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, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and PayPal.

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.