The Disappearance of Interiority

This study explores the algorithmic colonization of human interiority in Helen Phillips’ Hum. Drawing on Shoshana Zuboff’s concept of instrumentarian power and Dorrit Cohn’s narratology of free indirect discourse, the study argues that how narrative form of Hum encodes this colonization at the level of language itself. In order to achieve this aim, the study conducts extensive close textual and narratological analysis of the free indirect discourse in the novel. These two frameworks, notably Zuboff’s, are chosen because the novel dramatizes new surveillance-oriented situations that the existing dystopian frameworks fail to adequately account for. Frameworks based on Foucauldian panopticism presume a subject who internalizes the possibility of being watched. Such frameworks are inadequate to a surveillance apparatus that requires no observer. This study, therefore, proposes the eroded self to denote a subjectivity not suppressed by external force, as in classic Anglophone dystopian fiction, but gradually colonized by the ambient, incentivized operations of surveillance capitalism. The analysis shows that Hum enacts its argument formally as well as thematically. Commercial vocabulary contaminates the central character’s interior monologue, performing the very erosion of selfhood the plot describes. The study concludes by proposing surveillance realism as a designation for this generic mode of Hum. It, ultimately, argues that privacy frameworks built around concealment rather than personalization are poorly equipped to address the harms surveillance capitalism produces.