Free The Circle by Dave Eggers Page A

few miles down the
     Pacific coast. “And now Montara. And Ocean Beach. Fort Point.” With each beach Bailey
     mentioned, another live image appeared. There were now six beaches in a grid, each
     of them live, visible with perfect clarity and brilliant color.
    “Now remember: no one sees these cameras. I’ve hidden them pretty well. To the average
     person they look like weeds, or some kind of stick. Anything. They’re unnoticed. So
     in a few hours this morning, I set up perfectly clear video access to six locations
     that help me know how to plan my day. And everything we do here is about knowing the
     previously unknown, right?”
    Heads nodded. A smattering of applause.
    “Okay, so, many of you are thinking, Well, this is just like closed-circuit TV crossed
     with streaming technology, satellites, all that. Fine. But as you know, to do this
     with extant technology would have been prohibitively expensive for the average person.
     But what if all this was accessible and affordable to anyone? My friends, we’re looking
     at retailing these—in just a few months, mind you—at fifty-nine dollars each.”
    Bailey held the lollipop camera out, and threw it to someone in the front row. The
     woman who caught it held it aloft, turning to the audience and smiling gleefully.
    “You can buy ten of them for Christmas and suddenly you have constant access to everywhere
     you want to be—home, work, trafficconditions. And anyone can install them. It takes five minutes tops. Think of the
     implications!”
    The screen behind him cleared, the beaches disappearing, and a new grid appeared.
    “Here’s the view from my back yard,” he said, revealing a live feed of a tidy and
     modest back yard. “Here’s my front yard. My garage. Here’s one on a hill overlooking
     Highway 101 where it gets bad during rush hour. Here’s one near my parking space to
     make sure no one parks there.”
    And soon the screen had sixteen discrete images on it, all of them transmitting live
     feed.
    “Now, these are just
my
cameras. I access them all by simply typing in Camera 1, 2, 3, 12, whatever. Easy.
     But what about sharing? That is, what if my buddy has some cameras posted, and wants
     to give me access?”
    And now the screen’s grid multiplied, from sixteen boxes to thirty-two. “Here’s Lionel
     Fitzpatrick’s screens. He’s into skiing, so he’s got cameras positioned so he can
     tell the conditions at twelve locations all over Tahoe.”
    Now there were twelve live images of white-topped mountains, ice-blue valleys, ridges
     topped with deep green conifers.
    “Lionel can give me access to any of the cameras he wants. It’s just like friending
     someone, but now with access to all their live feeds. Forget cable. Forget five hundred
     channels. If you have one thousand friends, and they have ten cameras each, you now
     have ten thousand options for live footage. If you have five thousand friends, you
     have fifty thousand options. And soon you’ll be able to connect to millions of cameras
     around the world. Again, imagine the implications!”
    The screen atomized into a thousand mini-screens. Beaches, mountains, lakes, cities,
     offices, living rooms. The crowd applauded wildly. Then the screen went blank, and
     from the black emerged a peace sign, in white.
    “Now imagine the human rights implications. Protesters on the streets of Egypt no
     longer have to hold up a camera, hoping to catch a human rights violation or a murder
     and then somehow get the footage out of the streets and online. Now it’s as easy as
     gluing a camera to a wall. Actually, we’ve done just that.”
    A stunned hush came over the audience.
    “Let’s have Camera 8 in Cairo.”
    A live shot of a street scene appeared. There were banners lying on the street, a
     pair of police in riot gear standing in the distance.
    “They don’t know we see them, but we do. The world is watching. And listening. Turn
     up the audio.”
    Suddenly they could hear a