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Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2013 07:12:46 +0200 From: Patrice Riemens <patr...@xs4all.nl> To: nettim...@kein.org Subject: <nettime> Book Review: "The Circle" by Dave Eggers (NYT) Message-ID: <bbd533f8b2d5017828ae0159c76859f3.squir...@webmail.xs4all.nl> User-Agent: SquirrelMail/1.4.18 Reply-To: a moderated mailing list for net criticism <nettim...@mail.kein.org> original to: http://nyti.ms/1akhmcT A Novel Prompts a Conversation About How We Use Technology By JULIE BOSMAN and CLAIRE CAIN MILLER Has Dave Eggers written a parable of our time, an eviscerating takedown of Silicon Valley and its privacy-invading technology companies? Or has he missed his target, producing a sanctimonious screed that fails to humanize its characters and understand its subject? Book critics are divided over the quality of Mr. Eggerss highly anticipated novel The Circle, which went on sale Tuesday. But in Silicon Valley and beyond, the books theme promises to spark an even bigger debate over the 21st-century hyperconnected world that Mr. Eggers describes. Set in an undefined future time, Mr. Eggerss novel tells the story of Mae Holland, a young idealist who comes to work at the Circle, an immensely powerful technology company that has conquered all its competitors by creating a single log-in for people to search, shop and socialize online. Initial orders have lifted the book to the No. 21 spot on Amazon, no small achievement for literary fiction, and booksellers reported selling copies almost immediately after opening their doors on Tuesday. In the tech world, some readers have bristled at the reflection of their world. It makes me feel defensive because it hits home, said Esther Dyson, an investor in tech start-ups. Other early readers of the book said they were reconsidering their attachment to the Internet. In an essay titled Dave Eggers Made Me Quit Twitter, Michele Filgate, a writer and bookseller in Brooklyn, wrote about her experience swearing off social media for a week, an experiment prompted by the unsettling feeling the book produced. I hope that it allows people to step back and have a conversation about how we want to use technology, said Jennifer Jackson, Mr. Eggerss editor at Knopf. I dont think that this book is really going to make people stop using social media and I dont think thats at all Daves intent. This book is going to make people be more thoughtful thats my hope. Mr. Eggers, who lives in the Bay Area, declined to be interviewed. He is not doing any readings or events to publicize the book. Knopf and McSweeneys, which are publishing the book together, have planned a print run of 125,000, an ambitious number in a busy fall book season where Mr. Eggers will compete against fiction by Elizabeth Gilbert, Jhumpa Lahiri and Thomas Pynchon. A spokeswoman for McSweeneys declined to reveal the advance. On the McSweeneys Web site, Mr. Eggers said that he did not base the Circle on any particular company like Facebook or Google, nor did he visit the campuses of Google, Twitter or Facebook, interview their employees or read books about them. Yet Silicon Valley is recognizable everywhere. The Circle most closely resembles Google, with its Google Glass-like retinal computers, initiatives to map far-flung parts of the world, a triumvirate running the company, antitrust investigations and a secret lab for future projects. TruYou, the fictional companys core product, has the letters of one of the founders names, just like PageRank, Googles search algorithm, is named after the Google co-founder Larry Page. The Circles founders have mantras that paint a troubling, dystopian picture, like sharing is caring and secrets are lies. Those refrains are similar in tone to remarks made by executives like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Eric E. Schmidt of Google, who once said, If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place. Representatives of Google and Facebook declined to comment on the book. In early September, a spokesman for Google e-mailed Knopf to ask for an advance copy of the book, saying that it sounded like an interesting an important read for us, according to the e-mail, a copy of which was obtained by The Times. Knopf did not comply with the request. Glen Robbe, the manager at Books Inc., in Mountain View, Calif., said that he had read parts of The Circle and recognized the Google campus, a place he has visited frequently to sell books during author visits. Dave Eggers is so well known in the Bay Area, I have no doubt in my mind it will be a huge hit, Mr. Robbe said. People will be enlightened by it. Mr. Eggers portrays Silicon Valley as a place with ostentatious goals and an idealistic belief that its technology will change the world for the better, no matter the potential consequences. The Circles SeeChange cameras, for instance, stick to walls and broadcast live video, so they can do things like capture protests in the Middle East when journalists have been kicked out. The trade-off is that they also secretly broadcast peoples private moments at home. Benedict Evans, a tech and media analyst at Enders Analysis, a London research firm, said that Mr. Eggerss descriptions capture two qualities typical of tech companies: unbridled optimism and the failure to understand real-world consequences of new technologies. There is a massive bias toward optimism, and thats why we have computers and all this stuff, because if people sat down rationally at every moment and said, Would that work? we wouldnt have anything, Mr. Evans said. But, he added, The flip side is there is a sort of utopian and a Panglossian approach that comes from never having seen a failure and never having to deal with the reality of people who arent in Silicon Valley. Some of Mr. Eggerss references ring false. He misuses technical terms like operating system, for instance, and there is little public outrage in the book over the privacy violations the Circle commits, in contrast to the real-life anger that often accompanies privacy intrusions. Yet part of the reason The Circle can seem unnerving is because it stops short of far-fetched science fiction. Many of the inventions are just one small step further than tech companies have already gone. Sometimes, the books characters use technology that is already available. Circle employees and lawmakers go transparent, meaning they wear cameras that broadcast everything they see much like Google Glass can do. In other cases, Mr. Eggerss dystopian imaginings seem to have come true in the time since he wrote the novel. In the last week, articles in The New York Times have described several real-life situations that sound uncannily similar to plot twists in The Circle, like the privacy risks for children from schools that collect data about students and store it in the cloud, and the ability to search peoples names and find their arrest photos . Mr. Eggers is using fiction to ask questions that writers like Rebecca Solnit, Jaron Lanier and Evgeny Morozov have raised in nonfiction. The novel continues the debate, and asks whether the semi-imaginary world of The Circle is inevitable. In Silicon Valley, some tech people have criticized the book for its lack of verisimilitude, echoing a column for Reuters in which Felix Salmon criticized the novel. Eggers is preaching to a group of people which has already made up its collective mind that social media is dangerous, Mr. Salmon wrote. But others thought the tech community doth protest too much. Its more of a stark look in the mirror, said Perry Hewitt, who has worked at tech companies and is now chief digital officer at Harvard. Its less about Silicon Valley and its more about looking at ourselves. More reviews: http://bit.ly/1aCYIOM (San Jose Mercury News) http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/09/circle-dave-eggers-review (The Guardian) http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/12/the-circle-dave-eggers-review (The Observer) Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/The-Circle-Dave-Eggers/dp/0385351399 # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5 -- Liberationtech is public & archives are searchable on Google. 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