About a year ago, just as Donald Trump was waiting be inaugurated, two twentieth century novels skyrocketed up the bestseller list. One was George Orwell’s 1984, which topped Amazon’s sales rankings that week. The other was Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which repeated the feat two weeks later.
People seemed to think that these classics had something to tell us about Trump’s America. The parallels weren’t—how to put this delicately—exact. Orwell’s warning about a hyper-repressive Soviet-style totalitarian system with no free speech rights did not have much in common with the hapless, chaotic, and widely-criticized Trump transition. Indeed, you could argue that 1984’s bestseller status demonstrated us precisely that we were living in a society nothing like 1984.
By the same token, Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, a dystopian novel about a religious fundamentalist society, was somehow seen to bear similarities to the presidency of a thrice-married, non-church-going, affair-with-porn-star-having libertine.
That’s not to say that literature can’t tell us anything about the Trump era, of course. I would just suggest a different guide to the moment we now find ourselves in: Dave Eggers’s 2013 novel The Circle.
The Circle, like all of Eggers’s books, is overlong and self-indulgent—but at times quite brilliant. Most profoundly, it recognizes where the real power in American society lies these days: With our tech overlords.
In The Circle, there is one dominant corporation in America. It’s essentially a hybrid of Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, and Google. Relentlessly expansive, it operates with three mottos: “secrets are lies,” “sharing is caring,” and, most chillingly, “privacy is theft.”
The symbolism of the book is obvious, of course: Eggers is sounding a warning about the American tech giants that are undermining our personal privacy—and indeed, commodifying it. All of this, of course, is done with a happy face. (Its portrayal of one of the company’s leaders, a smiley-faced totalitarian, is a brilliant send up of the messianic do-goodism of Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, et al.)
When The Circle came out, some of its features seemed a bit overstated. For example, it has a plot line where the company begins installing cameras in people’s homes. That seemed over the top. That could never happen, right? Wrong. Facebook is moving forward with a similar plan. Likewise, The Circle has a character who co-founded the company turn on it, and begin to act as a digital dissident. It all seemed a little on the nose, too. Except now that’s happening too: A Facebook co-founder is these days making the rounds warning of social media addiction. As for “privacy is theft?” Well, how else can we explain the backlash against Taylor Swift for not having public opinions on Donald Trump? The idea, quite clearly, is that she is not entitled to any private life. All of which is to say, Eggers’s book doesn’t look over the top so much as eerily prescient.
Perhaps the sharpest insight of The Circle is the way that it shows how our government is now, in many respects, subservient to our tech masters. In the novel, Washington bigwigs and local politicians grovel towards the company—concerns about privacy or monopolistic practices be damned.
Today, tech companies largely dominate K Street. The upshot is that even though they increasingly look like monopolies, no action is taken to squelch their power. Nor is this a federal-only issue: Look at the way local governments have fallen all over themselves to offer Jeff Bezos incentives to set up his second Amazon headquarters in their cities.
Indeed, the supposed feud between Bezos and Trump shows who has the real power in America these days. Trump can tweet impotently about Bezos all he likes; the Amazon titan continues his forward march.
So if you want a novel that reflects today’s reality well, pick up The Circle. Perhaps not from Amazon, however.
