The Circle

day, and by the second week, when
     she was meeting with a group of lobbyists wanting to drill in the Alaskan tundra,
     there were millions watching her. She was candid with these lobbyists, avoiding anything
     like preaching or pandering. She was so frank, asking the questions she would haveasked behind closed doors, that it made for riveting, even inspiring viewing.
    By the third week, twenty-one other elected leaders in the U.S. had asked the Circle
     for their help in going clear. There was a mayor in Sarasota. A senator from Hawaii,
     and, not surprisingly, both senators from California. The entire city council of San
     Jose. The city manager of Independence, Kansas. And each time one of them made the
     commitment, the Wise Men zinged about it, and there was a hastily arranged press conference,
     showing the actual moment when their days went transparent. By the end of the first
     month, there were thousands of requests from all over the world. Stenton and Bailey
     were astounded, were flattered, were overwhelmed, they said, but were caught flat-footed.
     The Circle couldn’t meet all the demand. But they endeavored to do so.
    Production on the cameras, which were as yet unavailable to consumers, went into overdrive.
     The manufacturing plant, in China’s Guangdong province, added shifts and began construction
     on a second factory to quadruple their capacity. Every time a camera was installed
     and a new leader had gone transparent, there was another announcement from Stenton,
     another celebration, and the viewership grew. By the end of the fifth week, there
     were 16,188 elected officials, from Lincoln to Lahore, who had gone completely clear,
     and the waiting list was growing.
    The pressure on those who hadn’t gone transparent went from polite to oppressive.
     The question, from pundits and constituents, was obvious and loud: If you aren’t transparent,
     what are you hiding? Though some citizens and commentators objected on grounds of
     privacy, asserting that government, at virtually every level, had alwaysneeded to do some things in private for the sake of security and efficiency, the momentum
     crushed all such arguments and the progression continued. If you weren’t operating
     in the light of day, what were you doing in the shadows?
    And there was a wonderful thing that tended to happen, something that felt like poetic
     justice: every time someone started shouting about the supposed monopoly of the Circle,
     or the Circle’s unfair monetization of the personal data of its users, or some other
     paranoid and demonstrably false claim, soon enough it was revealed that that person
     was a criminal or deviant of the highest order. One was connected to a terror network
     in Iran. One was a buyer of child porn. Every time, it seemed, they would end up on
     the news, footage of investigators leaving their homes with computers, on which any
     number of unspeakable searches had been executed and where reams of illegal and inappropriate
     materials were stored. And it made sense. Who but a fringe character would try to
     impede the unimpeachable improvement of the world?
    Within weeks, the non-transparent officeholders were treated like pariahs. The clear
     ones wouldn’t meet with them if they wouldn’t go on camera, and thus these leaders
     were left out. Their constituents wondered what they were hiding, and their electoral
     doom was all but assured. In any coming election cycle, few would dare to run without
     declaring their transparency—and, it was assumed, this would immediately and permanently
     improve the quality of candidates. There would never again be a politician without
     immediate and thorough accountability, because their words and actions would be known
     and recorded and beyond debate. There would be no moreback rooms, no more murky deal-making. There would be only clarity, only light.
    It was inevitable that transparency would come to the Circle, too. As clarity among
     elected officials proliferated, there were rumblings inside and outside the Circle:
     What about the Circle itself? Yes, Bailey said, in public and to the Circlers, we
     should also be clear. We should also be open. And so started the Circle’s own transparency
     plan, which began with the installation of a thousand SeeChange cameras on campus.
     They were placed in common rooms, cafeterias and outdoor spaces first. Then, as the
     Wise Men assessed any problems they might pose for the protection of intellectual