Dave Eggers, The Circle
"It was called the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages. If not for the monks, everything the world had ever learned would have been lost. Well, we live in a similar time, when we're losing the vast majority of what we do and see and learn. But it doesn't have to be that way."
22 Quotes
"It was called the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages. If not for the monks, everything the world had ever learned would have been lost. Well, we live in a similar time, when we're losing the vast majority of what we do and see and learn. But it doesn't have to be that way."
Dave Eggers, The Circle
"I mean, all this stuff you're involved in, it's all gossip. It's people talking about each other behind their backs. That's the vast majority of this social media, all these reviews, all these comments. Your tools have elevated gossip, hearsay and conjecture to the level of valid, mainstream communication. And besides that, it's fucking dorky."
Dave Eggers, The Circle
"If things continue this way, there will be two societies - or at least I hope there will be two - the one you're helping create, and an alternative to it. You and your ilk will live, willingly, joyfully, under constant surveillance, watching each other always, commenting on each other, voting and liking and disliking each other, smiling and frowning, and otherwise doing nothing much else."
Dave Eggers, The Circle
"You look at pictures of Nepal, push a smile button, and you think that’s the same as going there."
Dave Eggers, The Circle
"That’s what’s new. There used to be the option of opting out. But now that’s over. Completion is the end. We’re closing the circle around everyone—it’s a totalitarian nightmare."
Dave Eggers, The Circle
"So many of the things I invented I honestly did for fun, out of some perverse game of whether or not they’d work, whether people would use them. I mean, it was like setting up a guillotine in the public square. You don’t expect a thousand people to line up to put their heads in it"
Dave Eggers, The Circle
"Now, you and I both know that if you can control the flow of information, you can control everything."
Dave Eggers, The Circle
"Surveillance shouldn't be the tradeoff for any goddamn service we get."
Dave Eggers, The Circle
"He handed Mae a piece of paper, on which he'd written, in crude all capitals, a list of assertions under the headline "The Rights of Humans in a Digital Age." Mae scanned it, catching passages: "We must all have the right to anonymity." "Not every human activity can be measured." "The ceaseless pursuit of data to quantify the value of any endeavour is catastrophic to true understanding." "The barrier between public and private must remain unbreachable." At the end she found one line, written in red ink: "We must all have the right to disappear."
Dave Eggers, The Circle
"Here though, there are no oppressors. No one's forcing you to do this. You willingly tie yourself to these leashes. And you willingly become utterly socially autistic. You no longer pick up on basic human communication clues. You're at a table with three humans, all of whom are looking at you and trying to talk to you, and you're staring at a screen! Searching for strangers in... Dubai!"
Dave Eggers, The Circle
"This democracy thing, or Demoxie, whatever it is, good god. Under the guise of having every voice heard, you create mob rule, a filterless society where secrets are crimes."
Dave Eggers, The Circle
"For a moment, she thought it natural in a way seeing a plane fall from the sky can seem natural, too. The horror comes later."
Dave Eggers, The Circle
"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."
Dave Eggers, The Circle
"Everyone will be tracked, cradle to grave, with no possibility of escape."
Dave Eggers, The Circle
"I was trying to make the web more civil. I was trying to make it more elegant. I got rid of anonymity. I combined a thousand disparate elements into one unified system. But I didn’t picture a world where Circle membership was mandatory, where all government and all life was channeled through one network."
Dave Eggers, The Circle
"Ty swept his arms around, encompassing everything around them, the vast campus above. “All this. The fucking shark that eats the world."
Dave Eggers, The Circle
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