The Circle
starring Tom Hanks, Emma Watson, John Boyega, Patton Oswalt, Karen Gillen and Bill Paxton
screenplay by James Ponsoldt and Dave Eggers
directed by James Ponsoldt
Rating: ♦♦♦♦♦
A 2017 American techno-thriller. I had seen it in the DVD rental shop here for several months but I passed it over because it looked like something I wouldn’t be interested in. Then in November I saw it on Japanese television and realized what kind of movie it was. After that, I rented it and watched it in English. I think it’s a great movie, but it made me angry. It made me angry about the technology that increasingly saturates our lives, the acceptance of the normalization of this saturation among the young, and about how almost everything is moving online now. Online does not mean convenience. It means profit for corporations.
The story features a social media company called The Circle Corporation. Comparisons to Facebook and Microsoft are easy and intentional. The company is dominated by young people, and the headquarters, called a “campus,” looks and feels like a college campus. Emma Watson plays young Mae Holland, who lands a job as an online customer service agent. Mae becomes addicted to the charismatic personality of the company president, Eamon Baily (Tom Hanks). Baily dreams of monopolizing online and social media services globally, and towards that end, Mae becomes an apostle of “transparency,” living her entire life online and on camera.
If knowledge is good, then maximum knowledge equals maximum virtue. Withholding information from the community - through privacy, for example - is robbing the community of a resource.
The Circle is so large it’s practically dystopian. It’s a wolf dressed in sheep’s clothing. Participation practically becomes mandatory. The company’s membership grows so large, with so much reach and so much market share, that Mae suggests the clever idea to link Circle membership to voter registration, and to mandate voter participation in elections. This is all framed as a virtue, of course, in an insidious Big Brother-ish way. The right to privacy is condemned as a form of theft - i.e., individuals stealing information from the collective. This is almost word-for-word what my former United Church of Canada minister said to me twenty years ago: if knowledge is good, then maximum knowledge equals maximum virtue. Withholding information from the community - through privacy, for example - is robbing the community of a resource. It’s the ultimate expression of Big Data mining.
I’m angry because I can easily imagine today’s young people seriously thinking like this - young people who grew up with a public persona on social media that people my age and older never experienced. I mean, young people today are less familiar with the breadth of privacy that older people are familiar with.
The same formula is at work here as the argument for greater camera surveillance of society: if people know they are being watched all the time then they have less opportunity and less motivation for secretive, deviant, harmful, and even criminal behavior. In this new “transparent” worlds of the Circle, individuals become commodities. Without privacy our humanity is compromised. We are actually less human. Mandatory participation in an election does not mean that democracy is augmented, because abstention is also a democratic choice. What it all amounts to is that all people - not just Circle members - are not just sold a service, but enrolled in a mandatory program of behavior and thought control, with passively aggressive punitive measures for a disinclination to participate. In fact, lack of a desire to participate, or dissention are framed as some kind of pathology.
The telecommunications industry and their friends in Silicon Valley promised us a brave new world of convenience, all at our fingertips. They told us not to worry, our secrets would be safe. None of it was true. They intentionally lied to us. They stole our privacy. And in the process, they’ve ruined everything.
What makes me angry is how real it all feels.