Users or Used: Surveillance Capitalism in James Ponsoldt’s film The Circle (2017)

Abstract

In contemporary society, enjoying the basic rights of freedom and choice appears at first glance as an acquired asset, yet the unprecedented level of conformity of taste signals some hidden forces, with a unifying tendency, that currently work online. Shoshana Zuboff proposes what she calls The Surveillance Capitalism, a cult and economic order that implicitly revolves around the commodification of collected data with the purpose of making lucrative profits for businesses. Through a thematic reading, this research examines how James Ponsoldt’s film The Circle (2017) encodes Zuboff’s tenets in cinema language. It argues that the film serves as an eye-opener on tech giants’ agendas of crowd manipulation.