Surveillance Capitalism and the Critique of Social Media in Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story (2010)

Abstract

This study seeks to explore speculative fiction’s response to the growth and influence of surveillance capitalism on human values and social relations through a case study of Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story (2010). Prompted by unprecedented advancements in technology, surveillance capitalism is a novel and worrying economic system that underpins contemporary digital culture and capitalizes on the manipulation of human users’ data for purposes of power and profit-making. Following an interdisciplinary approach, the study relies primarily on the theory of surveillance capitalism articulated by the American economist Shoshana Zuboff in 2019. It seeks to provide an in-depth analysis of the relationship between dataveillance and new social media in Shteyngart’s novel and the influence of this syndicate on the digitization of human identity and social relations under surveillance capitalism. Employing Zuboff’s concept of ‘instrumentarianism’, it further investigates how surveillance capitalism functions through instrumentarian power to control human behavior and instrumentalize social relations. The study ultimately concludes that there are eerie similarities between the observations of Zuboff and the fictional society created by Shteyngart as they both work to demystify and argue for resistance to surveillance capitalism which has transformed the way in which humans perceive their identities and the world surrounding them.