Blog Post 1: Super Sad True Love Story and Emerging Technology

            While reading Wednesday’s section of Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story, what came most strikingly to my attention in Lenny and Eunice’s world – a facet of their culture that is equal parts disturbing and fascinating – was the sheer amount of information that strangers could easily access about one another.  The episode that I have in mind occurs when Eunice has brings Lenny to the “United Nations Retail Corridor.”  While Eunice does her shopping, Lenny uses his äppärät to look at information about the Retail assistant who is helping her.  He is able to see where and what she studied, who her parents, photos from her childhood, her relationship status, and even her sexual preferences.  Later, when Lenny is at work, he is able to use his äppärät to pinpoint Eunice’s location and what she is doing, down to the fact that she is tracking him as well.  Their world is consumed by this proliferation of information and data-gathering capabilities.  I thought about Edward Snowden’s ominous warning in his Guardian interview from June 9, “‘The extent of our capabilities is horrifying…  You will never be safe whatever protections you put in place.’”

            Not only does the culture of total disclosure in Super Sad True Love Story allow its citizens to access someone’s information; it allows people to use that information to “rate” one another, as in jezebel.com’s “Sex Yelp” article, which rates an application that women can use to review men with whom they’ve hooked up.  Likewise, the August 2 article from VentureBeat, about a new iPhone application that works as an “activity tracking service” for one’s friends, speaks to Lenny and Eunice’s mutual keeping of tabs on one another. While the current focus of “The Hotlist” is the location that one’s friends chooses, rather than the fact that they are there, it fulfills both purposes, showing users “where their contacts from social networks are congregating, or have visited in the past, or are going in the future.”

            This immense traffic of data, in which nothing, not even one’s cholesterol levels, are private, led me to ask a question of the novel and its characters:  Is nobody bothered by the fact that they have such complete access to one another?  Lenny, who is supposedly old-fashioned in his sensibilities, may still read real books, but he has no qualms about reading data from people’s äppäräti and “FACing” with bars- and buses-full of strangers, acutely conscious of where he is ranked.  It struck me then that, in the real world, most people don’t think twice about “stalking” someone on Facebook or “Googling” them, and while people can still keep many aspects of their lives from the public eye, many people choose not to.  We do not think twice about his as a society and yet I, personally, was shocked at a glimpse of what it can become.  Perhaps, as was suggested in class last week, Shteyngart’s America is a little nearer in the future than any of us might be comfortable with.