20:09: 🔗 404media.co/students-are-being

A worrying look into the future of "education"

20:16: 🔗 theguardian.com/commentisfree/

Big tech = imperialism

20:53: 📖 Finished reading The Circle by Dave Eggers (after previously posting I'd never be able to finish it by the end of February, ha!)

It was okay. It's a satirical dystopia, clearly very 1984-inspired, but the surveillance overlords are a US big tech monopoly. If you're going in hoping for believable characters and plot, you'll be sorely disappointed. But like 1984, everything about this novel is silly and exaggerated, the characters are caricatures, and it is completely devoid of subtlety. if you can deal with this style, it can be pretty fun.

It's interesting in that it takes some of the utopian mission statements of actually existing big tech companies (Facebook's "make the world more open and connected", Twitter's "give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers", Google's "organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible", etc) to their dystopian extremes ("Everything must be known"), and it was doing this in 2013 before public opinion really soured on these companies.

The Circle captures the insanity of the hyper distracted and connected mode of life through its exaggerated numbers. Every day the characters are responding to thousands of messages, petitions, surveys, event invitations and friend requests. Political action is reduced to how many millions of "Smiles" or "Frowns" a cause gets, while the characters track dozens of metrics about their health and productivity. No one can hold a normal conversation.

20:59: The final quarter or so got a bit too predictable, the author-insert characters too didactic, and the evil nature of the Circle too heavy-handed. I guess the haters of the book just reached this point a bit earlier than me.

It's an easy-breezy read, on a constantly relevant theme in today's world "how much privacy are we willing to sacrifice for the benefits of increased surveillance (e.g. health monitoring, crime prevention)", so give it a go if that sounds like your kind of thing, but its flaws make it far from an essential read.