Social media has fundamentally reshaped debates around human rights and democratic governance. It has also reconfigured the relationship between digital platforms and individual subjectivity. While sociologists, media theorists, and others have critiqued this transformation, less attention has been given to the role of cultural formations, such as literature, in helping to explain the effects of networked platforms on human subjects. This article examines contemporary fiction as a contribution to studies of platform capitalism and algorithmic surveillance. Focusing on Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts and Yomi Adegoke’s The List, it shows how novelists construct “platform subjects” to dramatize and interrogate the effects of surveillance on users of social media. Rather than confirming the failure of the “internet novel” as a literary genre, these novels demonstrate how contemporary fiction functions as a crucial site for theorizing platform subjectivity in an age defined by the inexorable influence – and banality – of the algorithm.
Tyne Daile Sumner (Tue,) studied this question.