I know that I'm a few years late to the party, but I finally got around to reading Dave Eggers's The CirPRIVACY IS THEFT - AND THIS CIRCLE IS A SQUARE
I know that I'm a few years late to the party, but I finally got around to reading Dave Eggers's The Circle. It has since been adapted into a movie, starring Tom Hanks and Emma Watson, which apparently wasn't very well received - and I can see why. I didn't watch the movie, so I can't judge it on its own merits, but after reading the source material I have serious doubts that even those two excellent actors could have saved this particular story.
What it is about? The Circle aims to be a cautionary tale about the consequences of humanity seemingly growing willingness to relinquish our right to privacy. The eponymous Circle is a massive technological conglomerate, whose power and influence is rapidly expanding. Basically, the Circle is Big Brother with a human face - only this face is smiling widely, because everyone is willingly giving it more and more of their personal information. Your real name? You got it. Your location? You got it. A live-feed from millions of minuscule cameras placed all over the world? I can see how that would work - everyone could see faraway places they'd never be able to visit, and bad people would refrain from doing bad things since everyone would be watching them.. Hey, speaking of cameras, why don't you wear one of these around your neck and livestream what you're doing 24/7? Yeah, that sounds like a sweet idea... and speaking of sweet ideas, wouldn't it be nice if parents could chip their children to make sure none of them ever get kidnapped? Not sure how a child could ever get kidnapped if the entire surface of planets would be livestreamed 24/7, but why not go the whole hog? Right?
If this sounds absurd to you, it's because it is. I get that The Circle wants to warn us (and given the age of the protagonist - whom we'll get to in a second - and other characters, specifically the younger generation) about the risk of freely donating our personal information to big tech giants, such as Google or Facebook, but it does it in the worst way possible - by dumbing down the arguments and presenting them in very simplistic way, which transforms the novel from a piece of speculative, dystopian fiction into the wort thing of comedy and satire - the unintentional one. Instead of writer sending a warning to generation Z, Eggers comes off as a boomer trying to smack it on the head and saying "See? This is what will happen if you won't stop making these Tik Tok videos".
Consider Mae Holland, the main character of the book. Consider also the country of Kazakhstan. Located in Central Asia, the country is known for being the world's largest landlocked country, and for its vast steppes. Why am I telling you about Kazakhstan? Well, because I bring good news. You don't need to travel to Kazakhstan to see an endless stretch of flat; you need only to read the book and get acquainted with Mae Holland.
Mae is flatter than the Kazakh steppe because she has absolutely no character, no personality, there is nothing that would make her even remotely interesting as a person, nothing that would make her sympathize with her. Perhaps this was Eggers's idea - to pulll a Frankenstein and create a composite of what he thought were generation Z's worst traits into this monster... but then again Frankenstein's monster was an actual character, so no, that can't be it. Mae serves only as a vehicle for Eggers to present his ideas, being a mouth for him to speak through. His only saving grace is that he does it with all other characters in this book... which, on second thought, is not a saving grace at all. It's a sin!
Have you ever played Street Fighter? The fighting game? It features a rooster of characters from all over the world, and one of them is a muscular, blonde American airman named Guile. Why am I mentioning Guile? Because of his theme song. Why is Guile's theme song important? Because it goes with everything.Seriously, check any of the videos on YouTube. . Basically, Guile's theme fits any scene from any movie or television series ever produced. Why is this important? Because just as Guile's theme goes with everything, so does Mae Holland.
Eggers eggs Mae on (please, excuse the pun - I couldn't stop myself...) to do things which get progressively more and more absurd and insane, and Mae - like a good little doll - goes with everything he makes her do. Although Mae is given a semi-backstory and an excuse for a life - she has a sick father and an ex-boyfriend, and gets romantically involved with a fellow Circler - she has absolutely no agency, to the point where I was amazed that she remembered how to breathe on her own. But then again, why would she need to breathe, if she has no lungs or windpipe, because all that's inside her is Dave Eggers's hand that animates her entire being like a puppet? Whatever reservations he might allow her to have for plot points quickly get thrown out of the window, and Mae cheerfully tumbles down the rabbit hole. Answer 90 trivia questions per minute? Answer to tens of thousands of comments? Wear a camera around your neck at all time? No objection here, only enthusiasm. Perhaps with Mae Eggers was trying to portray an easily swayed, impressionable young girl - because young female graduates are soooooo easily swayed these days, didn't you know? - but he overshot his mark not by a mile, not even by two miles, but by the length that the Eurasian Steppe stretches from eastern Europe all the way to the northern part of China. I am not sure what the exact distance is, but I'm sure you get my meaning.
There is also no subtlety in any of what Eggers is doing here, anywhere. Of course these characters are supposed to be caricatures of people depending entirely on societal approval and extrernal affirmation, but you can't come to this conclusion all by yourself, because Eggers will beat you over into your head with a sledgehammer. At one point Mae has a conversation with Mercer, her ex-boyfriend, discussing privacy with all the subtlety of Ayn Rand's characters discussing the merits of capitalism versus the evil of collectivism. Eggers doesn't even spare poor Mae the indignity of having to go through a very bad sex scene... and there's more than one. YUCK.
Sex is generally a problematic subject in this book, and not just because of something he makes Mae do: (view spoiler)[ Early on in the book, Mae hooks up with Francis, the nerd she was interested in, though calling it a hook up is stretching it - she gives him a quasi-handjob, and he films it without her consent. Mae gets understandably upset and asks him to delete the video, which he can't do - it's instantly uploaded to the Circle cloud, like everything else. She is upset with him for a page or two, before the incident gets forgotten and he becomes her love interest afterwards. That earned a big NOPE from me. (hide spoiler)] Eggers never seems to take into consideration what most of the world's population actively uses internet for: porn. Why on earth would he think that anyone would be okay with having a Big Brother monitor their entire porn history and watching habits, openly displaying them for everyone to see? Well... he doesn't. In Eggersverse people just don't watch porn. I guess that can be an allegory for people being more interested in watching each other do ordinary things, as he has hundreds of thousands watch Mae go through mundane activities, but I call it a cop-out.
I could go on, but at this point I really just don't want to. What I found especially interesting is that instead of going with Eggers's vision, the world took the exact opposite direction. Consider this article from 2013, which discusses the growing surveillance of ordinary citizens.
We might live in an age of persistent and pervasive surveillance. The recent revelations about the secret National Security Agency programs aimed at collecting vast amounts of data on Americans and foreigners seemingly confirm what tinfoil-wearing netizens have feared for years: They're watching us; technology has turned against its users.
The article discusses the early development of secure messaging apps, but what's of special interest is one paragraph in the middle:
"Ten years ago, if you had encryption on a device or your laptop, people thought, 'What you're trying to hide?'" says Janke. "Today, you don't have it, they say, 'Are you freaking crazy?'"
That was in 2013, and since then more and more people understand the need for encryption and actively seek it. Instead of Eggers's technocratic utopia where secrets are lies and privacy is theft, more and more people seek encryption and privacy, wanting to secure their communication away from prying eyes. Even WhatsApp, the world's most popular communication app adopted end-to-end encryption for its 2 billion users, effectively rendering its owners unable to read the content of messages that they exchange with it, and still people are moving towards even safer and more secure options. So, in summation, I find Eggers's vision just as impossible as I do comparisons of this book with 1984 and other, much better books. 'Are you freaking crazy?'...more
The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe holds the records for the most misleading title that I encountered this year. MThe Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe holds the records for the most misleading title that I encountered this year. Marci Shore is an associate professor at Yale University, where she teaches European cultural and intellectual history. On the more personal note, she is married to a fellow Yale scholar and author of acclaimed books on the history of the region, professor Timothy Snyder. Basing on the title and the author's credentials, I was expecting a well-researched and scholarly work on the subject - the lingering ghost of various totalitarianisms which took shape in Eastern Europe during the 20th century.
I admit that the fault is largely mine for not reading the blurb and just diving right into the book, but even the blurb is misleading and does not prepare the reader for what lies behind the covers of the book. The Taste of Ashes is not a scholarly study of totalitarianism, Eastern Europe or pretty much anything, really - the closest comparison I can come up with is a travelogue. Basically, the author took several trips to Eastern Europe, where she was given access to several archives and browsed documents from the period, but mostly talked to people.
Although the book claims to to be about the experience of totalitarianism in Eastern Europe, it is mostly limited to Poland and former Czechoslovakia. The second half of the book focuses on Poland especially, and is the one which I hoped to find to be the most interesting: being Polish myself I wanted to learn what the author discovered in the dusty archives which held the murky past of Polish Stalinism, thankfully now long gone.
Instead, the author shifts focus to the experience of Polish Jews - during the war and in the post-war Stalinist years, and later in independent Poland. She talks to relatives of Polish Jews who became involved in post-war politics - such as Wanda Wasilewska, Jan Broniewski and Jakub Berman - and also to several Jews who have remained in Poland after the collapse of communism, and who struggle with finding their own identity. She also talks to several remarkable individuals, who have shaped Polish politics and culture - the World War II Auschwitz prisoner and resistance fighter Władysław Bartoszewski, who later became the Minister of Foreign Affairs; Marek Edelman, who led the uprising in the Jewish Ghetto in Warsaw in 1943 and later became an author and cardiologist; and Adam Michnik, the son of Polish communists who would later became a major figure among anti-communist dissidents and eventually create and lead what would became Poland's largest newspaper, "Gazeta Wyborcza" (Electoral Newspaper).
Marci Shore has such fascinating interviewees, but the conversations that she has with them are very skin-deep, which is an incredibly missed opportunity to introduce these figures to a wider audience. The format of the book is at least partly to fault here - entire books have been written by, with or about each of these figures, and in a single, slim volume the reader will only get a glimpse of their lives. Shore presents vignettes, snippets and fragment, but the large picture of the afterlife of totalitarianism in Eastern Europe never emerges.
What is Eastern Europe, exactly? In her work Shore completely ignores countries which have also traditionally been seen as the "East", that is the European part of the former Soviet Union - Belarus, Ukraine and Russia. Like Poland and Czechoslovakia, all of these countries have suffered not one, but two totalitarianisms - yet they all are barely mentioned in this book. And these are the countries where, arguably, the afterlife of totalitarianism is most visibly and deeply felt - in Russia, where the initial embrace of democracy turned into disdain for it and the emergence of an autocratic leader; in Ukraine, where the desire to eliminate the remains of a communist past clashes with the struggle for the national soul as an actual war takes place in the east of the country; and perhaps most in Belarus, which is often said to be "the last dictatorship in Europe", and which is ruled in an almost nostalgically Stalinist style by the same president since 1994 - down to keeping the name of the KGB and organizing a referendum to ditch the new flag and coat of arms, and returned the slightly changed Soviet symbols, and being the only country in Europe which still uses the death penalty.
The subject provides so much opportunity, and it is a real shame that the book delivers so little. Despite blurbs from celebrated and acclaimed authors such as Norman Davies and Anne Applebaum - who called it "a personal, intellectual, literary and historical tour of contemporary central Europe" - I honestly cannot recommend it in good faith to anyone interested in the subject, as ultimately the book is more about the author herself rather than the subject matter she choose for her title. It is too disorganized, too fragmented and ultimately too unfocused to match Applebaum's praise and to fully convey its eponymous premise.
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