(5) Book I

Mae Holland heeft een baan verworven bij The Circle, dank zij haar succesvolle aloude vriendin Annie die al een tijdje bij The Circle werkt en snel opgeklommen is tot de 'Gang of 40'. Dit is Mae's eerste werkdag. Ze werkt op de afdeling Customer Experience.

"Though the company was less than six years old, its name and logo — a circle surrounding a knitted grid, with a small ‘c’ in the center — were already among the best-known in the world. There were over ten thousand employees on this, the main campus, but the Circle had offices all over the globe, and was hiring hundreds of gifted young minds every week. It had been voted the world’s most admired company four years running."(6)

[Het hoofdgebouw is symbolisch van glas en 'overal' transparant. De kantoren in ieder geval.]

"As the elevator rose, the day’s featured activities appeared on every elevator wall, the images and text traveling from one panel to the next. With each announcement, there was video, photos, animation, music."(11)

Annie geeft haar de 'grand tour' op de Circle-campus.

"Now she [Annie] was part of the forty most crucial minds at the company — the Gang of 40 — privy to its most secret plans and data."(22)

"They stopped at five or six other tables, meeting fascinating people, every one of them working on something Annie deemed world-rocking or life-changing or fifty years ahead of anyone else."(27)

Ze vertelt over Ty (Tyler Alexander Gospodinov) - die zich steeds meer terugtrekt als een soort van kluizenaar - en de andere twee 'wijze mannen' Eamon Bailey and Tom Stenton. Samen vormen ze de top van het bedrijf.

"Ty had devised the initial system, the Unified Operating System, which combined everything online that had heretofore been separate and sloppy — users’ social media profiles, their payment systems, their various passwords, their email accounts, user names, preferences, every last tool and manifestation of their interests. The old way — a new transaction, a new system, for every site, for every purchase — it was like getting into a different car to run any one kind of errand. “You shouldn’t have to have eighty-seven different cars,” he’d said, later, after his system had overtaken the web and the world.
Instead, he put all of it, all of every user’s needs and tools, into one pot and invented TruYou — one account, one identity, one password, one payment system, per person. There were no more passwords, no multiple identities. Your devices knew who you were, and your one identity — the TruYou, unbendable and unmaskable — was the person paying, signing up, responding, viewing and reviewing, seeing and being seen. You had to use your real name, and this was tied to your credit cards, your bank, and thus paying for anything was simple. One button for the rest of your life online."(32)

"TruYou changed the internet, in toto, within a year. Though some sites were resistant at first, and free-internet advocates shouted about the right to be anonymous online, the TruYou wave was tidal and crushed all meaningful opposition. It started with the commerce sites. Why would any non-porn site want anonymous users when they could know exactly who had come through the door? Overnight, all comment boards became civil, all posters held accountable. The trolls, who had more or less overtaken the internet, were driven back into the darkness.
And those who wanted or needed to track the movements of consumers online had found their Valhalla: the actual buying habits of actual people were now eminently mappable and measurable, and the marketing to those actual people could be done with surgical precision. Most TruYou users, most internet users who simply wanted simplicity, efficiency, a clean and streamlined experience, were thrilled with the results. No longer did they have to memorize twelve identities and passwords; no longer did they have to tolerate the madness and rage of the anonymous hordes; no longer did they have to put up with buckshot marketing that guessed, at best, within a mile of their desires. Now the messages they did get were focused and accurate and, most of the time, even welcome."(33)

Daarna wordt de tour voortgezet door Josiah en Denise. Mae is onder de indruk van de Circle-campus.

"Outside the walls of the Circle, all was noise and struggle, failure and filth. But here, all had been perfected. The best people had made the best systems and the best systems had reaped funds, unlimited funds, that made possible this, the best place to work. And it was natural that it was so, Mae thought. Who else but utopians could make utopia?"(43)

Daarna gaat ze met Annie naar een feest op campus. Ze raakt in de drukte Annie kwijt en ontmoet toevallig ene Francis die voor 'security' werkt, maar Annie duikt ineens weer op.

De dag erna wordt haar eerste echte werkdag. Ze leert verschillende mensen kennen. Dan is er een van, een HR-persoon, die haar de bedrijfsfilosofie bijbrengt.

"We want this to be a workplace, sure, but it should also be a humanplace. And that means the fostering of community. In fact, it must be a community. That’s one of our slogans, as you probably know: Community First. And you’ve seen the signs that say Humans Work Here — I insist on those. That’s my pet issue. We’re not automatons. This isn’t a sweatshop. We’re a group of the best minds of our generation. Generations. And making sure this is a place where our humanity is respected, where our opinions are dignified, where our voices are heard — this is as important as any revenue, any stock price, any endeavor undertaken here. Does that sound corny?”"(65)

Mae is helemaal vóór.

[Ze heeft blijkbaar geen idee hoe ver dat doorgetrokken kan worden.]

Ze wordt ingewerkt en gaat aan de slag. Naast het hoofdbeeldscherm voor het afhandelen van klantvragen komt een tweede scherm voor interne communicaties. Ze is goed in dit werk.

"And then a message told her she’d been mentioned on Zing. She clicked over to read it. It was written by Annie. Newbie Mae is kicking ass! She’d sent it out to the rest of the Circle campus—10,041 people. The zing was forwarded 322 times and there were 187 follow-up comments. They appeared on her second screen in an ever-lengthening thread. Mae didn’t have time to read them all, but she scrolled quickly through, and the validation felt good. At the end of the day, Mae’s score was 98. Congratulatory messages arrived from Jared and Dan and Annie. A series of zings followed, announcing and celebrating what Annie called the highest score of any CE newb ever of all time suck it." [mijn nadruk] (75)

Ze luncht met Annie en een paar anderen en hoort over Francis' werk aan een programma om de ontvoering van kinderen te voorkomen. Ze gaan samen naar de Grote Hal voor DreamFriday waar Bailey zal spreken over een nieuw product, SeeChange, kleine goedkope technisch briljante camera's die beelden en geluiden kunnen streamen en alles wat er is of gebeurt zichtbaar kunnen maken.

"“Like it?” Bailey said. “Okay, now this doesn’t just apply to areas of upheaval. Imagine any city with this kind of coverage. Who would commit a crime knowing they might be watched any time, anywhere? My friends in the FBI feel this would cut crime rates down by 70, 80 percent in any city where we have real and meaningful saturation.”
The applause grew.
“But for now, let’s go back to the places in the world where we most need transparency and so rarely have it. Here’s a medley of locations around the world where we’ve placed cameras. Now imagine the impact these cameras would have had in the past, and will have in the future, if similar events transpire. Here’s fifty cameras in Tiananmen Square.”
Live shots from all over the square filled the screen, and the crowd erupted again. Bailey went on, revealing their coverage of a dozen authoritarian regimes, from Khartoum to Pyongyang, where the authorities had no idea they were being watched by three thousand Circlers in California—had no notion that they could be watched, that this technology was or would ever be possible. (...) There needs to be accountability. Tyrants can no longer hide. There needs to be, and will be, documentation and accountability, and we need to bear witness. And to this end, I insist that all that happens should be known.”"(91)

[Is het nu zo moeilijk te bedenken dat diezelfde autoritaire regimes met dit soort spullen en vanuit dezelfde filosofie All that happens must be known hun hele bevolking in de gaten kunnen houden?]

"Bailey continued. “Instead of searching the web, only to find some edited video with terrible quality, now you go to SeeChange, you type in Myanmar. Or you type in your high school boyfriend’s name. Chances are there’s someone who’s set up a camera nearby, right? Why shouldn’t your curiosity about the world be rewarded? You want to see Fiji but can’t get there? SeeChange. You want to check on your kid at school? SeeChange. This is ultimate transparency. No filter. See everything. Always.”"(94)

"“Now let’s experiment a bit, using all of this together. I’m sitting at home. I log on and want to get a sense of the world. Show me traffic on 101. Streets of Jakarta. Surfing at Bolinas. My mom’s house. Show me the webcams of everyone I went to high school with.”
At every command, new images appeared, until there were at least a hundred live streaming images on the screen at once.
“We will become all-seeing, all-knowing.”"(96)

[Over privacy geen woord.]

Ze is het weekeinde thuis bij haar ouders. Over Mae's ouders, de MS van haar vader en het gedoe met de ziektekostenverzekering, over haar voormalige vriendje Mercer die kroonluchters maakt van hertengeweien. Daarna besluit ze te gaan kajakken.

De maandag erna praat ze tijdens de lunch met Francis en zijn ChildTrack project.

"“Mae, think about a world where there could never again be a significant crime against a child. None possible. The second a kid’s not where he’s supposed to be, a massive alert goes off, and the kid can be tracked down immediately. Everyone can track her. All authorities know instantly she’s missing, but they know exactly where she is. They can call the mom and say ‘Hey, she just went to the mall,’ or they can track down some molester in seconds. The only hope an abductor would have is to take a kid, run into the woods with her, do something and run off before the world descends upon him. But he would have about a minute and a half to do it.”
“Or if they could jam the transmission from the chip.”
“Sure, but who has that expertise? How many electronic-genius pedophiles are there? Very few, I’m guessing. So immediately you take all child abduction, rape, murder, and you reduce it by 99 percent. And the price is that the kids have a chip in their ankle. You want a living kid with a chip in his ankle, a kid who you know will grow up safe, a kid who can again run down to the park, ride his bike to school, all that?”
“You’re about to say or.”
“Right, or do you want a dead kid? Or years of worry every time your kid walks to the bus stop? I mean, we’ve polled parents worldwide, and after they get over the initial squeamishness, we get an 88 percent approval."(122)

[Ook dit project is heel problematisch en tast de privacy van kinderen aan. Het gaat uit van controle over kinderen en bescherming van kinderen. Eerst is het tot 14 jaar - al is die grens al discutabel. Daarna volgt vast tot 18 jaar. Het is niet per se in het belang van kinderen. En het gaat er vanuit dat alle ouders volmaakt zijn. Wat als een kind misbruikt wordt en van huis wegloopt? Er is totaal geen vrijheid meer tegenover de ouders.]

Onderweg naar de wc komt ze de mysterieuze Kalden tegen. Gina van CircleSocial komt haar (non)deelname aan de sociale kant van het bedrijf bespreken.

"But Gina had hit a groove and would not be stopped until she’d finished her thought. “You realize that community and communication come from the same root word, communis, Latin for common, public, shared by all or many?”
Mae’s heart was hammering. “I’m very sorry, Gina. I fought to get a job here. I do know all this. I’m here because I believe in everything you said. I was just a bit crazed last week and didn’t get a chance to set it up.”
“Okay. But just know, from now on, that being social, and being a presence on your profile and all related accounts—this is part of why you’re here. We consider your online presence to be integral to your work here. It’s all connected.”"(128)

[Dat gemeenschapsdenken wordt dus inderdaad als dogma geleefd. Totale transparantie op het sociale vlak. ]

"“Okay. So your second screen will continue to be the way you’ll stay in touch with your team. That will be exclusively for CE business. Your third screen is for your social participation, in the company Circle and your wider Circle. Does that make sense?”"(129)

Gina legt ook CircleSearch op scherm 2 uit, een zoekprogramma waarmee je iedereen op campus kunt vinden

"“And over here you’ll see a cool new app, which sort of gives us a history of the building every day. You can see when each staffer checked in every day, when they left the building. This gives us a really nice sense of the life of the company. This part you don’t have to update yourself, of course. If you go to the pool, your ID automatically updates that on the feed. And outside of the movement, any additional commentary would be up to you, and of course would be encouraged.”
“Commentary?” Mae asked.
“You know, like what you thought of lunch, a new feature at the gym, anything. Just basic ratings and likes and comments. Nothing out of the ordinary, and of course all input helps us do a better job at serving the Circle community. Now that commentary is done right here,” she said, and revealed that every building and room could be clicked on, and within, she could add any comments about anything or anyone.
“So that’s your second screen. It’s about your coworkers, your team, and it’s about finding people in the physical space. Now it’s on to the really fun stuff. Screen three. This is where your main social and Zing feeds appear. I heard you weren’t a Zing user?”
Mae admitted she hadn’t been, but wanted to be.
“Great,” Gina said. “So now you have a Zing account. I made up a name for you: MaeDay. Like the war holiday. Isn’t that cool?”
Mae wasn’t so sure about the name, and couldn’t remember a holiday by that name.
“And I connected your Zing account with the total Circle community, so you just got 10,041 new followers! Pretty cool. In terms of your own zinging, we’d expect about ten or so a day, but that’s sort of a minimum. I’m sure you’ll have more to say than that. Oh, and over here’s your playlist. If you listen to music while you work, the feed automatically sends that playlist out to everyone else, and it goes into the collective playlist, which ranks the most-played songs in any given day, week, month. It has the top one hundred songs campuswide, but you can also slice it a thousand ways—top-played hip-hop, indie, country, anything. You’ll get recommendations based on what you play, and what others with similar taste play—it’s all cross-pollinating while you’re working. Make sense?”
Mae nodded.
“Now, next to the Zing feed, you’ll see the window for your primary social feed. You’ll also see that we split it into two parts, the InnerCircle social feed, and your external social, that’s your OuterCircle. Isn’t that cute? You can merge them, but we find it helpful to see the two distinct feeds. But of course the OuterCircle is still in the Circle, right? Everything is. Make sense so far?”
Mae said it did.
“I can’t believe you’ve been here a week without being on the main social feed. You’re about to have your world rocked.” Gina tapped Mae’s screen and Mae’s InnerCircle stream became a torrent of messages pouring down the monitor.
“See, you’re getting all last week’s stuff, too. That’s why there’s so many. Wow, you really missed a lot.”
Mae followed the counter on the bottom of the screen, calculating all the messages sent to her from everyone else at the Circle. The counter paused at 1,200. Then 4,400. The numbers scrambled higher, stopping periodically but finally settling at 8,276.
“That was last week’s messages? Eight thousand?”
“You can catch up,” Gina said brightly. “Maybe even tonight. Now, let’s open up your regular social account. We call it OuterCircle, but it’s the same profile, same feed as you’ve had for years. Mind if I open it up?”
Mae didn’t mind. She watched as her social profile, the one she’d first set up years ago, now appeared on her third screen, next to the InnerCircle feed. A cascade of messages and photos, a few hundred, filled the monitor.
“Okay, looks like you have some catching up to do here, too,” Gina said. “A feast! Have fun.”
“Thank you,” Mae said. She tried to sound as excited as she could. She needed Gina to like her.
“Oh wait. One more thing. I should explain message hierarchy. Shit. I almost forgot message hierarchy. Dan would kill me. Okay, so you know that your first-screen CE responsibilities are paramount. We have to serve our customers with our full attention and our full hearts. So that’s understood.”
“It is.”
“On your second screen, you might get messages from Dan and Jared, or Annie, or anyone directly supervising your work. Those messages inform the minute-to-minute quality of your service. So that would be your second priority. Clear?”
“Clear.”
“The third screen is your social, Inner- and OuterCircle. But these messages aren’t, like, superfluous. They’re just as important as any other messages, but are prioritized third. And sometimes they’re urgent. Keep an eye on the InnerCircle feed in particular, because that’s where you’ll hear about staff meetings, mandatory gatherings, and any breaking news. If there’s a Circle notice that’s really pressing, that’ll be marked in orange. Something extremely urgent will prompt a message on your phone, too. You keep that in view?” Mae nodded at her phone, resting just below the screens on her desk. “Good,” Gina said. “So those are the priorities, with your fourth priority your own OuterCircle participation. Which is just as important as anything else, because we value your work-life balance, you know, the calibration between your online life here at the company and outside it. I hope that’s clear. Is it?”
“It is.”
“Good. So I think you’re all set. Any questions?”
Mae said she was fine.
Gina’s head tilted skeptically, indicating she knew that Mae actually had many questions still, but didn’t want to ask them for fear of looking uninformed. Gina stood up, smiled, took a step back, but then stopped. “Crap. Forgot one more thing.” She crouched next to Mae, typed for a few seconds, and a number appeared on the third screen, looking much like her aggregate CE score. It said: MAE HOLLAND: 10,328.
“This is your Participation Rank, PartiRank for short. Some people here call it the Popularity Rank, but it’s not really that. It’s just an algorithm-generated number that takes into account all your activity in the InnerCircle. Does that make sense?”
“I think so.”
“It takes into account zings, exterior followers of your intra-company zings, comments on your zings, your comments on others’ zings, your comments on other Circlers’ profiles, your photos posted, attendance at Circle events, comments and photos posted about those events—basically it collects and celebrates all you do here. The most active Circlers are ranked highest of course. As you can see, your rank is low now, but that’s because you’re new and we just activated your social feed. But every time you post or comment or attend anything, that gets factored in, and you’ll see your rank change accordingly. That’s where the fun comes in. You post, you rise in the rankings. A bunch of people like your post, and you really shoot up. It moves all day. Cool?”
“Very,” Mae said.
“We started you with a little boost—otherwise you’d be 10,411. And again, it’s just for fun. You’re not judged by your rank or anything. Some Circlers take it very seriously, of course, and we love it when people want to participate, but the rank is really just a fun way to see how your participation manifests itself vis-à-vis the overall Circle community. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Okay then. You know how to get hold of me.”
And with that, Gina turned and left."(130-136)

[Natuurlijk kan niemand die informatieovervloed behappen. En natuurlijk is die PartiRank wel degelijk een middel om werknemers te controleren. ]

"But now that became more challenging. The third-screen feed dropped forty new InnerCircle messages every few minutes, fifteen or so OuterCircle posts and zings, and Mae used every available moment of downtime to quickly scroll through, make sure there was nothing that demanded her immediate attention, and then come back to her main screen. By the end of the morning, the flow was manageable, even exhilarating."(140)

Maar mensen verwachten ook echt deelname. Ene Alistair is diep bedroefd dat ze niet reageert op een uitnodiging, het moet uitgepraat, etc.

[De sociale druk neemt toe.]

Annie moest op haar wachten maar had het gesprek tussen Alistair, Dan en Mae gevolgd vanaf het grasveld.

"In quick succession, two waves passed over Mae. First, profound unease that Annie had been listening without her knowledge, followed by a wave of relief, knowing her friend had been with her, even if remotely, and could confirm that Mae would survive." [mijn nadruk] (146)

Annie blijkt enorm gespannen en overwerkt. Ze verwacht dan ook onmiddellijke reacties op berichten en zo.

[Opnieuw: sociale druk. Annie bezwijkt er al vrijwel onder. En zet daarom ook anderen onder druk.]

Mae gaat uit met Francis. Ze kussen en worden wat verliefd. Ze trekken vaker samen op en bezoeken samen de volgende Dream Friday. Daar is een presentatie van Gus Khazeni over het programma LuvLuv voor het vinden van dates, het krijgen van een relatie.

"This is called LuvLuv. Okay, maybe that name sucks. Actually, I know it sucks and we’re working on it. But this is how it works. When you’ve found someone, and you have their name, you made contact, you have a date planned—this is when LuvLuv comes in. Maybe you’ve already memorized their dating-site page, their personal page, all their feeds. But this LuvLuv gives you an entirely different set of information. So you feed in your date’s name. That’s the start. Then LuvLuv scans the web and uses some high-powered and very surgical search machinery to ensure that you don’t make an ass out of yourself and that you might find love and produce grandchildren for your baba, who thinks you might be sterile.”"(159)

['Uncertainty eliminated.' staat er op p. 164. Alles draait weer op het hebben van volledige controle, om het uitsluiten van elk risico.]

Francis wordt de proefpersoon tijdens de sessie. Mae kan zich niet voorstellen dat hij het over haar zou gaan hebben.

"Mae thought she’d puke. What was happening? This isn’t real, she said to herself. Was he really going to talk about her onstage? No, she assured herself. He’s just helping a friend, and they’ll do their demonstration using fake names."(160)

Maar dat gebeurt dus wel en alle mogelijke informatie over haar voorkeuren verschijnt op[ het grote scherm. Ze is woedend en verlaat op een gegeven moment zo onopvallend mogelijk de zaal. Ze wil Francis niet meer zien.

"She wasn’t angry at the revelation of her allergies. Or her favorite foods. She had openly offered this information for many years, and she felt that offering her preferences, and reading about others’, was one of the things she loved about her life online.
So what had so mortified her during Gus’s presentation? She couldn’t put her finger on it. Was it only the surprise of it? Was it the pinpoint accuracy of the algorithms? Maybe. But then again, it wasn’t entirely accurate, so was that the problem? Having a matrix of preferences presented as your essence, as the whole you? Maybe that was it. It was some kind of mirror, but it was incomplete, distorted. And if Francis wanted any or all of that information, why couldn’t he just ask her? Her third screen, though, all afternoon was filled with congratulatory messages." [mijn nadruk] (166)

[Dat lijkt me nogal simpel. Mensen die je persoonlijke informatie gebruiken zonder jouw toestemming om een punt te scoren? En inderdaad, waarom zou je zo'n programma gebruiken om iets te weten te komen over iemand als je dat die persoon gewoon kunt vragen?]

Haar vader blijkt een aanval gehad te hebben. Ze haast zich na het werk naar huis. Mercer is er ook, maar daar is ze helemaal niet blij mee. Haar ouders zien hem nog steeds als de toekomstige schoonzoon, terwijl Mae hem niet meer ziet zitten.

"Mae fumed. She’d driven two hours in a red panic to find her father relaxing on the couch, watching baseball. She’d driven two hours to find her ex in her home, anointed the hero of the family. And what was she? She was somehow negligent. She was superfluous. It reminded her of so many of the things she didn’t like about Mercer. He liked to be considered kind, but he made sure everyone knew it, and that drove Mae mad, always having to hear about his kindness, his straight-upness, his reliability, his boundless empathy. But with her he’d been diffident, moody, unavailable too many times she needed him."(169)

"Mae’s mind churned through a half-dozen Circle tools she knew would help his business, but Mercer was an underachiever. An underachiever who somehow managed to be smug about it.
“See, that’s not true, Mae. It’s not true. I know I’m successful if I sell chandeliers. If people order them, then I make them, and they pay me money for them. If they have something to say afterward, they can call me or write me. I mean, all this stuff you’re involved in, it’s all gossip. It’s people talking about each other behind their backs. That’s the vast majority of this social media, all these reviews, all these comments. Your tools have elevated gossip, hearsay and conjecture to the level of valid, mainstream communication. And besides that, it’s fucking dorky.”"(174)

[Mercer heeft een 'gezonde weerstand' tegenover alle sociale media, al het geklets daar, alle likes en smiles daar.]

"“It’s not that I’m not social. I’m social enough. But the tools you guys create actually manufacture unnaturally extreme social needs. No one needs the level of contact you’re purveying. It improves nothing. It’s not nourishing. It’s like snack food."(176)

"“And it’s eliminated my ability to just talk to you.” He was still talking. “I mean, I can’t send you emails, because you immediately forward them to someone else. I can’t send you a photo, because you post it on your own profile. And meanwhile, your company is scanning all of our messages for information they can monetize. Don’t you think this is insane?”"(177)

Mae is niet tevreden met Mercer en met haar ouders die haar de les lezen. Als ze weer vertrekt komt ze langs de werf. Ze kan nog even gaan kajakken. Op haar tocht komt ze bij een woonboot en raakt in gesprek met de mensen die er wonen. Dat ontspant haar.

"On Monday, when she got to work and logged on, there were a hundred or so second-screen messages.
From Annie: We missed you Friday night!
Jared: You missed a great bash.
Dan: Bummed you weren’t at the Sunday Celebr!"(190)

[Opnieuw de sociale druk vanuit het bedrijf, terwijl ze dat weekeinde bij haar ouders, haar zieke vader was.]

En er komt een vierde beeldscherm zodat ze samen met Jared newbies kan helpen met het werk bij CE.

[Niemand die vraagt of ze daar tijd voor heeft, zin in heeft. Een nieuwe stroom van informatie waar ze aandacht aan moet schenken.]

Jared wijst haar er op dat ze nog niet bij de kliniek geweest is voor een gezondheidscontrole bij Dr. Villalobos.

[Het suggereert dat het bedrijf ook heeft voor zijn medewerkers. De praktijk lijkt me anders.]

"The doctor smiled. “Every two weeks. That’s the wellness component. If you come here only when there’s a problem, you never get ahead of things. The biweekly checkups involve diet consultations, and we monitor any variances in your overall health. This is key for early detection, for calibrating any meds you might be on, for seeing any problems a few miles away, as opposed to after they’ve run you over. Sound good?”"(198)

"“And all the data we generate here is available to you online. Everything we do and talk about, and of course all your past records. You signed the form when you started that allowed us to bring in all your other doctors’ information, so finally you’ll have it all in one place, and it’s accessible to you, to us, and we can make decisions, see patterns, see potential issues, given our access to the complete picture. You want to see it?” the doctor asked, and then activated a screen on the wall. Mae’s entire medical history appeared before her in lists and images and icons. Dr. Villalobos touched the wallscreen, opening folders and moving images, revealing the results of every medical visit she’d ever had—back to her first checkup before starting kindergarten."(199)

"“Piecing together some of the stuff when you were very young was a challenge, but from here on out, we’ll have near-complete information. Every two weeks we’ll do blood work, cognitive tests, reflexes, a quick eye exam, and a rotating retinue of more exotic tests, like MRIs and such.”"(200)

"“And of course,” Dr. Villalobos said, “all that data is stored in the cloud, and in your tablet, anywhere you want it. It’s always accessible, and is constantly updated. So if you fall, hit your head, you’re in the ambulance, the EMTs can access everything about your history in seconds.”"(205)

De situatie met haar ouders komt op tafel en dan blijkt dat die ook onder het Health Plan van het bedrijf kunnen vallen.

"Mae was alone in Annie’s office, stunned. Was it possible that her father would soon have real coverage? That the cruel paradox of her parents’ lives—that their constant battles with insurance companies actually diminished her father’s health and prevented her mother from working, eliminating her ability to earn money to pay for his care—would end?"(210)

Ze gaat naar een voorstelling op campus om dit te vieren. Ze komt Kalden tegen. Die maakt opnieuw grote indruk op haar. Ze wil te weten komen wie hij is, maar dat is niet zo simpel, de systemen hoesten niets op. Die dag horen ze ook dat Senator Williamson een aanklacht tegen The Circle wil indienen vanwege monopolistisch gedrag. En verder begint Dan aan haar kop te zeuren over haar deelname aan dingen na 17u en in het weekeinde en over haar lage Popularity Rank.

"“Now listen. Mae, I should admit that I know you didn’t go to the store. That’s one of the things I wanted to talk to you about. You haven’t been in the store, not once. You — a former college athlete — haven’t been to the gym, and you’ve barely explored the campus. I think you’ve used about one percent of our facilities.”
“I’m sorry. It’s just been a whirlwind so far, I guess.”
“And Friday night? There was a major event then, too.”
“I’m sorry. I wanted to go to the party, but I had to run home. My dad had a seizure and it ended up being minor but I didn’t know that until I got home.”
Dan looked at his glass desk and, with a tissue, tried to remove a smudge. Satisfied, he looked up.
“That’s very understandable. To spend time with your parents, believe me, I think that is very, very cool. I just want to emphasize the community aspect of this job. We see this workplace as a community, and every person who works here is part of that community. And to make it all work it requires a certain level of participation. It’s like, if we were a kindergarten class, and one girl has a party, and only half the class shows up, how does the birthday girl feel?”"(230-231)

Bovendien wordt van haar verwacht dat ze haar ervaringen deelt met anderen.

"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?”"(240)

[Het niet delen van al die persoonlijke zaken wordt als egoïstisch neergezet. ]

"Not to say this kind of attitude is antisocial, but it’s certainly sub-social, and certainly far from transparent. And we see that this behavior sometimes stems from a low sense of self-worth — a point of view that says, ‘Oh, what I have to say isn’t so important.’ Do you feel that describes your point of view?”"(244)

[Nog wat gepsychologiseer toe. Ze wordt uitgenodigdd voor een speciaal programma.]

"After the interview, at her desk, Mae scolded herself. What kind of person was she? More than anything, she was ashamed. She’d been doing the bare minimum. She disgusted herself and felt for Annie. Surely Annie had been hearing about her deadbeat friend Mae, who took this gift, this coveted job at the Circle — a company that had insured her parents! had saved them from familial catastrophe! — and had been skating through. Goddamnit, Mae, give a shit! she thought. Be a person of some value to the world."(245)

[In plaats van dat ze minstens van binnen woedend wordt over zo veel onzin, voelt ze zich schuldig. Typisch.]

"Mae looked at the time. It was six o’clock. She had plenty of hours to improve, there and then, so she embarked on a flurry of activity, sending four zings and thirty-two comments and eighty-eight smiles. In an hour, her PartiRank rose to 7,288. Breaking 7,000 was more difficult, but by eight o’clock, after joining and posting in eleven discussion groups, sending another twelve zings, one of them rated in the top 5,000 globally for that hour, and signing up for sixty-seven more feeds, she’d done it. She was at 6,872, and turned to her InnerCircle social feed. She was a few hundred posts behind, and she made her way through, replying to seventy or so messages, RSVPing to eleven events on campus, signing nine petitions, and providing comments and constructive criticism on four products currently in beta. By 10:16 her rank was 5,342, and again, the plateau — this time at 5,000 — was hard to overcome. She wrote a series of zings about a new Circle service, allowing account holders to know whenever their name was mentioned in any messages sent from anyone else, and one of the zings, her seventh on the subject, caught fire and was rezinged 2,904 times, and this brought her PartiRank up to 3,887.
She felt a profound sense of accomplishment and possibility that was accompanied, in short order, by a near-complete sense of exhaustion. It was almost midnight and she needed sleep. It was too late to go all the way home, so she checked the dorm availability, reserved one, got her access code, walked across campus and into HomeTown."(246)

[Ik word al moe als ik het lees ... ]

Na al die verwijten dat ze niet 'sociaal' genoeg is voelt ze zich alleen. Het liefst zou ze Kalden zien maar die is nergens te vinden. Dan neemt ze maar genoegen met toch weer Francis.

[Erg principieel is ze niet.]

Maar die blijkt hun ontmoeting helemaal opgenomen te hebben met zijn smartphone. Dat vindt ze verre van leuk.

[Weer zonder enig overleg worden dingen vastgelegd van haar die ze niet wil dat iedereen ziet of weet. Ze zou uit haar vel moeten springen. Maar, nee. ]

"More than anything, she was disappointed in herself. She’d let the same man do the same thing to her, twice.
“Don’t ask me again to delete it,” Annie said, waving to a few senior Circlers in the crowd, members of the Gang of 40.
“Please delete it.”
“You know I can’t. We don’t delete here, Mae. Bailey would freak. He’d weep. It hurts him personally when anyone even considers the deleting of any information. It’s like killing babies, he says. You know that.”"(265)

Tijdens de DreamFriday van de week erop stelt Tom Stenton een senator voor die transparantie en je verantwoorden belangrijk vindt en er wel voortdurend een camera voor wil dragen. De erder genoemde senator Williamson is gearresteerd vanwege allerlei materiaal op haar computer etc.

[Uiteraard probeert het bedrijf wel politieke invloed uit te oefenen, wat het ook zegt. En ze spelen smerige spelletjes ook nog. ]

Op het feestje erna ontmoet ze Kalden weer. Die neemt haar mee naar de kelders waar de servers staan waarop de cloud wordt opgeslagen. Ze bedrijven er de liefde. Ze moet er over liegen tegenover Annie.

"“Mae, I’m not your boss. I don’t want to be your supervisor or anything. But the company needs to know who this guy is. Company security’s something we have to take seriously. Let’s get him nailed down today, okay?” Annie’s voice had changed; she sounded like a displeased superior. Mae held her anger and hung up."(290)

"During lunch Mae made her way to the Cultural Revolution, where, at the behest of Jared and Josiah and Denise, she would be outfitted to answer CircleSurveys. She had been assured this was a reward, an honor, and an enjoyable one — to be one of the Circlers asked about her tastes, her preferences, her buying habits and plans, for use by the Circle’s clients."(291)

Waarvoor een vijfde beeldscherm op haar werkplek zal staan.

"It was all easy enough to assimilate. The first day, she’d gotten through 652 of the survey questions, and congratulatory messages came from Pete Ramirez, Dan and Jared. Feeling strong and wanting to impress them even more, she answered 820 the next day, and 991 the day after that. It was not difficult, and the validation felt good. Pete told her how much the clients were appreciating her input, her candor and her insights." [mijn nadruk] (299)

[Hm, indruk willen maken ... ]

"The main development, and one that Bailey himself zinged about every few hours, was the rapid proliferation of other elected leaders, in the U.S. and globally, who had chosen to go clear. It was, to most minds, an inexorable progression."(306)

[Is dat een grapje richting Scientologie?]

"Every time a camera was installed and a new leader had gone transparent, there was another announcement from Stenton, another celebration, and the viewership grew. By the end of the fifth week, there were 16,188 elected officials, from Lincoln to Lahore, who had gone completely clear, and the waiting list was growing.
The pressure on those who hadn’t gone transparent went from polite to oppressive. The question, from pundits and constituents, was obvious and loud: If you aren’t transparent, what are you hiding? Though some citizens and commentators objected on grounds of privacy, asserting that government, at virtually every level, had always needed to do some things in private for the sake of security and efficiency, the momentum crushed all such arguments and the progression continued. If you weren’t operating in the light of day, what were you doing in the shadows?
And there was a wonderful thing that tended to happen, something that felt like poetic justice: every time someone started shouting about the supposed monopoly of the Circle, or the Circle’s unfair monetization of the personal data of its users, or some other paranoid and demonstrably false claim, soon enough it was revealed that that person was a criminal or deviant of the highest order. One was connected to a terror network in Iran. One was a buyer of child porn. Every time, it seemed, they would end up on the news, footage of investigators leaving their homes with computers, on which any number of unspeakable searches had been executed and where reams of illegal and inappropriate materials were stored. And it made sense. Who but a fringe character would try to impede the unimpeachable improvement of the world?"(307-308)

"And so started the Circle’s own transparency plan, which began with the installation of a thousand SeeChange cameras on campus. They were placed in common rooms, cafeterias and outdoor spaces first. Then, as the Wise Men assessed any problems they might pose for the protection of intellectual property, they were placed in hallways, work areas, even laboratories. The saturation was not complete — there were still hundreds of more sensitive spaces without access, and the cameras were prohibited from bathrooms and other private rooms, but otherwise the campus, to the eyes of a billion-odd Circle users, was suddenly clear and open, and the Circle devotees, who already felt loyal to the company and enthralled by its mystique, now felt closer, felt part of an open and welcoming world.
There were eight SeeChange cameras in Mae’s pod, and within hours of them going live, she and everyone else in the room were provided another screen, on which they could see a grid of their own and lock into any view on campus. They could see if their favorite table at the Glass Eatery was available. They could see if the health club was jammed. They could see if the kickball game was a serious one or for duffers only. And Mae was surprised by how interesting Circle campus life was to outsiders. Within hours she was hearing from friends from high school and college, who had located her, who now could watch her work.(...)
She began to think a bit harder about the clothes she wore to work. She thought more about where she scratched, when she blew her nose or how. But it was a good kind of thinking, a good kind of calibration. And knowing she was being watched, that the Circle was, overnight, the most-watched workplace in the world, reminded her, more profoundly than ever, just how radically her life had changed in only a few months. She had been, twelve weeks ago, working at the public utility in her hometown, a town no one had heard of. Now she was communicating with clients all over the planet, commanding six screens, training a new group of newbies, and altogether feeling more needed, more valued, and more intellectually stimulated than she ever thought possible." [mijn nadruk] (309-310)

Gina komt vertellen over de Conversion Rate en Retail Raw, de mate waarin je er in slaagt om andere mensen prodcten van The Circle te laten kopen.

"“Okay. I feel like I’m invading your lunch and your friendship. So that’s the Conversion Rate and Retail Raw. I know you understand it. There’ll be a new screen by the end of the day to measure these scores.”"(322)

[En een zesde beeldscherm wordt toegevoegd.]

Ze zoekt haar ouders op met wie het - dankzij de deelname aan het Circle Health Plan een stuk beter gaat. Een fraaie nieuwe kroonluchter van Mercer staat op tafel. Ze besluit - buiten hem om - reclame te gaan maken voor dat product. Meteen volgen er reacties. Hij is woedend. Hij is ook bijzonder kritisch naar The Circle en zijn leiders toe. Ze wil hem nooit meer zien. Als ze naar de campus rijdt besluit ze om 22u nog te gaan kajakken terwijl de werf gesloten is. Ze 'leent' er een, maar als ze terugkomt is de politie er etc. Gelukkig pleit de eigenares van de werf haar vrij, dus ze komt met de schrik vrij.

Maar natuurlijk is er dan Dan van The Circle die dit via een SeeChange-camera te weten is gekomen en die er een reuzeprobleem van maakten weer de egoïsme-kaart speelt. Ze krijgt een gesprek met Eamon Bailey ook weer op haar schuldgevoelens inspeelt en tegelijkertijd SeeChange promoot.

[Ik vind al die schuldgevoelens op zijn zachst gezegd belachelijk.]

De discussie gaat dan over geheimen en of transparantie niet veel beter is.

"Mae knew she shouldn’t press him, but her mouth got ahead of her. “But you can’t be saying that everyone should know everything.”
Bailey’s eyes widened, as if pleased she’d led him to an idea he coveted. “Of course not. But I am saying that everyone should have a right to know everything, and should have the tools to know anything. There’s not enough time to know everything, though I certainly wish there was.”" [mijn nadruk] (367)

[Wat een onzinnig standpunt.]

"“See that?” he said. “A circle is the strongest shape in the universe. Nothing can beat it, nothing can improve upon it, nothing can be more perfect. And that’s what we want to be: perfect. So any information that eludes us, anything that’s not accessible, prevents us from being perfect. You see?”" [mijn nadruk] (369)

"That’s the nature of secrets. They’re cancerous when kept within us, but harmless when they’re out in the world.”
“So you’re saying there should be no secrets.”
“I have thought on this for years, and I have yet to conjure a scenario where a secret does more good than harm. Secrets are the enablers of antisocial, immoral and destructive behavior."(371)

"But my point is, what if we all behaved as if we were being watched? It would lead to a more moral way of life. Who would do something unethical or immoral or illegal if they were being watched? If their illegal money transfer was being tracked? If their blackmailing phone call was being recorded? If their stick-up at the gas station was being filmed by a dozen cameras, and even their retinas identified during the robbery? If their philandering was being documented in a dozen ways?”"(372)

Op DreamFriday doen ze hun inteveiw op een bepaalde manier over. Afgezien van het idee geheimen gaat het ook weer over het delen van je ervaringen.

"“It was just selfish, Eamon. It was selfish and nothing more. The same way a child doesn’t want to share her favorite toy. I understand that secrecy is part of, well, an aberrant behavior system. It comes from a bad place, not a place of light and generosity. And when you deprive your friends, or someone like your son Gunner, of experiences like I had, you’re basically stealing from them. You’re depriving them of something they have a right to. Knowledge is a basic human right. Equal access to all possible human experiences is a basic human right.”"(386)

[Wat een onzin.]

"“I think it’s simple. If you care about your fellow human beings, you share what you know with them. You share what you see. You give them anything you can. If you care about their plight, their suffering, their curiosity, their right to learn and know anything the world contains, you share with them. You share what you have and what you see and what you know. To me, the logic there is undeniable.”
The audience cheered, and while they did so, three new words, SHARING IS CARING, appeared on the screen, below the previous three. Bailey was shaking his head, amazed."(387)

"“Well, I said, privacy is theft.”
Bailey turned to the audience. “Isn’t that an interesting way of putting it, guys? ‘Privacy is theft.’ ” The words now appeared on the screen behind him, in great white letters:
PRIVACY IS THEFT
Mae turned to look at the three lines together. She blinked back tears, seeing it all there. Had she really thought of all that herself?
SECRETS ARE LIES
SHARING IS CARING
PRIVACY IS THEFT"(388)

"Somewhere in the stampeding applause, Bailey managed to announce the capper to it all — that Mae, in the interest of sharing all she saw and could offer the world, would be going transparent immediately." [mijn nadruk] (389)

(389) Book II

Mae laat iedereen de wereld van The Circle zien met haar aangepaste SeeChange-camera. Kalden weet haar te bereiken zonder dat iedereen mee kan luisteren.

"At first, Mae had been surprised when they’d asked her to continue working, at least a few hours a week, at CE. She’d enjoyed her time there, yes, but she assumed transparency would mean she’d leave that far behind. “That’s exactly the point,” Bailey had explained. “I think Number One, it’ll keep you connected with the ground-level work you did here. Number Two, I think your followers and viewers will appreciate you continuing to do this essential work. It’ll be a very moving act of humility, don’t you think?”
Mae was at once aware of the power she wielded — instantly, she became one of the three most visible Circlers — and determined to wear it lightly. So Mae had found time in each week to return to her old pod, and to her old desk, which they’d left vacant. There had been changes made — there were now nine screens, and the CEs were encouraged to be delving far deeper with their clients, to reciprocate in far-reaching ways — but the work was essentially the same" [mijn nadruk] (413)

[Ah, we zijn inmiddels al bij negen schermen die iemand moet kunnen volgen.]

"She turned off the SeeChange cameras, poured more sake, drank it down and got into bed, and, thinking of Kalden and his hands, his thin legs, his long fingers, she circled her nipples with her left hand while, with her right, she moved her underwear to the side and simulated the movements of a tongue, of his tongue. It had no effect. But the sake was draining her mind of worry, and finally, at just before twelve, she found something like sleep."(426)

[Niet iets wat in de film terecht is gekomen :-) Zoals heel het onderwerp seks natuurlijk weer vermeden wordt, zowel in het boek als in de film. Want als je overal kleine camera's neer kunt hangen, waarom dan niet in de kleedkamers van de hockeyclub, de slaapkamers van je dochters en zonen, of de ouders als je wilt. Waarom stopt het delen van informatie ineens als iemand in bed ligt? Hebben mensen geen seks buiten het bed? Lopen ze nooit naakt rond in huis overdag? en zo verder. Het zou mooi zijn als dat allemaal gewoon normaal gevonden zou worden. Maar nee, en dat illustreert alle waarden en normen op de achtergrond die helemaal niet veranderen.]

"We’re inches away from the moment when, by the time a student is ready for college, we have complete knowledge of everything that student has learned. Every word they read, every word they looked up, every sentence they highlighted, every equation they wrote, every answer and correction. The guesswork of knowing where all students stand and what they know will be over."(438)

[Nog zo'n voorbeeld van gebrek aan respect voor privacy.]

"We’ve sent over 180 million frowns from the U.S. alone, and you can bet that has an effect on the regime.”"(441)

[Nou, ik wed van niet, zeker niet als het een dictatuur is. Een dictator zou 180 miljoen van zijn onderdanen dwingen om 'frowns' terug te sturen.]

Over het project PastPresent:

"Annie said, looking briefly at her shoes before raising her eyes back to Mae, with a professional smile. “I can say that the basic idea is to take the power of the Circle community and to map not just the present but the past, too. We’re right now digitizing every photo, every newsreel, every amateur video in every archive in this country and Europe — I mean, we’re doing our best at least. The task is herculean, but once we have a critical mass, and with facial recognition advances, we can, we hope, identify pretty much everyone in every photo and every video. You want to find every picture of your great-grandparents, we can make the archive searchable, and you can — we expect, we bet — then gain a greater understanding of them."(446)

Een groot stuk over de jaloezie tussen Annie en Mae en over dat haar ouders de camera's in huis voor het grootste deel hebben afgedekt. Haar ouders hebben helemaal geen zin in al die mensen die meeleven, berichten sturen, antwoorden verwachten en zo verder. Ze brengen het goed, maar Mae snapt het niet. Ze krijgt een brief mee van Mercer die er niet om liegt en het hele probleem duidelijk verwoord:

""If you saw your parents, and your mom gave you this note, then you saw the effect all your stuff has had on them. I wrote this note after seeing them, both of them strung out, exhausted by the deluge you unleashed on them. It’s too much, Mae. And it’s not right. I helped them cover some of the cameras. I even bought the fabric. I was happy to do it. They don’t want to be smiled upon, or frowned upon, or zinged. They want to be alone. And not watched. Surveillance shouldn’t be the tradeoff for any goddamn service we get.(...) What I should say is that I await the day when some vocal minority finally rises up to say it’s gone too far, and that this tool, which is far more insidious than any human invention that’s come before it, must be checked, regulated, turned back, and that, most of all, we need options for opting out. We are living in a tyrannical state now, where we are not allowed to ..."(470-471)

"Increasingly, she found it difficult to be off-campus anyway. There were homeless people, and there were the attendant and assaulting smells, and there were machines that didn’t work, and floors and seats that had not been cleaned, and there was, everywhere, the chaos of an orderless world.(...) Walking through San Francisco, or Oakland, or San Jose, or any city, really, seemed more and more like a Third World experience, with unnecessary filth, and unnecessary strife and unnecessary errors and inefficiencies—on any city block, a thousand problems correctible through simple enough algorithms and the application of available technology and willing members of the digital community. She left her camera on."(475)

[Technologie als de oplossing voor alles. Hoe naïef ...]

Verslag van de Kingdom Meeting.

"“I’m just going to connect some dots,” Mae said. “Well, first of all, we all agree that we’d like 100 percent participation, and that everyone would agree that 100 percent participation is the ideal.”
“Yes,” Bailey said. “It’s certainly the idealist’s ideal.”
“And we currently have 83 percent of the voting-age Americans registered on the Circle?”
“Yes.”
“And it seems that we’re on our way to voters being able to register, and maybe even to actually vote, through the Circle.”
Bailey’s head was bobbing side to side, some indication of mild doubt, but he was smiling, his eyes encouraging. “A small leap, but okay. Go on.”
“So why not require every voting-age citizen to have a Circle account?”
There was some shuffling in the room, some intake of breath, mostly from the older Circlers.
“Let her finish,” someone, a new voice, said. Mae looked around to find Stenton near the door. His armed were crossed, his eyes staring at the floor. He looked, briefly, up to Mae, and nodded brusquely. She regained her direction.
“Okay, I know the initial reaction will be resistance. I mean, how can we require anyone to use our services? But we have to remember that there are all kinds of things that are mandatory for citizens of this country—and these things are mandatory in most industrialized countries. Do you have to send your kids to school? Yes. That’s mandatory. It’s a law. Kids have to go to school, or you have to arrange some kind of home schooling. But it’s mandatory. It’s also mandatory that you register for the draft, right? That you get rid of your garbage in an acceptable way; you can’t drop it on the street. You have to have a license if you want to drive, and when you do, you have to wear a seat belt.”
Stenton joined in again. “We require people to pay taxes. And to pay into Social Security. To serve on juries.”
“Right,” Mae said, “and to pee indoors, not on the streets. I mean, we have ten thousand laws. We require so many legitimate things of citizens of the United States. So why can’t we require them to vote? They do in dozens of countries.”
“It’s been proposed here,” one of the older Circlers said.
“Not by us,” Stenton countered.
“And that’s my point,” Mae said, nodding to Stenton. “The technology has never been there before. I mean, at any other moment in history, it would have been prohibitively expensive to track down everyone and register them to vote, and then to make sure they actually did. You’d have to go door to door. Drive people to polls. All these unfeasible things. Even in the countries where it’s mandatory, it’s not really enforced. But now it’s within reach. I mean, you cross-reference any voting rolls with the names in our TruYou database, and you’d find half the missing voters right there and then. You register them automatically, and then when election day comes around, you make sure they vote.”
“How do we do that?” a female voice said. Mae realized it was Annie’s. It wasn’t a direct challenge, but the tone wasn’t friendly, either.
“Oh jeez,” Bailey said, “a hundred ways. That’s an easy part. You remind them ten times that day. Maybe their accounts don’t work that day till they vote. That’s what I’d favor anyway. ‘Hello Annie!’ it could say. ‘Take five minutes to vote.’ Whatever it is. We do that for our own surveys. You know that, Annie.” And when he said her name, he shaded it with disappointment and warning, discouraging her from opening her mouth again. He brightened and turned back to Mae. “And the stragglers?” he asked.
Mae smiled at him. She had an answer. She looked at her bracelet. There were now 7,202,821 people watching. When had that happened?
“Well, everyone has to pay taxes, right? How many people do it online now? Last year, maybe 80 percent. What if we all stopped duplicating services and made it all part of one unified system? You use your Circle account to pay taxes, to register to vote, to pay your parking tickets, to do anything. I mean, we would save each user hundreds of hours of inconvenience, and collectively, the country would save billions.”
“Hundreds of billions,” Stenton amended.
“Right,” Mae said. “Our interfaces are infinitely easier to use than, say, the patchwork of DMV sites around the country. What if you could renew your license through us? What if every government service could be facilitated through our network? People would leap at the chance. Instead of visiting a hundred different sites for a hundred different government services, it could all be done through the Circle.”
Annie opened her mouth again. Mae knew it was a mistake. “But why wouldn’t the government,” Annie asked, “just build a similar wraparound service? Why do they need us?”
Mae couldn’t decide if she was asking this rhetorically or if she truly felt this was a valid point. In any case, much of the room was now snickering. The government building a system, from scratch, to rival the Circle? Mae looked to Bailey and to Stenton. Stenton smiled, raised his chin, and decided to take this one himself.
“Well, Annie, a government project to build a similar platform from the ground up would be ludicrous, and costly, and, well, impossible. We already have the infrastructure, and 83 percent of the electorate. Does that make sense to you?”"(498-502)

[Waarbij dus een overheidstaak wordt overgenomen door een commercieel monopolie, met alle mogelijkheden om de stemming te beïnvloeden, en nog meer problemen.]

"“It would eliminate the guesswork,” Stenton said, now standing at the head of the table. “Eliminate lobbyists. Eliminate polls. It might even eliminate Congress. If we can know the will of the people at any time, without filter, without misinterpretation or bastardization, wouldn’t it eliminate much of Washington?”"(503)

[De wil van het volk. Alsof dat niet problematisch is. Dus de meerderheid beslist zonder meer. Alle minderheden en minderheidsstandpunten kunnen het dan wel schudden natuurlijk.]

"Quickly, as they walked toward the water, she scrolled through the most popular recent comments. There seemed to be one particular zing with heat, something about how all this could or would lead to totalitarianism. Her stomach sank.
“C’mon. You can’t listen to a lunatic like that,” Francis said. “What does she know? Some crank somewhere with a tin-foil hat.” Mae smiled, not knowing what the tin-foil hat reference meant, but knowing she’d heard her father say it, and it made her smile to think of him saying it." [mijn nadruk] (506)

Kalden probeert haar uit alle macht te bereiken. Uiteindelijk neemt ze op en spreken ze elkaar ergens op een wc.

"“Kalden, what do you want?”
“You can’t do this. Your mandatory thing, and the positive reaction it’s gotten—this is the last step toward closing the Circle, and that can’t happen.”
“What are you talking about? This is the whole point. If you’ve been here so long, you know more than anyone that that’s been the goal of the Circle since the beginning. I mean, it’s a circle, stupid. It has to close. It has to be complete.”
“Mae, all along, for me at least, this kind of thing was the fear, not the goal. Once it’s mandatory to have an account, and once all government services are channeled through the Circle, you’ll have helped create the world’s first tyrannical monopoly. Does it seem like a good idea to you that a private company would control the flow of all information? That participation, at their beck and call, is mandatory?”
“You know what Ty said, right?”
Mae heard a loud sigh. “Maybe. What did he say?”
“He said the soul of the Circle is democratic. That until everyone has equal access, and that access is free, no one is free. It’s on at least a few tiles around campus.”
“Mae. Fine. The Circle’s good. And whoever invented TruYou is some kind of evil genius. But now it has to be reined in. Or broken up.”"(515)

"Fuck. There was a pain in her, a pain that was spreading its black wings inside her. And it was coming, primarily, from the 368 people who apparently hated her so much they wanted her gone. It was one thing to send a frown to Central America, but to send one just across campus? Who would do that? Why was there so much animosity in the world? And then it occurred to her, in a brief and blasphemous flash: she didn’t want to know how they felt. The flash opened up into something larger, an even more blasphemous notion that her brain contained too much. That the volume of information, of data, of judgments, of measurements, was too much, and there were too many people, and too many desires of too many people, and too many opinions of too many people, and too much pain from too many people, and having all of it constantly collated, collected, added and aggregated, and presented to her as if that all made it tidier and more manageable—it was too much. But no. No, it was not, her better brain corrected. No. You’re hurt by these 368 people. This was the truth. She was hurt by them, by the 368 votes to kill her. Every one of them preferred her dead. If only she didn’t know about this. If only she could return to life before this 3 percent, when she could walk through campus, waving, smiling, chatting idly, eating, sharing human contact, without knowing what was deep in the hearts of the 3 percent. To frown at her, to stick their fingers at that button, to shoot her that way, it was a kind of murder. Mae’s wrist was flashing with dozens of messages of concern. With help from the campus SeeChange cameras, watchers were noticing her standing, stock-still, her face contorted into some raging, wretched mask." [mijn nadruk] (527)

Der dag erna bezoekt Mae een middag waarop allerlei personen plannen voor innovaties kunnen voorleggen aan de Bende van 40.

"Belinda continued. “We’re seeing what an officer would see if he were equipped with SeeYou. It’s a simple enough system that works through any retinal. He doesn’t have to do a thing. He scans any crowd, and he immediately sees all the people with prior convictions. Imagine if you’re a cop in New York. Suddenly a city of eight million becomes infinitely more manageable when you know where to focus your energies.”"(539)

"They’ve been using ankle bracelets for decades now. So you modify it so the bracelet can be read by the retinals, and provides the tracking capability. Of course,” she said, looking to Mae with a warm smile, “you could also apply Francis’s technology, and make it a chip. But that would take some legal doing, I expect.”
Stenton leaned back. “Maybe, maybe not.”
“Well, obviously that would be ideal,” Belinda said. “And it would be permanent. You’d always know who the offenders were, whereas the bracelet is still subject to some tampering and removal. And then there are those who might say it should be removed after a certain period. The violators expunged.”
“I hate that notion,” Stenton said. “It’s the community’s right to know who’s committed crimes. It just makes sense. This is how they’ve been handling sex offenders for decades. You commit sexual offenses, you become part of a registry. Your address becomes public, you have to walk the neighborhood, introduce yourself, all that, because people have a right to know who lives in their midst.”" [mijn nadruk] (540)

"So I thought, why not use the same motion sensor technology in the home, especially high-risk homes, to record any behavior outside the norm?”
“Like a smoke detector for humans,” Stenton said."(46)

[Het is allemaal gericht op controle en zekerheid vanuit heel conformistische opvattingen over wat goed is en wat niet. Alles wat en iedereen die afwijkt is een probleem. Pas als mensen er zelf last van krijgen - zoals Annie die via haar PastPresent-project dat haar familie helemaal niet zo top is, maar in slavben handelde - komen ze tot het inzicht dat privacy echt belangrijk is en dat het helemaal niet goed is om alles te weten.]

De dag erna presenteert ze op Dream Friday het programma SoulSearch waarmee innen 20 minuten iedereen op aarde gevonden kan worden, met name gevluchte misdadigers. Het wordt later ook gebruikt om Mercer te zoeken en die achtervolging leidt er toe dat hij een ravijn in rijdt.

Bij een ander event ontmoet ze Ty, de derde directeur. Dat blijkt Kalden. Ze maken een stiekeme afspraak en Ty probeert haar over te halen de zaak e stoppen.

(629) Book III

Bij het ziekbed van Annie, die compleet ingestort is, zit Mae te mijmeren. Annie is in coma: ze vindt het maar vreemd dat ze haar gevoelens en gedachten niet direct kan lezen.

"There was so much Mae wanted to tell Annie. With a duty that felt holy, she’d told the world about Kalden being Ty, about his bizarre claims and misguided efforts to derail the completion of the Circle. Remembering it now, it seemed like some kind of nightmare, being so far under the earth with that madman, disconnected from her watchers and the rest of the world. But Mae had feigned her cooperation and had escaped, and immediately told Bailey and Stenton about it all. With their customary compassion and vision, they’d allowed Ty to stay on campus, in an advisory role, with a secluded office and no specific duties. Mae hadn’t seen him since their subterranean encounter, and did not care to.
Mae had not reached her parents in a few months now, but it would be only a matter of time. They would find each other, soon enough, in a world where everyone could know each other truly and wholly, without secrets, without shame and without the need for permission to see or to know, without the selfish hoarding of life—any corner of it, any moment of it. All of that would be, so soon, replaced by a new and glorious openness, a world of perpetual light. Completion was imminent, and it would bring peace, and it would bring unity, and all that messiness of humanity until now, all those uncertainties that accompanied the world before the Circle, would be only a memory."(632-633)

[In tegenstelling tot de film is Mae hier nog steeds een idolate aanhanger van The Circle, een gelovige. En daarmee eindig het boek dan ook. Er is geen uitweg, wil Eggers blijkbaar zeggen.]