Abstracts
Abstract
Dave Eggers’s novels The Circle (2013) and The Every (2021) explore the unsettling consequences of life under unrelenting digital scrutiny, shedding light on how constant connectivity can erode personal autonomy and reshape identity. In The Circle, Mae Holland’s rise from a private individual to a public figure demonstrates how technologies that promise social and professional benefits can, in practice, commodify human experiences. In The Every, Delaney Wells’s attempts to sabotage the company that succeeds the Circle reveal the overwhelming power of data-driven platforms and the difficulty of breaking free from them. Building on Shoshana Zuboff’s (2019a) concept of surveillance capitalism, this study examines how Eggers critiques a world where behaviour is traced, analysed, and exploited for profit. As characters navigate environments that demand perpetual sharing and content creation, they become cogs in an ecosystem that rewards performative participation over authentic connection. Sherry Turkle’s (1995, 2012, 2015) work on digital intimacy further illuminates the emotional toll of virtual interactions, illustrating how Eggers’s characters struggle to maintain genuine relationships when validation depends on algorithmic metrics. Eggers’s narratives raise urgent questions about privacy, selfhood, and agency. The relentless pursuit of transparency and “perfect” data reduces individuals to mere sources of information, leaving them vulnerable to burnout, social alienation, and a hollow sense of belonging. By focusing on Mae’s and Delaney’s personal journeys, the novels expose the hidden costs of algorithmic governance and corporate surveillance, ultimately warning readers about how unchecked data practices can undermine trust, fragment relationships, and reshape what it means to be human in a digitally dominated world.
Keywords:
- Surveillance Capitalism,
- Autonomy,
- data ethics,
- participatory culture,
- hyper-transparency
Appendices
Bibliography
- Andrejevic, Mark. 2007. iSpy: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas.
- Arendt, Hannah. 1951. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace.
- Atwood, Margaret. 1985. The Handmaid’s Tale. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart.
- Atwood, Margaret. 2013. When Privacy Is Theft: Review of The Circle by Dave Eggers. New York Times Review of Books, November 21. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2013/11/21/eggers-circle-when-privacy-is-theft/ [accessed May 15, 2025].
- Benjamin, Garfield. 2019. Playing at Control: Writing Surveillance In/for Gamified Society. Surveillance & Society 17 (5): 699–713.
- Butler, Octavia E. 1993. Parable of the Sower. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows.
- Copeland, Rob. 2019. Google’s “Project Nightingale” Gathers Personal Health Data on Millions of Americans. Wall Street Journal, November 11. https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-s-secret-project-nightingale-gathers-personal-health-data-on-millions-of-americans-11573496790 [accessed May 15, 2025].
- Eggers, Dave. 2013. The Circle. Erscheinungsort Nicht Ermittelbar, DE: Knopf Publishing Group.
- Eggers, Dave. 2021. The Every. New York: Vintage Books.
- Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon Books.
- Gilliard, Chris. 2019. Luxury Surveillance. Real Life, May 8. https://reallifemag.com/luxury-surveillance/ [accessed March 23, 2025].
- Golumbia, David. 2009. The Cultural Logic of Computation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
- Han, Byung-Chul. 2015. The Transparency Society. Translated by Erik Butler. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
- Heise, Ursula. 2016. Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
- Hogan, Katie, Briana Macedo, Venkata Macha, Arko Barman, and Xiaoqian Jiang. 2021. Contact Tracing Apps: Lessons Learned on Privacy, Autonomy, and the Need for Detailed and Thoughtful Implementation. JMIR Medical Informatics 9 (7): https://doi.org/10.2196/27449.
- Jameson, Fredric. 1994. The Seeds of Time. New York: Columbia University Press.
- Krantz, Rachel. 2021. It Has to End Now: The Millions Interviews Dave Eggers. The Millions, September 20. https://themillions.com/2021/09/it-has-to-end-now-the-millions-interviews-dave-eggers.html [accessed November 30, 2024].
- Lyon, David. 2018. The Culture of Surveillance: Watching as a Way of Life. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
- Mannheim, Karl. 1936. Ideology and Utopia. Translated by Louis Wirth and Edward Shils. London: Routledge.
- Marx, Karl. 1987 [1867]. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Edited by Frederick Engels. Translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. Vol. 1. Moscow, RU: Progress Publishers.
- Molla, Rani. 2019. Amazon’s Ring Partnerships with Police Are Trouble. Vox, October 8. https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/10/8/20903536/amazon-ring-doorbell-civil-rights-police-partnerships [accessed February 13, 2025].
- Moore, Fernanda. 2014. These Rotten Kids Today: Dave Eggers Hates Them. Commentary 137 (1): 61–62.
- More, Max. 1990. Transhumanism: Toward a Futurist Philosophy. Extropy 6 (Summer): 6–12. Revised June 1994 and 1996.
- More, Thomas. 1516. Utopia. Leuven, BE: Dirk Martens.
- Moylan, Thomas. 2000. Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia. London: Routledge.
- Orwell, George. 1949. Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Secker & Warburg.
- Rayner, Tim. 2012. Foucault and Social Media: Life in a Virtual Panopticon. Philosophy for Change: Ideas that Make a Difference (blog), June 21. https://philosophyforchange.wordpress.com/2012/06/21/foucault-and-social-media-life-in-a-virtual-panopticon/ [accessed June 5, 2025].
- Sartre, Jean-Paul.1992 [1943]. Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology. Translated by Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press.
- Selisker, Scott. 2018. The Novel and WikiLeaks: Transparency and the Social Life of Privacy. American Literary History 30 (4): 756–776.
- Stein, Joshua. 2024. Should Elon Musk Decide Who Wins Wars? Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), February 29. https://cepa.org/article/should-elon-musk-decide-who-wins-wars/ [accessed March 10, 2025].
- Tait, Robert. 2025. US Postal Service Faces Murky Future as Trump Mulls Dismantling Institution. The Guardian, March 2. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/mar/02/usps-trump-postal-service-cuts [accessed May 23, 2025].
- Terentowicz-Fotyga, Urszula. 2024. Do It Yourself Dystopia: The Digital Future in Dave Eggers’s the Every. Critique Studies in Contemporary Fiction 66 (2): 382–393.
- Turkle, Sherry. 1995. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Touchstone.
- Turkle, Sherry. 2012. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books.
- Turkle, Sherry. 2015. Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age. New York: Penguin Books.
- van Gend, Thijmen, Donald Jay Bertulfo, and Seda Gürses. 2024. The PET Paradox: How Amazon Instrumentalises PETs in Sidewalk to Entrench Its Infrastructural Power. ArXiv, December 13. https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2412.09994.
- Wasihun, Betiel. 2018. Surveillance and Shame in Dave Eggers’s The Circle. On_Culture: The Open Journal for the Study of Culture 6: http://geb.uni-giessen.de/geb/volltexte/2018/13898/.
- Zeng, Jing, and D. Bondy Valdovinos Kaye. 2022. From Content Moderation to Visibility Moderation: A Case Study of Platform Governance on TikTok. Policy & Internet 14 (1): 79–95.
- Zuboff, Shoshana. 2019a. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. New York: Public Affairs.
- Zuboff, Shoshana. 2019b. The Surveillance Threat Is Not What George Orwell Imagined. Time, June 6. https://time.com/5602363/george-orwell-1984-anniversary-surveillance-capitalism/ [accessed May 23, 2025].

