A Case For The Circle

Spoiler alert: these pictures are all real.

BBC News Headquarters, London

Google Headquarters, Dublin

Corus Quay, Toronto

Google, Tel Aviv

Would you want to work in any of these?

I know for a fact I would-- not only are these cool per se, but their companies seem to be actual beacons of good. Take Google's motto, for example: "Don't Be Evil". It's quirky, independent, alternative. It embodies all they do (it's even embedded in its search algorithm). They also emphasize personal and communal development, by providing opportunities for growth both in and out of the office space. All in all, it sounds perfect. Just like The Circle was in those first chapters. The question is, when did The Circle stop being good?

It was painted as a utopia, a perfect paradise-- the ultimate company. However, there must've been somewhere at which the reader was funneled into believing that the organization was in fact evil. Was it when Mae went clear? Was it before? Had the company been racking up the negatives until they blew up?

Individually, the little programs that The Circle has (SeeChange, for example) are not bad in themselves: the little cameras "would cut crime rates down by 70, 80 percent in any city where we have meaningful saturation" (p67). Furthermore, the OuterCircle, Zing and InnerCircle feeds that Mae uses to communicate echo Facebook, Twitter, and messaging platforms that we already have, and LuvLuv can be compared to the advanced version of Tinder.

The point of this being-- we already have this technology and online prowess. The Circle as a company merely englobed these phenomena we subscribe to and put it on steroids under various slogans: "secrets are lies", "in this short life, why shouldn't everyone see what they want to see?", why shouldn't everyone have equal access to all the experiences available in this world?", "privacy is theft", amongst others. These aren't that different from Google's motto, but what makes The Circle so evil to our eyes?

Perhaps The Circle lost all its credibility (to the reader) at the point where collective enterprise interfered and was valued over individual liberties by trying to get everyone to give up their intrinsic essence in favor of the company's network of shared experience. You can say, then, that The Circle only stopped being good when the obsession with oversharing got to the point of losing one's identity to the collective. I think this is echoed throughout the book, but we have forgotten it: oversharing is losing your own identity, surrendering all that makes you yours in order to adopt the philosophy of a larger body that doesn't necessarily reflect our own mantra.

And that cannot be compensated by quirky architecture and office space.

Mistaeks

We all make mistakes. From the small and mundane, to the enormous, accompanied-by-a-bad-word mistakes that make us want to burrow down into a hole and never come back out. Like my Snapchat story last Friday. Or the first fifteen years of my life. Or that old Facebook picture I should have deleted before adding any new college friends.

For your entertainment, circa 2010. I did in fact eat that box all by myself. 

Thankfully, I could take both the story and the picture down, and promptly get rid of them, and no one was the wiser. However, The Circle offers an alternative: banning the deletion information. By not deleting anything, The Circle aims to make all information free, but instead, they create a prison of mortification. 

The basic premise we operate under is pretty simple: we all fail. We all make mistakes. Saying "that's okay, you're only human", is a way of empathizing with the person who just made a mistake, and assuring them that they're not in the mess alone. Being "human" is, innately, being flawed. And that's okay, because humans have a particularly interesting quality to them:

We learn from our mistakes. 

It's true, we're not allowed to "delete" in real life; to go back and make our mistakes disappear, or to actually have them taken off our record. All of our actions do take a toll and leave a mark on us, but this mark then allows us to learn. This in turn helps us rationalize the fact that we messed up, and then come to terms with it. We slowly forget we messed up, and only the correction remains. 

In not being able to delete anything off the company's cloud, the opposite happens: we aren't able to grow past our mistakes, because we never go through the process of rationalization that characterizes learning from them. We keep on being reminded that we messed up, over and over, by the certainty that the evidence is uploaded somewhere on the cloud. Besides, there are copyright issues.

This is an example (quite extreme, I must admit) of an enormous copyright dispute:

Source, Wikipedia

David Slater, a British nature photographer, was photographing Celebes crested macaques in Indonesia, when he purposefully let the camera's shot trigger within reach of a pair of female macaques. The macaques proceeded to take "selfies", and Slater then sold the pictures to a news agency, under the premise that it was his own work. This created disputes across ethics and legal boards, as to whom the copyright belonged to. In 2016, a judge declared that given that monkeys are not humans, they can't hold copyright over material, and the picture was permitted to circle (pardon the pun) freely.

What if the monkey had won the dispute? What if this picture actually threatened their way of life in a certain manner? It would create immense repercussions within nature, all because of a certain "harmless" image that couldn't be erased. The same goes for humans-- the ability to erase is a precious one given to us by the Internet, through which our privacy can be protected, and we get a second chance, and we should always have the right to this.

The aim of not being able to delete anything uploaded to the internet is, according to Eamon Bailey, in line with their well-meaning but reductionist mantras of "Secrets are lies. Sharing is Caring. Privacy is theft". However, these mantras are white or black: they don't take into account the grey areas. And the thing is, life is a collection of grey. We should be allowed to keep our right to privacy, just as we have for the past thousands of years before the "new dawn" of technology, or we risk becoming machines who think they know everything about everyone around them... but really, don't know anything at all.