How realistic is The Circle?

Probably the most striking part of The Circle is the degree to which its characters give up their privacy. It is first imperative to note that the narrator, whose name is never mentioned, is nearly passive throughout the book, only giving brief hints of agreement with the events that take place.

Opinion

At the moment, there is absolutely no way I would be willing to broadcast every second of my life (excluding slumber, urination, and defecation) to the rest of the world. Secondly, there is no way I would waste my time watching the lives of other people I don't even know. Would you?

I'll be honest. I pitied a good number of the characters in the book. But, objectively, I must look at this sense of pity. We "know" that social communication is meant to be done in person, that that's the superior way, the best way to connect with others...but all knowledge is relative. The reality in The Circle is that technology is the superior way to communicate. The value that our society puts on tangibility is simply absent in that of The Circle.

Change is slow in our world. Especially change on the broadest social scale. The Circle is based in the seemingly near future, but the society and its values are so drastically different--even just those at  the beginning of the book compared to those at the end--that it's unrealistic. But let us take a moment and think of the rate of change. If we look at change over time mathematically, we'll see that advances and, more so, what society recognizes have increased over time. The rate of change is increasing. But the rate at which the rate of change is increasing, qualitatively, seems far too small to make something like the society in The Circle possible.

Conclusion

It seems like the world Eggers has created is a harsh exaggeration of what he believes may be coming in our futures. Maybe it's to convince us that, if this time arrives, we have to take a step back and look from an outside perspective. The Circle is internally a grandiose Utopian world. Externally, it is an unfortunately paradoxical dystopia that is a concerning reminder of what may be to come. Of course we can extrapolate this to other, broader, ideas, but that's for another blog post.

Composed by Seth