February 18, 2022
I first heard about Dave Eggers in October 2019 during an encounter with a stranger in a San Francisco park, which in hindsight was rather fitting.
On top of Alamo Square Park, we started chatting about how we were finding San Francisco so far. She was here to see her tech boyfriend, and I was spending a week in the city after visiting relatives in Silicon Valley. Our conversation meandered along the dramatic slopes of colourful Victorian homes, the wild stores and restaurants that catered to a very niche audience, how to narrowly avoid getting mugged (by not realising you’re the target until after it happens), the holdouts that gave you glimspes of the “old” San Francisco amidst the rising inequality, and the Google buses that shield you from the grime all the way from Potrero Hill to Mountain View.
It was along that train of thought that Dave Eggers popped up. “Have you heard of the book The Circle by Dave Eggers? He talks all about this.” I promised to check it out. Ironically, I couldn’t find a copy in San Francisco, but I managed to get the book back in Sydney.
True to my San Francisco friend, The Circle was a great read, especially after visiting so many of its plot locations. Facebook and Google HQ’s sheer size and variety of ecosystems were a far cry from the sterile white-black-chic-modern-default office fitout I had worked in, and like the Circle’s protagonist Mae Holland, I could feel myself getting pulled into the system. Free food, free swag, free transport, free laundry, free medical consults on the job? Count me in!
But meeting a true Google believer (let’s call him Jeff) made me think twice. Jeff woke up early to catch the Google bus from Russian Hill to Mountain View, working all the way there, brought all his laundry to be done onsite, worked out at the Google gym, ate a Google breakfast, and this was all before 9am. He’d work until 7 or 8, possibly having Google dinner and drinks depending on the extra events happening after, and take the bus back to the city. Rinse and repeat. I asked if he liked exploring San Francisco; he told me it was too dangerous. He jokes that if he didn’t have a family, he’d live at Google HQ if he could. This was pre-‘The Every’ - in The Every, Eggers takes it to the next level with Every HQ building on-site accomodation for its staff, completing the bubble so its workers don’t need to leave the campus at all.
It’s interesting to see how easy it is to fall into a bubble, particularly in a place like San Francisco. The first thing my Bay Area family told me was to ‘stay away from the Tenderloin and the Mission District’, and to watch out for the homeless population. And yet we went to an upmarket restaurant in the Mission District that boasted you would be seated next to strangers on a communal table, the concept being a dinner party where people from different backgrounds could share stories and experiences with each other. It ended up being people mostly from tech backgrounds. As we left the restaurant, I noticed a lot of my fellow dinner party guests looking visibly uncomfortable, turning their eyes away from the Mission homeless, who were collecting cans and shuffling along with their metal shopping carts in the cold. The bubble popped for a minute, at least until they got into their Tesla.
It’s easy for some to say it’s Big Tech’s fault, but these physical and metaphorical bubbles can’t exist without the twin elements of people and places. Surveillance technology like the Ring doorbell are touted for safety, but often come at the cost of trust. Expanded on a larger scale, neighbours band together to surveil those they deem ‘suspicious’, or turn the cameras against each other in new ways of neighbourhood warfare. It’s a slippery slope, but one we can avoid if we see the bubbles for what they are - attempts at simplifying and smoothing over our lives, when it’s the bumpiness that gives it substance and texture, kind of like cookies and cream ice cream.
Eggers’ world is a place where everyone is alone, together; where Ring doorbells are taken to the nth degree and feel-good/cancel culture abounds. It’s a place of extremes, with disconcerting echoes of present-day San Francisco. But that’s where I hopefully end with the similarities. If we can see the borders of our bubbles, and push against them once in a while, whether that’s helping someone out, supporting your local bookstore and grocer, or talking to a stranger in the park, it might just help us see that the world isn’t so dangerous and that technology can’t eat our world. I mean, not unless we want it to.
One hour after I leave Alamo Square Park, I get a new friend request notification on my phone. With just my first name and our conversation tidbits, the stranger in the park finds me.