• 1 Zuboff, Shoshana, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Front (...)

‘Surveillance capitalism is the puppet master that imposes its will through the medium of the ubiquitous digital apparatus. I now name the apparatus Big Other: it is the sensate, computational, connected puppet that renders, monitors, computes and modifies human behaviour’. Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019)1

• 2 Zuboff, S., Surveillance Capitalism, p.524
• 3 Zuboff, S., Surveillance Capitalism, p.254 (original emphasis)
• 4 Auden, W.H.and Christopher Isherwood, Journey to a War (London, Faber & Faber, 1939)

1Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at The New Frontier of Power quickly became an international bestseller and one of the year’s most lauded academic books when it was published in 2019. Rightly so: based on decades of thoughtful, detailed and innovative research, acute in its analysis and timely in its dark prognosis of a brave new world based on what Zuboff explained as a new species of power, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism was both a multi-dimensional examination of new and worrying forces in the twenty-first century and a political and social call to arms. After spending over 500 pages detailing this new, pervasive and determining form of surveillance, Zuboff argues that, as powerful and potentially overwhelming as it seems in the early decades of the twenty-first century, surveillance capitalism does not herald the end of history. There are, she asserts, other possibilities available to those with the courage to resist what seems to be irresistible. Indeed, in the final chapter, titled ‘A Coup From Above’, she calls for the overthrow of surveillance capitalism, using the American Gilded Age as a comparable period of social rupture. In that era, she notes, people who recognised robber barons as robbers brought them and the Age to an end through ‘progressive legislation and the New Deal’.2 Building on this historical precedent, Zuboff declares: ‘surely the age of surveillance capital will meet the same fate as it teaches us how we do not want to live. It [surveillance capitalism] instructs us in the irreplaceable value of our greatest moral and political achievements by threatening to destroy them’.3 Despite its undeniably weighty intellectual argument (the ‘Notes’ themselves run to over 100 pages), Zuboff’s energetic, fluent prose helps make The Age of Surveillance Capitalism a compelling read. She is a literary stylist, one who also calls upon a range of creative works to illustrate a point or suggest a counter-argument. Her book, for example, repeatedly references the work of one of the greatest British writers of the 1930s and 1940s in advocating a response to contemporary surveillance. She also sources a late-1940s piece of speculative fiction with surveillance implications to explain the new forces at play. Yet, despite the reference in the epigraph above to ‘Big Other’, the British writer is not George Orwell; nor is the key speculative work Nineteen Eighty-Four. Instead, Zuboff deploys W.H. Auden’s sonnet sequence from Journey to a War (1939),4 and B.F. Skinner’s utopian Walden Two (1948) to prosecute her case. Zuboff does cite Orwell’s dystopian classic, but largely dismisses its contemporary relevance. She is concerned about the power and the plans of surveillance capitalists such as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Larry Page and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella. She labels these and their ilk ‘utopianists’, who act to create a ‘Utopia of Certainty’ using data collection and its monetization. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism deplores what she sees as this utopian drive.

• 5 More, Thomas, Utopia, revised edition, eds. G. Logan and R. Adams (Cambridge, Cambridge University (...)
• 6 Zuboff, S., Surveillance Capitalism, p.402
• 7 Manuel, Frank and Fritzie, Utopian Thought in the Western World (Cambridge MA, Belknap Press, 1979)

2The terms ‘utopia’, ‘utopianists’ and ‘utopian’ are all contestable, as Zuboff is no doubt aware. In the most obvious sense, the term derives from Thomas More’s 1516 classic text in which he largely invents and names a genre. Crucially, More consciously embeds in the term Utopia a play on words signalling that his fictional island is the good place that is no place. Within Utopia itself he introduces characters who argue with the traveller who claims to have returned from Utopia, Raphael Hythloday, and who argues forcefully that Utopia is superior to the contemporary Europe of the sixteenth century. These characters have reasons to challenge that certainty, for More consciously seeds Utopia the text and Utopia the island with provocative elements: the Utopians wage war and enslave captured soldiers, assassinating opposing leaders. The island is a place of constant surveillance—for while the communal lifestyle abolishes private property, it also abolishes privacy, so that ‘there are no hiding places’ and everyone lives ‘in the full view of all’.5 Zuboff suggests that contemporary surveillance capitalism is marked by ‘the utopian rhetoric of a magical age’ in which people such as Zuckerberg, Page and Nadella literally propose, as Nadella did in 2017, to ‘‘Change the world!’’6 Her use of the term ‘utopian’ builds on the foundational work of Frank and Fritzie Manuel, who in Utopian Thought in the Western World7 distinguish six features that characterize utopianists:

• 9 Zuboff, S., Surveillance Capitalism, p.405

3The one point at which she diverges from the Manuels is in their sixth element, that the utopianist’s gadgets ‘rarely go beyond the technological potentialities of his age’, that ‘he cannot make a world out of nothing’. Zuboff counters than in our age ‘surveillance capitalists can and do make such a world—a genuinely historical deviation from the norm’.9 In Skinner’s Walden Two she sees the fictional foretelling of the type of ‘instrumentarian power’ that has superseded the “totalitarian power” Orwell depicts in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

• 11 Zuboff, S., Surveillance Capitalism, p.364
• 12 Zuboff, S., Surveillance Capitalism, p.404
• 13 Zuboff, S., Surveillance Capitalism, p.471

5The references to myth, perennial struggle and the human spirit, offer solace, inspiration and an alternative means of understanding history, social forces, motivations and possibilities for change. Other epigraphs in the book draw on Homer’s Odyssey, Leonard Cohen’s song ‘Hallelujah’ and Susan Sontag’s On Photography. Zuboff incorporates Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol into the text, reading Scrooge as someone unwilling to accept the ‘uncomfortable facts of human ignorance’;11 Goethe’s fable ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ is seen as a metaphor for surveillance capitalism, which is a ‘demonic force of pure unrelenting power’,12 and Jean-Paul Sartre’s drama No Exit is taken to illustrate how ‘the self-other balance can never be adequately ‘struck’ as long as the others are constantly ‘watching’’.13 While she treats Nineteen Eighty-Four as dated, Zuboff lauds Orwell’s relatively obscure essay ‘Second Thoughts on James Burnham’ (in which Orwell eviscerates Burnham’s influential 1941 study The Managerial Revolution) arguing that the essay exemplifies the intellectual independence and refusal to submit to dominant forces required to resist surveillance capitalism today. Creative works clearly matter to Zuboff for their explanatory power and their potential to activate critical thought and necessary action. This article explores the ways in which, in an immensely learned and detailed piece of nonfiction, Zuboff utilises literary works to demystify – and argue for resistance to – surveillance capitalism. As interesting as what Zuboff includes in the book is what is not there. For readers of this journal (given The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’s focus on surveillance) one obvious absence is Jeremy Bentham. Her 2015 article ‘Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of An Information Civilization’, which introduces arguments developed at length in her later book, provides the explanation:

• 15 Zuboff, S., Surveillance Capitalism, pp. 470-471
• 16 See Lyon, David, The Culture of Surveillance: Watching as a Way of Life (Cambridge, Polity Press, 2 (...)

6Her argument is persuasive: while the panopticon usefully accounted for a world before surveillance capital took hold, in the age of Facebook, Google and Apple, the insights it provided no longer apply. Jeremy Bentham and his brother Samuel make only a fleeting appearance in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,15 and Bentham scholars might (if they accept Zuboff’s argument) need to comfort themselves with the fact that there is something admirable in a theory having nearly 200 years of intellectual purchase. Another absence more easily explained is Dave Eggers’ The Circle, a dystopian novel about the meshing of surveillance and capitalism that was itself a bestseller when it first appeared in 2013. I am explicitly not using the absence of The Circle in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism to create a ‘gotcha’ moment—as wide-ranging as Zuboff’s work undoubtedly is, she cannot be expected to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of every new novel on a related topic. Rather, given her undoubted interest in the ways that fiction can provide insightful analysis of reality, I want in this article to connect The Circle and The Age of Surveillance Capitalism within a broader examination of surveillance capitalism and its relationship to surveillance and to creative literature more generally.16 I aim to show how The Circle does what utopian literature often does: discern, depict and intelligently decipher emerging trends. While not openly referencing either Samuel or Jeremy Bentham, Eggers’ novel nevertheless incorporates ideas relevant to the panopticon: the baleful effect of being watched; the ways in which architecture plays its part in surveillance; how monitoring can subtly infiltrate multiple zones of existence. I also contend that The Circle, for all its focus on surveillance capitalism, ends on a note that reflects the enduring power and relevance of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell’s classic, I suggest, still has a role to play in the resistance to surveillance capitalism that Zuboff calls for so persuasively.

• 20 Auden and Isherwood, Journey to a War, p.13

11Journey to a War had detailed in diaries, photographs and poetry Auden’s and Isherwood’s impressions of a war now largely forgotten, except by its antagonists. The authors acknowledge the highly impressionistic quality of their observations: that they did not speak Chinese, suspected that some of their informants might have been unreliable, and had no special knowledge of ‘Far Eastern affairs’.20 These acknowledged flaws, however, are irrelevant given Zuboff’s purpose. She deploys Auden’s sonnets not for their historical, military and cultural accuracy, but because they supply ways of articulating thoughts, fears and motivations. Zuboff extracts Auden’s awareness of the hatred for the unseen, the pining for real human connection, and the sense of unprecedented oppression from ‘Sonnets from China’, repurposing those ideas to understand and potentially resist the contemporary world of surveillance capitalism.

• 21 Zuboff, S., Surveillance Capitalism, pp.364-365
• 22 Zuboff, S., Surveillance Capitalism, p.367
• 23 Zuboff, S., Surveillance Capitalism, p.366

12Where Auden formulates emotional insights that provide Zuboff with succour and resolve, for the substance of her analysis of surveillance capitalism she draws more extensively from the scientific and creative work of the behavioural psychologist B.F. Skinner. In About Behaviourism (1974), Zuboff explains, Skinner extols the virtues of a textbook with ‘the ominous-sounding title Psychology of the Other-One’ by psychologist Max Meyer, in which Meyer restricts ‘human inwardness—‘soul’, ‘self”, ‘mind’, ‘consciousness’—[…] to the subjective life of the individual’. Meyer claims that for the social sciences, and therefore for the understanding of society at large, human inwardness could have ‘no scientific value because it cannot be observed and measured’.21 Zuboff judges that Skinner adopted Meyer’s focus on the outer, observable Other, rather than any notion of a soul, as the necessary step for the proper understanding of society. This ‘otherization of humanity was to be the road to a new kind of political liberation’.22 She suggests that ‘Skinner’s commitment to the viewpoint of the One-Other was unshakable, and it is through his elaboration of this viewpoint that we can begin to grasp the essence of instrumentarian power’.23 In Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971), Zuboff declares, Skinner

• 25 Zuboff, S., Surveillance Capitalism, p.370

13Skinner, for Zuboff, is the utopianist forerunner of Zuckerberg, Page and Nadella. The technologies that engineered behaviour would be unobtrusive and would incorporate ‘organisational systems and procedures designed to shape behaviour toward specific ends’. The large amounts of personal data required to facilitate this shaping would require the resituating of the boundary between public and private, but Zuboff judges that ‘like today’s surveillance capitalists, [Skinner] was confident that the slow drip of technological invention would eventually push privacy to the margins of human experience, where it would join “freedom” and other troublesome illusions’.25 Though Skinner was not overtly interested in the commercial potential of his ideas, Zuboff sees him as unwittingly providing a form of blueprint for the type of behavioural manipulation that forms the basis of contemporary surveillance capitalism. Given this assessment, it is ironic that Skinner died at the very dawn of the internet age in 1990: Tim Berners-Young invented the World Wide Web that year; Google was still nearly a decade away. While her term for this new form of power, ‘Big Other’, appears specifically to reference Orwell’s classic (the association is so obvious that one’s spellcheck is likely to autocorrect the phrase ‘Big Brother’) and certainly plays on the brand recognition of that work, in fact the term mashes together Orwell with Skinner’s concentration on the Other-One interaction. Zuboff argues that Skinner’s fictional Walden Two, published more than half-a-century before his death, offers a more accurate vision of the processes behind contemporary surveillance than does Nineteen Eighty-Four.

• 26 Zuboff, S., Surveillance Capitalism, pp.371-375
• 27 Orwell, George, Nineteen Eighty-Four, edited by Peter Davison, (London, Secker and Warburg, 1998), (...)
• 28 Zuboff, S., Surveillance Capitalism, p.373

14In a section titled ‘Two Utopias’26 she compares these novels, seeing Nineteen Eighty-Four as depicting the totalitarian power only recently destroyed in Nazi Germany, still dominant in the Soviet Union, and a potential threat globally at the time of publication, in 1949. Orwell’s vision suggests the Party’s need to crush the souls of its opponents, to render them compliant husks, exemplified in the narrative’s famous final lines about protagonist Winston Smith: ‘He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.’27 By contrast, she argues, ‘Walden Two was not intended as a warning but rather as the antidote to totalitarianism, and more broadly a practical recipe for rebuilding Western societies after the war’.28 The fictional society of Walden Two is a utopian community of about one thousand people organised around principles of behavioural engineering established by Frazier, a Skinner doppelgänger. This imagined world has labour-saving devices and communal effort that require only four hours work per day, a labour-credit scheme that abolishes money, and community-reared children, relative sexual equality and artistic flourishing as the norm. Zuboff describes Walden Two as depicting

• 30 https://www.twinoaks.org/faqs-all-on-one-page

15Initially largely ignored, Walden Two enjoyed a revival in the 1960s and 1970s when intentional communities proliferated, Skinner’s ideas proving so attractive that dozens of actual societies were established on its principles. At least one, Twin Oaks, is still functioning.30 In Living Walden Two: B.F. Skinner’s Behaviourist Utopia and Experimental Communities, Hilke Kuhlmann reports that most communities based on Skinner’s ideas in fact have failed, and that from early on ‘Skinner’s ideas were far from universally applauded’, with critics such as Noam Chomsky, Carl Rogers and Arthur Koestler arguing that

• 32 Zuboff, S., Surveillance Capitalism, p.352

16While this provides a useful summation of arguments against Skinner, he would likely dismiss them as based on a deficient understanding of the individual and of social forces in general. Zuboff’s comparison of Walden Two and Nineteen Eighty-Four illustrates ‘two distinct species of power’: the totalitarian power depicted by Orwell and the instrumentarian power evoked by Skinner. The latter she defines as ‘the instrumentation and instrumentalization of behaviour for the purposes of modification, prediction, monetization, and control’.32 She understands instrumentarian power as the prevalent form evident in our age of surveillance capitalism.

• 35 Zuboff, S., Surveillance Capitalism, p.373

20This is the world of Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and internet corporations of their ilk, in which data is harvested on an unprecedented scale and then monetised, again on an unprecedented scale. In fact, data surveillance is more important than the visual surveillance of individuals, because of the enormous economic potential data contain. The crucial dynamic involves the monetized collection of data, because, in Zuboff’s reading, that information is also used to modify the behaviour of its suppliers, the public at large, again for profit. Zuboff suggests that Skinner was not interested in the commercial aspect of his ideas, indeed seeing the ‘‘free market’ as an empty dream […] because it rewards destructive competitiveness between people and classes’.35 As noted earlier, Skinner died in 1990. It is worth remembering that both Nineteen Eighty-Four and Walden Two were written at the dawn of the modern computer age (usually dated around 1940), and neither novel incorporates computer technology. That said, for Zuboff, Skinner provides the conceptual framework for our world, Walden Two suggesting how behaviorist principles might be incorporated into a surveillance capitalist utopia. We need to look elsewhere, however, for a fictional rendition of that world.

• 36 Eggers, Dave, The Circle: A Novel (London, Penguin Books, 2013), p.1
• 37 https://www.seriouseats.com/lunch-at-google-insanely-awesome-as-you-thought
• 38 Eggers, D., The Circle, pp.1-2

22The Circle provides that fictional rendition. It is an extended creative account of what Zuboff understands as a new and worrying form of social organisation and control; indeed, the novel is a forceful critique of surveillance capitalism’s incursions and perversions. Eggers tracks the exponential expansion of the eponymous hi-tech company The Circle, which presents itself to the world it dominates as the utopian, necessary and inevitable future. The opening line, ‘MY GOD, Mae thought. It’s heaven’,36 both introduces us to the novel’s young, idealistic protagonist, Mae Holland, and reflects the positive image the company projects. In Zuboff’s terms, this is a utopianist vision. One might criticise this opening as a tad unsubtle, but in mitigation it seems clear that Eggers was aiming to write a novel of ideas that functioned as both piercing warning about surveillance capitalism and accessible narrative for a wide audience. The Circle, like The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, aims to alert and to activate its readers—signalling big themes early on is a way of positioning its audience for what lies ahead. Mae’s enthusiasm also aligns with the image that many Silicon Valley companies relentlessly curate for themselves: young, hip, geeky but idealistic, where executives always wear t-shirts and workers skateboard, play basketball and eat free high-quality meals on campus-like work sites.37 The almost-immeasurable profit being created gets presented as a surprising by-product of supplying people worldwide with instant information, products and the approximation of personal interaction. ‘Don’t be evil’, from Google’s corporate code of conduct, is emblematic of its rather-too-insistently signalled idealism—although the motto might suggest that being evil lies within Google’s capabilities. The Circle has similarly aspirational tiles built into its headquarters that urge employees to ‘Dream’, ‘Innovate’ and ‘Imagine’.38 Mae quickly becomes a willing participant in the new reality of surveillance capitalism that The Circle as a company is expanding exponentially—and from which it is profiting massively.

• 39 Zuboff, S., ‘Big Other’, p.81
• 40 Eggers, D., The Circle, p.21
• 41 Eggers, D., The Circle, p.21
• 42 Eggers, D., The Circle, p.20

23The actual term ‘surveillance capitalism’ does not appear in the 2013 novel, but Zuboff herself would not introduce the term until her 2015 ‘Big Other’ article. In that, she classifies her own work as a contribution ‘to a new discussion on these still untheorized new territories’, announcing ‘the new expression of power I christen Big Other’.39 The Circle appears to have fleshed out certain key elements of surveillance capitalism avant la lettre. The narrator, for example, notes that the company’s young technical genius Ty Gospodinov devises a Unified Operating System and invents ‘TruYou—one account, one identity, one payment system, per person’ that ‘was tied to your credit cards, your bank, and thus paying for everything was simple. One button for the rest of your life online’.40 Gospodinov is one of the three Wise Men who run the company, the others being predatory-capitalist Tom Stenton, and Eamon Bailey, The Circle’s soothing front man. The success of TruYou for customers necessarily benefits The Circle, for ‘those who wanted or needed to track the movements of consumers online had found their Valhalla: the actual buying habits of actual people were now eminently mappable and measurable, and the marketing to those people could be done with surgical precision’.41 The reference to Valhalla (Norse abode of the Gods) reinforces perplexing links between utopian aspirations and the monitoring of personal information. Gospodinov claims not to have recognised the commercial side of TruYou, though his decision to hire Stenton and Bailey is described as a ‘wise and very profitable suggestion’, one that ‘assuaged the fears of investors and ultimately tripled the company’s valuation. The IPO [Initial Public Offering of shares] raised $3billion, unprecedented, but not unexpected’.42 From early on, then, economic imperatives drive The Circle’s success:

• 44 Eggers, D., The Circle, p.51

24Eggers projects a future dominated by forces that in 2013 were only just being recognised by social researchers, even ones as canny and expert as Zuboff. In depicting a relatively realistic future in which larger moral, personal and social questions are raised from the perspectives of myriad characters, he engages readers in the sort of stimulating thought experiments that mark the best utopian and dystopian works. As is often the case in such texts, in The Circle putative boundaries between utopia and dystopia are consciously blurred or rendered ambiguous, repeatedly being subject to change. Narrative twists suggest possibilities rather than rigid pre-packaged awareness, so that early on, for example, Mae’s superior, Jared, while acknowledging that her customer satisfaction rating of 99 out of 100 is ‘good’, nevertheless comments: ‘I can’t help wondering why it wasn’t 100 […] it’s nearly perfect, sure. But at The Circle, that missing point nags at us’.44 His critique exhibits the type of behavioural modification that determines how The Circle operates, and readers are likely to interpret it this way, even if Mae herself does not. Cultural, intellectual and moral diversity is also built into characterisation: is Mae, for example, an idealist, a hypocrite, a stooge or a sell out; or combinations of these elements at different times and in different circumstances? By fusing an exposé of surveillance capitalism with a study of its implications for different individuals and on society more broadly, Eggers deploys literature’s capacity to offer multi-dimensional, humanised and digestible accounts of (in this case) the emerging realm of contemporary surveillance, both in its possible effects and in the prospects it raises. A somewhat oblique relationship with the protagonist generates a nuanced perspective for the novel’s readers.

• 46 Eggers, D., The Circle, p.131
• 47 Eggers, D., The Circle, p.259
• 48 Eggers, D., The Circle, p.433

26A little unsubtle, perhaps, but Eggers balances Mae’s unthinking enthusiasm with the full-blown critique of The Circle by her counter-cultural boyfriend, Mercer. Mercer berates her for succumbing to the philosophy and the practices of the company, as part of his broad-spectrum rejection of social media and its acidic impact on personal interactions: ‘Mae, we have to change how we interact,’ he insists at a crisis point, adding that her dependence on social media for assessing the world and her relationships means that ‘it’s like we’re never alone. Every time I see you, there’s a hundred other people in the room. You’re always looking at me through a hundred other people’s eyes.’46 In vivid contrast to her positive take on The Circle as utopian, Mercer counters that ‘[i]t’s the usual utopian vision […] [t]hat sounds progressive, but it carries with it more control, more central tracking of everything we do’.47 Mercer is a character who from the start argues loudly against the world The Circle is creating. In a letter announcing that he intends to go ‘off-grid’ in an attempt to escape suppressive monitoring, he writes about how The Circle advances ‘the criminality of privacy’; calls the need to collect everyone’s data ‘a sickness’; and finishes by prophesying a ‘great schism’ in which ‘There will be those who live under the surveillance dome you’re helping to create, and those who live, or try to live, apart from it’.48 Again, perhaps a little didactic for a novel, but then Mercer is a forthright naysayer. Although he flees, it is impossible for him to escape. In a live feed watched by over one billion people, Mae uploads his photo from her phone to demonstrate the company’s SoulSearch tracking system. Starting a clock that generates a gameshow atmosphere in the search for someone who has declared he does not want to be found, Mae, who is directing the search from The Circle’s auditorium, gets caught up in the thrill of the chase. When Mercer is found driving his truck in the mountains she communicates with him via a tracking drone:

• 50 Eggers, D., The Circle, p.461

27Instead, rather than obeying the protocols of the new surveillance regime, he consciously drives off a bridge to his death.50

• 52 Eggers, D., The Circle, p.481

29Arguing against this process of ‘Completion’, when everyone is connected through The Circle, he warns her that ‘We’re closing the circle around ourselves—it’s a totalitarian nightmare’.52 Where Zuboff distinguishes between totalitarian and instrumentarian power, Eggers links them. Kalden devises a manifesto, ‘The Rights of Humans in a Digital Age’, which he asks Mae, as both his lover and as someone who has quickly become the public face of The Circle, to read to all Circle watchers as a prompt for resistance. It asserts, among other things, that

• 54 Eggers, D., The Circle, p.14

31An even more surprising (and perhaps more subtly developed) refusenik is Mae’s friend Annie, who is at the opening of The Circle ‘part of the forty most crucial minds in the company—the Gang of 40—privy to its most secret plans and data’.54 Annie gets Mae her job at the company, and in Mae’s early assessment (the implications of which are not fully worked through until the very end of the novel) Annie’s success

• 56 Eggers, D., The Circle, p.407
• 57 Eggers, D., The Circle, p.408
• 58 Eggers, D., The Circle, p.434
• 59 Eggers, D., The Circle, pp.436-439

32For much of the early part of the novel Annie is a dynamic force, an active booster for The Circle. But the novel focuses on Mae’s increasing immersion in the company, and Annie’s importance as a character diminishes. Things change briefly with the inauguration of PastPerfect, which uses ‘the power of the web, and of the Circle and its billions of members, to try to fill in the gaps of personal history’.56 Annie’s ancestors had sailed on the Mayflower, and her family have ‘always been proud of our heritage’,57 so she pushes hard to take control of the project, besting a resentful Mae. But data about Annie’s ancestors prove that some of her English forbears had Irish slaves, and that her American ancestors kept African-American slaves and fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War. She receives hate mail, gets called “Massa Annie” in email messages, and discloses to Mae that ‘[h]alf the people of color I hired over the years are now suspicious of me. Like I’m some genetically pure intergenerational slave owner’.58 Later still, photographs and videos of her parents show them at swingers’ parties, while footage from a security camera reveals them drunk, and failing to help a mentally disabled man while he is drowning.59 Under the weight of revelations about her family that crush her established sense of her ancestry and her own identity, Annie suffers a nervous breakdown, another victim of a company whose utopian ideology consciously or unconsciously conceals dystopian forces. Data and the means of gathering and deploying them are anything but neutral.

• 60 Eggers, D., The Circle, p.481

33As Kalden declares to Mae, in the world The Circle is creating—under the guise of education and safety—a new, monitored generation will have everything they have done ‘recorded, tracked, logged, analyzed—it’s permanent […] Everyone will be tracked, cradle to grave, with no possibility of escape’.60 For Kalden, and presumably for Eggers, this constitutes a dystopian future that needs to be stopped. But it is also not that far from the ‘utopian’ world Zuboff argues surveillance capitalists such as Mark Zuckerberg aim to create. In 2015, she notes, Zuckerberg had put out a statement that his ‘three big company goals’ include ‘connecting everyone; understanding the world; and building the knowledge economy’. Facebook, she added

• 62 Eggers, D., The Circle, p.484

34For Zuckerberg and others this might seem utopian; for Zuboff and presumably Eggers, precisely the opposite. This contest of perspectives plays out in The Circle. One example is when Kalden charges that ‘“Stenton professionalized our idealism, monetized our utopia. He’s the one who saw the connection between our work and politics, and between politics and control […] And if everyone’s tracked—"’, Mae fires back, ‘“Then there’s no crime. No murder, no kidnapping or rape”’.62 As Thomas More had done as far back as the inaugural Utopia, Eggers creates arguments and conundrums to generate imaginative, much-needed thinking in his readers.

• 63 Eggers, D., The Circle, p.68
• 64 Eggers, D., The Circle, p.67
• 65 Eggers, D., The Circle, p.435 (original emphasis)
• 66 Eggers, D., The Circle, p.208
• 67 Eggers, D., The Circle, p.287

35While the surveillance of data is the primary source of The Circle’s universality and profitability, the company and the novel do not neglect traditional visual forms of monitoring. Eggers has the company develop tiny, high-quality video cameras labelled Sea Change, that can be placed anywhere and viewed from anywhere. Eamon Bailey argues to Circle employees that they protect loved ones—‘Transparency leads to peace of mind’ he coos.63 At the oppressive end of human interaction, tyrants will be held to account once their heinous deeds are exposed to international scrutiny, because, fearing exposure, they will commit fewer crimes. Bailey uses this example to introduce one of his key concepts: ALL THAT HAPPENS MUST BE KNOWN.64 It is a measure of Annie’s despair that when the revelations begin about her family she writes, ‘Actually, I don’t know if we should know everything’. And it is a measure of Mae’s increasing compliance with The Circle’s ideology that she ‘couldn’t believe that Annie had actually typed that sentence’.65 Visibility is not restricted to tyrants, with a Circle meeting announcing ‘a very important development in the history of government’, in which a politician agrees to go ‘Transparent’, to record and transmit through a device they wear, announcing at a Circle presentation that ‘My every meeting, movement, my every word will be available to all my constituents and the world’.66 This moment encourages/forces other politicians to do the same in the name of openness. Part of The Circle’s larger Completion strategy is that everyone will eventually achieve Transparency, so that there is no secrecy, that all that happens is known. Eamon Bailey explains the process to Mae, who comes to understand that ‘Any assessment, any judgment, or picture utilizing incomplete information would always be wrong’.67 ‘Wrong’ in this understanding largely stands for incorrect, but Bailey also instructs Mae about the larger ethical impact of Transparency. He asks her rhetorically:

• 69 Zuboff, S., Surveillance Capitalism, p.360

36B.F. Skinner emphasised the importance of observation in monitoring and then modifying behaviour, but largely dismissed the importance of the ‘inner life’ where something like morality might develop or be cultivated. As Zuboff notes: ‘Instrumentarian power has no interest in our souls or in any principle to instruct’.69 Gaining the ‘love’ of someone like Orwell’s Winston Smith would be irrelevant to and unnecessary for instrumentarian control. But the desire to improve morality through observation immediately brings to mind Jeremy Bentham’s memorable words from his Panopticon Writings:

• 71 Marks, P., Imagining Surveillance, p.164.
• 72 Marks, P., Imagining Surveillance, p.166.

37In Imagining Surveillance I note the light Bentham’s ideas throw on a range of utopian and dystopian texts. I wonder, for example, if the internet ‘is the contemporary version of Panopticon’71, and observe in passing that The Circle ‘intersects with […] Bentham’s Panopticon writing and Nineteen Eighty-Four’.72 I now develop that preliminary comment in relation to The Circle and to Zuboff’s work.

• 73 Eggers, D., The Circle, p.15

38As already remarked, Zuboff essentially ignores Jeremy Bentham in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. It would be startling if Bentham’s ideas remained completely valid in the age of Big Data, with a global population in thrall to the internet. Even so, Bentham understands how the visual surveillance possible in his own time was applicable to health, industry, education and the economy. He registers something like the instrumentalist power of the panopticon in modifying behaviour. While The Circle does not specifically reference Bentham, we see such forces at work in the set up and processes on the company’s campus and in its global operations. An early example is the second-floor cafeteria, the ‘Glass Eatery’, which Mae visits on her first day. She is told that it is designed ‘such that diners ate at nine different levels, all the floors and walls glass’. The unnerving sense of being constantly visible is soon reinforced unconsciously by Annie’s throwaway line: ‘I’ll be watching you […] and every time you do something great I’ll be making sure that everyone knows about it’.73 While Annie means to inspire Mae, readers might interpret more intrusive resonances, perhaps picking up on an earlier exchange when Mae meets her first Circle employee, Renata:

• 75 Eggers, D., The Circle, p.100

39From the novel’s outset, sight—both actual and virtual—is tagged as a multi-faceted form of power. There are dozens of such moments in The Circle, one of the more emblematic being Mercer’s ‘You’re always looking at me through a hundred other people’s eyes,’ referenced earlier. This condemns Mae’s replacement of face-to-face engagement with interaction mediated through technology. Computer screens supply another prevalent form of visual surveillance on The Circle campus. They not only offer access to the interactive commercial world beyond the company’s physical space, but also monitor those using them. A Participation Rank (or PartiRank) derived from an ‘algorithm-generated number that takes into account all your activity’75 ensures that Circle workers know themselves to be under constant scrutiny. A perverse measure of Mae’s “success” is that eventually she has nine screens on her desk.

• 77 Eggers, D., The Circle, p.486
• 78 Eggers, D., The Circle, p.491
• 79 Orwell, G., Nineteen Eighty-Four, p.174
• 80 Orwell, G., Nineteen Eighty-Four, p.304

42This episode reflects earlier examples: Mae had assumed that she knew Mercer’s thoughts well enough that she could win him over to the virtues of SoulSearch; and Mae herself deceives Kalden when he asks her to broadcast ‘The Rights of Humans in a Digital Age’. While she tells him ‘‘Okay, good. Good. I see everything clearly now’’,77 in Book 3 readers find that she has betrayed him, ‘had feigned her cooperation and had escaped, and immediately told Bailey and Stenton about it all’78. Any chance of breaking The Circle ends, it seems. But Mae’s deception, along with Mercer’s concealing of his willingness to commit suicide until it is too late to intercede, and the failure of the doctors, monitors and colleagues to know what Annie thinks, echo Julia’s declaration about the sacrosanct world of the mind in Nineteen Eighty-Four: ‘they can’t get inside you’.79 Winston Smith famously learns that ‘they could get inside you’.80 Whether conscious or not, Eggers’ decision to have Annie frustrate the desire of those at The Circle to know what she is thinking contrasts substantially with Winston’s acceptance of his thoughts being known and his individuality being largely erased. The Circle ends on a consciously ambiguous note, a final prompt to readers to think independently, and perhaps to resist the utopianist claims of surveillance capitalism.

• 81 Zuboff, S., Surveillance Capitalism, p.520

43Zuboff sees Nineteen Eighty-Four as obsolete in relation to surveillance capitalism (as she dismisses Bentham’s relevance to this world). Yet Orwell features prominently in her final chapter, ‘A Coup From Above’. In the first five sections of this chapter Zuboff summarises her argument with customary panache and vigour. The sixth and final section, titled ‘Be the Friction’, makes a rousing, highly personal case against the passive acceptance of surveillance capitalism, rejecting any sense that its total dominance of contemporary society is desirable or inevitable. Zuboff argues for the critical role of public opinion in shaping the present and the future, proclaiming that ‘even the most destructive “ages” do not last forever’.81 She entreats her readers to become engaged citizens who resist the encroachments and attractions of surveillance capitalism:

• 83 Zuboff, S., Surveillance Capitalism, p.522
• 84 Zuboff, S., Surveillance Capitalism, p.524

44Declaring that she ‘reject[s] inevitability’, she invokes Thomas Paine, ‘who called upon each generation to assert its will when illegitimate forces hijack the future’, and Hannah Arendt’s argument that ‘the natural human reaction to such conditions is one of anger and indignation because these conditions are against the dignity of man’.83 And Zuboff invokes Orwell, in typically idiosyncratic fashion: Orwell’s indignant 1946 essay on James Burnham’s once-influential The Managerial Revolution. Zuboff notes that ‘Orwell takes aim at Burnham for his cowardly attachment to power’. Burnham had argued for the inevitable triumph of a ‘planned centralised society modelled on totalitarianism’. Given her sense that Orwell’s totalitarian model had less explanatory force than Skinner’s instrumentalist assessment, it might seem odd that she lauds Orwell. But she is less impressed by his perspicuity as by his righteous indignation, his refusal to succumb to Burnham’s suppliant acceptance of what the latter saw as the inevitable triumph of a planned centralised society. Orwell, like Arendt, Zuboff argues, ‘asserts the possibility of new beginnings that do not cleave to already visible lines of power’.84 For that, she praises him.

• 85 https://www.onjam.tv/greengage/1984-edward-snowden-and-joseph-thompson
• 86 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0498637/

45The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is recognised as one of the most intellectually impressive and powerfully argued studies of the contemporary world, offering rich and compelling evidence of new forces at work. While they seem to offer an enticing new world of potential ease and connectivity, they also work consciously if invisibly to modify behaviour for profit; to threaten fundamental freedoms, and to impose a new form of power: instrumentalism. Interleaved with a small library of social science references, arguments and data, Zuboff’s study deploys creative texts inventively in fashioning an argument that calls for us to understand surveillance capitalism in order to resist it. Dave Eggers’ The Circle argues a similar case by different means. It is not for nothing that its subtitle is ‘A Novel’, Eggers actively invoking the power of fiction to represent and evaluate this new phenomenon for a wide audience, many of whom might avoid a 500-page work of non-fiction, even one as eloquent as The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. In creating a piece of popular fiction on this vital topic, Eggers provides a means to understand at the personal as well as at the social level the impact of new social forces that, while superficially highly attractive and enabling, submit us to pervasive and potentially detrimental forms of power that reduce us to datafodder for profit. That said, while surveillance capitalism is developing at a concerning rate, as Edward Snowden exposed in 2013 (the year The Circle appeared), malevolent forms of state surveillance continue to impose power of a different type than do commercial enterprises such as Google and Facebook. Emphasising the continuing relevance of Orwell’s masterpiece to our world, Snowden’s revelations caused Nineteen Eighty-Four to enter the best-seller lists again. Then, Snowden noted how Orwell had warned us of the dangers of mass surveillance. In 2021 Snowden appeared in an innovative film adaptation of the novel.85 Another film adaptation is in development, to be directed by Paul Greengrass.86 Nineteen Eighty-Four still has lessons to tell about surveillance in all its forms. But the final word should go to Dave Eggers, whose sequel to The Circle, titled The Every, was published in October 2021. For the creative and critical depiction of surveillance capitalism, the story literally continues.