The Circle

these comments.
     Your tools have elevated gossip, hearsay and conjecture to the level of valid, mainstream
     communication. And besides that, it’s fucking dorky.”
    Mae exhaled through her nostrils.
    “I love it when you do that,” he said. “Does that mean you have no answer? Listen,
     twenty years ago, it wasn’t so cool to have a calculator watch, right? And spending
     all day inside playing with your calculator watch sent a clear message that you weren’t
     doing so well socially. And judgments like ‘like’ and ‘dislike’ and ‘smiles’ and ‘frowns’
     were limited to junior high. Someone would write a note andit would say, ‘Do you like unicorns and stickers?’ and you’d say, ‘Yeah, I like unicorns
     and stickers! Smile!’ That kind of thing. But now it’s not just junior high kids who
     do it, it’s everyone, and it seems to me sometimes I’ve entered some inverted zone,
     some mirror world where the dorkiest shit in the world is completely dominant. The
     world has dorkified itself.”
    “Mercer, is it important to you to be cool?”
    “Do I look like it is?” He passed a hand over his expanding stomach, his torn fatigues.
     “Clearly I’m no master of cool. But I remember when you’d see John Wayne or Steve
     McQueen and you’d say, Wow, those guys are badass. They ride horses and motorcycles
     and wander the earth righting wrongs.”
    Mae couldn’t help but laugh. She saw the time on her phone. “It’s been more than three
     minutes.”
    Mercer plowed on. “Now the movie stars beg people to follow their Zing feeds. They
     send pleading messages asking everyone to smile at them. And holy fuck, the mailing
     lists! Everyone’s a junk mailer. You know how I spend an hour every day? Thinking
     of ways to unsubscribe to mailing lists without hurting anyone’s feelings. There’s
     this new neediness—it pervades everything.” He sighed as if he’d made some very important
     points. “It’s just a very different planet.”
    “It’s different in a good way,” Mae said. “There are a thousand ways it’s better,
     and I can list them. But I can’t help it if you’re not social. I mean, your social
     needs are so minimal—”
    “It’s not that I’m not social. I’m social enough. But the tools you guys create actually
manufacture
unnaturally extreme social needs. No one needs the level of contact you’re purveying.
     It improves nothing.It’s not nourishing. It’s like snack food. You know how they engineer this food? They
     scientifically determine precisely how much salt and fat they need to include to keep
     you eating. You’re not hungry, you don’t need the food, it does nothing for you, but
     you keep eating these empty calories. This is what you’re pushing. Same thing. Endless
     empty calories, but the digital-social equivalent. And you calibrate it so it’s equally
     addictive.”
    “Oh Jesus.”
    “You know how you finish a bag of chips and you hate yourself? You know you’ve done
     nothing good for yourself. That’s the same feeling, and you know it is, after some
     digital binge. You feel wasted and hollow and diminished.”
    “I never feel diminished.” Mae thought of the petition she’d signed that day, to demand
     more job opportunities for immigrants living in the suburbs of Paris. It was energizing
     and would have impact. But Mercer didn’t know about this, or anything Mae did, anything
     the Circle did, and she was too sick of him to explain it all.
    “And it’s eliminated my ability to just talk to you.” He was still talking. “I mean,
     I can’t send you emails, because you immediately forward them to someone else. I can’t
     send you a photo, because you post it on your own profile. And meanwhile, your company
     is scanning all of our messages for information they can monetize. Don’t you think
     this is insane?”
    Mae looked at his fat face. He was thickening everywhere. He seemed to be developing
     jowls. Could a man of twenty-five already have jowls? No wonder snack food was on
     his mind.
    “Thanks for helping my dad,” she said, and went inside andwaited for him to leave. It took him a few minutes to do so—he insisted on finishing
     his beer—but soon enough he did, and Mae turned out the downstairs lights, went to
     her old room and dropped herself into her bed. She checked her messages, found a few
     dozen that needed her attention, and then, because it was only nine o’clock and her
     parents were