The Circle

corner of
     the web, every portal, every pay site, everything you wanted to do.
    TruYou changed the internet, in toto, within a year. Though some sites were resistant
     at first, and free-internet advocates shoutedabout the right to be anonymous online, the TruYou wave was tidal and crushed all
     meaningful opposition. It started with the commerce sites. Why would any non-porn
     site want anonymous users when they could know exactly who had come through the door?
     Overnight, all comment boards became civil, all posters held accountable. The trolls,
     who had more or less overtaken the internet, were driven back into the darkness.
    And those who wanted or needed to track the movements of consumers online had found
     their Valhalla: the actual buying habits of actual people were now eminently mappable
     and measurable, and the marketing to those actual people could be done with surgical
     precision. Most TruYou users, most internet users who simply wanted simplicity, efficiency,
     a clean and streamlined experience, were thrilled with the results. No longer did
     they have to memorize twelve identities and passwords; no longer did they have to
     tolerate the madness and rage of the anonymous hordes; no longer did they have to
     put up with buckshot marketing that guessed, at best, within a mile of their desires.
     Now the messages they did get were focused and accurate and, most of the time, even
     welcome.
    And Ty had come upon all this more or less by accident. He was tired of remembering
     identities, entering passwords and his credit-card information, so he designed code
     to simplify it all. Did he purposely use the letters of his name in TruYou? He said
     he realized only afterward the connection. Did he have any idea of the commercial
     implications of TruYou? He claimed he did not, and most people assumed this was the
     case, that the monetization of Ty’s innovations came from the other two Wise Men,
     those with the experience and business acumen to make it happen. It was they who monetizedTruYou, who found ways to reap funds from all of Ty’s innovations, and it was they
     who grew the company into the force that subsumed Facebook, Twitter, Google, and finally
     Alacrity, Zoopa, Jefe, and Quan.
    “Tom doesn’t look so good here,” Annie noted. “He’s not quite that sharky. But I hear
     he loves this picture.”
    To the lower left of Ty was Tom Stenton, the world-striding CEO and self-described
Capitalist Prime
—he loved the Transformers—wearing an Italian suit and grinning like the wolf that
     ate Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother. His hair was dark, at the temples striped
     in grey, his eyes flat, unreadable. He was more in the mold of the eighties Wall Street
     traders, unabashed about being wealthy, about being single and aggressive and possibly
     dangerous. He was a free-spending global titan in his early fifties who seemed stronger
     every year, who threw his money and influence around without fear. He was unafraid
     of presidents. He was not daunted by lawsuits from the European Union or threats from
     state-sponsored Chinese hackers. Nothing was worrisome, nothing was unattainable,
     nothing was beyond his pay grade. He owned a NASCAR team, a racing yacht or two, piloted
     his own plane. He was the anachronism at the Circle, the flashy CEO, and created conflicted
     feelings among many of the utopian young Circlers.
    His kind of conspicuous consumption was notably absent from the lives of the other
     two Wise Men. Ty rented a ramshackle two-bedroom apartment a few miles away, but then
     again, no one had ever seen him arrive at or leave campus; the assumption was that
     he lived there. And everyone knew where Eamon Bailey lived—a highly visible, profoundly
     modest three-bedroom home on a widely accessible streetten minutes from campus. But Stenton had houses everywhere—New York, Dubai, Jackson
     Hole. A floor atop the Millennium Tower in San Francisco. An island near Martinique.
    Eamon Bailey, standing next to him in the painting, seemed utterly at peace, joyful
     even, in the presence of these men, both of whom were, at least superficially, diametrically
     opposed to his values. His portrait, to the lower right of Ty’s, showed him as he
     was—grey-haired, ruddy-faced, twinkly-eyed, happy and earnest. He was the public face
     of the company, the personality everyone associated with the Circle. When he smiled,
     which was near-constantly, his mouth smiled, his eyes smiled, his