科幻小说恐怖图景影射谷歌

    The Circle公司初期的行事方式还是比较有可信度的，不过后来幻想的意味很快越来越浓烈。梅的第一份工作是客户服务，主要是回答用户的问题，然后获得用户的满意度评分。梅的第一个客户给她打了99分，但是她的上级对她说：“99分很不错了，但我不禁要想，为什么不是100分呢？大多数公司可能会说，满分100分的话，99分可以说很高了。但是在The Circle公司，这丢掉的1分让我们很不舒服。”这番激昂的演说很有意思，而且让人很容易想象它是出自硅谷某个创新工厂的高管口中。没过多久，梅参加了公司所谓的“检查浮游生物时间”。梅的朋友安妮（安妮是把梅招进公司的人，但随着梅的平步青云，她在公司很快受到了冷落。）这样解释道：“你知道，很多小的创业公司希望像咱们公司这样的大鲸鱼能够吃掉他们。每个星期，我们都和这些家伙——也就是想成为像泰一样的大老板的人开一系列会议，他们则想方设法说服我们收购他们。”梅在这些会议中会一直在脖子上戴着一个摄像头，她在会上所看到的一切都会被转播给几百万人，这就是The Circle公司的“透明”路线。且不说让公众了解企业收购情况的做法无疑是很荒谬的，我们不妨想象一下，如果雅虎（Yahoo）CEO梅莉沙•梅耶尔在收购Tumblr之前也拍了这么一支视频，还把它发到了Twitter上会是什么样子。但读到此处，读者会发现，在梅和The Circle公司其他人的推动下，全世界从政治圈开始，都走起了“透明”路线。（梅只有上厕所的时候才能把摄像头关掉，但时间仅限两分钟，以免让她的观众们担心。）

    书中也有为数不多的几处搞笑情节。比如有一次，梅和公司里一个追求他的男同事睡了。这哥们儿有早泄的毛病，但是事后总是请（或者说要求）梅给他的床上表现打分。为了让他感觉良好，梅每次都给他打100分，他也把分数看得极重。像这位快枪手一样的技术宅大概就是艾格斯想象中科技公司技术员的样子。或许与其说是搞笑，倒不如说是可悲。

    不管怎样，某家科技公司有可能攫取过大的权力和社会影响这个想法绝对是一个合理的担忧。像乔纳森•弗伦岑一样，艾格斯也很担心这一点。艾格斯自己不上Twitter，在Facebook上也没有主页，但是在这本小说中，全世界人民都很快地爱上了The Circle公司的“透明”概念。人们牢牢地坐在电脑屏幕前，目不转睛地盯着梅一整天的工作，不禁令人遐想，这故事莫非是发生在另一个星球上。艾格斯对社交媒体的讽刺有一部分是正确的（The Circle公司的人都非常喜欢在社交媒体上点“赞”，经常在状态更新中发笑脸或皱眉的表情），不过在他的书中，美国人民似乎除了上网就不需要过日子了。虽然社交媒体的确非常普及，但是老百姓其实并不像艾格斯笔下那样好骗。

    书中唯一理性的声音来自梅的父母和他的前男友默瑟。默瑟是一个户外运动爱好者，工作是用鹿角做吊灯。随着梅的职务越来越高，她很快开始瞧不起土里土气的父母。由于默瑟和她的父母走得很近，每次梅回家看父母的时候，她也会顺便看看默瑟。默瑟很反感梅在The Circle公司的工作。有一次吃饭的时候，他对梅说：“梅，你知道我是怎么想的吗？我想，你大概觉得坐在桌子后头，发一个皱眉或笑脸的表情，你就觉得你的生活也挺精彩的。你对事情评论一番，就代替了亲手去做这些事。你看了看尼泊尔的照片，发一个笑脸的表情，就觉得好像跟自己去了那里一样……梅，你知道你的生活已经变得多无聊了吗？”这番话说得都是事实，而且显然是替我们这些读者说的。不过他的口气听起来很像是一个爱抱怨的老头在抱怨现代科技。梅很快和默瑟分手了，而这本书也从这里开始变得无聊起来。梅的父母也不再给她提出任何针对公司的警告，因为他们已经享受上了公司的医保服务。之后默瑟成了唯一一个敢提反对意见的人。一次他给梅写了一封信表达了善意的关心，但她当着几百万“观众”的面把这封信大声念了出来。我们发现，艾格斯并没有故意要写一部具有可信性的讽刺作品的意思（如果是故意讽刺也倒好了，但并不是这样——这本书很少搞笑），因为人们很快一边倒地嘲笑默瑟关于The Circle公司侵犯人隐私的警告。如果有人站出来为默瑟说句话，甚至说上一句“其实他说得也挺有道理的”，可能会显得更有可信性，但艾格斯并没有这样写。在这个虚拟的社会中，整个社会都像梅一样，茫然无视“老大哥”对隐私的侵犯。

    后来书中写道，由于不堪其扰，梅只想远离世事，不受打扰地住在森林里，因此梅开始动用The Circle公司的移动摄像头寻找默瑟。但因为她干得太过火，最终发生了非常不好的事。但此时本书的情节已经发展得过于牵强，书中的人们也变得不像我们所知道的任何人类，你可能也将知道接下来会发生什么事。艾格斯并没有给出令人意外或纠结的结尾，而是选择了大家都期待的结局。（财富中文网）

    译者：朴成奎 

    Early explanations of how they do things at The Circle are believable until they spiral quickly into fantasy. Mae's first gig is in customer service, responding to user queries and getting back a satisfaction rating. When her first customer gives Mae a 99, her superior tells her: "Ninety-nine is good. But I can't help wondering why it wasn't a 100… Now, most companies would say, Wow, 99 out of 100 points, that's nearly perfect. And I say, exactly: it's nearly perfect, sure. But at the Circle, that missing point nags at us." That little rant is funny and one can indeed imagine it coming from the mouth of some zealous exec at a Silicon Valley innovation factory. But soon enough, Mae attends "plankton-inspection time," which her friend Annie (who recruits Mae to The Circle and is swiftly kicked aside as Mae scrambles up its ladder) explains this way: "You know, little startups hoping the big whale—that's us—will find them tasty enough to eat. Once a week we take a series of meetings with these guys, Ty-wannabes, and they try to convince us that we need to acquire them." That series of pitches are broadcast to millions of people once Mae "goes transparent" with a camera around her neck that allows anyone to see everything she sees. Nevermind how ludicrous it is to picture a company letting the public watch it deliberate acquisitions (can you imagine if Yahoo (YHOO) CEO Marissa Mayer created a Vine video, and shared it on Twitter, of her early meetings with David Karp before buying Tumblr?). By now the reader has checked out anyway, as Mae and the rest of The Circle rapidly convinces people all over the world, beginning with politicians, to "go transparent" (Mae gets to turn her camera off when she's in the bathroom, but only for two minutes, lest her watchers worry).

    In one of the book's rare funny moments, Mae sleeps with a guy at The Circle who has pursued her. He is a premature ejaculator but nonetheless he asks her—demands, in fact—to "rate him" based on his sexual performance. She keeps giving him 100s to make him feel good. The rating is really important to him. These are the kinds of people Eggers imagines actually occupy the desks of our hallowed tech companies. Maybe it's more upsetting than funny.

    Regardless, the idea that one of our biggest tech companies could gain too much power and influence is certainly a legitimate fear—like Jonathan Franzen, Eggers, it seems reasonable to extrapolate, is indeed afraid; he does not tweet or keep up a Facebook author page—but inThe Circle, the rest of the world outside the company so quickly embraces "transparency" and sits glued to their screens watching Mae's work day that you begin to wonder if the novel is meant to take place on a different planet. Eggers's sendup of social media is partially dead-on (people at The Circle rampantly send "zings" and give a "smile" or "frown" to status updates) but in his depiction no one in America seems to have any life at all outside the computer. The proliferation of social media notwithstanding, human beings simply aren't as gullible as he makes them out to be.

    The sole voices of reason in the novel are Mae's analog parents and her ex- boyfriend, Mercer, an outdoorsman type who makes chandeliers out of antlers. Whenever she visits her folksy parents, whom she quickly comes to look down on, she also sees Mercer, who has become close with her parents and who is wary of her work at The Circle. "You know what I think, Mae?" he tells her at one family meal. "I think you think that sitting at your desk, frowning and smiling somehow makes you think you're actually living some fascinating life. You comment on things, and that substitutes for doing them. You look at pictures of Nepal, push a smile button, and you think that's the same as going there… Mae, do you realize how incredibly boring you've become?" All of that is true, and Mercer is clearly meant to stand in for us, the reasonable reader. But he also sounds too much like an angry old man complaining about technology to be a fair surrogate for sanity. Mae swiftly writes him off, and this is where the book begins to get boring. Mae's parents are unable to warn her against The Circle because they're benefitting from its healthcare program, so Mercer is left to the task alone. When he writes Mae a letter further explaining his kind concerns, she reads that letter aloud to her millions of "watchers" and we realize Eggers has no intention of creating a believable satire (which would be fine if it were meant to be an intentionally over-the-top parody, but it isn't that—the book is rarely funny) because the people tuned in to Mae unhesitatingly and unanimously mock Mercer for suggesting caution about The Circle's encouraged obliteration of privacy. Eggers would do well to show a few of them piping up in his defense, or even one chorus of, "well, he makes some fair points…" but there is none. The fictional society is as blindly accepting of Big Brother as Mae.

    By the point in the book when millions of people tune in to cheer Mae on as she uses The Circle's mobile cameras to pursue Mercer (for wanting only to live alone, unbothered in the woods) so relentlessly that, inevitably, something awful happens, the plot has grown so far-fetched, and the people so far gone from any semblance of humans we know, that you're well aware of what's coming. And Eggers doesn't surprise or give a twist: instead, he chooses the exact ending we expect.