The Circle

by Dave Eggers

“Better to be at the bottom of a ladder you want to climb than in the middle of some ladder you don’t, right? Some shitty-ass ladder made of shit?”

Every time my brain parks the car neatly in the driveway, my mouth drives through the back of the garage.

Having a matrix of preferences presented as your essence, as the whole you? Maybe that was it. It was some kind of mirror, but it was incomplete, distorted.

Your tools have elevated gossip, hearsay and conjecture to the level of valid, mainstream communication.

like everything else you guys are pushing, it sounds perfect, sounds progressive, but it carries with it more control, more central tracking of everything we do.”

You’re leaving no evidence that you lived. There’s no proof.”

“And worse, you’re not doing anything interesting anymore. You’re not seeing anything, saying anything. The weird paradox is that you think you’re at the center of things, and that makes your opinions more valuable, but you yourself are becoming less vibrant.

A secret between two friends, Mae, is an ocean. It’s wide and deep and we lose ourselves in it. And now that I know your secret, do you feel better or worse?”

Knowledge is a basic human right. Equal access to all possible human experiences is a basic human right.”

the chaos of an orderless world.

We are not meant to know everything, Mae. Did you ever think that perhaps our minds are delicately calibrated between the known and the unknown? That our souls need the mysteries of night and the clarity of day?

Suffering is only suffering if it’s done in silence, in solitude. Pain experienced in public, in view of loving millions, was no longer pain. It was communion.

feelings—love, and there was understanding, and there was a desire to let the past be the past.

Now, you and I both know that if you can control the flow of information, you can control everything.

Under the guise of having every voice heard, you create mob rule, a filterless society where secrets are crimes.