I wish I could remember which of you recommended this movie to us. Feel free to remind me.
The Circle is a 2017 techno-thriller starring Emma Watson (Harry Potter) and Tom Hanks (Far Left Crazy). It received an awful lot of bad reviews (somebody called it “the reason people hate Hollywood”), but I would call it a timely, worthwhile horror movie. One might even say an appalling horror movie.
Watson plays a young woman, nobody special, who lands a job with The Circle, the world’s biggest media corporation, a social media colossus reminiscent of Google, not to mention Scientology meets Amway–with the Tower of Babel and Revelation thrown in. Hanks, playing the lord high CEO of The Circle, sums up its philosophy succinctly: “Knowing things is good. But knowing everything is better!”
And so you have this hi-tech amoeba spreading out to engulf everybody, and we’re all cool with that because once the sum total of human knowledge and experience is gathered into one place and digitized, etc., “We will reach our full potential” (God forbid!) and be able to do everything and solve every single problem in the world. Indeed, there will be nothing too trivial for The Circle to sink its fangs into. There will be no more privacy: because having a personal experience not shared by everybody in the world is “selfish.”
But this is where Satan takes us, with his promise that “ye shall be as gods.” He always takes us there! A less deserving object of worship than ourselves should be, for anyone not totally off his chump, impossible to imagine.
It’s almost as hard to imagine how horrible it would be to live in a world from which privacy has literally been eradicated. The Circle has even succeeded in making membership mandatory and getting the government to require everyone to vote–a little fantasy which President *Batteries Not Included used to kick around.
The Circle abounds with babble about “democracy,” abundantly demonstrating why our country’s founders had a horror of it, and did everything in their power to give us a republic instead. Or you could read The Peloponnesian War, Thucydides’ eyewitness account of the political hysteria that led to the civic suicide of Athens.
Maybe we don’t want to be “connected” with everyone else in the world. Maybe we don’t want to know what Joe Blow in Brazzaville had for supper that night. Maybe we absolutely no way want a global government, or a global anything for that matter.
The last time we tried this, building the Tower of Babel, God came down and confounded our language. It was an act of mercy. He was protecting us from those who would devour us alive.
If He has to do it again, it won’t be pretty.