Are We Completing the Circle?
By: Rhiannon Alobeid
I remember back in the 90’s watching a movie that scared me of how society would truly get with the progress of technology. It showed that privacy for every American was gone because of lax regulations by government officials. In Enemy of the State, the movie I just referred to, spoke of privacy concerns related to actual laws that were passed by the government at that time by a lone character within the movie who hauntingly spoke of the demise it would create. It is hard to believe that the technology in that film appears outdated by miles, but the concerns the film raises speak truthfully of issues we face now. Technology each of us are using today is leaving a blueprint of our and everyone else’s information we are in contact with for others to find.
One important issue that the Eggers book brings up is that the job that Mae has is an in demand computer professional. It does not state exactly what she does, but we know she was hired for her degree and expertise in PC’s. This is a job for a small subset of people. It requires high math skills something our country has a hard time producing enough quantity of. The jobs we are producing today are not ones we are training a majority of our population for. Good quality computer savvy people are in high demand for highly sought after jobs in highly sought after companies. It is a utopian ideal to produce savvy computer programmers from our public schools that barely offer a computer class to speak of.
Another issue that Eggers refers to in is the major advantages to giving up your privacy, for the reward. At the beginning of the book young Mae is in a job she hates with little opportunity for accolade, peer collaboration and camaraderie. She seeks the benefits of working in a beautiful building that is awe inspiring. “The front hall was as long as a parade, as tall as a cathedral” (Eggers, p. 3). The fictional company continues to impress her with a gym, yoga studio, and even a hotel to stay in for late work nights. In comparison, there are not many jobs that offer these kinds of perks; except ones that have similar qualities to The Circle i.e. Amazon, Google, and Facebook are a few. A number of complaints within news sources have alluded to issues in overworking employees from these above real employers, extensive pressure from supervisors to obtain perfect results and a culture that does not allow dissent among others from the companies listed above. The frightening thing with these corporations is how much money they are worth. Even if the government were to regulate them it would not happen overnight because they would be able to fight it for years with their unending resources.
One important issue the book for Mae was the health of her parents. Her dad has a degenerative, disabling health condition that they struggle with finding and paying therapy for. Her new employer, The Circle, informs her that they are happy to provide health care for extended family members. All she had to do was continue to work there and allow cameras to be put into her parents’ home. Now if you are suffering from a terrible disease and you have no way of obtaining insurance to help pay for your care or you have insurance that is refusing to pay what choice do you have? The alternative is bankruptcy, depending on others, and indentured servitude to help you. The situation with obtaining health insurance within the US has put many people in precarious situations. Taking jobs people would otherwise not want to work at just for the "benefits" is well known. Being self-employed or working at a company with no insurance is not a luxury many can take.
I think the book shows what I have felt to be true; that we are expected to work harder at our jobs (even to the detriment of our mental, physical and emotional health) and forgo more of our personal lives in order to obtain employment with a secure job so that we can obtain the necessities of life: food, clothes and shelter. As life gets closer and closer to the fiction we read in books it becomes more insurmountable to overcome the large corporations that run the computers, that run our lives. Nobody is watching them and that is something everyone needs to think about. How much has technology changed your life and what actions if any have you taken to protect your privacy?
