Book I, Part 5

Summary: Book I, Part 5

Annie tells Mae that nothing can be deleted at the Circle because Bailey, one of the Circle’s leaders, considers all information precious. Stenton gives a company talk on the Circle’s mission of transparency. He calls up a man from the audience named Stewart, a Circler who has been willingly wearing a camera that records his every move for the past five years. Stenton suggests that Congress, which has a low approval rating, would benefit from going transparent, too. He invites a congresswoman named Santos onstage, who has volunteered to be the first example. It is announced that this policy of going transparent will extend to the Circle itself, where “SeeChange” cameras will be installed inside, making all interactions public.

Mae runs into Kalden again, who remains tight-lipped about who he is. After drinking wine, he leads her to an underground network of caves that house huge data storage units that house all the recordings of Stewart’s life. They share another kiss, and make love on a makeshift bed Kalden has set up in the tunnels, where he says he sleeps sometimes. Mae thinks that Kalden must be either a spy or a high-ranking member of the Circle. She tells Annie about the encounter the next day but withholds some details, unsure of whether she’s done something wrong.

Mae’s feelings of self-importance grow at the Circle. She is given an additional task to completing “CircleSurveys” from outside companies as an official representative of the Circle. As she’s fed questions through a headset all day prompted by her name spoken, she finds it makes her feel significant. When Mae is asked to show her online support for a woman who escaped a paramilitary group in Guatemala, she reflects on how her position at the Circle has made her a part of the world stage. Kalden returns and invites Mae to meet again, but Mae is hesitant, knowing all their interactions are public now. They meet in a bathroom stall, where they make love. Mae tries to take a photo of him as he rushes out of the bathroom but is only able to capture his arm.

Back at her parents’ house, Mae finds Mercer, who has gifted her parents a chandelier made of antlers. Mae, feeling more generous towards him, compliments the chandelier. She secretly takes a photo of it at the table and uploads it to her feeds to help promote his work. Mesmerized by the almost instant uptick in attention on Mercer’s website, she doesn’t hear Mercer’s pleas to stop, and he storms out. Mae follows him to his car where he calls her naïve about technology and that she’s become a bore, incessantly tracking data and hardly going outside anymore.

Analysis: Book I, Part 5

Earlier in the novel, Francis’s video recording of his and Mae’s intimate moment becomes a crucial impasse in Mae’s relationship with technology and privacy. Now, Mae has willingly made her life available to the Circle in exchange for more prestige and place in the world. Mae assumes, however, that certain things would be kept private, revealing how naïve Mae is about the world, especially the tech world. Mae is now faced with an ethical dilemma over whether she thinks making everything public and known is a good thing.

Francis’s earlier declaration that nothing at the Circle can be deleted is harsh, but it’s a reality Mae signed up for, willingly or not. This is one of Mae’s first opportunities to question the Circle’s practices, but she flounders and settles on complaining to Annie and asking her help in getting the video deleted instead. When Annie refuses to help her get the video deleted, Mae stops pursuing the issue, feeling powerless to pursue any action. By giving up the fight, the Circle has gained more ground over Mae, which it does little by little throughout the book, until it completely overtakes her.

In this context, Bailey’s insistence that all information is precious, something which Mae never questioned prior, now seems outrageous and infuriating. Annie’s declaration that he’d consider deleting her video akin to “killing a baby,” shows Bailey as a caricature of morality and highlights the overreaching power of the Circle. Outside the confines of the Circle, it seems harmless to delete a short intimate video between two relatively inconsequential people. However, Bailey’s dictates serve an important purpose in indoctrinating the Circle community into the idea that all information must be saved, and all must be known. This highlights how tech’s utopian ideals of things like “open access” can have a moral and religious tinge to them. Rather than free-thinking and progressive, tech’s proclamations can seem dogmatic and heavy-handed.

These dictates are also clearly geared towards a more sinister ulterior motive—political control. With the incident with Senator Williamson, Eggers shows how tech and politics can mix, yielding bad results. By indoctrinating the public to the idea that their lives should be “transparent,” Congress is now even more strapped to get control over monopolies like the Circle, which is exactly what the Circle, as Kalden later reveals, is after.

Mercer’s negative reaction to Mae’s uploading images of his work, and Mae’s ignoring his emotional pleas for her to stop, reveal the growing divide in Mae’s psyche and personal relationships. She is now more concerned with successfully achieving her tasks at the Circle, stoked by the power she feels with her newfound influence and importance. Mae is blind to the harm she is doing to those she once cared about.