[...] It is in The Circle, though, that Eggers finally writes his Infinite Jest, the book he had the honor of introducing in its 2006 edition. [...]

In a country that builds endless opportunities for "connection" but no longer makes anything, The Circle's endorsement of essentially Thoreauvian economic values comes through Mercer Medeiros, the protagonist Mae's Luddite ex-boyfriend, who stands for inefficient artisanship (he makes antler chandeliers) and rants about what The Circle does to in-person interactions. [...]

The Circle is among the first Pale King-influenced novels as well, applying Wallace's insights into mechanized labor to the fully digital era. While there are no "Tingle tables" here (PK 276), Eggers satirizes the endless streams of stressful, pointless, and self-obliterating work in a supposedly hyperefficient age [...] A feckless and Fogle-like character, Mae-as-May embodies the perverse new liberty implied by the word neoliberal: applied to technological formations, liberal now essentially refers not to citizens' rights but to the freedom they grant corporate systems to instrumentalize their tastes and habits. Crime prevention and many other civic domains are soon to fall as well under The Circle's corporate control. If Infinite Jest told us in 1996 where digital entertainment "choices" would lead us, The Circle predicts the neoliberal dystopia to which today's wave of (social) media saturation is headed. It also offers a far more detailed account of the technocorporate methods by which the American social contract is being sundered, a subject The Pale King addresses in much more mysterious terms.