Abstract
This essay proposes Gary Shteyngart's dystopian satire, Super Sad True Love Story, as an appropriate heuristic model for understanding surveillance and society in the twenty-first century. While George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four remains influential, many of his observations now seem anachronistic. Shteyngart, it is argued, offers a more appropriate vision for our world of decentralized digital "surveillant assemblages" that maintain a "control society" with little need for a Big Brother–like state. Unlike Orwell, who predicted the "proles" would be relatively free from surveillance, Shteyngart also emphasizes the disproportionate impact of surveillance on different sections of society. Finally, this essay turns to the thorny question of personal liberty and autonomy as a justification for the right to privacy and as a central theme within the dystopian genre. Many critics argue that dystopian literature is inherently reactionary because of its anti-utopianism and individualism. This essay, however, argues that the kind of autonomy that privacy activists and dystopian novelists most often wish to defend should be understood not as a self-sufficiency but as personhood that is socially embedded and politically engaged, and, crucially, a necessary but insufficient precondition for the resistance and refusal of digital mass surveillance.
Highlights
In the week after the Edward Snowden revelations first broke, sales of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four increased by 6,000 per cent.i Key actors in the drama, including Glenn Greenwald and Snowden himself, rushed to describe the implications of the leaks as “Orwellian”, whilst President Obama quickly reassured the nation that ‘in the abstract, you can complain about Big Brother and how this is a potential program run amok, but when you look at the details, I think we’ve struck the right balance.’ii Contemporary mass surveillance practices are still often understood in Orwellian terms
Zygmunt Bauman argued that ‘one can do worse than define historical epochs by the kind of “inner demons” that haunt and torment them.’ix Nineteen Eighty-Four, he argued, offered ‘the fullest – and canonical – inventory of the fears and apprehensions which haunted modernity in its heavy stage.’x But today we find ourselves situated within a new historical formation
I do not consider a concern for personal liberty and autonomy in the face of proliferating mass surveillance practices to mutually exclude a concern for social justice
Summary
In the week after the Edward Snowden revelations first broke, sales of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four increased by 6,000 per cent.i Key actors in the drama, including Glenn Greenwald and Snowden himself, rushed to describe the implications of the leaks as “Orwellian”, whilst President Obama quickly reassured the nation that ‘in the abstract, you can complain about Big Brother and how this is a potential program run amok, but when you look at the details, I think we’ve struck the right balance.’ii Contemporary mass surveillance practices are still often understood in Orwellian terms.
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