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Cultural Logic: Marxist Theory & Practice
Volume 25 (2021), pp. 72-88
Normalizing Surveillance in Dave Eggers’ The Circle
Shohel Rana
Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman Aviation and Aerospace University
One’s private life may be what makes a life worth living. One needs a place of one’s own
– an escape from the public life. One’s happiest moments are probably those which give one
separate space and time to live by one’s own norms and habits. These, at least appear to be some
of the underlying assumptions that guide Dave Eggers when he imagines a world almost devoid
of privacy in The Circle, a novel concerned with public faces and private desires, including the
desire for privacy and the desire for relentless publicity that some see in social media at present.
What if this individual desire – the space and time that one longs for – becomes a sign of the
“other” in a society constantly monitored by a modern surveillance system that requires total
transparency, including the visibility of our most personal space to the public, the novel asks? How
would such an imagined society function where there is one standard of behavior and one set of
fixed rules to follow under the reach of one company? What would happen to those who would
not be willing to follow these rules or norms? And most importantly, what might be lost in a world
where people conform fully to the ideals that guide the system of surveillance? Can surveillance
shift from being a means of assessing and correcting behavior and activity, to the essence of
activity itself, such that a world becomes defined less by its ideals and more by practices that
subject it to constant public inspection, a world where the annihilation of privacy is the goal of
social life?
These questions are explored in Dave Eggers’ dystopian novel The Circle. The novel tells
the story of Mae Holland and her metamorphosis as she goes from being a new employee to the
face of the company. She starts “going transparent” (Eggers 304) by broadcasting her every
moment “through the lens worn around her neck, a window into this new world” (307). This lens
shares her entire life as it is lived online for all to see and comment upon. The book is a work of
dystopian fiction that touches on a number of key features of contemporary digital sociality, as
well as providing a new vision of the sort of total social surveillance first explored in George
Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
The Circle is an attempt to understand the ambivalence related to the discipline and control
social media exercises and to narrate a story of what our future could look like in a world
monopolized by such regulatory norms. The novel is also a thought experiment that is designed to
challenge a narrative that some might offer of the obvious goodness and morality of sharing oneself
online as so many do. The very language of “sharing” captures much of this benevolence. Social
media platforms like Facebook and Google are now inevitable parts of the lives of millions of
people worldwide. The vitality and necessity of these platforms during this Covid-19 pandemic is
profound. Several recent social and political revolutions can also be attributed to have been
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influenced by the networking power of the social media – e.g., Black Lives Matter and the Arab
Spring. Many fundraising campaigns have happened through social media that have transformed
lives. But this happy story is not the whole story.
Egger’s novel suggests that one must also consider the other sides of social media – that it
is the social media which has created a world of digital normalization that has made our life self-
centered and created huge distance among our loved ones. In fact, many cannot think about
existing without social media for even a day. Many people are living a mediated, socially
connected but physically distant reality all the time. They are manipulated by fabricated news
stories and posts they read on social media. They may be giving up their own freedom for a chance
to vicariously observe others or stay in touch. Individuals may not even know that they are being
exploited, marketed to, and their thoughts and desires are being manipulated by the social media
and by those who use social media platforms to reach their audiences. So subtle are many of the
strategies that its victims often may not imagine that they are being exploited at all. I contend that
this novel initiates significant arguments addressing the importance of privacy in an age of digital
surveillance. As a methodology, I return to Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975) to
bring its key issues – especially the genealogy of discipline in the eighteenth and nineteenth
century that leads to a society that seeks to normalize individuals – into the discussion of the
surveillance system of the technology company the Circle in The Circle. This means that my
analysis will break with the obvious visual nature of surveillance as it is often studied (Lyon et al.
3). In contrast to this approach, my focus will be on mechanisms of social policing and regulation,
not literal public visibility of the sort that concerns so many in Surveillance Studies. I will show
that The Circle explores what might be the final stage of a system of social regulation that Foucault
locates at the end of the eighteenth century during a time when the ruling classes confronted the
problem of how best to manage and control free and democratic societies and developed practices
of education, religion, and employment rituals that would generate docility and conformity.
Whereas surveillance studies are concerned with tactics of observation meant to control behavior,
Eggers’ depicts a world in which being tracked is no longer a tactic: it is the norm and the social
ideal at the heart of modern social life.
My research belongs to a tradition of repurposing some of the ideas and itineraries of
thought that Foucault has pursued that are shared with Marxism. I would agree with Mark Olseen,
who contends that “Although he was often critical of Marxism, Foucault’s own approach bears
striking parallels to Marxism, as a form of method, as an account of history, and as an analysis of
social structure” (454). As I have analyzed Foucault’s concept of disciplinary power in this article,
it should be emphasized that “in analyzing disciplinary power, Foucault saw a kindred spirit in
Marx” who recognized that power could be “exercised” (Sherman) throughout different
institutions outside the state. Even though The Order of the Things criticizes Marx’s “economic
doctrine,” “it is not a total rejection of Marxism” (Kelly). On the other hand, Foucault’s “anti-
humanist position was not in itself anti-Marxist…” (Kelly). In several ways, my argument is closer
to Marx’s in the sense that I emphasize a top-down centralized model of power (Marx) that happens
to be elaborated through everyday social media that is decentralized (Foucault).
I place my perspective on The Circle into conversation with several critics who have
offered recent analyses of the novel. As I will show, my argument differs from theirs because I
contend The Circle offers a dystopian perspective on a world of total surveillance that reflects
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upon the vitality of privacy and explores its complex nature. The novel considers the usefulness
of a binary conception that imagines privacy to be a domain of freedom and publicity to be a
domain of social control. Such a structure makes little sense, however, if one follows Foucault and
appreciates how privacy can be a space of aggressive self-regulation and the public can be a space
of surprising freedom if one is willing to challenge convention. The novel thus considers the
unstable power dynamics that always structure operations of surveillance and social regulation and
how that instability leads to opportunities for alteration and change of the sort that is presently
visible, for example, at so many Black Lives Matters protests. Unlike a contemporary world in
which social media can tactically publicize otherwise private and unacknowledged acts, Egger’s
dystopia emphasizes the emergence of absolute publicity and the loss of any individual
unmonitored existence in which individuals come to exist only to share their lives with others and
lose the freedom to make choices not sanctioned by a public that is always watching.
The Circle depicts the frustrated and fractured future of such a world dominated by
pervasive technology. The novel is an attempt to argue that social media technology seeks to
normalize individuals in ways that make social discipline pervasive, subtle, and, above all else,
effective in normalizing individuals such that each begins to appear “like one another” (Foucault
182). Eggers appears to offer a perspective like Foucault’s, however, who once also insisted that
“power is everywhere” (Foucault 93) and this means that social relations are not defined by those
who have power and those who do not. Instead, counter hegemonic resistance is always possible;
one is never without access to these relations of power and the possibility that one could mount a
form of spirited resistance that can destabilize this power structure. However, this novel also
explores how such resistance fails. Ultimately, the novel often shows the inner struggles and
desperation of the central characters to get rid of the dominant power structure – the visible power
of the company – that has made their lives suffocating and distressing. But perhaps because
individuals remain isolated from one another – and indeed much of the plot of the novel revolves
around the secrecy of individual rebellions that never quite reveal themselves to one another –
there is not a great and substantial moment of rebellion. The Circle is an attempt to chart the
failures of resistance and rebellion that may follow from such a world in which individuals confuse
visibility with social life, and no longer forge meaningful alliances that might lead to revolution.
The novel asks readers to wonder if contemporary social media self-surveillance can lead to a
coercive existence in which excessive visual transparency erases any sort of privacy and sacrifices
freedom to the ideology of openness. At the end, the novel also imagines why resistance of any
sort might become futile, especially if individuals fail to work together and instead protest alone.
The Circle revolves around Mae Holland, who considers her new workplace the Circle a
“heaven” on earth (Eggers 1). The company provides the employees with all the amenities one
could want: insurance for parents, free health and wellness service, well-organized dormitory
rooms, gymnasium, beautiful campus, hotels and restaurants, theatre, etc. The Circle was founded
by Ty Gospodinov, who brought all the social media profiles and other accounts of the users into
one platform which he named TruYou: “one account, one identity, one password, one payment
system, per person” (21). The company develops technology that becomes pervasive across the
United States and eventually the world. They invent SeeChange cameras to make everyone visible
and accountable. In one of the Great Hall presentations, one of the company’s CEOs, Eamon
Bailey, announces that “all that happens must be known” (67) and this captures the company’s
aggressive assault on privacy.
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Mae’s supervisors gradually indoctrinate her into the company’s norms. Mae finds that
“this is not a clock in clock out company” but an entire lifestyle (Eggers 176). She starts living in
the campus even on weekends and participates in all the activities which increase her PartiRank.
Her co-workers and supervisors convince her that within the Circle, it is important to always
engage with the community and continually develop her rank in the company. Mae, however,
keeps her connection with her parents and her ex-boyfriend Mercer and she often goes kayaking
in the weekends. But with the constant vigilance and reminders of her co-workers and supervisors,
Mae starts giving all her time to the campus. Although Mae often feels that her privacy is being
erased, she becomes more attached to the Circle. Her conversations with Bailey on the effects of
surveillance indoctrinate Mae fully as she willingly becomes transparent and broadcasts her life to
the world, embodying the company’s philosophies of surveillance: “sharing is caring,” “secrets
are lies” and “privacy is theft” (303).
Meanwhile, Mercer’s and Mae’s parents become unsettled by the twenty-four-hour
visibility conditions of the Circle. They warn Mae of the terrible consequences of such excessive
social networking. Alongside this thread of concern, the novel develops another: Mae often meets
the mysterious figure of Kalden on the campus, a man who is against the monopoly of the Circle.
Kalden warns Mae about the “totalitarian nightmare” (481) emerging from the Circle’s proposal
to control voting and he suggests that Mae should use her power to bring the company to its limit.
But Mae’s absolute commitment to the company’s vision becomes so powerful that she does not
leave her position even after the murder of Mercer, the broadcast of the sex video of her parents
and Annie’s (Mae’s close friend and an employee of the Circle) hospitalization – all of which are
the effects of the Circle surveillance. Mae does not listen to the suggestions of Kaden – who is the
company’s founder, Ty – to stop the completion of the Circle. Instead, Mae wants to discover how
to know the thoughts of Annie, who is in a coma now.
Such a plot might remind some of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which
Winston Smith is also a transformed person at the end of the novel where he recognizes that he
loves Big Brother. By forcing everyone to be under the constant vigilance of the telescreens and
subject to state ideology, Airstrip One maintains its power in Orwell’s novel. Is The Circle a
modern version of Nineteen Eighty-Four? Although they seem to be similar in some aspects of
surveillance and totalitarianism, they are significantly different from each other. In The Circle, no
one forces Mae to do anything. By the end of the novel, Mae enters a stage of willing servitude.
On the other hand, Winston Smith is forced to transform. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, there are only
telescreens to keep the citizens under surveillance but in The Circle, we see a modern social
networking system that dominates the lives of the users through what Zygmunt Bauman calls
“seduction” (Lyon 327) and what Michel Foucault would term “normalization” (308). The power
structures in these two novels are very different: one has top down structure and the other has a
networked structure of power. Hence, the process and the effect of surveillance in these two texts
are substantially different.
The literal form of surveillance in Nineteen Eighty-Four is in absolute contrast with the
surveillance in Foucault’s carceral society, as David Lyon has explored. This debate is important
for understanding what one means by surveillance, how and where it occurs, and what its effects
include. Where Big Brother involves a totalitarian state that is always watching and ready to punish
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transgressors, Foucault notes a more elemental form of discipline that characterizes free and open
societies in which individuals learn to monitor themselves and regulate their desires and actions
according to social norms rather than overt acts of correction. Lyon further notes that in electronic
surveillance system, the modern concept of a “human-centered self” is replaced by the “remote
databases” (62) that store our personal details and make us the bearers of our own surveillance that
assures the “certainty of punishment” (Lyon 70), although one may be unable to “verify” (Lyon
68) the power source. Although “Orwell places less emphasis on the subjects being the bearer of
their own surveillance,” the citizens of Foucault’s disciplinary society are the bearers of the power
that dominates them (Lyon 66). While writing about resistance, Lyon highlights the “distant roar
of battles,” arguing that Foucault “abandoned” (76) the probability of resistance in his modern
disciplinary societies. Lyon finishes the essay by contending that “Orwell’s dystopic vision was
dominated by the central state” and that modern forms of surveillance rely much more on
decentralized electronic dominance in a world of consumerism (Lyon 78).
Although I agree with most of Lyon’s analysis of the modern electronic surveillance, I
disagree with his argument that Foucault abandoned the idea of the possibility of resistance against
such power. I contend that Lyon misses what Foucault argued about the concept of power – that
“power is everywhere” (Foucault 93) and its structure is relational rather than the traditional top-
down style of the sort seen in the police state imagined by Nineteen Eighty-Four. I observe that
The Circle has a power structure that is best understood with Foucault’s insights and understanding
regarding the volatility of relations of power. And because power comes from no single source but
from multiple relays and relations, there are always possibilities of resistance, including what
Marxists would call “relative autonomy” or the possibilities for change that are included within a
system designed to still revolutionary impulses (Parker 227). I would argue that the relative
autonomy that we observe in The Circle through the characters like Mercer and Ty are the effects
of the relational power structure of the world in the novel. My argument regarding the
establishment of surveillance as a norm in itself relies on these complex relations of power and
resistance.
The loss of privacy in modern data surveillance system is one of the most significant
matters in The Circle. This issue is taken up by Scott Selisker in his “The Novel and WikiLeaks:
Transparency and the Social Life of Privacy” where he focuses on the differences in privacy
between a “democratic and the totalitarian state” (Selisker 765). He brings in Nelson’s observation
that a totalitarian state “penetrates” (765) into private lives. Selisker refers to Jonathan Crary’s
24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep which shows that in neo-liberalism, most of our social
relations are transferred into “monetized and quantifiable forms” such that “privacy is impossible”
in a context where an individual “becomes a permanent site of data-harvesting and surveillance”
(qtd. in Selisker 765). Selisker argues that “The Circle …explores…what we may lose by not
safeguarding our privacy” (766). He asserts that “total transparency renders Mae surprisingly
inert” (770). Mae loses her opportunities to have meaningful private communications. I agree that
losing one’s privacy is central to the novel, but my discussion of the erasure of privacy in The
Circle arises from my contention that modern form of data surveillance becomes, in the novel, a
social norm in itself rather than a tactic designed to regulate individuals to make them docile
governable subjects.
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The normalization that happens with our constant awareness to our public self or to our
visibility through social media or surveillance is further analyzed by Oliver Muller in his essay
“Being Seen: An Exploration of a Core Phenomenon of Human Existence and Its Normative
Dimensions.” He argues that “being seen obliges us to follow and even to comply with certain
social and moral orders” (Muller 368). Citing Blumenberg, he observes that “the possibility of
being seen challenges our self-image and gives rise to ‘the calculated self-display and playful self-
portrayal’” (qtd. in Muller 369). These realizations reflect Foucault’s concept of the “normalizing
judgement” (Foucault 177) in modern disciplinary society because, as Blumenberg further
elaborates, “the human being is…constantly transversed and determined by the gaze of others”
(qtd. in Muller 369). While “investigating the right to be invisible in the context of surveillance
technologies” (375), Muller takes up Foucault’s statement that “visibility is a trap” (Foucault 200)
and asserts that “visibility can be instrumentalized in surveillance technologies and disciplinary
regimes” (Muller 375). In the context of The Circle, “transparency …can also be a trap” (Muller
375). Muller further argues that the “omniscient gaze” in the novel has “totalitarian…gaze” in the
tradition of Nineteen Eighty-Four” and “the Big Brother of our times emerges from an obsessive
self-display…” (376). Roy Sommer, however, does not consider Big Brother as an issue of the
“new kind of surveillance culture” (Sommer 53) that we see in The Circle. He claims that “the
greatest risk to individual freedom, Eggers reminds us, is no longer Big Brother but the naive (and
greedy) user who unwittingly pays for the ‘free’ services of the web browsers and social networks
with the gold and oil of the digital age: personal data” (Sommer 53). Sommer contends that “like
the sirens of the Greek mythology, who promised errant sailors secret knowledge of the world but
killed them once they set foot on shore, these computer networks seduce us to agree to terms and
conditions that will enslave us” (Sommer 53).
I mostly agree with Muller and Sommer’s understanding of digital personal data visibility
as a kind of trap in Foucault’s sense of the word. Although they have taken a different stance in
viewing the gaze of the Circle, I share their fascination with how normalization involves
transparency and the propagation of liberal humanist values of freedom of choice alongside the
process of seducing the consumers. Unlike them, however, I contend that resistance to a
technological gaze that penetrates our private lives and data is possible because of the fragile and
suspicious nature of the power structure of such regimes of surveillance.
How does The Circle explore the notions of electronic surveillance and the integration of
disciplinary forms of social media into everyday life? One way of approaching this question may
be to notice that a society of control and normalization may not be the overt ambition of the Circle.
The Circle’s major technological ambitions work to “realize” the “potential” of human beings
(Eggers 292). The SeeChange cameras might protect “human rights” (65); TruYouth can “make
kids safer” (342); SoulSearch boasts the capability to catch the “fugitive from justice” (446). Why
should a technology company provide such great but very costly services for its users? They must
have a plan to get their invested capital back in multiplied forms and this is what Marx argued
about such “capital” – "money that is used to make more money” (Parker 213). Surveillance begins
as a means to an economic end.
While teaching Mae about “Conversion Rate” (Eggers 248) and “Retail Raw” (250), Gina
emphasizes that “the Circle would not exist, and would not grow… if there were not actual
purchases being made, actual commerce spurred. We’re here to be a gateway to all the world’s
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information, but we are supported by advertisers who hope to reach customers through us, right?”
(248). Hence, the Circle’s ultimate monetary purpose reinforces the central Marxist reality:
“getting and keeping economic power is the motive behind all social and political activities,
including education, philosophy, religion, government, the arts, science, technology, the media,
and so on” (Tyson 54). Gina explicates that everything an employee of the Circle does is supposed
to “spur” action of the consumers – “to provoke” and “to stimulate purchases” (248). By using
one’s “credibility,” one can increase the “conversation rate” (248). And the credibility of an
employee like Mae in the Circle is created through a network of extraordinary initiatives that
revolutionize the social media platform by technological innovation which is supposed to create a
world of transparency and availability.
Although “Ty invented TruYou” (21), Bailey and Stenton “monetized” (23) it. They
“found ways to reap funds from all of Ty’s innovations, and it was they who grew the company
into the force that subsumed Facebook, Twitter, Google, and finally Alacrity, Zoopa, Jefe, and
Quan” (23). They have commodified the system and the activities of users of TruYou enrich the
Circle. Senator Williamson launches an “investigation into whether or not the Circle acts as a
monopoly” that violates “free market capitalism” (173) in a brief episode in which Eggers again
emphasizes that the company is a “shark like entity” (476) who would “devour” (477) everything
in its path with “ruthless capitalistic ambition” (484).
To fulfil their disguised monetary ambition, the Circle first propagates several “imploring
messages of inspiration” : “Dream, Participate, Find Community, Innovate, Imagine, Breathe,”
amidst a “vast and rambling campus” below the “spotless and blue sky” (1). After Mae Holland’s
initiation into the Circle campus, one of her supervisors, Dan, shares the company’s “core beliefs”
(46) with her: “…it must be a community. That’s one of our slogans…This isn’t a sweatshop…this
is a place where our humanity is respected, where our opinions are dignified, where our voices are
heard – this is as important as any revenue, any stock price, any endeavor undertaken here” (47).
“Communication” “Understanding,” and “Clarity” are the “mission of the company” (47). While
presenting the wireless SeeChange cameras that can ensure “transparency,” “documentation,” and
“accountability” – from which “tyrants can no longer hide” – Bailey “insists that all that happen
must be known” (67) and “we will become all-seeing, all knowing” (70). Bailey “believes in the
perfectibility of human beings” (291) who would behave as if they are “being watched” (290). The
Circle does not appear to represent a totalitarian future of total control, then. It is a benevolent
entity that believes it is an agent of improvement that has successfully monetized its mission. But
the story or surveillance in the service of perfecting humans into more ideal versions of themselves
and ensuring that they remain good consumers at the same time, changes dramatically. Influenced
by Bailey’s perspectives on secrets and sharing, Mae shares three of her crucial revelations in front
of the Circle audience in the campus, comments that begin to reveal how such benevolence is
always also normalizing in scope and effect: “SECRETS ARE LIES; SHARING IS CARING;
PRIVACY IS THEFT” (303). The goal of surveillance shifts subtly at first, but eventually all that
matters is that everyone broadcasts themselves in ways that successfully end privacy entirely.
As “the most influential company of the world” (Eggers 1), the Circle uses modern
surveillance to establish social norms which it expresses as a set of core values that it then
implements as “ideologies” (from Althusser’s perspective) or “discourses” (from Foucault’s
perspective). As I will argue, these norms are “necessarily imperfect and incomplete” (Parker 259)
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and therefore the “false consciousness” (Parker 228) that they create could be “resisted” (Parker
259). Although the “discourses are not absolute,” “they wield great power” (Parker 256) and the
Circle ultimately normalize the values and visions that they want to “commodify” (Tyson 62)
through modern surveillance system. It is therefore pertinent to first understand what Michel
Foucault explored “as a historical background to various studies of the power of normalization and
the formation of knowledge in modern society” (Foucault 308) – “the correlative history of the
modern soul and of a new power to judge” (Foucault 23).
In Discipline and Punish (1975), Michel Foucault explores how a once dominant form of
punishment that involved the torture of “the body of the condemned” (Foucault 3) was replaced
by different forms of punishment that ultimately served as the model for “disciplinary institutions”
(183) with their “infinite examination and …compulsory objectification” (189) to regulate, perfect,
and “normalize” individuals in modern society. Instead of the body further being the “major target
of penal repression” (8), punishment later became an issue of “certainty” (9) with an intention to
“correct, reclaim, ‘cure’” (10). The idea that “punishment…should strike the soul rather than the
body” (qtd. in Foucault 16) replaced “penal severity” as the primary aim of punishment (16). In
this new form of justice, punishment is acted on “the heart, the thoughts, the will, the inclinations”
(16) and the judicial sentence “bears within it an assessment of normality and technical
prescription for a possible normalization” (21). But “even when they use “‘lenient’ methods,” “it
is always the body that is at issue – the body and its forces, their utility and their docility, their
distribution and their submission” (25).
There were public protests against the spectacle of the scaffold. Hence, “it was breaking
up of this solidarity that was becoming the aim of penal of police repression” (63). To face the
more “widely spread” and “subtle” targets, the penal system recommended a reduced “economic
and political cost” while “increasing its effectiveness and …circuits” (89). “It is no longer the
body, with the ritual play of excessive pains…it is the mind or rather a play of representations and
signs circulating discreetly but necessarily and evidently in the minds of all” (101). “When you
have thus formed the chain of ideas in the heads of your citizens, you will then be able to pride
yourselves on guiding them and being their masters…on the soft fibres of the brain is founded the
unshakable base of the soundest of Empires” (qtd. in Foucault 103). “The power that punishes” is
now “hidden” (105) and it must act while concealing itself beneath the gentle force of nature”
(106). “The best way of punishing them is to employ them” (106): “a slave at the service of all”
(109). “This visibility of punishment was one of the fundamental principles of the new penal code”
(qtd. in Foucault 112). This signifies that in the “punitive city” where there “will be hundreds of
tiny theatres of punishment” (113), “the criminal will be imagined as a source of instruction” and
“will become the vehicle of the law” (112).
Foucault explores the emergence of the “disciplines”, which are methods that “control the
operations of the body”, and “assures the constant subjection of the forces and impose upon them
a relation of docility-utility” (137). In “the art of distributions,” “discipline…requires enclosure”
(141), “partitioning” (143), “registration” (144) and “ranking” – that involves “supervising,
hierarchizing, rewarding” (147). In such disciplinary mechanisms, “an attempt is…made to assure
the quality of the time used” by “constant supervision, the pressure of supervisors, the elimination
of anything that might disturb or distract” (150). Discipline trains, improves, and corrects.
“Discipline…arranges a positive economy” (154) and it “makes individuals” by power through
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the “art of correct training” which involves the “hierarchical observation, normalizing judgement
and…the examination” (170). Such regulation requires unique operations and structures to be
effective. “The perfect disciplinary apparatus would make it possible for a single gaze to see
everything constantly” (173) where the “supervisors” are “perpetually supervised” (177).
“Surveillance” works in a “network of relations” both from “top to bottom” and “bottom to top”
(176) and “produces ‘power’ and distributes individuals in this permanent and continuous field”
(177). In order to establish normalizing effects, “the slightest departures from the correct behavior”
(178) are punished through a process of a “whole micro-penalty” where “each subject finds himself
caught in a punishable, punishing universality” (178). Individuals face “a constant pressure to
conform to the same model, so that they might all be subjected to ‘subordination, docility…correct
practice of…all parts of discipline’” so that they will “be like one another” (182). “The perpetual
penality…compares, differentiates, hierarchizes, homogenizes, excludes” and thus “normalizes.”
(183). Practices of “regular observation” (186) places the “patient in a situation of almost perpetual
examination” (184). Key to their functioning, however, is that these tactics largely do not appear
to be a form of correction and discipline. They appear instead as norms and natural expectations,
subtly enforced. “Disciplinary power…is exercised through its invisibility…and imposes on…its
subjects a principle of compulsory visibility” and it is this reality of “being constantly seen…that
maintains the disciplined individual in his subjection” (187) while being introduced “into the field
of documentation” (189).
Bentham’s architectural innovation of a prison with a central watchtower called a
panopticon becomes Foucault’s most memorable figure for the notion that discipline relies on
making individuals visible and that the exercise of regulatory norms is largely invisible. Any
number of institutions can, in effect, place “a supervisor in a central tower…to shut up in each cell
a madman, a patient, a condemned man, a worker or a schoolboy” (200). The individual “is seen,
but he does not see” who is observing (200) and this “induces in the inmate a state of conscious
and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power” (201). Because one
never knows if one is being watched, one learns to self-regulate and watch oneself. The “lateral
invisibility is a guarantee of order” (200): “there is no danger of a plot, an attempt at collective
escape…no disorders…no coalitions” (201). The result is a society that aims to regulate
individuals according to measures designed to “characterize, classify, specialize; they
distribute…around a norm…and, if necessary, disqualify and invalidate” through direct means of
correction (223).
The Circle reflects such a regulatory society. The Circle creates life-improving technology
that normalizes the company’s values and works through hierarchical observation, examination,
ranking and disqualification – all of which are part of direct surveillance processes. The Circle is
rooted in normalization, even if that is not a goal that would appear to define its operations, making
it a perfect example of a disciplinary institution. No one forces anyone to accept the company’s
discourses – everyone willingly participates in acts of regulating one another. But this is not the
whole story because Eggers combines this perspective with the emergence of the Circle as an
autocratic company – like Big Brother in Nineteen Eighty-Four – at least once their consumers
and the entire society become deeply immersed in the company’s surveillance and there remains
only one option – with no log out system – and that is to do everything through a TruYou account.
As such, the novel charts the progress from discipline as a tactic to normalize and regulate a society
to discipline as the goal or normalization itself.
Rana 81
The Circle’s methods begin according to a more conventional disciplinary model in which
Mae learns to internalize company values and is rewarded for doing so. Mae’s supervisors play a
significant role in this process with their repetition of the Circle values and works and thus establish
the discourses through the actions of Mae and other employees. It is Annie who actually starts the
process of surveillance over Mae, but it is perhaps less about overt claims such as “I’ll be watching
you” (15) and more about a consistent strategy to train and correct how Mae thinks: “Better to be
at the bottom of the ladder you want to climb than in the middle of some ladder you don’t, right?”
(16). She fascinates Mae with “Bailey’s passion project” of bringing “Musicians, comedians,
writers” (17), his love for “ancient” things and his “crusade” (26) for all the treasures. “He just
loves enabling the curiosity of the great young minds” (18). This primary astonishment creates a
channel for future normalization of the surveillance process because Mae certainly did not expect
to find such liberal minds behind the great success of a technology company. This is the moment
where Gramsci’s “hegemony,” Althusser’s “ideology” and Foucault’s “discourse” (Foucault 112)
or “ideologues” (Foucault 102) start to work on the “soft fibres” (Foucault 103) of Mae’s brain
and this is also the moment of normalization. Mae starts Feeling that she “never wanted to work –
never wanted to be – anywhere else” (30). The discipline associated with the Circle acts as a
regulatory force upon Mae as she comes to view herself according to the norms and values of the
company.
This disciplinary environment, like any regulatory society, involves surveillance and
observation followed by forms of correction. Mae understands that extracurricular activities are
integral parts of the Circle. Gina introduces her with the “Participation Rank” (100) that is counted
based on one’s “zings…profiles…photos posted, attendance at Circle events” (100). This certainly
creates a sense of competition in Mae and she starts permanently staying on campus and working
even on holidays to improve her position in the Circle. Mae comes to consider herself an integral
part of the Circle: “I’m all yours” (179). She internalizes the norms established by the Circle. She
does not view these norms as an ideology. They appear natural to her, because she is immersed in
its world.
The constant reports and demands on Mae make her fully aware of the expectations of the
Circle. She becomes “a crucial member of the community” (180). Denise and Josiah expect Mae
to share everything that she experiences. They emphasize that she has deprived the community of
learning about her father’s illness “episode” (183) by not sharing anything about it in the
InnerCircle or OuterCircle accounts. Focusing their target on “Passion, Participation and
Transparency” (184), Denise and Josiah then proceed towards Sunday activity of Mae and show
their surprise at not seeing any post on her “kayaking” (185). They emphasize being “engaged”
continuously (188) with the community. The most important point to mention here is that Mae is
not upset after these apparent humiliations; she rather takes these as her failure of not being able
to fulfil the expectations of the Circle. “She disgusted herself” (189) and thinks of her failure to
be “a person of some value to the world” (190). There was a time when Mae enjoyed privacy. She
used to kayak and appreciate that “no one could see her, and no one would ever know she was
here” (Eggers 268). But when her illegal entry into the water is caught on camera, she quickly
learns to internalize the expectation that she is “being watched” literally at all times (290). More,
she internalizes an expectation that she shares her life with others continuously. She becomes fully
“transparent” (304) after this episode and is transformed into an icon of the company by wearing
Cultural Logic 82
a portable “lens” (307) on her chest that broadcasts her entire life to viewers around the world. The
best measure of the effectiveness of social norms may just be that one is willing to turn on oneself.
Eggers offers readers a portrait of the ordinary ways in which individuals can internalize norms
and regulate themselves, even noting the aggression and disgust such self-regulation can involve.
Eamon Bailey influences Mae the most in terms of normalizing the values of the Circle.
After being accused of “selfishness” due to her private kayaking activities, she becomes
preoccupied with “self-denunciations”: “She hated who she was” (276). Mae now tries “to do
something visible to demonstrate her commitment to the company” (277). The power of norms to
cultivate in Mae a mental space of self-humiliation is the emotional expression of relations of
power that are designed to scrub privacy out of existence. For Mae, there are moments when secrets
are precious, especially when “[they] can protect someone’s feeling” (281). Bailey, however,
argues against any secret by providing examples like the value of Julian Assange’s Wikileaks and
the rhetoric of benevolent improvement. Bailey contends that “any information that eludes us,
anything that’s not accessible, prevents us from being perfect” (287). “Secrets are the enablers of
antisocial, immoral and destructive behavior” (289). He asks, “what if we all behaved as if we
were being watched?” (290). Eggers routinely stages debates such as these as a key medium for
the alteration of individuals as they are bent toward norms of transparency. The exercise of power
is presented as if it were a matter of reason rather than force. It is not the physical camera which
normalizes. It is the sense of always being watched that makes people docile and it is via norms –
like the Circle’s core values – that people come to regulate themselves.
Once she begins to broadcast her life, Mae becomes a “semi-celebrity” (376) with millions
of followers who want to be like her. She is a “role model” and this fact creates “a feeling of
responsibility” which “grounded and fueled her days” (329). Bailey utilizes the great popularity of
Mae to continue normalizing certain values. Instead of deleting the video of Mae’s parents’ sexual
encounter that was captured live on a Circle SeeChange camera, Bailey normalizes the absence of
privacy, even for such sensitive phenomena: “you know we don’t delete” (369) and “when
everything is known, everything acceptable will be accepted…You need to be a role model here”
(370). Hence, Bailey normalizes certain values and makes anything outside of those values appear
abnormal. The Circle’s visibility is no longer a tactic designed to subject individuals to normalizing
pressures because it is a society governed by social norms designed to regulate behaviour and
maximize social cohesion. Its visibility has become the norm in itself.
Losing one’s sense of privacy is one of the terrible consequences of the Circle’s regime of
surveillance and normalization. But such losses do not go unnoticed. The novel depicts attempts
by individuals, including Mae, Mercer, Ty and Annie, to keep a personal space for themselves and,
therefore, the rapid loss of this space through willing self-surveillance creates marked expressions
of alienation among at least some characters. Their attempts to create private spaces for meaningful
communication is antagonistic to the Circle’s vision of transparency and those attempts ultimately
fail. For example, in addition to kayaking alone, Mae often meets Annie (427) in secret and
expresses a desire “to be alone with Kalden” (323). Kayaking gives Mae great pleasure – the
pleasure of being alone with nature and thinking “if the seal knew…how lucky they were to have
all this to themselves” (83). Mae “stood, breathing heavily, feeling strong, feeling enormous. What
a strange thing, she thought, to be there…a private island” (267) and “because it was dark…no
one would ever know she was there” (268). Like the “nest” whose “equilibrium of scents and
Rana 83
construction” would be “ruined” (269) if touched, Mae’s own privacy can only be destroyed by
external intervention. The narrator bears witness to this recognition by observing that amidst the
roar of transparency in the Circle, “the wave of despair…gathers in Mae’s chest. She’d been
feeling this, this black rip, this loud tear, within her” that “didn’t …last long” “but …she saw a
tiny tear in …black cloth” through which she “heard the screams of the millions of invisible souls”
(196). But Mae does not know “who was screaming through the tear in the cloth” (196). Resistance
is everywhere and always possible; but it can be ignored, especially when it takes the form of
disorganized voices expressing their individual frustrations. Such moments of resistance appear,
first and foremost, as individual efforts in the novel.
Eggers exposes many of the fissures of this culture of pervasive and normalized self-
surveillance through the character of Mercer. Mercer can see through the apparently fantastic
Circle ideologies and discover a chained future for Circle users. He has the power to analyze
different consequences of the excessive Circle surveillance. From the beginning of Mae’s
employment till the visible signs of Mae’s impending tragedy, Mercer tries to show Mae the
possible fatal results of the Circle and its monopoly. While talking to Mae, he notes they are “never
alone” and they even look at each other “through hundred other people’s eyes” (131). Such a
description nicely captures the operations of any social norm that can condition how one sees
oneself or others. He argues that “the tools you guys create actually manufacture unnaturally
extreme social needs” (133) and the users feel “wasted and hollow and diminished” (134). For
Mercer, the Circle is a “cult taking over the world” and he warns Mae regarding the false
“benevolence” of the Circle leaders who could “ruin” (259) anyone who would challenge the
monopoly of the company. He contends that people like Mae “willingly tie” themselves “to these
lashes” and become “incredibly boring” (260).
In a letter to Mae and her “audience” (366), Mercer laments the possibility of losing Mae
as they have taken “very different evolutionary paths” (367) and thus emphasizes the fact that the
Circle continues to manufacture a terrible world of surveillance which would end in tragedy. He
further insists that “surveillance shouldn’t be the tradeoff for any goddamn service we get” and he
predicts that “if things continue this way, there will be two societies – the one you’re helping to
create, and an alternative to it” (367). In short, he criticizes the “constant surveillance” (367) of
the “tyrannical state” that may “go too far and collapses into itself” (368). After Annie’s collapse,
Mercer writes a letter to Mae again to make her consider the terrible “end” that would come to her
soon (430). He contends that “our souls need the mysteries of night and the clarity of day” and the
Circle’s “ever-present daylight” (430-431) and its “criminality of privacy” (432) “will burn us all
alive’ (431). Mercer becomes of a victim of Mae and her millions of followers whose merciless
pursuit of Mercer through the “SoulSearch” (456) program results in a terrible accident that kills
him. This tragic event perhaps oversimplifies things and demonstrates an area where Foucault’s
sense of surveillance culture is substantially more developed than Eggers’. This sample of a
multitude of happy consumers of surveillance is a proof of the Circle’s power of normalization.
This also shows how such blind adherence to one set of norms can overcome deviant beliefs,
especially when they are voiced by a lone individual. But if the tragedy of norms is that they can
chase one out of existence, this is too high a bar. Social norms can also make life unbearable
without actually killing individuals, as Foucault well knew. The goal of regulatory discipline is
not the return of the gallows, but instead the creation of conditions in which individuals need not
ever face the penalty of death to be kept docile and productive.
Cultural Logic 84
Annie’s collapse and Mae’s radical transformation are two parallel but totally opposite
phenomena. Where Mae happily eliminates her privacy, Annie becomes evidence of the cost of
doing so. The “PastPerfect” program that delves into the family history of individuals destroys
Annie by bringing up her family history of slave trading (428) and by sharing the story of her
parents’ “open marriage” (436). “Now I don’t have parents,” Annie is forced to declare (440). The
effect of such a search of her past is that she starts resisting the Circle beliefs: “I don’t know if we
should know everything” (435). The shocking consequence of such merciless pursuit of the past
is that Annie collapses and goes into a “coma” (490). On the other hand, Mae remains enthralled
by the company’s surveillance logic and the normalization of absolute transparency, so much so
that she wonders about a new technology that could capture Annie’s coma thoughts: “they needed
to talk about Annie, the thoughts she was thinking” (491). In brief, these two different poles of a
same thread are the signs of the complex nature of the Circle in an age of microcosms of power
structures where the effects of regulatory power are unequal and uneven.
The central concern of my paper involves a form of surveillance by social media that
becomes both a norm of absolute public transparency as well as the foundation of social existence.
Such pervasive transparency means that there “will be more Mercers” who “don’t want to be found
but who will be” (481) and such measures anticipate “a totalitarian nightmare” (481). Ty contends
that the “closing of the Circle” will make everyone “tracked” from “cradle to grave, with no
possibility of escape” (481). He observes that the Circle has “devoured” “competitors for years”
and as the “90 percent of the world’s searches go through the Circle,” it can “control most of what
anyone sees and knows” and it can “ruin anyone” within “five minutes” (482). In response to
Mae’s argument that “if everyone has equal access to services, to information, we finally have a
chance at equality” and “if everyone’s tracked, then there’s no crime, no murder, no kidnapping
and rape,” Ty contends that the Circle’s “ruthless capitalistic ambition” (484) with its “filterless
society” where “secrets are crimes” (483) will re-make the world. It will be reminiscent of life in
the “new aquarium” (466) where “every creature” would be “devoured by a beast” (485). He
further contends that “the ceaseless pursuit of data to quantify the value of any endeavor is
catastrophic to true understanding” and “we must all have the right to disappear” (485). These
counter discourses are significant to resist the borderless modern-day colonization of the minds by
the social media.
One may wonder why Mercer and Ty are not affected by the Circle’s powerful regimes of
normalization and why they resist the surveillance logic of the company. Understanding the nature
of the power structure and exploring the concepts of resistance within the domain of power or
ideology or discourse would help explain the context from which Mercer and Ty become the
exception in the Circle. For Foucault, “power is everywhere” (177); “it comes from everywhere”
(Foucault 93) and it is not “possessed as a thing, or transferred as a property; it functions like a
piece of machinery…it is the apparatus as a whole that produces ‘power’” (177). Power “invests”
even those who ‘do not have it’ and it is “transmitted by them and through them” (Foucault 27).
Power is found in “a network of relations” (26) which “go right down into the depths of society”
(27). Foucault argues that “power produces knowledge” (Foucault 27) and “discourse” (Parker
259) and the discourses – e.g., the discourses of surveillance – “regulate, police, and surveil”
(Parker 257) our “behavior and beliefs” (Parker 257). But the “discourses are not absolute” (Parker
256) and “any discourse of power…will necessarily be imperfect and incomplete” (Parker 259).
Rana 85
Foucault contends that “where there is power, there is resistance” and “these points of resistance
are present everywhere in the power network” (95) but it does not mean that these “plurality of
resistances” are “doomed to perpetual defeat”; rather, they are the “irreducible opposite” (96) to
power. He emphasizes that power remains “constantly in tension” and in “perpetual battle” (26)
with its internal “instability” and “struggles” that can even invert the relations of power (27).
The Circle’s power structure is not top down or bottom up or linear; it is a network of
various positions, all of which are different from each other and it has contradictions and tensions
within it. The biggest contradiction comes from the creator of the Circle, Ty. Even the owner
cannot control the power that was originated from him: it is as if “the falcon cannot hear the
falconer; Things Fall Apart” (Yeats). It is a clear proof that the Circle’s discourses have serious
contradictory positions within them. The liberal Eamon Bailey seems to be totally different from
the ruthless capitalist Stenton. Mae and Annie are important parts of this power structure, too.
They promote many of the Circle’s ideologies through their popularity in the Circle social media
platforms. There is always a force that resists the advance of power, too. Mercer and Ty create
resistance but fail to manufacture what Marxists would call “collective thinking” (Parker 226);
they are incapable of building up “alliances with other groups” (Parker 218). Unable to set up a
“historic bloc” (Parker 218), to borrow Gramsci’s phrasing, Mercer and Ty are doomed to fail. In
a world where most people broadcast their private lives for the consumption of others, such
alliances seem more and more unlikely, at least if consumers conceive themselves as alone in a
sea of others. By the end of the novel, it is already too late to expect any movement against the
Circle, “the fucking shark that eats the world” (Eggers 480). This reflects the fact that the effect of
Circle surveillance has extensively pervaded the society and it has created many highly successful
but obedient TruYou users. On the other hand, Ty’s alternative option of “sailing around the world
in a boat” (Eggers 486) seems ludicrous, born as it is of incredible privilege and indifference to
the rest of the world. Mercer’s logic against the Circle surveillance is strong but not enough to
replace the mental shackles which have softly chained Mae. Hence, although Mercer’s hope of “a
new generation” who will “rise up against” and “see all this as ludicrous, oppressive, utterly out
of control” (Eggers 432) is promising, the Circle has won over the soft fiber of Mae’s and her
followers’ brains and thus it seems impossible to expect such a force for change to organically
appear.
In order to best understand the effects associated with social surveillance in The Circle,
one needs to carefully analyze the scenes that Eggers significantly reiterates in the novel: Mae’s
private kayaking trips into the Oakland bay and the new aquarium scene with ocean-going
creatures, which is telecasted live to millions of TruYou users. If kayaking primarily represented
a sense of freedom and privacy, it comes to embody the extent to which visibility has become an
absolute norm. Even embarking onto the ocean has become an activity policed by SeeChange
cameras. By the time Mae is transformed into fully believing in the Circle’s norms of broadcasting
all of one’s life, privacy no longer carries any significance for her because the distinction between
a public self and a private self is now blurred by her practices of self-surveillance. But perhaps
such privacy never quite existed or was never as total as it appeared. As Foucault notes, the self-
regulating subject does not need to be watched and the pursuit of physical activity and associations
of nature and privacy are nothing if not social norms. Mae’s kayaking excursions are themselves
a particular way of embodying the norm, just a different norm than one of absolute publicity.
Perhaps there was always a shark circling there, unseen but active beneath the surface. The shark
Cultural Logic 86
in the tank represents the Circle itself with its deadly capacity to eat everything in its path. And as
anyone who has watched Jaws or is familiar with the social conventions associated with sharks
knows, one does not need to see the shark to fear it and act accordingly. It possesses a curiously
disciplinary force, thanks to how it has come to represent a particular sort of ideal of viciousness.
Both Mae (symbolically – as Mae often loves Kayaking alone in the sea) and the shark are
sea creatures and although they both love to live in the water, they are invisible to each other. Mae
does not know that her most private space – the vastness of the ocean – is invaded by the most
dangerous creature (the shark or the Circle surveillance) who is going to kill her soon. Like Mae,
Eggers would seem to suggest, one’s personal data and digital privacy increasingly reside in the
hands of sharks that have the power to destroy one’s privacy by utilizing one’s data for their
benefit. But like the shark, these strategies of self-surveillance remain invisible to many users.
Some may argue that there are privacy laws and the companies cannot use our data without
our knowledge, but The Cambridge Analytica and Facebook scandal, for example, reveals how
our data can be misused. As I argue before, resistance against such misuse is possible but Egger’s
novel reminds readers that social media companies may be tempted by totalitarian impulses that
destroy all opposition. This failure of resistance could also be reflected from the perspective of
Foucault’s idea of power as relational. As almost all of the users of the social media technology
developed by Circle have been rewarded for their compliance and are routinely encouraged to act
in ways that fulfill the social ideals associated with broadcasting one’s life and making oneself
subject to the normalizing desires of the masses, it is therefore impossible – or very difficult – for
a few revolutionary thinkers to change the system and especially to change the minds of users. But
what may be most surprising about the narrative that Eggers offers regarding the emergence of
pervasive data-based surveillance is that this may no longer be a tactic in order to promote
particular social ideals and norms. Instead, it may become the end of surveillance in itself. In such
a world, there can be no privacy; everyone will exist as fully public, transparent to the point of
almost non-existence, as if one were only what social norms and ideals could imagine about
existence and its complexities.
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to Dr. George C. Grinnell, who provided me with timely feedback on my article.
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Author
Shohel Rana is an assistant professor of English at Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman Aviation
and Aerospace University (Bangladesh). He received MAs in English from the University of
British Columbia Okanagan (Canada) and from Jahangirnagar University (Bangladesh).
Since 1997
ISSN 1097-3087
https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/clogic/index
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San Diego State University
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