Meet the New Boss: Dave Eggers's The Circle and the New Digital Totalitarianism

Abstract:Dave Eggers's 2013 novel, The Circle, is a digital age dystopia, illustrating a shift from traditional dystopian fears about totalitarian governments toward fears of media monopolies. Despite the modern polish, the Circle social media company illustrates the Althusserian concept of interpellation, where citizen identities are "hailed" by the social media they use. Indeed, "citizenship" itself in Eggers's novel has become digitally privatized. Structurally, social media companies undermine the notion of freedom of speech, even for Americans, by imposing their own standards for discourse, as well as exploiting digital audience labor in terms of content, consumption, and data mining. Individuals posting on social media no longer have the right to define their voice, audience, publicity, or their messages' permanence, because now "their existence is inscribed in the actions of practices governed by rituals defined in the last instance by an ideological apparatus" (Althusser 1971, 170). Dave Eggers's The Circle represents social media companies acting as a ruling class, enforcing ideology through material conditions of the digital factory—the attention industry of social media—by asserting powers of surveillance and structuring corporate-serving conventions of communication. Eggers espouses the dangers of users willingly logging into "digital citizenship" as subjects ruled by social media companies.