In the dystopian setting of Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story, privacy is nonexistent. A wide variety of information is available about any individual at the press of a button. People are monitored throughout daily life, from flashing credit scores above streetlamps as you walk down the street to answering personal questions from a stranger in order to board a ferry from Staten Island to Manhattan. One of the more disturbing scenes in Super Sad True Love Story occurs when Lenny goes to a bar in Staten Island with his friends, Vishnu and Noah. During the night, Lenny spots a pretty girl across the bar, and Vishnu introduces the term FAC, an acronym for “form a community.” After pressing the appropriate button on his äppärät, looking at the girl, and placing his äppärät over his heart, Lenny was presented with an entire list of facts about the girl. Her entire life story became available to him instantly, including her sexual preferences, abusive familial background, financial status, and her opinion of him (in terms of fuckability, anal/vaginal/oral preference, and personality). The girl was provided with a similar biography of Lenny, and could see his opinions of her as well. This scene clearly illustrates, if it wasn’t clear already, that privacy is nothing but an illusion.

In our present world, social media has almost completely destroyed privacy. Obviously our financial statistics and credit scores aren’t written on our Facebook pages, but anyone can see our pictures, our friends and family members, and things we like and don’t like, such as actors, movies, music, etc. Through programs like Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, it is possible to monitor individuals regularly, and obtain information about them in the blink of an eye. The technology available in this day and age eliminates privacy from our daily vocabulary, and most of our society is unaware of the degree to which they can be monitored.