The Circle was published simultaneously by Alfred A. Knopf and McSweeney’s in 2013. Mae Holland, a recent college graduate, lands a coveted job at the Circle — a Silicon Valley tech company that has absorbed Google, Facebook, and Twitter into a single unified platform. The Circle’s campus is a utopia of free food, free healthcare, and relentless social engagement. Its motto is “All That Happens Must Be Known.” Its founders — three “Wise Men” who combine Zuckerberg’s ambition, Page’s engineering, and Brin’s idealism — are building a world in which every human action is transparent, trackable, and shareable.
Mae rises through the company by embracing its ideology with increasing fervor. She goes “transparent” — wearing a camera that broadcasts her life 24/7 to millions of followers. She promotes “Completion” — the Circle’s plan to link every citizen’s identity to a single account. She helps implement “Demoxie” — mandatory online voting linked to Circle accounts. Each step is presented as a service to democracy, community, and human connection, and each step is a further erosion of the private self.
The novel’s method is satire through extrapolation: every feature of the Circle’s platform is a slight exaggeration of something that already exists. The surveillance is voluntary, motivated by the desire for connection and approval rather than imposed by a police state. The dystopia is cheerful, well-lit, and staffed by enthusiastic young people who genuinely believe they are making the world better. The horror is not that the system is evil but that it is appealing.
Critics were divided: some found the satire heavy-handed and the characters thin (Mae, in particular, lacks the interiority that would make her capitulation psychologically convincing), while others argued that the thinness was the point — in a world of total transparency, there is no interiority left. The 2017 film adaptation, starring Emma Watson and Tom Hanks, was poorly received.
Collecting The Circle
First edition (Alfred A. Knopf / McSweeney’s, 2013): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $15–$40
- Very good/very good: $5–$15
- Signed: $30–$80