The Circle

assessed and greenlighted new Circle ventures.
    “Hello Mae!” said a voice, and she found its source, Eamon Bailey, arriving and taking
     his place at the other end of the long room. Wearing a zippered sweatshirt, his sleeves
     rolled above his elbows, he entered theatrically and waved to her and, she knew, to
     all those who might be watching. She expected the audience to be large, given she
     and the Circle had been zinging about it for days. She checked her bracelet and the
     current viewership was 1,982,992. Incredible, she thought, and it would climb. She
     sat in the middle of the table, better to grant the viewers access not just to Bailey
     but to most of the Gang, their comments and reactions.
    After she’d sat, and after it was too late to move, Mae realized she didn’t know where
     Annie was. She scanned the forty faces in front of her, on the table’s opposite side,
     and didn’t see her. She craned her neck around, careful to keep the camera trained
     on Bailey, and finally caught sight of Annie, by the door, behind two rows of Circlers,
     those standing by the door, in case they needed to leave unnoticed. Mae knew Annie
     had seen her, but she made no acknowledgement.
    “Okay,” Bailey said, smiling broadly at the room, “I think we should just dig in,
     given we’re all present”—and here his eyes stopped, ever so briefly, on Mae and the
     camera around her neck. It was important, Mae had been told, that the entire event
     seem natural,and that it appear that Mae, and the audience, were being invited into a very regular
     sort of event.
    “Hi gang,” Bailey said. “Pun intended.” The forty men and women smiled. “Okay. A few
     months ago we all met Olivia Santos, a very courageous and visionary legislator who
     is bringing transparency to a new—and I daresay
ultimate
—level. And you might have seen that as of today, over twenty thousand other leaders
     and legislators around the world have followed her lead and have taken the pledge
     to make their lives as public servants completely transparent. We’ve been very encouraged
     by this.”
    Mae checked the view on her wrist. Her camera was trained on Bailey and the screen
     behind him. Comments were already coming in, thanking her and the Circle for this
     kind of access. One watcher compared it to watching the Manhattan Project. Another
     mentioned Edison’s Menlo Park lab, circa 1879.
    Bailey continued: “Now this new era of transparency dovetails with some other ideas
     I have about democracy, and the role that technology can play in making it complete.
     And I use the word
complete
on purpose, because our work toward transparency might actually achieve a fully accountable
     government. As you’ve seen, the governor of Arizona has had her entire staff go transparent,
     which is the next step. In a few cases, even with a clear elected official, we’ve
     seen some corruption behind the scenes. The transparent elected have been used as
     figureheads, shielding the backroom from view. But that will change soon, I believe.
     The officials, and their entire offices with nothing to hide, will go transparent
     within the year, at least in this country, and Tom and I have seen to it that they
     get a steep discount on the necessary hardware and server capacity to make it happen.”
    The 40 clapped heartily.
    “But that’s only half the battle. That’s the
elected
half of things. But what about the other half—
our
half as citizens? The half where we’re all supposed to participate?”
    Behind Bailey, a picture of an empty polling place appeared, in a desolate high school
     gym somewhere. It dissolved into an array of numbers.
    “Here are the numbers of participants in the last elections. As you can see, at the
     national level, we’re at around 58 percent of those eligible to vote. Incredible,
     isn’t it? And then you go down the line, to state and local elections, and the percentages
     drop off a cliff: 32 percent for state elections, 22 percent for counties, 17 percent
     for most small-town elections. How illogical is that, that the closer government is
     to home, the less we care about it? It’s absurd, don’t you think?”
    Mae checked her watchers; there were over two million. She was adding about a thousand
     viewers a second.
    “Okay,” Bailey continued, “so we know there are a bunch of ways that technology, much
     of it originating here, has helped make it easier to vote. We’re building on a history
     of