Il disincanto distopico di Dave Eggers verso le narrazioni del digitale nell’epoca dei social media

In The Circle (2013) and The Every (2021), Dave Eggers critiques technoutopianism, solutionism, and technologism. He exposes the Foucauldian nightmare of private international governmentality, described by Michael Rectenwald, in which technology promises a conflict-free society. Devices such as SeeChange minicameras, Demoxie’s mandatory digital citizenship, social algorithms, and gamification aim to erase inequality, crime, and violence while promoting sociability and political participation. Yet these interventions reflect a linear, deterministic view of progress, embodying the belief that social and political problems can be resolved technologically. This so-called solutionism, coined by Evgeny Morozov, replaces human agency with ethically fraught applications. Founders acquire quasi-divine status, and surveillance functions as collective judgment. Eggers’ dystopias reveal technology as a mechanism of collective memory and symbolic production. In this perspective, contemporary homo digitalis, shaped by social media, integrates three anthropological components: Daniel Cohen’s homo numericus, Johan Huizinga’s homo ludens, and Giovanni Sartori’s homo videns.