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When Mae Holland lands a new job at the illustrious Circle, she believes her life has been made. She, like many other college graduates in America, is attracted to the power and prestige of working at an innovative, cutting-edge company, and longs to make good on all the money she and her parents spent on her student loans. Mae resents working for her hometown’s utility company, as well as her parents’ middle-class socioeconomic status, which makes her feel inferior and a failure, especially compared to her friend Annie, who’s self-assured, driven, and comes from a family that traces its roots back to the Mayflower. Unlike Annie, Mae’s unsure of herself and her place in the world and puts all of her hopes and dreams into her new job.

Mae quickly finds out that working for the Circle will take up much more of her time than she expected. She’s given a job in Customer Experience answering client queries and repeatedly following up to earn a 100 percent satisfaction rate. It’s not enough, however. Her boss, Dan, calls her into his office on several occasions to discuss her participation rate in the company’s near-constant events, parties, and online social activity. The Circle is a human place, Dan says, and it relies on her participation to succeed. Eager to keep her job, Mae attends the Circle’s wacky, irreverent events, spends hours on Zing, the company’s social network, liking and replying to people’s posts, and handling the other layers of her job, which are piling up. Mae learns that working at the Circle means being online, all the time. She begins to have moments of panic staring at her computer and uses kayaking in nature to escape.

When Mae is caught stealing a kayak, she is publicly shamed by one of the founders of the company, Eamon Bailey. Bailey is the benevolent face of the company and a symbol of the progressive, utopian belief in technology’s power. Mae is used to becoming the face of the company’s Transparency campaign, which aims to convince people that if they were recorded all the time, they’d behave better. She ends up wearing a camera 24/7 that records her every move, word, and action. Her life is lifted to the world stage, where millions of eyes watch, follow, and converse with her online.

The Circle’s ultimate goal—to make all businesses, the government, and personal lives accountable, traceable, and public—grows closer as the Circle pressure Congress members to go transparent as well. Those who oppose the idea are made into pariahs and are suspected of having something to hide. Their lives, as well as Mae’s, become commodities for public consumption. Mae becomes alienated from her parents when she accidentally records them having sex, and her interactions with Annie become awkward and strained because they’re being recorded. Since Bailey believes that deleting information is on par with killing a baby, these recordings remain available for people to see. Technology is shown, as Mae’s ex-boyfriend Mercer warns her, to make a person’s social life more superficial, inauthentic, and constantly intruded upon.

Dave Eggers’ The Circle is dystopian fiction, and the dangers of the Circle’s main mission statements are made apparent by the climax of the book when Mae inadvertently drives Mercer to suicide and Annie to mental collapse. Mae is unable to hear the warnings given to her by others about the problems with constant surveillance and tech’s power to strip human life of its nuance, mystery, and privacy. Mae is a perfect candidate to carry out the Circle’s mission because she is young, naïve, and insecure. She hasn’t formed her identity strongly enough yet to withstand and think critically about the consequences and implications of the Circle’s agendas, and she relies on them too much for a sense of purpose and identity.

Finally, when Mae exposes her lover, Kalden, who turns out to be the company’s founder, Ty, and his plans to take down the Circle, she shows just how much she’s been indoctrinated by the Circle. Mae becomes both a protagonist and antagonist in that she truly believes she’s doing good by not compromising the Circle, which has given her so much power and a place in the world. The reader feels sympathy for her lack of strength. Yet at the same time, other characters have warned her of the consequences of the Circle’s plans and the human rights issues it violates, and she has chosen not to heed them.

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