It’s about a girl, Mae, joining this incredibly successful company called the Circle (which is basically a mix of evil!Google/Microsoft/Apple/what-have-you) and getting more and more wrapped up in its neverending demand for participation, for sharing, for giving more and more of your personal choices up to technology. Her life at work is very stressful at first, but, as you go on reading, this deluge of requests to share more, participate more, use more tech, starts becoming some sort of cult.. it feels like she’s gradually being brainwashed, especially because the more she complies, the more praise she gets and the more validated she feels. This is a book about the dangers of technology, sure, but I think that the way the society around Mae kept pressuring her more and more to give more of herself to the company/to her followers was the real enemy. I especially liked the little scene about the ‘unusually unironic’ sculpture. The only aspect of this I didn’t like was how ready Mae was to just accept every innovation as inherently good, at first. When the SeeChange cameras are first introduced, she’s been working at the Circle for only a few days - and yet she never once thought of the dangers to privacy the invention would bring. That felt hard to believe. Also the way everything became social in her work. The average person would have had more of a resisting reaction, I’d think. Anyway, it’s a great book and it totally resonated with me and with things everyone using the Internet certainly happened to experience, too.
