The Circle: emblematic of Hollywood's tech hate and current creative dark age

One movie has all the hallmarks of modern/lazy storytelling - including the now-clichéd anti-tech stance - presenting a perfect ex of Hollywood's vacuous state

Released in 2017, The Circle aimed to be a chilling prophecy of a tech-dominated future. I watched it the other weekend so you don’t have to (if you work in tech and see it, mentally prepare for 2 hours of cringe). Watching it felt like Tom Hanks lost a bet or owed someone a favor to star in something this contrived. Somehow, Hollywood gets Wall Street portrayals pretty good, or at the very least entertaining, but tech always feels off.

Instead of igniting a thoughtful discussion about technology's influence on privacy and culture, it devolved into a rushed, melodramatic caricature of the tech industry. It wasn't just a bad film: it was a misrepresentation of companies in the sector, social media, analytics, and any semblance of how these types of businesses actually function (having personally worked at Google for many years, which is clearly the company type being parodied, it was incredible just how silly and removed from reality this one was).

Audiences and professional critics alike thought it was poorly done, so we seem to have consensus here just how lost Hollywood is (yet again).

Media narrative is everyone hates tech, and yet with an A-list cast they can’t even make a flick audiences didn’t hate on this topic (if it’s even true, which it actually isn’t).

I jotted down a few notes on how The Circle fails in its attempt to paint tech as the harbinger of a dystopian nightmare, note the eerie resemblance to how much of the media covers the industry.

A monolithic monster

The film's villainous tech giant embodies the Hollywood trope of the tech company as a monolithic entity with nefarious intent. Its sprawling campus, omniscient surveillance, and cult-like employee culture bear no resemblance to the actual ecosystem of real-world tech companies. From startups to established giants, tech businesses vary vastly in size, focus, and culture. To lump them all into a single, sinister stereotype is lazy and inaccurate. Even the worst tech companies wouldn’t be run like this. I’m not sure how the HBO show Silicon Valley did comedy so well but The Circle did the “evil” version so poorly, the writers were just out of their element.

Misunderstanding of social

The flick’s main premise is on radical transparency, with users sharing every aspect of their lives online, but this paints a simplistic (and silly) picture of online social interaction. Real-world social media platforms allow for a nuanced spectrum of privacy settings and expression and no one livestreams everything. While some choose to share extensively, even they maintain carefully curated online personas. The film ignores this complexity, reducing social media to a voyeuristic panopticon, far removed from reality. I get what they were aiming for here but the execution just didn’t work — this kind of ‘science fiction but closely based on reality’ thing only works if the reality isn’t vacuous and the writers can, well, write. The early episodes of Black Mirror got this right on occasion (but they also quickly devolved to pure ‘tech bad’ stories).

Analytics are of course bad

The film portrays data analytics as a weapon used to manipulate and control users. Of course algorithms and targeted advertising influence online experiences, but framing them as tools for malicious intent is demonstrably false. Analytics help businesses understand user preferences and deliver relevant content, not orchestrate social engineering on a mass scale. Conspiracy theory nonsense. Attributing such nefarious motivations to analytics dismisses its legitimate, beneficial applications across industries. Anyway, if you wanted to do a story on using data poorly there are real ones here, and they’re much worse than consumer communication software (health insurance anyone — oh right we don’t talk about that).

Dystopian tunnel vision

Exploring the potential pitfalls of technology is a great topic for cinema, one of my favorites to be honest (everyone loved The Matrix). Which is why I was so disappointed: The Circle fails to appropriately acknowledge its vast potential for good, which is important to illustrate tradeoffs we have to make and provide all-important context. This is of course more difficult to write, and Hollywood reducing things to “us vs them” 1-dimensional villains is simpler. Writing good science fiction is hard, and business science fiction is even harder — I just don’t feel like they’re up to the challenge.

Note: I didn’t even get into just how ludicrous the actual plotline of the protagonist was…

I am begging once again, can we please get better cinema?

Instead of resorting to tired tropes and fearmongering, if filmmakers were doing their jobs they’d portray the tech world with the same complexity and nuance found in other areas of life. Technology is not inherently good or bad, it's a tool shaped by human intentions. Films like The Circle do a disservice by reducing it to a caricatured fantasy. Again, note how no one actually liked it: there’s a reason for this.

So, does Hollywood simply dislike tech? In the past they didn’t. Star Trek was a rather utopian view of the future with nuance on progress and using tech metaphors in interesting ways. Now it's just an easier target than exploring the nuances of other, less tangible societal anxieties. Also the media and tech industry are now frequently at war with each other. But by resorting to extreme caricature and exaggeration films like The Circle are more than just hard to watch, they miss an opportunity for genuine exploration and meaningful dialogue about the role of technology in our lives. I think it’s also Hollywood showing how they really feel here, versus any sort of reality.

Any sophomore film student without weird biases could have made a better piece of cinema. And again, you have to feel bad for Tom Hanks. The man can carry an entire 2 hour and 23 minute story about being stranded on a desert island (amazing flick, an all-timer). He didn’t deserve this.