The Circle

by Dave Eggers

  Mae checked the view on her wrist. Her camera was trained on Bailey and the screen behind him. Comments were already coming in, thanking her and the Circle for this kind of access. One watcher compared it to watching the Manhattan Project. Another mentioned Edison’s Menlo Park lab, circa 1879.

  Bailey continued: “Now this new era of transparency dovetails with some other ideas I have about democracy, and the role that technology can play in making it complete. And I use the word complete on purpose, because our work toward transparency might actually achieve a fully accountable government. As you’ve seen, the governor of Arizona has had her entire staff go transparent, which is the next step. In a few cases, even with a clear elected official, we’ve seen some corruption behind the scenes. The transparent elected have been used as figureheads, shielding the backroom from view. But that will change soon, I believe. The officials, and their entire offices with nothing to hide, will go transparent within the year, at least in this country, and Tom and I have seen to it that they get a steep discount on the necessary hardware and server capacity to make it happen.”

  The 40 clapped heartily.

  “But that’s only half the battle. That’s the elected half of things. But what about the other half—our half as citizens? The half where we’re all supposed to participate?”

  Behind Bailey, a picture of an empty polling place appeared, in a desolate high school gym somewhere. It dissolved into an array of numbers.

  “Here are the numbers of participants in the last elections. As you can see, at the national level, we’re at around 58 percent of those eligible to vote. Incredible, isn’t it? And then you go down the line, to state and local elections, and the percentages drop off a cliff: 32 percent for state elections, 22 percent for counties, 17 percent for most small-town elections. How illogical is that, that the closer government is to home, the less we care about it? It’s absurd, don’t you think?”

  Mae checked her watchers; there were over two million. She was adding about a thousand viewers a second.

  “Okay,” Bailey continued, “so we know there are a bunch of ways that technology, much of it originating here, has helped make it easier to vote. We’re building on a history of trying to increase access and ease. Back in my day there was the motor voter bill. That helped. Then some states allowed you to register or update your registration online. Fine. But how did it impact voter turnout? Not enough. But here’s where it gets interesting. Here’s how many people voted in the last national election.”

  The screen behind him read “140 million.”

  “Here’s how many were eligible to vote.”

  The screen read “244 million.”

  “Meanwhile, there’s us. Here’s how many Americans are registered with the Circle.”

  The screen read “241 million.”

  “That’s some startling math, right? A hundred million more people are registered with us than voted for the president. What does that tell you?”

  “We’re awesome!” an older man, with a gray ponytail and a frayed T-shirt, yelled from the second row. Laughter opened up the room.

  “Well sure,” Bailey said, “but besides that? It tells you that the Circle has a knack for getting people to participate. And there are a lot of people in Washington who agree. There are people in DC who see us as the solution to making this a fully participatory democracy.”

  Behind Bailey, the familiar image of Uncle Sam pointing appeared. Then another image, of Bailey wearing the same outfit, in the same pose, appeared next to Uncle Sam. The room guffawed.

  “So now we get to the meat of today’s session, and that is: What if your Circle profile automatically registered you to vote?”

  Bailey swept his eyes across the room, hesitating again at Mae and her watchers. She checked her wrist. Goosebumps, one viewer wrote.

  “With TruYou, to set up a profile, you have to be a real person, with a real address, complete personal info, a real Social Security number, a real and verifiable date of birth. In other words, all the information the government traditionally wants when you register to vote. In fact, as you all know, we have far more information. So why wouldn’t this be enough information to allow you to register? Or better yet, why wouldn’t the government—our government or any government—just consider you registered once you set up a TruYou profile?”

  The forty heads in the room nodded, some out of acknowledgement of a sensible idea, some clearly having thought of this before, that it was a notion long discussed.

  Mae checked her bracelet. The viewer numbers were climbing quicker, ten thousand a second, and were now over 2,400,000. She had 1,248 messages. Most had come through in the last ninety seconds. Bailey glanced down at his own tablet, no doubt seeing the same numbers she was seeing. Smiling, he continued: “There’s no reason. And a lot of legislators agree with me. Congresswoman Santos does, for one. And I have verbal commitments from 181 other members of Congress and 32 senators. They’ve all agreed to push legislation to make your TruYou profile your automatic path to registration. Not bad, right?”

  There was a brief round of applause.

  “Now think,” Bailey said, his voice a whisper of hope and wonder, “think if we can get closer to full participation in all elections. There would be no more grumbling from the sidelines from people who had neglected to participate. There would be no more candidates who had been elected by a fringe, wedge group. As we know here at the Circle, with full participation comes full knowledge. We know what Circlers want because we ask, and because they know their answers are necessary to get a full and accurate picture of the desires of the whole Circle community. So if we observe the same model nationally, electorally, then we can get very close, I think, to 100 percent participation. One hundred percent democracy.”

  Applause rippled through the room. Bailey smiled broadly, and Stenton stood; it was, for him at least, apparently the end of the presentation. But an idea had been forming within Mae’s mind, and she raised her hand, tentatively.

  “Yes Mae,” Bailey said, his face still locked into a broad grin of triumph.

  “Well, I wonder if we couldn’t take this one step further. I mean … Well, actually, I don’t think it—”

  “No, no. Go on, Mae. You started well. I like the words one step further. That’s how this company was built.”

  Mae looked around the room, the faces a mix of encouraging and concerned. Then she alighted on Annie’s face, and because it was stern, and dissatisfied, and seemed to be expecting, or wanting, Mae to fail, to embarrass herself, Mae gathered herself, took a breath, and forged ahead.

  “Okay, well, you were saying we could get close to 100 percent participation. And I wonder why we couldn’t just work backwards from that goal, using all the steps you outlined. All the tools we already have.”

  Mae looked around the room, ready to quit at the first pair of skeptical eyes, but she saw only curiosity, the slow collective nodding of a group practiced in pre-emptive validation.

  “Go on,” Bailey said.

  “I’m just going to connect some dots,” Mae said. “Well, first of all, we all agree that we’d like 100 percent participation, and that everyone would agree that 100 percent participation is the ideal.”

  “Yes,” Bailey said. “It’s certainly the idealist’s ideal.”

  “And we currently have 83 percent of the voting-age Americans registered on the Circle?”

  “Yes.”

  “And it seems that we’re on our way to voters being able to register, and maybe even to actually vote, through the Circle.”

  Bailey’s head was bobbing side to side, some indication of mild doubt, but he was smiling, his eyes encouraging. “A small leap, but okay. Go on.”

  “So why not require every voting-age citizen to have a Circle account?”

  There was some shuffling in the room, some intake of breath, mostly from the older Circlers.

  “Let her finish,” someone, a new voice, said. Mae looked around to find Stenton near th
e door. His armed were crossed, his eyes staring at the floor. He looked, briefly, up to Mae, and nodded brusquely. She regained her direction.

  “Okay, I know the initial reaction will be resistance. I mean, how can we require anyone to use our services? But we have to remember that there are all kinds of things that are mandatory for citizens of this country—and these things are mandatory in most industrialized countries. Do you have to send your kids to school? Yes. That’s mandatory. It’s a law. Kids have to go to school, or you have to arrange some kind of home schooling. But it’s mandatory. It’s also mandatory that you register for the draft, right? That you get rid of your garbage in an acceptable way; you can’t drop it on the street. You have to have a license if you want to drive, and when you do, you have to wear a seat belt.”

  Stenton joined in again. “We require people to pay taxes. And to pay into Social Security. To serve on juries.”

  “Right,” Mae said, “and to pee indoors, not on the streets. I mean, we have ten thousand laws. We require so many legitimate things of citizens of the United States. So why can’t we require them to vote? They do in dozens of countries.”

  “It’s been proposed here,” one of the older Circlers said.

  “Not by us,” Stenton countered.

  “And that’s my point,” Mae said, nodding to Stenton. “The technology has never been there before. I mean, at any other moment in history, it would have been prohibitively expensive to track down everyone and register them to vote, and then to make sure they actually did. You’d have to go door to door. Drive people to polls. All these unfeasible things. Even in the countries where it’s mandatory, it’s not really enforced. But now it’s within reach. I mean, you cross-reference any voting rolls with the names in our TruYou database, and you’d find half the missing voters right there and then. You register them automatically, and then when election day comes around, you make sure they vote.”

  “How do we do that?” a female voice said. Mae realized it was Annie’s. It wasn’t a direct challenge, but the tone wasn’t friendly, either.

  “Oh jeez,” Bailey said, “a hundred ways. That’s an easy part. You remind them ten times that day. Maybe their accounts don’t work that day till they vote. That’s what I’d favor anyway. ‘Hello Annie!’ it could say. ‘Take five minutes to vote.’ Whatever it is. We do that for our own surveys. You know that, Annie.” And when he said her name, he shaded it with disappointment and warning, discouraging her from opening her mouth again. He brightened and turned back to Mae. “And the stragglers?” he asked.

  Mae smiled at him. She had an answer. She looked at her bracelet. There were now 7,202,821 people watching. When had that happened?

  “Well, everyone has to pay taxes, right? How many people do it online now? Last year, maybe 80 percent. What if we all stopped duplicating services and made it all part of one unified system? You use your Circle account to pay taxes, to register to vote, to pay your parking tickets, to do anything. I mean, we would save each user hundreds of hours of inconvenience, and collectively, the country would save billions.”

  “Hundreds of billions,” Stenton amended.

  “Right,” Mae said. “Our interfaces are infinitely easier to use than, say, the patchwork of DMV sites around the country. What if you could renew your license through us? What if every government service could be facilitated through our network? People would leap at the chance. Instead of visiting a hundred different sites for a hundred different government services, it could all be done through the Circle.”

  Annie opened her mouth again. Mae knew it was a mistake. “But why wouldn’t the government,” Annie asked, “just build a similar wraparound service? Why do they need us?”

  Mae couldn’t decide if she was asking this rhetorically or if she truly felt this was a valid point. In any case, much of the room was now snickering. The government building a system, from scratch, to rival the Circle? Mae looked to Bailey and to Stenton. Stenton smiled, raised his chin, and decided to take this one himself.

  “Well, Annie, a government project to build a similar platform from the ground up would be ludicrous, and costly, and, well, impossible. We already have the infrastructure, and 83 percent of the electorate. Does that make sense to you?”

  Annie nodded, her eyes showing fear and regret and maybe even some quickly fading defiance. Stenton’s tone was dismissive, and Mae hoped he would soften when he continued.

  “Now more than ever,” he said, but now more condescending than before, “Washington is trying to save money, and is disinclined to build vast new bureaucracies from scratch. Right now it costs the government about ten dollars to facilitate every vote. Two hundred million people vote, and it costs the feds two billion to run the presidential election every four years. Just to process the votes for that one election, that one day. You factor in every state and local election, we’re talking hundreds of billions every year in unnecessary costs associated with simple vote processing. I mean, they’re still doing it on paper in some states. If we provide these services for free, we’re saving the government billions of dollars, and, more importantly, the results would be known simultaneously. Do you see the truth in that?”

  Annie nodded grimly, and Stenton looked to her, as if assessing her anew. He turned to Mae, urging her to continue.

  “And if it’s mandatory to have a TruYou account to pay taxes or receive any government service,” she said, “then we’re very close to having 100 percent of the citizenry. And then we can take the temperature of everyone at any time. A small town wants everyone to vote on a local ordinance. TruYou knows everyone’s address, so only residents of that town can vote. And when they do, the results are known in minutes. A state wants to see how everyone feels about a new tax. Same thing—instant and clear and verifiable data.”

  “It would eliminate the guesswork,” Stenton said, now standing at the head of the table. “Eliminate lobbyists. Eliminate polls. It might even eliminate Congress. If we can know the will of the people at any time, without filter, without misinterpretation or bastardization, wouldn’t it eliminate much of Washington?”

  The night was cold and the winds were lacerating but Mae didn’t notice. Everything felt good, clean and right. To have the validation of the Wise Men, to have perhaps pivoted the entire company in a new direction, to have, perhaps, perhaps, ensured a new level of participatory democracy—could it be that the Circle, with her new idea, might really perfect democracy? Could she have conceived of the solution to a thousand-year-old problem?

  There had been some concern, just after the meeting, about a private company taking over a very public act like voting. But the logic of it, the savings inherent, was winning the day. What if the schools had two hundred billion? What if the health care system had two hundred billion? Any number of the country’s ills would be addressed or solved with that kind of savings—savings not just every four years, but some semblance of them every year. To eliminate all costly elections, replaced by instantaneous ones, all of them nearly cost-free?

  This was the promise of the Circle. This was the unique position of the Circle. This is what people were zinging. She read the zings as she rode with Francis, in a train under the bay, the two of them grinning, out of their minds. They were being recognized. People were stepping in front of Mae to get onto her video feed, and she didn’t care, hardly noticed, because the news coming through her right bracelet was too good to take her eyes off.

  She checked her left arm, briefly; her pulse was elevated, her heart rate at 130. But she was loving it. When they arrived downtown, they took the stairs three at a time and arrived above ground, suddenly lit in gold, on Market Street, the Bay Bridge blinking beyond.

  “Holy shit, it’s Mae!” Who had said that? Mae found, hurrying toward them, a teenaged pair, hoodies and headphones. “Rock on, Mae,” the other one said, their eyes approving, starstruck, before the two of them, clearly not wanting to seem stalky, hurried down the stairs.

  “That was fun,” Fra
ncis said, watching them descend.

  Mae walked toward the water. She thought of Mercer and saw him as a shadow, quickly disappearing. She hadn’t heard from him, or Annie, since the talk, and she didn’t care. Her parents hadn’t said a word, and might not have seen her performance, and she found herself unconcerned. She cared only about this moment, this night, the sky clear and starless.

  “I can’t believe how poised you were,” Francis said, and he kissed her—a dry, professional kiss on the lips.

  “Was I okay?” she asked, knowing how ridiculous it sounded, this kind of doubt in the wake of such an obvious success, but wanting once more to hear that she had done a good job.

  “You were perfect,” he said. “A 100.”

  Quickly, as they walked toward the water, she scrolled through the most popular recent comments. There seemed to be one particular zing with heat, something about how all this could or would lead to totalitarianism. Her stomach sank.

  “C’mon. You can’t listen to a lunatic like that,” Francis said. “What does she know? Some crank somewhere with a tin-foil hat.” Mae smiled, not knowing what the tin-foil hat reference meant, but knowing she’d heard her father say it, and it made her smile to think of him saying it.

  “Let’s get a libation,” Francis said, and they decided on a glittering brewery on the water fronted by a wide outdoor patio. Even as they approached, Mae saw recognition in the eyes of the array of pretty young people drinking outdoors.

  “It’s Mae!” one said.

  A young man, seeming too young to be drinking at all, aimed his face at Mae’s camera. “Hey mom, I’m home studying.” A woman of about thirty, who may or may not have been with the too young man, said, walking out of view, “Hey honey, I’m at a book club with the ladies. Say hi to the kids!”

  The night was dizzy and bright and went too fast. Mae barely moved at the bayside bar—she was surrounded, she was handed drinks, she was patted on the back, she was tapped on the shoulder. All night she pivoted, turning a few degrees, like a haywire clock, to greet each new well-wisher. Everyone wanted a picture with her, wanted to ask her when all this would happen. When would we break through all these unnecessary barriers? they asked. Now that the solution seemed clear and easy enough to execute, no one wanted to wait. A woman a bit older than Mae, slurring and holding a Manhattan, expressed it best, though unwittingly: How, she asked, spilling her drink but with eyes sharp, How do we get the inevitable sooner?