrez:

The aspect which has been the hardest to wrestle with, is that so far most of the surveillance tools they have shown either feign empathy or seem fo come from a genuine position of wanting to improve the world. One understands why Francis would wanna make something like childtrack, or the fact that the Circle has made the Mae's life materially so much better, and practically saved her father's life and dignity, or the seechange being used to record police atrocities Egypt or many more. Eggars is very careful to not create a 1984-esque surveillance system, but one who's certain members at least want to be the force of good. This raises larger questions about good intentions and side effects of wanting to improve the world without thinking of the ripple effects.

If you were to check out my interview with C. Thi Nguyen, you’ll find he made a really interesting remark related to this. Nguyen believes that in our modern thought-world, quantified evidence always trumps qualitative evidence. But he also believes that many of our core human values, the ones that give our lives a sense of meaning, aren’t easily quantified. In the case of TruYouth/ChildTrack, I think we see this quite clearly. Reducing abductions is good, of course, but it is also easily measured. Intangibles like privacy or trusting your child are not.

1. Lasch mentions that the narcissist is also afraid of dependence. I don’t see this explored much in The Circle.