High-tech future and gadgets in The Circle are already here

Firm logo, social technology more mirror than crystal ball in film based on Eggers novel

It isn’t easy to make a movie about technology taking over or ruining the world — particularly because it takes at least two years to get a movie from script to screen, allowing Silicon Valley time to create the very thing that futuristic films are trying to warn us about.

Such is the fate that befalls The Circle, a new drama (opening Friday) based on Dave Eggers’ 2013 novel. The movie stars Tom Hanks as Eamon Bailey, a Steve Jobs-esque tech CEO, and Emma Watson as Mae, a freshman employee at The Circle who gets in over her head. Only problem is, the scariest parts of The Circle are already happening. Let’s explore.

For starters, the company logo The logo for The Circle, an Apple/ Google/Facebook hybrid company, is a circle with a line sliced out of it. Funny, that’s almost exactly the shape Uber replaced its old logo with early last year, but flipped 180 degrees.

High-tech medical bracelets Mae and her family sign up for the company medical plan, which helps with her father’s multiple sclerosis. But The Circle slaps a metal bracelet on her wrist, which tracks her intravenous system, her heart rate and her overall health. Sounds a lot like, um, an Apple Watch. Or health insurance-sponsored Fitbits, now a common perk at companies that of- fer incentives toward step counts.

‘Optional’ socialization Employees at The Circle are coerced into socializing their entire day: what they’re interested in, how they’re feeling, what their plans are. The dark side is that none of that information belongs to them anymore. Thanks to Donald Trump’s recent rollback of Internet privacy rules passed last year by the Federal Communications Commission, it’s now legal in the U.S. for Internet providers to sell customers’ information — including their search histories.

One account for everything In The Circle, Eamon artfully debuts Tru You, a service that ties together all of your bank and credit card accounts into one, with a single password. Remember that time you paid for groceries with Apple Pay? We’re getting pretty darn close.

Live casting your every move After fully drinking the company Kool-Aid, Mae decides to clip a camera to her shirt and live broadcast her entire life, morning to night. Which you can now do on Facebook Live and Instagram Live.

Eyes that watch us around the world A cool feature introduced by Eamon is a marble-size camera that devotees can stick anywhere, turning the world into one giant live cast. We’re not entirely at the stalker-level cameras imagined by The Circle yet, but between satellite images, omnipresent security cameras and easily hacked cameras in our computers, cellphones and tablets, we’re near it.