Drinking the social media Kool-Aid

What if you got a job with a great company that promised untold opportunities and riches if you just played ball? And what if you started to suspect that this company was being run by some version of the Antichrist?

Sounds a little like The Firm, doesn’t it?

Well, in his latest novel, The Circle, Dave Eggers conjures up that kind of John Grisham dilemma for the Millennial set, casting them on a genius tech campus that combines the more sinister aspects of Google, Apple and Facebook.

The Circle is the world’s most successful tech company, a corporate culture that “thinks different,” with founding genii wandering its lush grounds throwing out enigmatic pronouncements and looking to solve lots of the world’s problems. Missing or snatched children? The Circle’s working on imbedded chip technology called ChildTrack. Need 24/7 camera access to dictator-prone countries to prevent human rights abuses? They’ve got SeeChange, deploying cheap, almost invisible videocams by the thousands around the world. And say you need to know more about your blind date’s background, likes, dislikes and foibles. Forget Facebook: The Circle’s got LuvLuv, an app that uses complex algorithms to divine your prospective mate’s habits for you.

It sounds delightful to those who drink the Kool-Aid, which includes the thousands of Circlers (employees) who hoot and whistle at every technological rollout and unveiling. But to Mae Holland, a young IT worker who got the job through friend Annie, high-placed at the company, it all seems a little overwhelming.

What Eggers has crafted is a dystopian tale that rings scarily true for anyone who spends any amount of time on social media. Once you become a regular tweeter, Instagram poster or Facebook user, the urge to stay “visible” 24/7 grows more and more insistent. There’s FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) to contend with. Then there’s the carrot-on-a-stick validation of getting positive responses every time you post something. Eggers takes this urge to be part of an online community and flips it on its head: The Circle doesn’t just urge, it demands participation and sharing from its built-in community. It’s a Frankenstein monster of sharing, in fact.

When Mae is called to the carpet because she’s been skipping parties and extracurricular campus activities, she admits she spent an undocumented amount of time kayaking alone in San Francisco Bay near her parents’ place. What did she see, she’s asked. Sea lions, birds. “And you didn’t zing or post about it?” her interrogators demand. Why should she have, Mae wonders. “To share information! To add to the knowledge base of naturalists!”

Those who don’t comment online daily (or hourly) at The Circle about every aspect of their lives are shamed. Transparency — constantly sharing information and personal knowledge — is of utmost value. Private time and moments recollected in tranquility are viewed as “anti-Circle.” When Mae gives a hand job to a fellow Circler who’s shy but likeable, she’s shocked to find that he’s been filming the act on his cell phone. She demands that he delete the video, which is automatically uploaded to a cloud server, but he refuses: “We don’t delete here.” Apparently, the only dirty word on campus is “privacy.”

It gets creepier. Mae’s dad has Multiple Sclerosis and has frequent seizures that require expensive medical treatment. Mae learns that, as an employee, her dad could be covered by the company’s insurance. So all the more reason she feels compelled to play along, lest she lose her job and her family’s health coverage.

Mae tries to keep up with the monkey mind chatter that’s building up in her workspace, increasingly infiltrating her life. But things are complicated by the arrival of Kalden, an older, white-haired dude who never reveals his last name or job title at The Circle.

For Mae, it’s this shadowy outlier who’s the most seductive: the one who’s not 100-percent transparent or available all the time. When Kalden fails to contact her for a week, Mae tells herself “she would rather have someone lesser if that person were available, familiar, locatable.” But we fiction readers know it’s the mystery man who makes the female heart go pitter-pat.

With its air of shrouded mystery, The Circle suggests a company not unlike Apple, with gurus tossing out superlatives — “Amazing,” “Incredible,” “Awesome” — like our favorite genius, Steve Jobs, whenever they unveil some “exciting new project” they’re working on.

But Eggers pushes his scary fantasy further: people used to joke that Jobs ultimately meant to imbed a high-tech bar code in everybody, like the “sign of the beast” from “The Book of Revelation.” In The Circle, people are already absorbing biotech trackers through their health drinks, to better monitor employee heart rates, exercise patterns and calorie consumption. It’s Obamacare run amok (or at least Republicans’ worst nightmare of Obamacare: one that actually functions). It’s the “Nanny State” taken to sinister extremes.

The idea of a super-successful company going further with intrusive research than even governments do is not exactly the stuff of fantasy. We’ve heard of Google offering up its vast private files to the US government, and of course people always suspect Mark Zuckerberg every time he modifies Facebook settings in any way. And Eggers even nods at Wikileaks, when The Circle’s planted SeeChange cameras start revealing every ripple of government abuse, thus reshaping US policy. The presumption is, “If you aren’t transparent, what are you hiding?”

Eggers pushes it all to sci-fi levels, showing how a guiding corporate mentality that seems benign and liberal on the surface can mask frightening moral choices behind the scenes. He places his heroine, Mae, in plot-driven peril with her Circle friends, her mysterious lover, her family. Scary slogans (“SECRETS ARE LIES”) decorate the campus as it gets more and more Orwellian. If it all feels like Tom Cruise watching his life being taken over by The Firm, or Katherine Ross watching as her neighbors are turned into Stepford Wives, well, then that’s the level of creepy paranoia Eggers is going for here.

The character who seems to embody Eggers’ deepest concerns is Mercer, the chubby ex-boyfriend of Mae who makes deer antler chandeliers for a living and decries Mae’s sudden fascination with the “elevated gossip” that pervades The Circle.

There’s no “me” time, no interaction with the real world, Mercer gripes. Instead there’s a constant self-generated buzz about things happening outside your life. (Sound familiar, Facebook users?) “The weird paradox is that you think you’re at the center of things, and that makes your opinions more valuable, but you yourself are becoming less vibrant,” Mercer crabs, like a New York Times op-ed writer. “Mae, do you realize how incredibly boring you’ve become?”

Could it be that Eggers himself is turning on the self-obsessed tendencies of a generation that made his 2000 memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, such a huge literary hit?

That memoir, written when Eggers was much younger, was solipsistic, audacious, but admittedly entertaining — and it predicted a generation that was about to find their true selves on YouTube, FB and Twitter. (Eggers himself once auditioned to be on MTV’s Real World, foreshadowing the 24/7 self-recording of The Circle. Clearly, the urge to share runs deep in this one.)

Today, we can’t imagine what young people even did before celebrating themselves with every like or post shared on social media. Generation Y has imbibed the author’s meta-is-me approach to the max, they’ve drunk the Kool-Aid, and we now live in a world that Eggers kind of made happen. Or at least made seem cool to happen.

THE CIRCLE

By Dave Eggers

485 pages

Available at National Book Store