As the protagonist of ‘Super Sad True Love Story’, Lenny is Gary Shteyngart’s guinea pig whose life shows the process of people compromising their citizens’ rights. The insignia on soldiers’ uniforms, a sword superimposed over Lady Liberty’s crown can best describe the invisible power overriding people’s mind and life.

In the book, the United States collapses and the olive-shaped social structure becomes a pyramid-shaped social structure which means an aggravation of discrimination between different classes. However, people refuse to explore and correct this social injustice but instead deride poorer people, forming a vicious cycle. In the book, everyone is exposed to their authority’s surveillance and others’ peeping that even strangers can visualize Lenny’s love for Eunice in real time. Without those internal and private emotions kept to ourselves, people in those books can hardly be regarded as independent individuals. In the book, people prefer playing apparat rather than reading books. They no longer clean their hearts and enrich their brains through reading but accept the rude and inhumane data stream.

Are these scenarios kind of familiar? Yes, they are the soon future our society may become if we continue exchanging our ability to think and criticize for high tech products. Just as the world described by Neil Postman in ‘Amusing Ourselves to Death’, “people hypnotize themselves into addiction to TV”. In ‘Super Sad True Love Story’, the only difference is that people are addicted to apparat and FAC which nearly reduce real human contact to zero despite having sex.

Reflecting on our current society, businessmen are acceleratingly accumulating money and deepening the gap between classes; ubiquitous cameras and the Internet’s open information are cornering people to total exposure; an increasing amount of people are satisfied with only reading books’ gists. Most importantly, people are too focused on high tech to notice those crises. Though the situations described by Gary are exaggerated, we still need to carefully deal with technology’s brainwashing power.