The Circle Study Guide

Dave Eggers grew up in Chicago and he attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. However, shortly before graduating, both of his parents died suddenly and Eggers, aged 21, was forced to leave school to take care of his eight-year-old brother. In the early 90s, Eggers founded the satirical magazine Might; later, he worked as an editor for Salon.com. Eggers published his first book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, a chronicle of the years he spent raising his younger brother, in 2000—the book was a bestseller and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. For the rest of the decade, Eggers published a series of successful novels and nonfiction works, including What is the What and Zeitoun, which won praise for confronting serious, present-day issues, such as gentrification, the Internet, globalization, and immigration. Eggers is also the founder of McSweeney’s, an independent publishing house, a literary magazine called The Believer, and a network of writing and tutoring centers called 826. He lives in San Francisco.

The most important historical trend to which The Circle responds is the rise of the tech industry in California in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. During this period, computer programmers and engineers settled in California, particularly in Northern California, and created an astonishing number of the devices and websites that Americans now take for granted: the personal computer, the iPhone, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are all products of Northern Californian tech startups. Perhaps the most successful California tech startup, Google, was obviously a model for the Circle: like the Circle, Google is widely seen as a fantastic place to work and a benevolent, forward-thinking company. And, like the Circle, Google has come under fire in recent years, both for monopolizing the world’s access to information and for using its customers’ personal information in unethical ways.

Like many science fiction novels of the last twenty years, The Circle criticizes the rise of social networking and argues that the Internet has destroyed interpersonal connection. Other recent works of literature that explore similar themes include M. Anderson’s Feed (2002) and Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One (2011). A much earlier science fiction short story, “The Machine Stops” by E. M. Forster, also explores the sense of alienation that arises when one monopolistic entity provides for all human needs. Another piece of writing that influenced The Circle is Michel Foucault’s 1975 work of critical theory, Discipline and Punish. In this book, Foucault discusses the writings of the late-18th century philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who proposed a utopian solution to all human problems: allow all people to watch each other at all times. Bentham’s “solution” (which, Foucault points out, is utterly dehumanizing) sounds remarkably similar to the one offered by Eamon Bailey.