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Title: The Circle Authors: Dave Eggers Category:#supplementals Number of Highlights: 30 Date: 2022-07-17 Last Highlighted: **
Highlights
Having a matrix of preferences presented as your essence, as the whole you? Maybe that was it. It was some kind of mirror, but it was incomplete, distorted.
“Better to be at the bottom of a ladder you want to climb than in the middle of some ladder you don’t, right? Some shitty-ass ladder made of shit?”
“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 endeavor 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.”
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.
We are not meant to know everything, Mae. Did you ever think that perhaps our minds are delicately calibrated between the known and the unknown?
Tags:#knowledge,#balance
There was a rumor that Project 9 engineers had figured out a way to replace the random jumble of our nighttime dreaming with organized thinking and real-life problem solving.
As we all know here at the Circle, transparency leads to peace of mind.
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.
I’ve entered some inverted zone, some mirror world where the dorkiest shit in the world is completely dominant. The world has dorkified itself.”
All of it felt like something from another time, a rightfully forgotten time, and made Mae feel that she was not only wasting her life but that this entire company was wasting life, wasting human potential and holding back the turning of the globe.
A secret between two friends, Mae, is an ocean. It’s wide and deep and we lose ourselves in it.