When Dave Eggers published The Circle (2013), a dystopian novel about a social media empire that had created a blandly totalitarian world of mindless clicking and total surveillance, run by rich young Silicon Valley overlords certain they were saving the world, he was met by savage pushback. In a common verdict, The New Republic called The Circle “overwrought paranoia” and “a bumbling and ill-formed satire on the invasive, monolithic beast he imagines the tech industry to be.”
Five years on, Eggers must be feeling vindicated. He was writing during the Obama years, when a better world seemed within reach to many of his readers. The landscape looks very different in light of allegations of Russian social media interference in U.S. electoral politics, and revelations that Cambridge Analytica acquired data from tens of millions of Facebook users without their permission on behalf of the Trump campaign, and was working for the Leave side in the...
Deborah Campbell is the author of A Disappearance in Damascus, which won the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize and the Hubert Evans BC Book Prize. She is an assistant professor in the department of writing at the University of Victoria.
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