This disturbing book is a combination of Brave New World and 1984 in that there is a social media company, The Circle, which pervades across multiple industries, subsuming smaller competitors, taking over government control and intruding into the lives of people worldwide, till they take complete control and create a totalitarian private company. The book is brilliant in it’s concept and I like it on the one hand as it throws up a lot of philosophical questions like, ‘how far would you go?’, ‘what are your ethics and morals’, ‘what is a healthy balance between tech enabling our lives verses being dependant on tech for our validation and survival?’. On the other hand I don’t like the book because of the subject matter and the fact that the main character is an antagonist going on her antihero journey and not a protagonist going on a hero journey.
Mae Holland the main character starts out as a naïve fresh graduate and frustrated working in a tech-backward utility company in her backwater American town. She is by far the youngest worker and is told that she can have a stellar career climbing up the career ladder where she can make it to a management position in 10 years time. It’s not the 1950s, but the company is definitely stuck in that era with it’s value system and technology. Mae feels like she has wasted years of her life in a dead-end job and longs to work in a tech forward progressive company, with people her own age and with a rapid career progression. Though we don’t learn of her career ambition at the beginning of the book, it gets revealed. At the beginning Mae’s driver is to get out of her small town and crap company.
Her university roommate Annie is working at The Circle, the most prominent Silicon Valley company. The Circle is primarily a social media company, but it has many divisions and products looking at both profit and non-profit ‘doing good’ areas. Imagine all the known Silicon Valley companies today combined into a monster company, that is what Circle is. Mae checks her pride and begs Annie for a job. Annie (later to her detriment) gets Mae the lowest level job in Customer Services. But the reader learns that someone like Mae only needs a foot in the door before she takes over like a invading parasite.
Quickly Mae is outperforming in her job, receiving kudos and being noticed by people. The validation spurs Mae to overachieve, but she has a weakness in that she is not sharing her thoughts, photos and life online and going home at 5pm, which is bad behaviour in a social media company. As an employee she has to post her thoughts and journey at Circle whether she wants to or not, and attend the evening campus events or her colleagues get upset and HR complaints are made about her not being a ‘team player’ or ‘part of the community’ from lower-achieving colleagues. After being pulled into several meetings with her manager, HR and her friend Annie. Mae changes the behaviour she had learned in her small town on having privacy and boundaries between work and life and starts to be a prolific social media poster. There is a metric called Participation Rank, as there are metrics for everything in the company, and Mae aims to be in the top 2000 social media sharers in the company and is horrified when her manager tells her she is nearer the bottom at 10,000. Mae also notices that her friend Annie is in the Top40 that surrounds the Three Wise Men (the founder, CEO and COO). Mae aims to be in that Top40. To bring up her metrics, she barely sleeps and she moves into a dorm room on campus so that her whole life is about the Circle. At this point the author shows the reader just how ambitious Mae is. It’s months into her tenure in the company before she becomes a threat to Annie’s job.
Soon Mae is jealous of Annie’s position of honour in the Top40, with her privileged access to the closest guarded information. Meanwhile Mae is sleeping with two men she has met at evening events. Francis betrays Mae’s privacy and trust by sharing her personal information in a public meeting and taking a video of their sexual act all without getting her permission. Mae is disgusted each time and decides that she needs to ditch this guy. But she has no emotional intelligence development to figure out why she should ditch the guy and keeps going back to him. While on the rebound from Francis, she meets the mysterious Kalden who does not appear on intranet searches and who shares no information about himself. He avoids all the CCTV cameras on campus and always stays in the shadows. He is the one who shows Mae the underbelly of The Circle. Mae is obsessed about him but loses interest in him repeatedly as he is out of touch for weeks at a time and is unreachable. Whereas Francis is available, willing, easy to find, so Mae uses him for her needs and comfort and even grows to like him towards the end of the book.
Mae’s relationship with her parents deteriorate over the course of the book. Her father has multiple sclerosis and they are too poor to be able to afford health insurance and get him the best care while Mae works at the utility company. When she joins the Circle, her salary shoots up and she gets a family health care plan as part of the benefits package. Her parents are proud of her getting the job and are immensely grateful for the medical help from the Circle. They are unfortunately for Mae, overfond of her ex-boyfriend Mercer, a local artisan who makes chandeliers out of antlers. Mae and Mercer started out incompatible and while she works for the Circle, the divide between them grows larger. He is old-fashioned, introverted and a technophobe, which is the complete opposite of Mae. Mercer is constantly invited by her parents for meals and hangs around them. This drives a wedge between Mae and her parents. As an only child it is particularly difficult that they see Mercer as a son to them. Eventually Mae loses contact with her parents and they in turn avoid her and her company for their own privacy.
Mae turns out to be an entitled and mercenary character with no ethics or morals. She walks around with a camera livestreaming herself to show transparency as the Circle CEO thinks that is what authenticity looks like. Her friendships are all her viewers online and some colleagues in the Circle. There are twists for Mercer, Annie, her parents and Kalden in the book, but the main twist is the journey Mae makes herself from being a relatively normal human with healthy boundaries to being under constant surveillance and promoting a socio-communist society. From Mercer’s complaints about her, she always had the tendency to share other people’s private information online without their permission, in otherwards, she was much like Francis and they are suited to each other. Mae was the enabler that Bailey and Stenton had been waiting for the Circle to gain complete control over the world, a process they call ‘completion’. They actively groom her under the guise of ‘doing good for the world’.
Whenever any senator, regulator or civil servant criticises the Circle and suggests they hold a monopoly and are taking over, incriminating ‘searches’ and content would be found in their personal accounts and drives. The person would be mired in scandal and effectively taken out.
The author positions the Circle and it’s leaders Stenton and Bailey as smiling, power hungry and deeply insidious. Kalden (Ty) as the founder on the other hand sees the errors of the path his company is on and is unable to control his hires, Stenton and Bailey. They manage him by putting him under house arrest on the campus and taking away his job, all his rights and freedoms.
I’m not surprised this book won awards. It’s definitely thought provoking.
Chronicles of Tania 
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