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In Dave Eggers' The Circle (2013), a recent graduate joins a powerful internet company and rises inside its culture of total transparency. The book stays with you because the company never looks like a villain. It looks like the best place you could possibly work, right up until you notice what it costs.
If that is the feeling you want again, these twelve novels are a good place to look. They are about tech companies, data, and the systems that promise to improve your life by watching it. Some are thrillers, some are satire and some are literary fiction, so each entry has a tone label to help you choose.
I write about this kind of power myself, so there is one more book at the end, clearly marked as mine.
// THE LIST
// 01
The Circle merges with the world's biggest e-commerce company to become The Every. A tech-skeptical former forest ranger takes a job there, planning to bring it down from the inside.
The obvious first stop. Eggers goes back to his own monopoly and makes it bigger.
This is the sequel to The Circle, so read that first.
// 02
In a recession-hit America dominated by the megacorporation Cloud, a new worker and a corporate infiltrator both live on site, where every employee is tracked and rated with stars.
The Circle's campus culture moved onto the warehouse floor. If an app has ever rated you, this one will land.
// 03
In a future Britain, the tech giant Beetle runs most of society, and its Lifechain system predicts how people will behave, even to the point of prosecuting crimes before they happen. Then a killing by a robot starts raising questions.
Aimed at the same target as The Circle, a company certain that data can explain everyone, with a stranger and sharper sense of humor.
// 04
Tech billionaire Bix Bouton's invention, Own Your Unconscious, lets people upload their memories and trade them for access to other people's.
What happens when the thing we overshare next is memory itself.
Told in linked chapters from many different voices. Egan calls it a sibling novel to A Visit from the Goon Squad, but it stands on its own.
// 05
Born into a Dalit coconut-farming family in 1950s India, King Rao grows up to become the world's leading tech CEO and the head of a corporate government run by algorithms.
A tech founder who ends up running the world, told as a family saga. The most ambitious answer on this list to where The Circle was heading.
// 06
In near-future New York, everyone carries a device that makes their personal data public, and street-side "Credit Poles" display the credit rankings of people walking past. A middle-aged man falls for a younger woman.
Published three years before The Circle, and just as sharp about a life lived in public data.
// 07
When the obituary of a brilliant game-company programmer is published, software he left behind switches on and starts acting in the real world.
The fastest-paced pick here: code that keeps running with nobody accountable for what it does.
First published by the author in 2006 and reissued in 2009. Expect thriller violence. The sequel is Freedom™.
// 08
Pearl works for a company whose Apricity machine takes a cheek swab and tells people what will make them happy.
The gentle version of The Circle's promise: a company that knows what is good for you better than you do.
// 09
In AutoAmerica, where the internet is part AI and part surveillance system, people are sorted into the employed Netted and the jobless Surplus. A Surplus girl turns out to have a gifted pitching arm.
A baseball novel set inside a surveillance state, and far more moving than that description sounds.
// 10
In near-future Britain, the government offers benefits to couples who sign up for a "Smart Marriage", which means letting technology monitor their relationship.
Transparency, the big idea behind The Circle, pushed into the most private place there is.
// 11
Over one day in Geneva in 2010, a physicist who made billions from a trading algorithm that reads fear receives a mysterious book from an unknown sender, and is then attacked in his home.
For readers who were most interested in the money and power behind The Circle.
// 12
In a near-future Britain where "the System" records everything, an inspector investigates a dissident's death in custody by reviewing recordings of her mind.
Where total transparency ends up if nobody stops it. Long and deliberately puzzling, and worth it.
Every book above owes something to a few classics. If you have not read them, they still hold up:
If you want the watching to feel more frightening than satirical, try my list of surveillance horror books.
// AND ONE OF MINE
Full disclosure: I wrote this one, so weigh this entry accordingly.
A Coast Guard officer investigates a predictive security system after a dockworker is denied access for a “behavioral anomaly.” What he uncovers is a hidden network of billionaires, algorithms, blackmail, and modern technology quietly transforming society into a managed system where freedom still exists, but only for the privileged.
The Circle is about a company that wants to see everything. FRICTION is about what happens to the people a system has already decided about. It is a literary surveillance thriller with a streak of light horror.
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