The Circle (3 page)

And so how was this possible, that this scattershot and ridiculous person, who still
carried a piece of her childhood blanket around in her pocket, had risen so quickly
and high through the Circle? Now she was part of the forty most crucial minds at the
company—the Gang of 40—privy to its most secret plans and data. That she could push
through the hiring of Mae without breaking a sweat? That she could set it all up within
weeks of Mae finally swallowing all pride and making the ask? It was a testament to
Annie’s inner will, some mysterious and core sense of destiny. Outwardly, Annie showed
no signs of garish ambition, but Mae was sure that there was something within Annie
that insisted upon this, that she would have been here, in this position, no matter
where she’d come from. If she’d grown up in the Siberian tundra, born blind to shepherds,
she still would have arrived here, now.

“Thanks Annie,” she heard herself say.

They’d walked past a few conference rooms and lounges and were
passing through the company’s new gallery, where a half-dozen Basquiats hung, just
acquired from a near-broke museum in Miami.

“Whatever,” Annie said. “And I’m sorry you’re in Customer Experience. I know that
sounds shitty, but I will have you know that about half the company’s senior people
started there. Do you believe me?”

“I do.”

“Good, because it’s true.”

They left the gallery and entered the second-floor cafeteria—“The Glass Eatery, I
know it’s such a terrible name,” Annie said—designed such that diners ate at nine
different levels, all of the floors and walls glass. At first glance, it looked like
a hundred people were eating in mid-air.

They moved through the Borrow Room, where anything from bicycles to telescopes to
hang gliders were loaned, for free, to anyone on staff, and onto the aquarium, a project
championed by one of the founders. They stood before a display, as tall as themselves,
where jellyfish, ghostly and slow, rose and fell with no apparent pattern or reason.

“I’ll be watching you,” Annie said, “and every time you do something great I’ll be
making sure everyone knows about it so you won’t have to stay there too long. People
move up here pretty reliably, and as you know we hire almost exclusively from within.
So just do well and keep your head down and you’ll be shocked at how quickly you’ll
be out of Customer Experience and into something juicy.”

Mae looked into Annie’s eyes, bright in the aquarium light. “Don’t worry. I’m happy
to be anywhere here.”

“Better to be at the bottom of a ladder you want to climb than in
the middle of some ladder you don’t, right? Some shitty-ass ladder made of shit?”

Mae laughed. It was the shock of hearing such filth coming from such a sweet face.
“Did you always curse this much? I don’t remember that part of you.”

“I do it when I’m tired, which is pretty much always.”

“You used to be such a sweet girl.”

“Sorry. I’m fucking sorry Mae! Jesus fucking Christ, Mae! Okay. Let’s see more stuff.
The kennel!”

“Are we working at all today?” Mae asked.

“Working? This
is
working. This is what you’re tasked with doing the first day: getting to know the
place, the people, getting acclimated. You know how when you put new wood floors into
your house—”

“No, I don’t.”

“Well, when you do, you first have to let them sit there for ten days, to get the
wood acclimated. Then you do the installation.”

“So in this analogy, I’m the wood?”

“You are the wood.”

“And then I’ll be installed.”

“Yes, we will then install you. We’ll hammer you with ten thousands tiny nails. You’ll
love it.”

They visited the kennel, a brainchild of Annie, whose dog, Dr. Kinsmann, had just
passed on, but who had spent a few very happy years here, never far from his owner.
Why should thousands of employees all leave their dogs at home when they could be
brought here, to be around people, and other dogs, and be cared for and not alone?
That had been Annie’s logic, quickly embraced and now
considered visionary. And they saw the nightclub—often used during the day for something
called ecstatic dancing, a great workout, Annie said—and they saw the large outdoor
amphitheater, and the small indoor theater—“there are about ten comedy improv groups
here”—and after they saw all that, there was lunch in the larger, first-floor cafeteria
where, in the corner, on a small stage, there was a man, playing a guitar, who looked
like an aging singer-songwriter Mae’s parents listened to.

“Is that …?”

“It is,” Annie said, not breaking her stride, “There’s someone every day. Musicians,
comedians, writers. That’s Bailey’s passion project, to bring them here to get some
exposure, especially given how rough it is out there for them.”

“I knew they came sometimes, but you’re saying it’s every day?”

“We book them a year ahead. We have to fight them off.”

The singer-songwriter was singing passionately, his head tilted, hair covering his
eyes, his fingers strumming feverishly, but the vast majority of the cafeteria was
paying little to no attention.

“I can’t imagine the budget for that,” Mae said.

“Oh god, we don’t
pay
them. Oh wait, you should meet this guy.”

Annie stopped a man named Vipul, who, Annie said, would soon be reinventing all of
television, a medium stuck more than any other in the twentieth century.

“Try nineteenth,” he said, with a slight Indian accent, his English precise and lofty.
“It’s the last place where customers do not, ever, get what they want. The last vestige
of feudal arrangements between maker and viewer. We are vassals no longer!” he said,
and soon excused himself.

“That guy is on another level,” Annie said as they made their way through the cafeteria.
They stopped at five or six other tables, meeting fascinating people, every one of
them working on something Annie deemed
world-rocking
or
life-changing
or
fifty years ahead of anyone else
. The range of the work being done was startling. They met a pair of women working
on a submersible exploration craft that would make the Marianas Trench mysterious
no more. “They’ll map it like Manhattan,” Annie said, and the two women did not argue
the hyperbole. They stopped at a table where a trio of young men were looking at a
screen, embedded into the table, displaying 3-D drawings of a new kind of low-cost
housing, to be easily adopted throughout the developing world.

Annie grabbed Mae’s hand and pulled her toward the exit. “Now we’re seeing the Ochre
Library. You heard of it?”

Mae hadn’t, but didn’t want to commit to that answer.

Annie gave her a conspiratorial look. “You’re not supposed to see it, but I say we
go.”

They got into an elevator of plexiglass and neon and rose through the atrium, every
floor and office visible as they climbed five floors. “I can’t see how stuff like
that works into the bottom line here,” Mae said.

“Oh god, I don’t know, either. But it’s not just about money here, as I’m guessing
you know. There’s enough revenue to support the passions of the community. Those guys
working on the sustainable housing, they were programmers, but a couple of them had
studied architecture. So they write up a proposal, and the Wise Men went nuts for
it. Especially Bailey. He just loves enabling the curiosity of great young minds.
And his library’s insane. This is the floor.”

They stepped out of the elevator and into a long hallway, this one appointed in deep
cherry and walnut, a series of compact chandeliers emitting a calm amber light.

“Old school,” Mae noted.

“You know about Bailey, right? He loves this ancient shit. Mahogany, brass, stained
glass. That’s his aesthetic. He gets overruled in the rest of the buildings, but here
he has his way. Check this out.”

Annie stopped at a large painting, a portrait of the Three Wise Men. “Hideous, right?”
she said.

The painting was awkward, the kind of thing a high school artist might produce. In
it, the three men, the founders of the company, were arranged in a pyramid, each of
them dressed in their best-known clothes, wearing expressions that spoke, cartoonishly,
of their personalities. Ty Gospodinov, the Circle’s boy-wonder visionary, was wearing
nondescript glasses and an enormous hoodie, staring leftward and smiling; he seemed
to be enjoying some moment, alone, tuned into some distant frequency. People said
he was borderline Asperger’s, and the picture seemed intent on underscoring the point.
With his dark unkempt hair, his unlined face, he looked no more than twenty-five.

“Ty looks checked out, right?” Annie said. “But he couldn’t be. None of us would be
here if he wasn’t a fucking brilliant management master, too. I should explain the
dynamic. You’ll be moving up quickly so I’ll lay it out.”

Ty, born Tyler Alexander Gospodinov, was the first Wise Man, Annie explained, and
everyone always just called him Ty.

“I know this,” Mae said.

“Don’t stop me now. I’m giving you the same spiel I have to give to heads of state.”

“Okay.”

Annie continued.

Ty realized he was, at best, socially awkward, and at worst an utter interpersonal
disaster. So, just six months before the company’s IPO, he made a very wise and profitable
decision: he hired the other two Wise Men, Eamon Bailey and Tom Stenton. The move
assuaged the fears of all investors and ultimately tripled the company’s valuation.
The IPO raised $3 billion, unprecedented but not unexpected, and with all monetary
concerns behind him, and with Stenton and Bailey aboard, Ty was free to float, to
hide, to disappear. With every successive month, he was seen less and less around
campus and in the media. He became more reclusive, and the aura around him, intentionally
or not, only grew. Watchers of the Circle wondered,
Where is Ty and what is he planning?
These plans were kept unknown until they were revealed, and with each successive
innovation brought forth by the Circle, it became less clear which had originated
from Ty himself and which were the products of the increasingly vast group of inventors,
the best in the world, who were now in the company fold.

Most observers assumed he was still involved, and some insisted that his fingerprints,
his knack for solutions global and elegant and infinitely scalable, were on every
major Circle innovation. He had founded the company after a year in college, with
no particular business acumen or measurable goals. “We used to call him Niagara,”
his roommate said in one of the first articles about him. “The ideas just come like
that, a million flowing out of his head, every second of every day, never-ending and
overwhelming.”

Ty had devised the initial system, the Unified Operating System, which combined everything
online that had heretofore been separate
and sloppy—users’ social media profiles, their payment systems, their various passwords,
their email accounts, user names, preferences, every last tool and manifestation of
their interests. The old way—a new transaction, a new system, for every site, for
every purchase—it was like getting into a different car to run any one kind of errand.
“You shouldn’t have to have eighty-seven different cars,” he’d said, later, after
his system had overtaken the web and the world.

Instead, he put all of it, all of every user’s needs and tools, into one pot and invented
TruYou—one account, one identity, one password, one payment system, per person. There
were no more passwords, no multiple identities. Your devices knew who you were, and
your one identity—the
TruYou
, unbendable and unmaskable—was the person paying, signing up, responding, viewing
and reviewing, seeing and being seen. You had to use your real name, and this was
tied to your credit cards, your bank, and thus paying for anything was simple. One
button for the rest of your life online.

To use any of the Circle’s tools, and they were the best tools, the most dominant
and ubiquitous and free, you had to do so as yourself, as your actual self, as your
TruYou. The era of false identities, identity theft, multiple user names, complicated
passwords and payment systems was over. Anytime you wanted to see anything, use anything,
comment on anything or buy anything, it was one button, one account, everything tied
together and trackable and simple, all of it operable via mobile or laptop, tablet
or retinal. Once you had a single account, it carried you through every corner of
the web, every portal, every pay site, everything you wanted to do.

TruYou changed the internet, in toto, within a year. Though some sites were resistant
at first, and free-internet advocates shouted
about the right to be anonymous online, the TruYou wave was tidal and crushed all
meaningful opposition. It started with the commerce sites. Why would any non-porn
site want anonymous users when they could know exactly who had come through the door?
Overnight, all comment boards became civil, all posters held accountable. The trolls,
who had more or less overtaken the internet, were driven back into the darkness.

And those who wanted or needed to track the movements of consumers online had found
their Valhalla: the actual buying habits of actual people were now eminently mappable
and measurable, and the marketing to those actual people could be done with surgical
precision. Most TruYou users, most internet users who simply wanted simplicity, efficiency,
a clean and streamlined experience, were thrilled with the results. No longer did
they have to memorize twelve identities and passwords; no longer did they have to
tolerate the madness and rage of the anonymous hordes; no longer did they have to
put up with buckshot marketing that guessed, at best, within a mile of their desires.
Now the messages they did get were focused and accurate and, most of the time, even
welcome.

And Ty had come upon all this more or less by accident. He was tired of remembering
identities, entering passwords and his credit-card information, so he designed code
to simplify it all. Did he purposely use the letters of his name in TruYou? He said
he realized only afterward the connection. Did he have any idea of the commercial
implications of TruYou? He claimed he did not, and most people assumed this was the
case, that the monetization of Ty’s innovations came from the other two Wise Men,
those with the experience and business acumen to make it happen. It was they who monetized
TruYou, who found ways to reap funds from all of Ty’s innovations, and it was they
who grew the company into the force that subsumed Facebook, Twitter, Google, and finally
Alacrity, Zoopa, Jefe, and Quan.