The Circle
Dave Eggers' The Circle (2013), set in a fictional amalgam of the Google, Apple, and Facebook campuses, tells the story of Mae, who quickly rises in the company known as a giant of social media—but at the price of her privacy and possibly that of vast networks of global users. Made into a movie in 2017 starring Emma Watson, the novel explores what can happen when the proliferation of inexpensive cameras can either increase governmental and personal accountability or erode privacy in unanticipated ways. The novel further depicts the Circle as a corporate monopoly, whose intersection with voting comprises a “totalitarian nightmare” to which Mae and her co-workers are oddly blind. The novel's warning resonates particularly in the wake of two 2019 books by Cambridge Analytica whistleblowers.
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- The Immersive Worlds Project Elizabeth Burow-Flak