Computable Worlds: The Novel in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism

“Computable Worlds: The Novel in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism” examines the rise of the data economy from a literary perspective. Coined by Shoshana Zuboff in 2019, the term surveillance capitalism names the large-scale collection and analysis of personal data to predict and control consumer behavior. This dissertation argues that the rise of consumer surveillance has brought about significant transformations in twenty-first century fiction. I show how contemporary novels by J.M. Coetzee, Tom McCarthy, Tao Lin, Caroline Kepnes, Lauren Oyler, Dennis Cooper, Ruth Ozeki, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Natasha Stagg anatomize hidden assumptions about the boundaries of privacy, the yearning for recognition, and the fear of exposure in computationally surveilled environments, or what I call “computable worlds.” Along the way, I revisit canonical theories of the novel to argue for an affinity between novelistic discourse and the culture-wide exposure endemic to surveillance capitalism.

Although discussions of computation abound in literary criticism, literary scholars have yet to examine how the business of consumer surveillance has shaped cultural production. “Computable Worlds” addresses this intellectual gap by showing how the internet’s current organization as a surveillance system molds social sensibilities and shapes aesthetic production and reception. By increasing what people can know about one another at any given moment, and by producing subjects trained to maximize their visibility, surveillance capitalism has led to a rapid shift in social relations without ready norms to guide subjects. Combining close readings of novels, examinations of data companies’ managerial literature, and reflections on the structure of the literary field, “Computable Worlds” maps the affective atmospheres of the surveillance economy that shapes social life and culture today. To do so, I identify four key aspects of computable worlds: prediction, creepiness, lurking, and ratability.