Big Data and the Practice of Reading in Super Sad True Love Story

This essay examines the reading that individuals do online in conjunction with digital technologies, and how these reading practices are in turn read, monetized, and exploited by both corporations and state entities. Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story (2010) provides a fictional lens on these data surveillance regimes. Although the novel reproduces troubling assumptions about race and gender that inform these regimes, it also imagines modes of reading and being read that afford pathways of individual resistance to the full legibility that data collecting entities desire.