Think about a private matter in your life. A secret you keep. Maybe it’s a belief you hold that would make your friends ostracize you. Perhaps it’s an activity you enjoy in private that you know would shock your parents. Maybe it’s your browser history, the books you read, the underwear you wear under your clothes.

Why do you keep the secret? Is it selfish to be private? Wouldn’t those around you be better friends if they knew you for you who truly are? Why are you lying by omission? Wouldn’t society be better off if we stopped treating taboo topics as taboo and just spoke frankly and honestly with one another?

The powerful Silicon Valley company at the heart of Dave Eggers’ 2013 novel The Circle makes the case that privacy is pathology. The human instinct to hide private aspects of their lives comes from an anti-social, primitive, and hostile place, they argue. The Circle, of course, has the solution. Available at an affordable price point.

Dave Eggers’ book was released with mixed reviews, and for good reason. What was advertised as a futuristic techno-thriller was actually a 500-page allegory — a fable about a society that forgot that there’s value in the secrets we keep. As a thriller, the book fails. Following main character Mae Holland — the doe-eyed Millennial embarking on a post-grad career at The Circle — is tedious and unwieldy. She’s not like us. She’s not relatable. I came to appreciate that this is intentional — Eggers has created a world where society is 5% tilted away from current privacy norms in Western society. A little more willing to trust in corporations over our government. A little more willing to sacrifice personal privacy for the greater good.

What makes this book a classic is how our real-world society might close that 5% gap in the near future. I think about The Circle frequently. It looms over many trending stories in the news. I’ve come to appreciate that the true main character of The Circle isn’t Mae at all — it’s the company’s technology. The humans in the book are almost inconsequential. They are data points in an algorithm.

PastPerfect comes to life.

Of The Circle’s tech, PastPerfect is my favorite. A new and sexy product to scan every available piece of data and documentation to build a comprehensive family history — where you’re from, who your ancestors are, and what they did with their lives. In the book, a character’s reputation is ruined after some embarrassing information is uncovered about her parents and ancestors. In 2013, it’s far-fetched.

In 2015, however, a news story made the novel prescient. Internet outrage was palpable after Ben Affleck made news concerning an appearance on the PBS series Finding Your Roots. The show invites celebrity guests to learn more about their ancestry and heritage in front of the camera.

Over the course of filming, it was revealed to Affleck that one of his ancestors had owned slaves. In response to this shocking and embarrassing revelation, Affleck requested that PBS edit their footage to omit that revelation. Noting Affleck’s “megastar” status, PBS obliged and released the episode with the slave-owning ancestor excluded.

The whole ordeal would have remained a secret had Sony’s hacked emails not surfaced on WikiLeaks, revealing the entire back-and-forth deliberation about whether or not to “censor” the episode. Once revealed, the vitriol towards PBS and Affleck was incredible. PBS suspended Finding Your Roots and penalized producers for violating network standards. Affleck was publicly shamed for his request to cover up the discovery. Social media was vicious. Thinkpieces about Ben Affleck’s responsibility as a public figure to accept and decry his success amid an ancestral history of subjugating others were widespread. PastPerfect, once a clever plot device, had emerged as real. Most shockingly, our society reacted the same way as The Circle’s fictional world. That’s spooky.

Ben Affleck doesn’t have to answer for his slave-owning ancestor. He doesn’t owe it to anyone to talk about it or to reveal it on television. It’s none of our business. PBS’ Finding Your Roots isn’t an expose show — it’s a friendly and fluffy show not meant to have deeper political impact. We don’t infer that Channing Tatum is some kind of survivalist doomsday prepper just because he participated in Bear Grylls’ Running Wild. In the same way, Affleck isn’t necessarily a supporter of slaver, censorship, or anything sinister just because he wanted to leave out an embarrassing discovery. He’s just a person who feels shame like all the rest of us. The outrage cycle — jumping from one bad tweet to another, from one gaffe to another — is so quick to make something A THING TO DISCUSS that they forget that there are things that don’t need to be discussed.

Sometimes private things aren’t private because they are sinister — they are private because we simply want them to be private. Linking privacy with deviance is dangerous. It’s how “I’ve got nothing to hide” remains such a pithy (but effective) argument against privacy-invasive tactics by companies and governments. We all have something to hide, and that’s just fine.

It’s stories like this that make The Circle such an interesting book. It’s not a great beach read, for sure, but it’s captivating to see life imitate Dave Eggers’ art. Whether it’s the constant live-streaming body cameras, the increasingly invasive role that employers play in our health data, or the startling possibilities of mining student data to predict outcomes — the tech from The Circle is from the future, but it may not be a distant future.