With its entrails and killing floors, Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" was that rare novel that changed how the world saw business.

We've finally got a "Jungle" for our own times, a vivid, roaring dissent to the companies that have coaxed us to disgorge every thought and action onto the Web.

This novel is "The Circle," by Dave Eggers, and it carries the potential to change how the world views its addicted, compliant thrall to all things digital. If you work in Silicon Valley, or just care about what goes on there, you need to pay attention to it and its message.

Readers will have to wait until Oct. 8 to buy the novel. The more relevant question is why they have had to wait so long for a work that fully challenges the orthodoxies of our information era. Is it not remarkable that in less than 10 years it has become taboo not to share one's inner life online?

In Mr. Eggers's hand, these complexities take the human form of Mae Holland, a young woman starting a new job at an all-powerful Silicon Valley company called The Circle. Set in the near future, The Circle is the spiritual and business heir to our times, a mashup of Google, GOOG +1.41% Google Inc. Cl C U.S.: Nasdaq $579.18 +8.08 +1.41% July 11, 2014 4:00 pm Volume (Delayed 15m) : 1.60M AFTER HOURS $580.00 +0.82 +0.14% July 11, 2014 7:53 pm Volume (Delayed 15m): 13,060 P/E Ratio N/A Market Cap $388.22 Billion Dividend Yield N/A Rev. per Employee $1,281,680 07/09/14 Publicis Seeks Fresh Outlook o... 07/07/14 OK Glass, Go To The Office 06/23/14 A New Face Near the Top of Goo... More quote details and news » Facebook, FB +2.26% Facebook Inc. Cl A U.S.: Nasdaq $66.34 +1.47 +2.26% July 11, 2014 4:00 pm Volume (Delayed 15m) : 38.97M AFTER HOURS $66.41 +0.07 +0.11% July 11, 2014 7:59 pm Volume (Delayed 15m): 243,824 P/E Ratio 86.16 Market Cap $166.49 Billion Dividend Yield N/A Rev. per Employee $1,406,970 07/11/14 Hacking Grows at Messaging App... 07/11/14 Pitney Bowes CFO: Strategic Sh... 07/11/14 Myanmar's Firebrand Monk Wirat... More quote details and news » Twitter, Pinterest and PayPal.

Dave Eggers book 'The Circle' Knopf

It's run by a group of Sheryl Sandberg-ian high achievers and founded by shadowy futurists whose vision of complete, global knowledge-sharing carries ominous consequences for democracy by the book's end.

Like any good horror story, Mae's introduction into The Circle appears to be a blessed event. She glows with her newly won status and gawks at The Circle's schedule of academic lectures.

That's just when she begins to lose herself into a digital maw. She's asked to wear devices that monitor her health and emotions; she's pressured to constantly update her social-networking status; and soon she's asked to document her every move with a video camera hung from her neck, with what will be disastrous effects.

Mae's behavior changes for reasons that will feel very familiar. These services—and the promise of a data-driven world—do provide real value. But her fictional culture and our real one leave little room for objection. Opting out is seen as a personal and professional death.

Google and Facebook declined my request for comment. Mr. Eggers, best known for his memoir "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius," also declined a request for an interview.

His setups can border on the slapstick, such as when Mae ponders her information intake:

"On her second screen, there were the number of messages sent by other staffers that day, 1,192, and the number of those messages that she'd read, 239, and the number handled by her on average, 220, and by the pod's other members: 198."

But it is the silliness of Mae's world that gives "The Circle" its currency. It's just similar enough to the present to help us see ourselves anew.

"The Circle" also carries a separate warning for business: That whatever the utility of the data today, serious consequences await when that data are assembled into a full Circle that connects every inch of our private, public and civic lives.

The warning comes into view with one chilling scene of online vigilantism. It seems fantastical until one recalls what happened just months ago after the Boston Marathon bombings, when some were falsely implicated by "citizen investigators."

The author is unabashed, if not ham-fisted, about what he thinks this is doing to our personalities and dignity. He even devises a character to deliver sermons against the pervasive-information ethos of Facebook and Google: "The tools you guys create actually manufacture unnaturally extreme social needs. No one needs the level of contact you're purveying. It improves nothing."

This sets up the book's high point: when a company founder named Eamon Bailey takes on Mae's seemingly antiquated notions of private life. Here Mr. Eggers delivers dialogue with Orwellian flair:

"I understand that we're obligated, as humans, to share what we see and know. And that all knowledge must be democratically accessible," [said Mae.]

"It's the natural state of information to be free."


"We all have a right to know everything we can. We all collectively own the accumulated knowledge of the world."

"Right," Mae said. "So what happens if I deprive anyone or everyone of something I know? Aren't I stealing from my fellow humans?"

"Indeed," Bailey said, nodding earnestly....

"Privacy is theft.'"

As it is, "The Circle" is not great literature. But it is a great warning—one that you'll be hearing a lot more about. In Mr. Eggers' "Jungle," it's we, not the cattle, who are anesthetized and led unawares to our demise.

Write to Dennis K. Berman at dennis.berman@wsj.com and follow on Twitter: @dkberman