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Francis Garaventa
Mercer Medeiros, Mae Holland’s old boyfriend, embodies the analog way of living and the last gasp of resistance to the Circle’s unethical philosophy of transparency. He’s everything that Circle employees aren’t: confident, outspoken, good with his hands, overweight, poorly dressed, unkempt, and committed to the importance of face-to-face contact. Mercer is the only character in the novel who offers an eloquent response to the Circle’s worldview: he insists that the Circle has reduced human connection to a shadow of what it once was, trading rich and nuanced relationships (which, he maintains, can only exist when people interact face-to-face) for shallow, meaningless social networking “friendships.” Toward the end of the novel, as the Circle prepares to flood the entire industrialized world with cameras, Mercer writes Mae a letter insisting that he’s going to live as a hermit. When Mae sends a fleet of drones after Mercer to harass him, he commits suicide by driving his car into a gorge. He’d rather die, it’s suggested, than live in under the Circle’s totalitarian regime.
Mercer Medeiros Quotes in The Circle
The The Circle quotes below are all either spoken by Mercer Medeiros or refer to Mercer Medeiros. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Book One, part 4
Quotes
"It's not that I'm not social. I'm social enough. But the tools you guys create actually manufacture unnaturally extreme social needs. No one needs the level of contact you're purveying. It improves nothing. It's not nourishing. It's like snack food. You know how they engineer this food? They scientifically determine precisely how much salt and fat they need to include to keep you eating. You're not hungry, you don't need the food, it does nothing for you, but you keep eating these empty calories. This is what you're pushing. Same thing. Endless empty calories, but the digital-social equivalent. And you calibrate it so it's equally addictive."
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
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Explanation and Analysis:
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Mercer Medeiros Quotes in The Circle
The The Circle quotes below are all either spoken by Mercer Medeiros or refer to Mercer Medeiros. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Book One, part 4
Quotes
"It's not that I'm not social. I'm social enough. But the tools you guys create actually manufacture unnaturally extreme social needs. No one needs the level of contact you're purveying. It improves nothing. It's not nourishing. It's like snack food. You know how they engineer this food? They scientifically determine precisely how much salt and fat they need to include to keep you eating. You're not hungry, you don't need the food, it does nothing for you, but you keep eating these empty calories. This is what you're pushing. Same thing. Endless empty calories, but the digital-social equivalent. And you calibrate it so it's equally addictive."
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
