The Invisible Counterpoint

The most interesting thing in Dave Eggers' novel "The Circle" hadn't anything to do with technology. It was that he seemed to take a "manifestation" concerning how humans relate to one another that bubbled up in production of his previous work, "Hologram for a King," and gave it full extension here. Specifically, in "Hologram for a King," while writing to his daughter, the principle protagonist, the salesman Alan, makes reference to himself as once akin to Hitler's Youth or Khmer Rouge, in that, once having found out his parents were hypocrites, he "lorded it over them," did the emotional equivalent of "shooting the adults in the rice paddies." In the novel "The Circle," Mae Holland has parents who, no matter what she does, always ostensibly know just a bit more than she does. They are always a bit her moral superior. They keep around them her ex-boyfriend, Mercer, who, too, feels he's much better m...

Wolf of Wall Street (part one) There are no victims at the beginning of the movie. Basically, it begins with a lad finding himself in what turns out to be one of the engine rooms keeping a whole society running, that needs to be kept going smoothly lest – collapse.  To their "customers," they flood confidence, their own ego, surety, and unflappability. Anything equivocating must be "other side" – on the side of those investing in stocks, who need to have every bit of wavering greeted with an immediate return of reassurance. To be this for them, for society , means affixing themselves with the right mix of chemicals so to be a stable base of relaxed bliss from whence confidence can be spurt out as required. There are no victims, because the movie begins with a sense that this is just where society is. Whatever might have driven societies before then – which might in the past have been "righteous" war and sacrifice (the 40s), cautious but r...

So you know those  scale-model Dickensian villages  that pop up this time of year in store windows or on holiday-themed merchandise display tables? The ones that most kitsch-averse people would describe as cloyingly precious,  [. . .]  Um, well … the thing is … I love those. I always have. As a kid, I would make my whole family stop our Christmas shopping whenever we came across one of these tiny, twee tableaux. [. . .]  Then I’d be jolted back to 1970s Dallas, Texas, as my family and I zig-zagged through the massive shopping-mall parking lot in search of our car.  [. . .] There’s a reason, I think, that human beings—wherever they happen to live—dream about disappearing into the inviting setting of an urban village, be it  real and historic  or  fake and kitschy . In the visual shorthand of our collective unconscious, the scene functions as a reliable stand-in for our much more abstract and hard-to-define concept of commu...

Malcolm Gladwell was born in 1963, in England. He moved to Canada as a child, and still identifies as a Canadian author. His new book, “David and Goliath,” “is a very Canadian sort of book,” he says. The theme of his book is that underdogs — Davids — win over powerful opponents — Goliaths — more often than people think. “David and Goliath,” Gladwell says, is “Canadian in its suspicion of bigness and wealth and power.” . . . Christopher Chabris is a psychology professor at Union College in New York. In 2013, he studied Gladwell’s newest book in order to write a review for the Wall Street Journal. Here’s what Chabris found : In Gladwell’s previous book people like attorney David Boies were said to be successful because of their environment (his parents were teachers) and because of hours of work (he debated in college). Now, Boies’ success happens for a simpler, more uplifting reason: Because he was dyslexic. Gladwell calls dyslexia a “desirable difficulty.” But there was a p...

The Circle It's difficult to figure out why everyone is so ready to laugh at the humiliated Carrie in Carrie . We're told at the beginning that it's the popular gang's fault, where everyone else laughs along so to not be caught out and be deemed part of her very dubious camp. And this is substantiated at other times, when one or two kids show that, when no one's really attending, they're quite prepared to interact with her as if she might not have the plague. But then again, when the prom's on, and they laugh at her while she's covered with blood, it's impromptu, immediate, reflex: there's no calculation of what is expected of them, they simply automatically in chorus respond in awful jeering. So, what? Kids can be mean? Except they're not really quite kids anymore. So, people can be? Except not everyone is. There's not an ounce of it in the gym teacher. Nor in a few others who met her at the prom and reacted to her openly. The film ha...

The Circle Dave Eggers clearly thinks most of us have become incredibly needy and paranoid—guessing that anyone who is private, is doing so to deliberately withhold approval from us, and must be chased down and punished. There is a scene in this book where the main protagonist is going to pieces upon learning that 3% of her workplace doesn’t like her. All she can do is imagine who they might be, and wonder how they might be courted to her. Our collective regression to the emotional state of an abandoned child, is according to Eggers what could empower our wanting some giant company—a Google gone total world domination, for instance—to have everyone in some way under wraps. Little lollypop Google icameras everywhere, ensuring no one does anything that might be felt by our Earth hoard as a snubbing. Terrorism isn’t the issue. Nor really crime or racist behavior. It’s that someone if they could would “unfriend” you, if only if it could be done anonymously.