The Circle

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Circle (Original title: The Circle ) is a bestselling novel by Dave Eggers from 2013 . At the center of the dystopia is the powerful Internet company The Circle , modeled on the GAFAM companies, which is increasingly generating social control through extensive transparency and surveillance . The Circle was published in German translation in 2014.

content

The novel portrays the fictional, globally dominating Internet company Circle , which has not only surpassed Facebook, Twitter and Google, but also unites the likewise fictional companies Alacrity, Zoopa, Jefe and Quan and their offers.

Maebelline "Mae" Holland, a college graduate, is starting her new position at The Circle , a powerful IT company run by the so-called "Three Wise Men". Mae owes her employment to her best friend and former college roommate, Annie, who is also one of the company's 40 most influential people. Mae starts with “Customer Experience”, the company's customer service, but quickly climbs up its hierarchy. Right from the start, Mae was impressed by the convenience of the Circle, for example access to first-class technology, its own dormitories, fitness studios, other recreational opportunities and parties. Mae's first day at the Circle ends with a party where she meets Francis, with whom she has a love affair. Later on, Mae meets a mysterious colleague named "Kalden" and feels drawn to him, although she doesn't manage to find out his status at the company or even his last name.

In the meantime, the Circle continues to develop a number of sophisticated technologies, including SeeChange: lightweight, portable cameras that broadcast video in real time anywhere with minimal effort. The “SeeChange” cameras are worn around the clock by politicians, among others, who would like to be “transparent” and thus allow the public to see what they are doing at any time.

Mae's father is diagnosed with multiple sclerosis . Because of this illness, Mae takes her parents into her own health insurance with her employer The Circle, who in return equips Mae's apartment with SeeChange cameras. After a brief incident with the police, Mae finally agrees to also wear a SeeChange camera on his body and thus become "transparent". Thereby she embodies her increasingly important role in the company, which is also symbolized by a public speech in which she makes the statements "Secrets are lies", "Sharing is healing" and "Everything private is theft". Most of her job now consists of walking around the company campus as an “ambassador” and showing customers future products. Any suggestion that she has doubts about (lack of) privacy is now waning, in contrast to her former friend Mercer, who eventually insists on "getting off the map" to cope with the ever-growing and far-reaching influence of the Circle and escape its technologies. Kalden contacts Mae and warns her that the circle must be stopped, but she refuses to obey the thought.

Meanwhile, Annie becomes jealous of Mae's success and volunteers to become the first "PastPerfect" test person to cement her status within the company. "PastPerfect" prepares a complete family history of any person with the help of all information available online. As part of this process, disturbing things about Annie's family also come to light. Eventually, the psychological distress of Annie from these revelations becomes so great that she falls into a coma. Exposed both by her parents' distrust of SeeChange's surveillance of her apartment and by the behavior of her ex-boyfriend Mercer - both publicly visible to her millions of followers through Mae's body camera - Mae becomes more and more angry. When she demonstrates a new program live, which can be used to catch fugitive criminals within minutes, she also uses it to find Mercer. He tries to escape video tracking and, meanwhile pursued by drones and with no chance to "escape", commits suicide by deliberately falling from a bridge. Although she is initially depressed by this, Mae soon tries, with the help of the charismatic "Wise Man" Eamon Bailey, to discuss her depression about Mercer's death. So she comes to the conclusion that he was a very depressed, anti-social person who refused to accept help from the community, and compares his actions with that of a person who at that moment commits suicide by jumping out the window when the doctor shows up for the rounds.

Kalden turns out to be the elusive "wise man" Ty Gospodinov, the original inventor and founder of the Circle. Mae agrees to meet with him in secret, and he tells her that he is worried that a totalitarian regime will soon emerge, like a “ surveillance society ”, if nothing is done about it. He outlines the need for privacy in a digital age and asks her to help him destroy the Circle, as he cannot do it alone. Mae thinks Ty is crazy but pretends to be supportive of him - but then she betrays him by revealing what happened to the other founders of the Circle. These ensure that Ty is silenced. The book ends with Mae looking at Annie in the hospital and wondering when the time will come for people's thoughts to be made visible and a public good, because the world has a right to do so.

German-speaking reception

The novel was discussed extremely frequently and intensively in the German-language feature pages. So Gerrit Bartels is not surprised that he was at the top of the bestseller lists two weeks after the German translation was published. In the book reviews, the literary quality of the novel is consistently criticized, but the dystopian vision is considered noteworthy. Some reviewers, such as Gerrit Bartels, consider the novel to be polemical. Sascha Lobo calls it "a book worth reading, interspersed with cleverly constructed mini-dystopias ". But he is also practicing a counterproductive demonization of the Internet companies, which lack the arguments, and thereby become polemical.

filming

The filming of a film adaptation of the novel directed by James Ponsoldt began on September 11, 2015. Emma Watson plays Mae Holland and Tom Hanks plays Eamon Bailey. The role of Kalden / Ty is played by John Boyega . The US theatrical release was on April 27, 2017. It was released in Germany in September.

Opera

An opera based on the book by Ludger Vollmer was premiered on May 4, 2019 in the German National Theater Weimar.

expenditure

  • Dave Eggers: The circle: a novel . Alfred A. Knopf, New York 2013, ISBN 978-0-385-35139-3 (American English, 504 pages).
  • Dave Eggers: The Circle: Novel . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2014, ISBN 978-3-462-04675-5 (560 pages, American English: The Circle . New York 2013. Translated by Ulrike Wasel and Klaus Timmermann). ( # 1 on the Spiegel bestseller list for 2 weeks in 2014 )
  • Dave Eggers: The Circle . Sound carrier, abridged reading, read by Torben Kessler. Audiobook Hamburg, Hamburg 2014, ISBN 978-3-89903-898-9 (American English: The Circle . New York 2013. Translated by Ulrike Wasel and Klaus Timmermann).

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ David Hugendick, Ijoma Mangold, Iris Radisch, Marie Schmidt and Adam Soboczynski: This world is new, is it also beautiful? In: Zeit Online. August 7, 2014, accessed May 5, 2020 .
  2. ^ A b Gerrit Bartels: A novel for analog anachronists and internet haters. In: tagesspiegel.de. August 21, 2014, accessed August 18, 2016 .
  3. ↑ Dave Eggers: The Circle. Novel. In: perlentaucher.de. Retrieved August 18, 2016 .
  4. ^ Sascha Lobo: SPON - The human machine: Demonized digital corporations. In: Spiegel Online. SPIEGEL ONLINE, August 27, 2014, accessed on August 18, 2016 .
  5. ^ The Circle. In: moviepilot.de. Retrieved August 18, 2016 .
  6. ↑ Peter Jungblut: Enlightenment through data: "The Circle" as an opera in Weimar. May 4, 2019, accessed May 5, 2019 .