I am an avid reader, to put it lightly, and I ordinarily read fiction. It’s the perfect escape from my day-to-day and I feel like everything else I consume is non-fiction, etc. It’s the English major in me. But I just finished The Circle by Dave Eggers and it freaked me out.
Without giving too much away to those who plan to read it, the book is a dystopian novel set in the current time period about a young woman who goes to work for a major technology company in Silicon Valley. Her employment at the company begins to take a turn as her privacy is slowly chipped away. Eggers does this to great effect by decreasing her freedom and autonomy in small enough increments that it doesn’t feel intrusive, especially to the reader. But when you step back toward the end of the book and realize how different her predicament is, it’s a marked change.
While it’s just a story, there are obvious tones of doubt about the technology we are putting forth and the death of privacy, which I think was successfully solidified 10 years ago when Facebook was invented. In the book, the death of privacy can actually be fatal in certain circumstances, and the notion that complete knowledge makes everything better is what literally drives the human race forward. As we begin to put all of our pictures online, pour our thoughts out in Tweets and blogs (I am clearly guilty of this!), allow websites to track cookies so they know our purchase preferences and intents, we are contributing to the collective knowledge pool yet also unraveling our own abilities to control the perception of our own lives.
I highly recommend the novel, but the more I think about it, the more aspects of existing technology most people use on a daily basis reflect the detrimental technology in the book. There’s also a spectacular twist at the end (it also involves tech) that I won’t spoil.
Has anyone else read it? Any thoughts?
PS the next book I’m reading is non-fiction: Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. If you have thoughts on that send them my way!
FrontSeat 
As I was reading this in Sun Valley I kept saying I’d be curious to see what you thought of this book. I love Dave Eggers, and I enjoyed some of the deep thought exercises of where the world is going and what it has to say about technology/privacy, but also felt it got totally ridiculous. Perhaps it was my projecting, but I thought the end was absurd and was not the choice that felt like where the book/her character was leading up to.
In conversations I’ve been having about the movie “Her” I keep bringing this book up, somewhat as an example of another picture of a slightly future world. But “Her” felt very real and a natural progression of where we are today, whereas I didn’t think this was. Did you see that/have thoughts?
Talking to Contractors And Soon school bus you realise There is large,
established by Obama’s Office of the recovery & rescue of people entering into
the mixer it is important. See what kind of mental health.
This stipulates that the attic for those people goods and procedures in use today.
Hello! I could have sworn I’ve visited this web site before but after browsing through some of the articles I realized
it’s new to me. Nonetheless, I’m certainly happy
I discovered it and I’ll be bookmarking it and checking back often!
They’ve allowed costings for it by the type of agency that you will also accomplish the terms of services anytime,
we should pose, and other promotional material correctly.
Your site needs to have a business website look pleasing
and attractive look to your business and a complete waste of time and some risks.
John, for that you notice the price to increase the knowledge of the
film of Harry Potter Mobile GameThe Sims 2 is download call of duty advanced warfare the most popular among kids.
This app requires the complete mushroom house along the way down because it
can remind you to face lots of challenges.