Hacker Cinema
The Circle
2017 · Film · 110 min
Directed by James Ponsoldt
A young tech worker takes a job at a powerful Internet corporation, quickly rises up the company's ranks, and soon finds herself in a perilous situation concerning privacy, surveillance and freedom. She comes to learn that her decisions and actions will determine the future of humanity.
8 positive16 negative6 mixed21 neutralfrom 51 commenters
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58 comments on Hacker News
> I want to know if there's a reason beyond that why widespread surveillance shouldn't be a thing.
See copypasta https://pastebin.com/GQBGWjv8 for full explanation of the four counter arguments below, too long to post here.
"You have nothing to fear" This is a very dangerous mindset. The argument is frequently raised in debates by pro-big brother hawks, and doing so is dangerous, cowardly and dishonest.
There are at least four good reasons to reject this argument solidly and uncompromisingly: the rules may change, it's not you who determine if you're guilty, laws must be broken for society to progress, and privacy is a basic human need.
> Guy takes his dog for a walk, doesn't pick up, boom, cameras plus AI finds the person and issues a fine.
In the 1980s depending on your jurisdiction there were some kind of sodomy or gross indecency law. Applying AI and surveillance to that. Guy goes for a walk, kisses his boyfriend, boom, cameras plus AI finds the person and issues a fine and/or jails them.
Most arguments boil down to not trusting current or future government because the government can commit violence against you, deprive you of liberty, or take away your possessions. With a combination of the rules may change, and it's not you who determines guilt.
From: https://www.sfu.ca/~palys/Solove-2011-TheNothingToHideArgument.pdf?form=MG0AV3
in Friedrich Durren-matt's novella Traps, which involves a seemingly innocent man put on trial by a group of retired lawyers for a mock trial game, the man inquires what his crime shall be. "'An altogether minor matter,' the prosecutor replied .... 'A crime can always be found."'
Dave Eggers' The Circle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Circle_(Eggers_novel) - also a movie - explores the concept of people going fully "transparent" effectively mass surveilling themselves
There is Dave Eggers's book (and film adaptation) The Circle, which I understood as largely commentary on Google rather than other tech firms, though it's also described as an amalgam of several others. That might be steering your fickle memory ;-)
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Circle_(Eggers_novel)#Film_adaptation>
They are quoting the book/movie the circle.
Required reading: "The Circle" by Dave Eggers.
Skip the movie; the ending sucks and there's too much drama.
The book neatly lays out how little steps towards a better life (like being able to find your lost dog) lead to an oppressive surveillance state. Every step is a good thing and makes logical sense. The end result is not good.
The Circle (2017) is by no means a perfect movie, based on a 2013 book which I’m told is only marginally better.
But it did do a surprisingly accurate job of depicting pretty much this exact scenario, 9 (13) years in advance.
As in: sleek FAANG holds a grand showcase of mass surveillance using its ubiquitous user-installed smart cameras, under the guise of a good cause.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Mro9RCAhvE4
(The fictional story is slightly more blunt about it, the good cause being finding wanted persons, rather than lost dogs).
Holy Jobs, these Ads as if straight from the Black Mirror episode or that The Circle movie, unreal and sad, to the level of Idiocracy (2006) movie cringe.
Or the show "The One," the movie "The Circle" and endless dystopian movies and TV shows about tech knowing all things leading to personal ruin
I don't believe an attached pin camera with app control is going to "change" the internet. But I do see a whole more privacy issues popping up as this is rolled out. Whether it takes hold is yet to be seen but also makes me shudder as I think of the movie The Circle with Tom Hanks and the similarities I draw from it. TBD on what happens in the next year+
I recently watched a movie called the circle with Emma Watson where they want to tie the account with a corporation as a means of Id to register to vote.
Imagine leaving identity to a corporate who simply shrugs off all but legal threats. It's terrifying and I reckon we are in our way there
They can try. They'll generally fail. Trademark law has specific parody exceptions, which permits things like https://variety.com/2022/digital/news/adam-mckay-fake-chevron-ad-viral-1235389355/, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/shell-arctic-ready-hoax-greenpeace_n_1684222, and https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/spoof-apple-site-touts-bendable-iphone-6-as-a-plus/ to exist. No changing the company name was necessary in any of these.
"The Circle" isn't a parody. Social commentary, perhaps, and its commercial nature as a film would make reaching the threshold for parodic fair use harder. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/parody
Uh you might want to look out for a copyright claim from "The Circle" movie?
Interesting. Passengers also had at least one fairly nonsensical effect scene and some plot points that just didn't make sense. But, yeah, with some fairly modest changes it could IMO have been a notably better film. For me, it's definitely in the category of films that are frustratingly close to having all of the ingredients but doesn't pull them together properly.
The Circle is another one. If ever a film called out for a satirical take on its source material, it was that one.
I asked ChatGPT. It gave me bunch. I got some I've never heard of. I think I'll look into them.
<ChatGPT>
list 50 interesting movies that explore AI.
The Matrix
Ex Machina
Blade Runner
The Terminator
I, Robot
The War of the Worlds
A.I. Artificial Intelligence
Transcendence
The Fifth Element
2001: A Space Odyssey
WarGames
Westworld
The Machine
Her
The Iron Giant
Automata
The Truman Show
The Prestige
The Martian
The Fly
The Bicentennial Man
Surrogates
The Day the Earth Stood Still
Limitless
Robocop
Electric Dreams
The Island
The Time Machine
The Circle
The Arrival
The Host
The Stepford Wives
The Brain that Wouldn't Die
Frankenstein
The Invisible Man
Metropolis
The Thing
Jurassic Park
Independence Day
Gravity
Artificial Intelligence: AI
Avatar
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The Matrix Reloaded
The Matrix Revolutions
Inception
Interstellar
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Butterfly Effect
The Future.
</ChatGPT>
That was sort of the premise of the book "The Circle" by Dave Eggers (not going to mention the film adaptation because it was so bad I pretend it doesn’t exist). It didn’t turn out too well in the end.
The Circle can only really be enjoyed if read as an over-the-top satire in the vein of "if things go on this way." And the film was a great missed opportunity to do some sort of Strangelovian dark comedy rather than playing things straight.
The Circle is also a novel by Dave Eggers, which is the original version that predates the movie adaptation.
You didn't watch "The Circle" [1] did you? I expect it's a somewhat accurate, if hyperbolic, picture of what life there is like.
Take their money, as long as it doesn't eat your soul. You'll likely learn a lot of interesting technologies along the way.
1 - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4287320/
You’re describing neoliberalism, not the liberals or the left. Surveillance capitalism in the tech sector arose with the rise of FAANG, which depends on monetizing personal data for its models. The American political class is guilty of not regulating this industry, which came about as a result of the influence of the libertarian right, not the left. While entirely fictional, Dave Eggers' novel "The Circle" is an interesting overview of the surveillance zeitgeist and philosophy from a centrist POV. I wouldn’t really recommend the film as it’s terrible, but the book illustrates how every good tech idea is a slippery slope or double-edged sword. Every idea that has the potential to make us more free, also has the risk of enslaving us. The reason the tech sector requires regulation in this arena is because they aren’t willing to do it themselves as it impacts their profits. There’s nobody in DC looking out for the consumer or interested in protecting personal data, and that’s the most troubling part of the problem. Our representatives aren’t there to protect us, they are there to protect the donor class.
That’s genius. The Circle (with Emma Watson and Karen Gillan) started out really promising but ended up drifting in silliness towards the end. Also I seem to recall the movie having a really wooden quality despite the emotional content and having competent actors.
This is exactly the plot of The Circle (the book—I haven't seen the movie).
> Rape, Muggings, theft, seem like they'd all go down in a world where AR cameras are as ubiquitous as smartphones.
A simple mask stops the second two. And it'll take a generation at least until wearing camera sunglasses indoors leads to sex/rape.
> How do backroom deals, government conspiracies, corporate malfeasance stay private when everyone in the room is recording it?
The powerful will be the last people this affects. Thus, privacy will be seen as a mark of status.
I saw this movie. The Circle.
Yeah, for the first couple of paragraphs, I was sure they're summarizing some movie. Because I've already seen this exact story at least twice, played out to disastrous consequences.
One take was in "The Circle". Still not sure why people hate that movie, it's pretty much a documentary on Google and Facebook, and about the only fictional element in it are the advanced video cameras. That, and this vigilante crime tracking, which until now I thought nobody was insane enough to try and make a startup of.
This is also one of the main scenes of the Tom Hanks 2017 flop of a movie "The Circle".
Not minority. I love this stuff too, I can find project links I saved years ago by searching my own history. I like Timeline on Google maps and seeing where I've been. Check out the movie The Circle.
Reminds me a bit of The Circle movie from netflix (https://www.netflix.com/cz-en/title/80098473), where a similar idea comes up.
The Circle (both book and film) was, sadly, a largely botched attempt to explore issues like privacy, the power of tech companies, widespread surveillance, etc.
Missed opportunity in that the book was only readable if you took it as a deliberately over the top "if this goes on" fable. And the film was mostly notable for how it squandered a top-notch cast.
What you're saying resonates with the plot of the movie "The Circle".
The most unassuming movie I was recommended, but turned out to be spectacular: Upgrade. I read somewhere the producers had really low expectations for this movie as it is low budget and not about comic book superheroes. Apparently, there are no plans for the 2nd installment. But, imho, creative camerawork, beautiful cinematography and wild choreography put it anywhere above and beyond most any superhero flick out now.
The movie that shattered any expectations I had for it: Enter Nowhere. I stumbled upon it on Amazon Prime, thought the synopsis was somewhat interesting and went into watching it with extremely low expectations (the title is crap, the poster is crap, it has Clint Eastwood's son with wooden expression throughout the movie). But this movie turned out to be a trippy puzzle unlike what we are used to (Cube, Saw, Escape Room). Instead of wealthy people with kinky(?) sense of entertainment and insane philosophers, it has something to do with WW2. Unusual.
Low budget movie that takes place in a single room, yet won't bore you even for a second: Circle. It's a survival game movie where predicting the outcome of the game is half the fun. Blew all my expectations out the park. I watched a lot of survival movies of late and this is one of the (very few) best.
The movies that deserved all their hype: Arrival, It, Us, Annihilation. In Arrival I loved the design of aliens, their environment, the way the linguist tries to decipher their language and the final twist. One negative is how the movie deals with geopolitics - it's crude and laughable. For a movie led by kids, It (the movie) is really a solid one. It is polished like a huge budget superhero flick, but also, uh, literate and entertaining. Us is a beautiful, very slick movie that pops in your face. It has a couple of interesting twists and some funny bits. Refreshing break from the regular Hollywood fare(schlock). That said, Us is riddled with holes as if someone shot at it from a semi. But even with that it's fun to watch as Hollywood doesn't make movies like Us often (only on special occasions?). Annihilation is gorgeous. Period. The set design is a work of art and I love the subject matter. Again, H'wood doesn't dabble in this sort of stuff very often. The move signals the ending twist half-way through, but I am not sure it's even a twist. This movie doesn't end with a bang as it's all about the process. To me it is a meditation on research, often frustrating and unsuccessful (though, the linguist in Arrival was very much successful in her endeavor :) The soundtrack is unusual (and beautiful) for this kind of movie (although the movie itself is unusual). I love the sound design in all these four movies. Really attractive.
Among the memorable shorts (I watch a lot of them; I can recall many, but can't remember their titles) I saw are The Gun Fighter [0], Paradox (try solving the problem in the movie before it ends)[1], Thresher [2], Rakka [3].
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWs4WA--eKU
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnfh3qcpBxA
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqNdbHHWtBc
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjQ2t_yNHQs
> I'm always amazed Google management tolerates things like internal message boards aimed at letting employees create Memes on company time.
See The Circle, the Emma Watson film.
It is already 6 years old. I had a great time reading it when a friend recommended it to me about 3 years ago: The Circle by Dave Eggers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Circle_(Eggers_novel)
And do yourself a favour, never watch the movie version from 2017. The end has been butchered which ruins the whole message of the story.
That episode was good, but the book/film The Circle I think covered this type of scenario better (even if the movie adaptation did leave a little to be desired)
Er... did anyone see the movie Circle? I'm pretty hard to creep out, but this seems to be walking down that path...
Also see The Circle[1] movie for a glimpse into a reality where everything is recorded.
[1]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4287320/
Silicon Valley
The Internship
The Circle
It's possible to get a somewhat accurate view from watching these, but you have to know which parts to completely ignore. I kind of wish there were "this is accurate" edits of those shows and movies.
LMAO. They already track people who disabled tracking without telling them about it.
If you request they delete your data they probably won't, either.
Tech companies (especially Google) are giant black boxes with vast control over our lives. "The Circle" wasn't a good movie in my eyes, but it might give people a feeling of what such a company is capable of.
Another worse case scenario for the future of social media could be one outlined in the movie The Circle with Tom Hanks and Emma Watson. Soon, the "influencers" will be available live, all the time. If you have no job prospects or useful skills, why not just sell your privacy for brand promotion? https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4287320/
Which is explored (in a decent but not brilliant way) in the Emma Watson movie "The Circle". It's ending was somewhat chilling, if a little naff. I enjoyed it though, and provoked some interesting thoughts, even if it doesn't dive quite as deep as I'd like into this topic.
> In an ideal world, nobody should have to conceal anything.
Why not strive for it?
> The data we freely post out into the world via our social channels is tracked, recorded, cataloged. Our social graphs mined for information about whatever can be gleaned about our personalities and things that matter to us.
That's great, and I'd be happy to pay to ensure more data is collected about me. I'm sure this will become extremely popular in the future. In the meantime, I'm doing it myself (Quantified Self).
> They say it's to our advantage, because we only receive ads for products that are important to us... but it's really just a means for them to be more specific with their advertising, a way to exploit our information to get access to our wallets. It isn't there for our benefit, though it's sold to us that way.
Showing me what I'm looking for is great. I'd pay for that. Do you think Company X is evil for providing services and products that are perfectly compatible with my needs? They get access to my wallet because they do something great and I'm happy to encourage them.
> If you've never seen the movie "The Circle," watch it.
I'm actively trying to make the technology in this movie become reality. However, it wasn't such a great movie, and I disliked the end. Hopefully people realized that the benefits of transparency are well worth the rough adaptation period.
> This highlights in very real terms why privacy matters - including your skin colour, sex, sexuality, religion, political affiliation or anything else about yourself. You should be able to divulge your personal information as you see fit, not as a matter of policy.
What if I see you crossing the street? Am I supposed to keep that for myself? Should we ban surveillance cameras, drones, sensors, GPS trackers, etc? Should people really own any data that intersects with themselves? None of this seems at all reasonable.
In an ideal world, nobody should have to conceal anything.
But we don't live in an ideal world. The data we freely post out into the world via our social channels is tracked, recorded, cataloged. Our social graphs mined for information about whatever can be gleaned about our personalities and things that matter to us. They say it's to our advantage, because we only receive ads for products that are important to us... but it's really just a means for them to be more specific with their advertising, a way to exploit our information to get access to our wallets. It isn't there for our benefit, though it's sold to us that way.
If you've never seen the movie "The Circle," watch it.
This highlights in very real terms why privacy matters - including your skin colour, sex, sexuality, religion, political affiliation or anything else about yourself. You should be able to divulge your personal information as you see fit, not as a matter of policy.
It can be hard to be sure though. For example, IMO The Circle is unreadable unless you approach it as a satirical, deliberately over the top cautionary fable but I don't think that was its intent. (Haven't seen the movie given its reviews.)
I think your response to this will depend on whether or not you've read Dave Eggers' The Circle, in which battery-free wireless cameras play a central role. (Spoiler: it doesn't go well).
Imagine the current state of blanket surveillance, particularly in dense urban cities like London, but everywhere, invisibly. Cheap, battery-free, weatherproof cameras are a step towards this.
P.S.: The book isn't great, but it's miles better than the film.
Although I couldn't stand The Circle (book or film), it did raise questions about what happens to society when we can place extremely cheap cameras everywhere invisibly that require no battery, and hence can operate almost indefinitely.
In The Circle they are owned by a pseudo Goog-book company that publishes (and records) every video feed (and its history) publicly.
There's a pretty good movie called The Circle from 2017 with Tom Hanks and Emma Watson that stylized really well what's happening now with FB. (The funniest part was Doga!)
Facebook is keeping silent and will be addressing 'one threat at the time' (threat to their stock value of course - nothing else matters). If they speak up, for them to come clean they will have to blow the(-ir own lid) and expose all the dirt they have been involved (and profitted from).
I suggest people watch "The Circle" [1]. It is about a company that combines FB-Google.
If FB every decided to come clean on ALL dirt they've done, it will be something like Tom Hanks saying towards the end of The Circle: "Oh we are xxxxed!"
[1]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4287320/
Not a documentary, but the movie The Circle with Tom Hanks explores some of these issues.
Planned utopian communities have a track record of devolving into anything but their original goals. This feels like a cross between the movie "The Circle" and the Toyota company city in Japan.
Except Google Clip is like the camera in the movie "The Circle" and is a rabbid privacy violation. The discontent with Google Glasses was likely because it was ahead of its time.
I'm realising that The Circle was documentary not parody.
> There's honestly no way I would ever let Facebook have a device like this in my home
Dave Egger's excellent "The Circle" is a well-written, engrossing and quick book about "what if" Facebook becomes even more a part of people's lives with a personal surveillance device. Do not watch the movie, read the book.
https://www.amazon.com/Circle-Dave-Eggers/dp/159413961X
You really ought to read the book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Circle_(Eggers_novel) I hear the movies crap, but the book is perfect.
As creepy as the increased invasion of privacy on the Google phones, the most disturbing is the Google Clips camera. That's literally how the movie "The Circle" started (although it's a pretty bad movie).
In the movie "The Circle" a big company (a mixture of Google and Facebook) invents a small camera that you can put everywhere that records everything and broadcasts it for everyone.
A post privacy future.
This is huge. I can't even count how many times I've argued about privacy with Googlers and run into "trust me, we take this very seriously, but I can't say anything about it". We're asked to share everything with them, but these tech companies are incredibly, incredibly secretive, all under the guise of protecting their interests from competition.
People in support of these companies running people's lives are all in favor of transparency and sharing on the Internet... until it gets turned around on them. For all it's other faults, The Circle movie captured this perfectly with one line from Tom Hanks: "We are so f###ed."
Maybe I wouldn't be so bothered by Google knowing where I am every five minutes if I could track Larry Page and Eric Schmidt in near realtime too.
I have mixed feelings about this. Personally, working as a contractor at Google was one of the interesting jobs I have had and I generally like Google.
That said, after reading Dave Eggers' excellent book "The Circle" last year and having watched the movie yesterday, I was reminded of the dangers (even if fictional in the case of the book) of a monopoly controlling knowledge. The book/movie is obviously about Google and information monopolies even if the fictional company is named The Circle. Buying the education business with free/inexpensive services definitely increases Google's chance of being the information monopoly.
Personally I like to pay for services. I pay for FastMail and just use GMail as a backup email. I pay for Evernote instead of using free offerings like Keep. I pay for Office 365 to get lots of cloud storage and the Office apps for the rare times when I need them. I pay for using GCP and I buy movies and TV shows from Google Play and Apple. It is a cliche, but I like to be the customer and not the product.
I understand that School districts are on a tight budget, so it is understandable that they make use of free (or priced under-market) services.
I think you just need to learn to interpret the numbers. For a big Hollywood movie, anything sub-8.0 on imdb in the week after release (where the shill votes still aren't outweighed by the general population votes) is bad. Just for this week, this rule of thumb tells me for example that the "Alien: Covenant" is probably not worth watching, and "The Circle" is a disaster.
To be fair, and I was considering placing this as a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14157988
Google has incredible PR/marketing. And this isn't just a public-facing engagement. Google seems to do an incredible amount of inward marketing. The same high quality rhetoric that sells a large amount of the public on the notion that Google is a good company trying to make the world a better place works even better on Googlers themselves.
Bear in mind, Googlers are provided food and amenities on campus, which keep them surrounded by the Google mindset most of the time. One of the funniest things recently, on another site, was getting a response from someone condemning my post about pay equality by a "Googler with a Googler wife". Many Googlers friends and family are also Googlers... that's where they spend all of their time. So there are plenty of people at Google whose entire social circle comprises of other Googlers. And that's before you talk about the fact that Google is paying them to be there.
That's a huge amount of social pressure, and a huge amount of bias in what information they take in and how they interpret it. If their entire social and financial structure is built around a single entity, I suspect it'd be fairly difficult for the ordinary person in such a situation to leave. I don't fault individual Googlers for the direction of the machine.
A movie called The Circle comes out in eight days, and I suspect it will be quite worthwhile on this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUlr8Am4zQ0
- Algorithms to live by
- The Selfish Gene
- The Circle (because the movie is being released that year, and Emma Watson is in the film!)
The Circle is due to be released as a movie in April.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4287320