Josiah and Denise

Josiah and Denise are two HR employees at the Circle who have an extensive talk with Mae about "community" about a quarter of the way into the book. I found it to be perhaps one of the most infuriating parts of the book. I've taken out some excerpts here for discussion, from pages 179 to 189. Why is it that these passages are so horrifying? They reveal some of the values of the society in The Circle. (Blogger doesn't permit indenting, pardon the formatting errors in the quotes.)

One

“And that sharing with other young people whose parents suffer from the disease [MS]—do you see the benefit in this?” [asked Denise.]
“Absolutely.” [replied Mae.]
“For example, when you heard your dad had a seizure, you drove, what, a hundred miles or so, and never once during that drive did you try to glean any information from the InnerCirclers, or from the larger OuterCircle. Do you see that as an opportunity wasted?”
“Now I do, absolutely. I was just upset, and worried, and I was driving like a maniac. I wasn’t very present.”
Denise raised a finger. “Ah, present. That is a wonderful word. I’m glad you used it. Do you consider yourself usually present?”

This is a society that would choose social networking about an emergency over physically responding to the emergency. I can pretty concretely infer that if someone got hit by a bus in this Circular world, we'd see pictures of the individual's mutilated body and "zings" (much like tweets) of the incident before anyone would rush to help the injured individual. I, personally, hope this shift in ethics never occurs.

 Two

"Can you talk about what you did on Saturday?”
“It’s embarrassing,” Mae said. “Nothing.”
“Nothing meaning what?”
“Well, most of the day I stayed at my parents’ house and just watched TV.”
Josiah brightened. “Anything good?”
“Just some women’s basketball.”
“There’s nothing wrong with women’s basketball!” Josiah gushed. “I love women’s basketball. Have you followed my WNBA zings?”
“No, do you have a Zing feed about the WNBA?"
Josiah nodded, looking hurt, even bewildered.

Why do something when you can talk about doing it? Whereas in our world, language more so shapes reality, in this world language can create reality in the mundane and literal sense. This turns out to be not such a good thing...

Three

"Okay. Let’s go to Sunday. Tell us about Sunday.”
“I just drove back.”
“That’s it?”
“I kayaked?”
Josiah and Denise registered dual looks of surprise.
“You kayaked?” Josiah said. “Where?”
“Just in the bay.”
“With who?”
“No one. Just alone.”
Denise and Josiah looked hurt.
“I kayak,” Josiah said, and then typed something in his tablet, pressing very hard.
“How often do you kayak?” Denise asked Mae.
“Maybe once every few weeks?”
Josiah was looking intently at his tablet. “Mae, I’m looking at your profile, I’m finding nothing about you and kayaking. No smiles, no ratings, no posts, nothing. And now you’re telling me you kayak once every few weeks?”
“Well, maybe it’s less than that?”
Mae laughed, but Denise and Josiah did not. Josiah continued to stare at his screen, while Denise’s eyes probed into Mae.

Again, we see that it's almost unreal if it's not recorded. These standards are excepted so much so that Josiah and Denise become angry when Mae questions them. Let's remember, in the Circular world, Mae's the one who's wrong here.

Four

“I’m sorry,” Mae said.
Josiah rolled his eyes. “No, I mean, this is a tangent, but my problem with paper is that all communication dies with it. It holds no possibility of continuity. You look at your paper brochure, and that’s where it ends. It ends with you. Like you’re the only one who matters. But think if you’d been documenting. If you’d been using a tool that would help confirm the identity of whatever birds you saw, then anyone can benefit—naturalists, students, historians, the Coast Guard. Everyone can know, then, what birds were on the bay on that day. It’s just maddening, thinking of how much knowledge is lost every day through this kind of shortsightedness. And I don’t want to call it selfish but—”
“No. It was. I know it was,” Mae said.

That about sums it up: privacy is selfishness. Text (in a broad sense) is necessary for a "knowledgeable"  and unselfish world. To me it's quite scary to think that doing anything privately would be considered, really, a sin.

The values in the society of The Circle are more different from ours than they first appear. I shouldn't judge, but it's impossible not to: these values are horrifying.

Written by Seth