The Circle

Most people would trade everything they know, everyone they know—they’d trade it all to know they’ve been seen, and acknowledged, that they might even be remembered. We all know we die. We all know the world is too big for us to be significant. So all we have is the hope of being seen, or heard, even for a moment.”

“Well, I did. That’s how I got to where I am now. It’s all about planning and it’s all about follow-through.”

my problem with paper is that all communication dies with it. It holds no possibility of continuity. You look at your paper brochure, and that’s where it ends. It ends with you.

It’s not that I’m not social. I’m social enough. But the tools you guys create actually manufacture unnaturally extreme social needs

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.”

mean, all this stuff you’re involved in, it’s all gossip. It’s people talking about each other behind their backs. That’s the vast majority of this social media, all these reviews, all these comments. Your tools have elevated gossip, hearsay and conjecture to the level of valid, mainstream communication

Having a matrix of preferences presented as your essence, as the whole you? Maybe that was it. It was some kind of mirror, but it was incomplete, distorted. And if Francis wanted any or all of that information, why couldn’t he just ask her?

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.

The trolls, who had more or less overtaken the internet, were driven back into the darkness.

It was a testament to Annie’s inner will, some mysterious and core sense of destiny