The Circle

Your tools have elevated gossip, hearsay and conjecture to the level of valid, mainstream communication.

"I've entered some inverted zone, some mirror world where the dorkiest shit in the world is completely dominant. The world has dorkified itself."

"There's this new neediness--it pervades everything."

"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."

They had access to virtually every movie and television show extant, and spent five minutes noting different things they could see, then thinking of something else that was like it but better.

"The Rights of Humans in a Digital Age." Mae scanned it, catching passages: "We must all have the right to anonymity." "Not every human activity can be measured." "The ceaseless pursuit of data to quantify the value of any endeavor is catastrophic to true understanding." "The barrier between public and private must remain unbreachable." At the end she found one line, written in red ink: "We must all have the right to disappear."

"Homelessness could be helped or fixed, she knew, once the gamification of shelter allotment and public housing in general was complete."