I posted an excerpt from the new Dave Eggers novel earlier, and here’s part of a riposte to the book that Felix Salmon wrote for Reuters, which contends that the author gets Silicon Valley all wrong. Because the novel doesn’t come out for another week and I haven’t read it, I don’t know what to say about this critique. Eggers seems to have purposely written about the Valley without firsthand experience in the same way that Kafka imagined America or Stephen Crane the Civil War, hoping to create something of an impressionistic truth. At any rate, this is from Salmon:

“The thing about the Valley that Eggers misses is that it’s populated by people who consider themselves above the rest of the country — intellectually, culturally, financially. They consider themselves the cognitive elite; the rest of us are the puppets dancing on the end of their strings of code.

Besides, we all share the downside of being part of an always-on, networked society, whether we participate on social media or not. If you’re going to suffer the downside, you might as well enjoy the upside — that’s all the motivation that anybody needs to get involved, there’s no need for crude coercion.

In science, there’s a phenomenon called ‘herd immunity’: if you vaccinate a high enough proportion of people, the entire population becomes immune. The evolution of the web is similar: enough of us are connected, in many different ways, that no one has real privacy any longer. Eggers can see that, but he then tries to reverse-engineer how we got here, and, by dint of not doing his homework, gets it very wrong.

The Circle is a malign organization; you can almost see its CEO, Eamon Bailey, stroking a white cat in his suburban Palo Alto lair, dreaming of Global Domination. In reality, however, the open protocols of the World Wide Web led naturally and ineluctably to our current loss of privacy. Tim Berners-Lee is no evil genius; he’s a good guy. And the Eggers novel I’d love to read is the one dominated by the best of intentions. Rather than the one which thinks that if technology is causing problems, then the cause must always be technologists with maleficent ulterior motives.”•

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Eggers visits Conan in 2004: