The template Silicon Valley billionaire: white, male, a monopolist, retires before he’s 40, and sooner, rather than later, sets sail to solve Africa’s problems.
None of this is objectionable. Information technology has certainly improved and made safer many aspects of human life-- whether one speaks of health; knowledge; or transport. Hopefully, many such advances will continue apace. The problem is the ‘free’ economy that has enveloped us so quickly that very few of us have had time to sit back and think about the precise moment the metaphor to describe the internet went from being something grounded, like a wire between two landline telephones, to something more nebulous and disconnected, like a cloud.
After all, it was one of the founding fathers of the economic church we all worship in today, Milton Friedman, who said: “there’s nothing like a free lunch”.
Why and what is Silicon Valley so keen on getting us to share for free?
None of this is objectionable. Information technology has certainly improved and made safer many aspects of human life-- whether one speaks of health; knowledge; or transport. Hopefully, many such advances will continue apace. The problem is the ‘free’ economy that has enveloped us so quickly that very few of us have had time to sit back and think about the precise moment the metaphor to describe the internet went from being something grounded, like a wire between two landline telephones, to something more nebulous and disconnected, like a cloud.
After all, it was one of the founding fathers of the economic church we all worship in today, Milton Friedman, who said: “there’s nothing like a free lunch”.
Why and what is Silicon Valley so keen on getting us to share for free?
As this novel so beautifully describes, through the allegory of deep sea ecology, and the contrasting personalities of the three men at the head of The Circle (creator; evangelist; and monetiser), this enterprise is the nexus of three types of creatures: sea horses (a species in which the male mothers), an octopus, and a shark that consumes everything and turns it to powdery shit. It struck me that maybe the sea horses were the kind of people who left helpful reviews and comments out of nothing but altruistic concern, the octopus represents coders and developers, and the sharks, of course, the fine gents of Wall Street.
For some time now, I have been unhappy with my relationship with the Internet. What exactly bothered me about it was like having a scratch in a place where I couldn’t reach. It took reading The Circle to place a finger on the exact location of irritation.
Periodically, a type of character surfaces in this novel: hyper-sensitive but grasping. Either for money or for attention. This is the kind of people— who one would normally endure on the pain of death— who have been made our ‘friends’ by the Facebook feed.
I don’t want to sound ungrateful. I am as addicted to the Net as the next person. It’s hard to even imagine what one would do without reviews and ratings for products and restaurants left by our seahorse friends. Yet, as someone pointed out, the Comments Section has chartered a private jet and is currently running for the United States Presidency. There is a line that demarcates a territory called over-sharing and being a compete asshole. Somewhere we have lost sight of that line.
Before there was the ALS ice-bucket challenge (many people felt immense relief when the foundation behind the campaign revealed that the money raised had led to an innovation in treatment), there was the ‘Runaway Train’ video. One or two people were found. More disturbingly, the mania the music video launched actually led to the discovery of people who were in hiding from abusive families.
People genuinely believe they can defeat terrorism or banish malaria on Facebook. I once believed I could stop Hindu fascism through blogging. At any given time, we have meerkat sentinels who warn us about things: a bank failing a capital test; trade treaties; Africa; and many such similar issues. This is without even mentioning the photographs of people’s lunches. And cats. Let’s not forget the cats. And remember: your lack of a donation, worth only a cup of coffee, is what is preventing Somalians from not having their genitals mutilated.
It is this peculiarly Californian, yet universal well-meaning hifi technological dorkiness, the great plague of our age, that Eggers does so well to spin a novel out of.
We have a protagonist stuck in a dead-end job. Her boss has a moustache like two small hands, and is impressed that she can switch on a computer. She calls in a favour from her old college room-mate, and suddenly, she’s at the swanky campus of The Circle: an amalgam of Microsoft (software), Apple (hardware), Google (internet search), Facebook/Twitter (social networking), and Amazon (online retail). The corporation soon adds her ailing father to the corporate health insurance scheme. Sometimes she romances a creepy guy with a Tibetan name who skulks around the place. Soon, she is living on campus, her every move logged and monitored, and there is no line between work and free time.
The value of software corporations is no longer merely determined by the products and services they offer. Rather, the statistical footprint of their customers and patrons that reveal data sets that sociologists once had sexual fantasies about. Harvesting this information has become the main function of the Internet. To businessmen and industrialists, this meta-data is the equivalent of the Holy Grail. It will solve all problems, answer all questions, and provide an unending stream of wealth. With access to the most intimate of all insights— what makes a human being tick— the mission, having consolidated technological and economic monopolies, is to close the circle of activities: the introduction of slavery on a scale that has never been been possible.
The weird bit is that it’s not exactly science fiction. For example, in India, it is a popular issue to make voting mandatory— so why not vote through Facebook? Many people would agree that the Election Commission— arguably, India’s finest government department— is a waste of tax payer’s money. The Indian government has already collected mass statistical information about its citizens. There is the UID biometric program, as well as a National Population Register. Mukesh Ambani (the time of this writing, Reliance has rolled out a telecommunication service called Jio, described as the world’s biggest start-up with approximately $20 billion dollars; its objective is data mining) put the Prime Minister, poor chap, front-and-center in what is essentially an advertisement for a private corporation. There is no division between a corporation that sees its commercial mission to provide internet as national redemption, the leader of the nation, and the nation itself. In the same week all this was going on, Mark Zuckerberg was shown in newspapers meeting the Pope.
The novel makes both fascinating reading while staying very funny. There is a generous marbling of art history. Yet, the way things are panning out in reality is what makes its prescience frightening.
It was in India that Zuckerberg received a stinging rebuke when the telecommunication sector regulator threw out his “Internet.org”plan to ensure every cotton farmer in Maharashtra updates his Facebook account before climbing the boughs of a tree to end it all (Monsanto, frowny face). The only people he managed to sign up, eventually, were some extremely poor African countries with circumstances so abject that they will accept anything from anyone, no matter what the cost.
Elon Musk, however, accidentally blew up the Facebook satellite that was to deliver that service that the Indians didn’t want and had to be forced onto the Africans (meanwhile, India’s state-owned ISRO offers one of the most cost-effective and reliable satellite launching services in the world). It does make you wonder if there isn’t a God in heaven, after all.
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