isunshower | surveillance state shit (Reply)

Time is weird because this week, January of 2025, in the middle of this whole corporate neo-nazi situation taking hold in the US, I read this book from 2013 that accidentally invented Ring cameras as a cautionary tale.

Dave Eggers' The Circle is downright creepy, satisfyingly unsatisfying, and most of all cautionary. When I started reading, I assumed quickly that Mae would eventually realize the perils of her obsessive, demanding, omniscient employer and work to take it down, but the further you get in the book, the more you realize she's not going to. She's totally drunk the Kool-Aid. There's no hope in The Circle. Mae is excited, Mae is hopeful, but we the readers have seen her betray her family, her friends, all sorts of people in service to digital connection.

One of the most unsettling parts for me was this sequence where Mae is told to up her rating/engagement on social media and then stays up all night doing it. I finished it and then... immediately picked up my phone and checked Bluesky, and I was like, wait, do I want to be doing this? And I feel so nervous about checking Facebook or Insta now as well. The other thing that really rattled me is how effective the propaganda is! When Eamon Bailey has conversations with Mae, and I try to take a second to consider his viewpoint, there are parts of it that make sense. I can feel myself sliding down the slope unless I catch myself, and that's... scary.

Are there parts of this book that I wish were better written? Yeah. I certainly could have done without the sex scenes, although admittedly giving Mae the chance to totally reject Francis after the whole sex tape situation was a good idea because it had me going crazy about, like, how could she not see that this was a bad thing??? The kayaking, also, plot relevant yes but also sort of shoehorned in in places.

Ultimately it's got me thinking a lot about privacy. I was a lonely kid in the 2010s, I spent a lot of time on the internet. In some ways this has been great! I've had good friends in Scotland and the Netherlands and Serbia and Brazil. I've met internet friends and it's been great. I've discovered cool new music, books, learned languages, all sorts of cool things. But I wonder, particularly as a queer person in this day and age, how much of my face and my identity do I want on, say, YouTube? Do I want my choir friends and my Eurovision fandom friends to know each other? What secrets do I want to keep? I'm not usually very good at keeping them, but over the past year I've found myself lying about certain things, keeping things from my parents, my roommate, past coworkers, things like that. So in that way, it's kind of nice that I mostly use this space just to talk about books. Like, I COULD ramble here all about the, say, Ted Lasso fic I've been reading or my job search or things like that, but mostly here I chat about books and music. And that's almost all that you guys (of which there are, like, not even five people subbed to me here and idk who's even active) get to know about me. It's weirdly freeing.

sorry if this one is sort of less than structured/doesn't "flow" i wrote it in my email drafts on the work computer and am posting it several days later and tbh i cba to reread it