Feeling Seen

The culture industries of the twentieth century manufactured and managed consumer subjectivity through the spectacular technologies of broadcast media. Today, adtech companies use data mining and machine learning to deliver personalized advertisements to individual users. Far from the authoritarian model of broadcast-era advertising, contemporary marketing is a more subtle affair, designed not only to manufacture desire but also to anticipate it with the use of data analysis. Adtech’s goal is to blend into the lifeworld of the customer so seamlessly that they barely notice its presence (see, e.g., Serazio 2). For adtech, to be noticed is to risk creeping out the customer.

Existing as it does in ever-increasing proximity to the lifeworld of the individual consumer, advertising has harnessed the language of intimacy to describe its operations. Twenty-first-century advertising exists under the sign of what the Industrial Research Institute calls “Extreme Customer Intimacy,” a new kind of marketing strategy that involves “moving beyond customer intelligence, or even customer insight, to true engagement” (Gobble 56). True engagement is data-fueled, using insights gleaned from the surveillance of populations to tailor specific messages to individual customers. Joe Weinman describes such uses as “collective intimacy”—“an intimate relationship with each customer enhanced by value-adding insights derived across all customers” (181); Arlonda Stevens and Casey Newmeyer have called this kind of personalized advertising, which its practitioners conceptualize using romantic language, “relationship marketing” (173).

This new kind of machine-mediated interaction between individual and corporation must be codified and formalized in some way, structured according to a set of rules, expectations, and norms. In other words, extreme customer intimacy requires new codes of conduct, and surveillance capital’s managerial literature is one key site where this code has been manufactured. I am calling this genre of managerial literature, somewhat metaphorically, adtech’s conduct books. The genre of the conduct book was forged in medieval Europe, but it took on a new significance as capitalist modernity picked up speed in the late seventeenth century. Conduct books were supposed to teach women how to be middle-class, domestic, and charming; such guides were “integral and instrumental to the history of desire” in capitalist modernity (Armstrong and Tennenhouse 1). Moreover, this genre helped manufacture and fortify the distinction between male publicity and female domesticity. Although managerial literature is not directly conceptualized in such terms by its writers, it is hard not to read it as one of the many afterlives of the conduct book genre: it explicitly formulates a code of behavior designed to cultivate a caring, helpful, and—significantly—feminine presence in the lives of its customers.

Consider, for instance, the newly ubiquitous devices and products known as “virtual assistants”: Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana, Samsung’s Viv, and Apple’s Siri. These are the bland, feminized interfaces that mediate interactions between machine-learning systems and consumers. Ostensibly designed to provide information and services to users, virtual assistant devices are also used to extract and store data about consumer behavior (see, e.g., “Amazon.com Privacy Notice”). These virtual assistants are more effective for being placed in domestic spaces—in kitchens, living rooms, and even bedrooms. For all their proclaimed futurism, virtual assistants are made intelligible to users through the old, gendered structures of bourgeois domesticity. As Thao Phan notes, the dynamic cultivated by feminized software is “consistently modeled on an idealized vision of domestic service” (4). Similarly, Jessa Lingel and Kate Crawford describe the canny use of the figure of the secretary in virtual assistant marketing, which helps to sell these devices “as convenience rather than surveillance” (16). The construction of these personalities as soft, unthreatening, white, and feminine is crucial for maintaining the smooth functioning of power in surveillance capitalism. It cultivates a subtle sensation of subjective mastery in the users of such devices, a feeling that must be carefully maintained lest it topple into a negative feeling of powerlessness, of being the object of the corporation’s gaze.

Such a construction requires an education in conduct. This is a sentimental education, one that takes shape through the language of intimacy, romance, and even love. Adtech conduct books, like Tom Eslinger’s Mobile Magic: The Saatchi and Saatchi Guide to Mobile Marketing and Design (2014), educate marketers on how to appear desirable to customers. “So long as an entity communicates with love, so long as it inspires love in its audience, that entity remains invulnerable to attacks by price, quality, feature, tech, range,” writes Eslinger; it is crucial for marketers to appear “motivated by emotionality, not by calculation” (126). This emotionality is simulated by cultivating the correct mode of attention and intimacy. For example, targeted advertising should “surprise and delight” the user: “customers should be either delighted at how well your mobile product serves them, or it should be so natural that they come to depend and rely on your services” (71). Moreover, there is a future-oriented temporality to this kind of intimacy: it should not only serve needs and desires but anticipate them. Location-based features “should be able to record past data and use it to extrapolate a customer’s future needs” (72). The advertisement, if it behaves properly, should be polite and tactful; it should emerge into the user’s everyday existence to surprise and delight the user with a recommendation, before disappearing again downstairs.

This is the central dilemma of surveillance capitalism in the twenty-first century: How can corporations instrumentalize information about users gathered through surveillance without revealing the fact of that surveillance to the users themselves? The solution to this dilemma can be found in the management of user affect, with the techniques of conduct described above. Adtech is aware of this precarious affective position, and it remains vigilant in its effort to “walk the line between surprise and delight and creepy” (Eslinger 126). For the user, delight is perched ever at the threshold of the much uglier feeling of creepiness.

Scholars of management and marketing have penned innumerable essays, reports, and articles on this ugly feeling. Even a cursory search in advertising, business, or data analytics journals reveals an ocean of studies on what the marketing expert Larry Downes calls the “creepy factor.” In almost all these studies, creepiness is dealt with as a hindrance to be avoided or minimized; it is a variable inserted into risk calculations. The feminized servant emerges as the ego ideal of adtech, while the creep becomes its ultimate villain. The caring presence of the virtual assistant, schooled as she is in proper conduct, makes the objects of her gaze feel seen; the creep, in contrast, makes them feel exposed. As in the case of many intimate relationships, helpful attentiveness always threatens to collapse into unwanted obsession. The services and recommendations delivered to customers “should also fall within the realm of genuine surprises, not stalking” (Eslinger 71).

Critiques of surveillance capitalism tend to turn on the issue of privacy—of its gradual waning or erasure. Yet, few of these critiques have paid due attention to the reverence that surveillance capitalists themselves show for the ideal of privacy or to how this ideal functions as a public relations tactic.Footnote ⁶ “You are in control,” reads the header text on Amazon’s website as of October 2025. “Alexa+ is designed to deliver a trusted experience with built-in protections to safeguard your privacy and secure your data to keep you in control of your experience” (“Alexa+”). Here, privacy is not only an ideal to be upheld but a feeling to be managed; it plays a crucial role in the construction of contemporary subjectivity. The proliferation of contracts in online life—privacy policies, terms and conditions—attests to the importance of the sensation of user autonomy, the feeling of consent.

Consider the uncanny sensation of the handheld digital device that seems to know more about you than you know about yourself. Indeed, it is in this microscene, surrounded by the invisible networks of big data analytics, that contemporary intimacy and subjecthood are constituted (see Chun; Hong). It is also the site where liberal personhood as such continues to be shaped and formed. To read managerial literature on creepiness is to witness a culture in the process of rethinking the boundaries and definition of subjectivity. “Creepiness is a nuanced construct,” writes the Georgia Business School professor Hugh J. Watson. “What is creepy today may not be after the surprise factor ends” (6). In Watson’s account, the liberal ideas of privacy, selfhood, and autonomy must be defended by the advertising corporations and data firms currently obliterating them. The founding concepts of liberalism have their afterlife as mere sensation, to be maintained by new techniques of conduct: the new terms and conditions of intimacy for the twenty-first century.

I read adtech’s systems this way to place them in a historical continuum with the novel, that older handheld technology of the liberal self. According to Foucauldian critics like Miller and Armstrong, to read novels was to constitute oneself as a liberal individual by acquiring intimate knowledge of other (albeit fictional) liberal subjects. The novel at its most successful makes the reader feel seen; it evokes feelings of recognition that, when read according to the Foucauldian critical idiom, seem uncannily like exposure. “Novel reading takes for granted the existence of a space in which the reading subject remains safe from the surveillance, suspicion, reading, and rape of others,” writes Miller in The Novel and the Police (1988). “Yet this privacy is always specified as the freedom to read about characters who oversee, suspect, read, and rape one another…. We enjoy our privacy in the act of watching privacy being violated, in the act of watching that is already itself a violation of privacy” (162). Of course, the consumption of narrative fiction and the flickering microencounter with a digital advertisement are two vastly different experiences. But both allow the experience of private singularity precisely through forms of unseen exposure. If the reader’s sense of interiority depends on witnessing the fictional violation of others’ privacy, the user’s sense of personal address depends on the real violation of others’ (and their own) personal data. Both technologies, in other words, define and sustain the ideal of privacy by concealing the surveillance that makes that privacy feel possible in the first place.

In situating the novel within the same field of discourse as adtech’s conduct books, I am responding to a strand of literary theory that emerged during the late 1970s and early 1980s. For critics like Armstrong and Mary Poovey, the rise of the novel and the rise of the conduct book must be understood as two interlocking parts in the same apparatus of power. In Armstrong’s influential Foucauldian-Althusserian account, both semiotic technologies “worked together in an unwitting conspiracy” to constitute a new kind of subject in eighteenth-century Europe: the white, middle-class, domestic woman (37). For Armstrong, the novel functioned as a manual for the construction of the disciplinary institution of the bourgeois family; the heterosexual norms, individuated subjectivity, and feminized administrative techniques for managing this new domestic space were all smuggled into capitalist modernity with the genre of writing called the novel.

Does this conception of the novel as a kind of guidebook or instruction manual hold up today? It is an idea worth entertaining for the historical moment of the early twenty-first century, as the old, solid institutions of capitalist modernity give way to looser, ever more “liquid” modes of social organization (Bauman) in what might be glossed as the movement from a disciplinary society (Foucault) to a society of control (Deleuze). The novel’s social function has of course changed, along with the dynamics of capitalism, from the nineteenth century to the present day. In turn, the novel’s romance plot has adapted to these changes, reflecting transformations in (among other things) privacy. If the boundary constituting the dyad of public and private has always been suspect, it is now being dismantled, not only by surveillance capitalists but also by users themselves through lateral surveillance. As this barrier collapses in actual fact, surveillance capitalists set their sights on micromanaging the social perception of such a barrier in the realm of the imagination. In parallel to these transformations, the contemporary romance novel has adapted to, and in part helped to construct, transformations in how privacy is understood. This becomes visible with the emergence of a new figure in contemporary fiction, a character whose raison d’être is to violate this semisacred sense of privacy in the name of satisfying and seducing his beloved. To do so, he must tactfully negotiate the fragile boundary between service and surveillance, between loving dedication and creepy violation. This figure is, of course, the creep.

The Art of Pleasing

The creep—in the guise of an online stalker—is everywhere in twenty-first-century cultural production.Footnote ⁷ But he has found his true home within the pages of contemporary fiction, ranging from the ultraliterary, through the mid-list, all the way to self-published fiction. I am thinking especially of A. Igoni Barrett’s tale of the Nigerian service economy Blackass (2015), Olivia Sudjic’s novel of Instagram stalking Sympathy (2017), Lauren Oyler’s Twitter mystery novel Fake Accounts (2021), and Barbara Browning’s The Gift (2017), a novel about “inappropriate intimacies” in the digital age. All of these belong to the subgenre that McGurl calls the “internet gothic,” native to the age of Amazon (217). While this essay focuses on two examples of male creeps, the creep’s gender is not necessarily fixed. The creepy protagonists of contemporary fiction, as Katy Waldman recently pointed out, also come gendered female. But the gender dynamics of creeping run deeper than this. Despite his predatory spying and his drive to violate, the creep has a complicated relationship to the traditional “masculine” values of dominance and autonomy. The creeps of surveillance capitalism are eminently other-directed—they strive to find out what the other wants so that they can reshape themselves in the image of that fantasy.

This other-directedness gives a particular twist to the stalker plot when it is imported into the very online present. The creepy online stalker uses the ubiquitous database of the Internet to acquire seemingly inappropriate levels of knowledge about his object of desire not to scare or intimidate but to satisfy them. This figure fascinates readers because he (or sometimes she) mobilizes a sort of ethical dilemma in violating the other’s privacy (ostensibly) in order to serve rather than dominate. The stalker plot is premised on the division of existence into public and private; its ideological function, it seems, is to ceaselessly affirm this distinction by dramatizing its violation. It is his proximity to the intimate that makes the creep a particularly novelistic figure, usurping the detective as the literary personification of power itself. According to Miller, the all-seeing detective was the nineteenth century’s literary figure par excellence; he blended the panoptic power of discipline with the novelist’s “penetration of social surfaces” (23). In Miller’s account of the novel, Victorian fiction was a technology for bringing discipline into the homes and minds of liberal, bourgeois individuals. Yet, even when portrayed as bumbling and inadequate (as in Dickens), the Victorian detective was never a shameful figure. He remained detached, calm, and confident.

By contrast, the creep of twenty-first-century surveillance capitalism must conceal his powers of observation, his control over others’ interiorities, and his fixation on others’ desire. This ambiguity indexes an important transformation in cultural understandings of surveillance as primarily consumer surveillance, rather than a state-led ideological project. State surveillance still occurs alongside data-based advertising, of course. But there is no doubt that surveillance capitalists like Google now play a much more significant role in the everyday lives of most people than, say, the National Security Agency (Lyon). In my account, the creep’s project differs from the detective’s panoptic power and the libertine’s seductive surveillance because of the addition of a uniquely late-capitalist imperative: the creep wants neither to discipline nor to punish but to please.

Caroline Kepnes’s romantic thriller You (2014), the paradigmatic instance of Internet gothic, provides an exemplary case study of the creep. Set in New York circa 2012, as Web 2.0 platforms began to accelerate the rise of e-commerce, You dramatizes the adventures of a stalker figure named Joe. The novel is narrated in the first person, situating the reader squarely within Joe’s subjectivity. Joe is calculating, duplicitous, and violent; he follows his object of desire around Manhattan, studying her routine and spying on her to glean knowledge that he can use to seduce her. Joe has all the tools of networked computation at his fingertips, allowing him to follow his victim’s movements through the city using her GPS location data, to access her inner life through her most private conversations with friends and family, and to view her web-browsing history and her recent purchases. You dramatizes a new kind of social dilemma of concealing one’s access to information about other people. It is an object lesson in how not to be creepy.

For all its newfangled digital trickery, You channels the spirit of the eighteenth century, particularly the spirit of politeness that Philip Stanhope, fourth earl of Chesterfield, famously called “the art of pleasing” (Chesterfield 108). In his letters, Chesterfield encourages his son to “inform yourself of the characters and situations of the company, before you give way to what your imagination may prompt you to say”—that is, to calculate his actions to conform to the tastes and predilections of his audience (108–09). Chesterfield continues: “go deeper still; observe their characters, and pry, as far as you can, into both their hearts and their heads. Seek for their particular merit, their predominant passion or their prevailing weakness; and you will then know what to bait your hook with to catch them” (89). Such deep probing provides a social advantage, but “the advantage…must be ably and artfully concealed” (208). This is one technique for managing your interlocutor’s feelings. You do not want to reveal that you know too much about your audience or interlocutors. Ever since the eighteenth century, the art of pleasing has been uncomfortably close to the art of creeping. Proper social conduct becomes a matter of managing the dialectical ambiguity of bourgeois manners and privacy, of making your interlocutor feel seen rather than spied on.

This is Joe’s dilemma, albeit with a twist. Joe is no aristocratic seducer backed by the symbolic or material hegemony of his class. He is in the much more precarious position of a service industry worker—specifically, a comanager of an independent bookstore in Manhattan. In this role, Joe is a master in the art of pleasing, conceptualized in late capitalist terms as a form of customer service. As he reveals in the first few pages of the novel, he is less in the business of selling books than in the business of information collection and management. Like the data analysis and marketing experts of adtech, Joe attempts to foster intimacy with his customers by collecting and archiving their most granular activities as they move through his store. Joe sees through his customers’ performances of highbrow literary sophistication, anticipating their taste for glossy paperback thrillers rather than austere modernist classics. As he puts it, “buying stuff is one of the only honest things we do” (Kepnes 5).

This tripartite set of skills—data collection, desire anticipation, and customer service—serves Joe well when he meets Guinevere Beck. Beck is a creative writing student who has recently moved to the big city to pursue her artistic dream. Unlike Joe, she is affluent, living a life of leisure as she bounces between dates, drinks, therapy, and writing classes. Beck is the book’s titular you. Throughout the novel, Joe carries on an imagined conversation with her, addressing her using this second-person pronoun. This is the key stylistic trick of the novel: Joe’s mode of address mirrors the ubiquitous you of Web 2.0 (YouTube, “your favorite songs and videos,” “recommended for you,” etc.). Seen in cybernetic terms as an addressable subject, Beck becomes intelligible according to a regime of visibility in which “what one types, clicks, likes, links…is socially configured as both an analog for and the totality of what one thinks, who one is, and what one will do” (Franklin 81). You situates the reader squarely within the gaze of surveillance capitalism while making the reader complicit with that gaze. The reader is invited to identify at once with the putative victim (Beck) and with her violator (Joe, the creep).

Joe’s “data gaze” (Beer) is layered with a curious affective texture. Like the advertising companies and data analytics firms cited above, Joe conceptualizes his surveillance of Beck using the language of intimacy and care. “I love you for wanting a record,” Joe thinks as he snoops through Beck’s e-mail account. “I love your records for being so accessible and I’m so full of you, your calendar and caloric intake and hookups and menstrual moments, your self-portraits you don’t publish, your receipts and exercises” (Kepnes 53). The violence of Joe’s desire for Beck is entangled with his desire to care for her, to serve her, to anticipate her needs and desires—a species of the “servile domination” identified by McGurl (44). Yet Joe faces the creep’s dilemma: for his form of anticipatory power to function, he must avoid being caught in the act of surveillance. To reveal his creepy spying would be a breach of decorum. To avoid this breach, he adopts a specific code of conduct; he must pretend that he does not know anything about Beck. Most of the novel’s narrative tension emerges from this dilemma.Footnote ⁸ For instance, Joe nearly exposes his surveillance of Beck’s Netflix account when he casually mentions that he knows her favorite film—Pitch Perfect. However, Joe’s slip, disguised as a casual recommendation, does not strike Beck as a violation of her singular interiority. Instead, she is forced into an embarrassed reflection on her own “basic” generality: “Note to self,” she says. “Become less predictable.” Joe’s response is candid: “You’re not predictable Beck. You’re just on Facebook” (Kepnes 90).

You’s stalker plot, then, brings together the novel’s centuries-old concern with the boundaries of liberal personhood and an exploration of surveillance capitalism’s extreme customer intimacy. But Joe also reveals what is literary—or, more specifically, novelistic—about the history of surveillance. Joe’s creepiness is in part due to his literariness: he is an avid reader of canonical novels and contemporary literary fiction. Joe has internalized the psychological lessons of the history of the novel, using the genre as a kind of conduct book. “I wish he could know everything about me without my telling him,” the heroine of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, Gwendolen Grandcourt, thinks to herself about the titular character of that novel (Eliot 430). One can only guess what Gwendolen would have thought of Joe, for whom consuming literary fiction is itself a kind of stalking of fictional people. Even if the situations they dramatize are fictional, novels offer up a veritable archive of people’s desires and fears. “The next asshole is rummaging through his wallet for his credit card to buy his Stephen King so he can (fingers crossed) read about a sicko doing sick things because he is too much of a pussy to do all the sick things he wants to do, things he’s probably wanted to do since he was a kid,” Joe thinks (Kepnes 77).Footnote ⁹ Like social media stalking, novel reading (and novel selling) functions as a tool for profiling people—for “discovering the truth about other people” (Rosen and Santesso 10). Joe uses fictional representations of interiority just as he mines Beck’s “personal data” to forge a general model of her desires—that is, to nudge and manipulate her.

Joe’s status as a reader underscores his relation to the institution of the novel as such, if the novel is understood, following Miller and Seltzer, as a technology designed to domesticate surveillance. Any reader of You with an ounce of self-awareness senses that Joe’s creepy desire to know everything about Beck cannot be so easily disavowed. While readers are interpolated and addressed—like users of online platforms—as you, they are also led to see something of themselves in the narrator. For they, too, have felt the tingle of pleasure and shame in reading Beck’s text messages and diaries and following her movements through the city. The titillation of inhabiting Joe’s violating gaze is matched by the reader’s awareness of its inappropriateness. Joe’s creepy stalking, although it takes an extreme form, is merely an exaggerated representation of ordinary practices of Internet lurking. Who among You’s readers has not Googled a colleague, searched Facebook for information on an acquaintance, or researched the Internet presence of a prospective friend, lover, or rival? In doing so, who has not felt the tingle of violation or shame? You directs the reader’s attention to the continuity between the prurient spying of novel reading and the inappropriate intimacies of web lurking.

This claim makes more sense when one considers the popularity of Kepnes’s novel. Both a New York Times and a USA Today bestseller (as the novel’s front cover dutifully informs readers), You has also become a successful international franchise, spawning several sequels, a Netflix adaptation, and translations into nineteen languages (Goldstein). Joe, moreover, is not so much a despised villain as an object of fascination among the novel’s readers. “Joe is a truly fascinating character,” writes a reviewer on the novel’s Amazon page. “He’s strangely likable and there was something disturbingly alluring in reading his narrative” (MD). This is a typical sentiment in online reviews of the novel, many of which narrate the reader’s struggle to dislike Joe, to find his actions revolting rather than relatable. Such a dilemma leads another reviewer to ask, “Joe—is it wrong that I loved him at times? That I felt like he was almost right at times?” (Review).

It is here, in the problem of Joe’s likability, that the shame and embarrassment of contemporary consumer surveillance become clear as a new kind of social problem for the novel to dramatize. Creepiness in You contains an echo of the gothic uncanny, albeit evacuated of the gothic’s unsettling eeriness and instead suffused with the minor affects of creepiness and shame. Like the surveillance capitalists who profit from the extraction and control of private data, Joe must conceal himself and mask his desire to expose as a desire to please. His appeal as a fictional character, moreover, points to the social meaning of this ambiguous shame. At stake in You is the ambiguous status of what Patricia Lockwood calls the “unforgivable intimacies” of Internet-mediated life (148). Such intimacies appear in the illusory form of an individual choice; they seem to be a matter of individual morality rather than a symptom of an underlying infrastructure designed for the purpose of exposure. What is one supposed to know—and not know—about a person before one meets them? The creep’s presence in the romance plot might be said to embody more than just a simple anxiety about surveillance capitalism’s panoptic gaze. It might reveal something about how power has transformed sociality tout court in our fully transparent and computable world. Could the creep, far from being a deviant figure to be denounced, in fact be the norm?

The Sublime Melancholy of the Creep

Tao Lin’s 2013 novel Taipei may contain an answer to this question. The case of Lin’s fiction also helps elucidate the historical specificity of the creep and his methods of data analysis. Data analysis, social media stalking, and novel writing converge into the unity of creeping most distinctly in Taipei, which instantiates creeping as a composition method just as it dramatizes the creep’s dilemma as a matter of content. Like You, Taipei narrates a single year in the life of a New York writer circa 2011.

Paul is a twenty-six-year-old Taiwanese American novelist of minor acclaim whose long stretches of isolation and work are broken by periods of intense, drug-fueled sociality. Taipei takes shape around a series of failed romances, culminating in Paul’s marriage to, and eventual divorce from, a fellow writer named Erin. Despite its relatively conventional romance plot, Taipei is self-consciously literary in style and content; its courtship narrative is punctuated by Paul’s melancholy reflections on death, isolation, loneliness, and technology. The tenor of these reflections is at once deeply philosophical and coolly scientific. Jason Gladstone recently argued that Taipei “isolates what would usually be understood as aspects of interior or subjective experience in order to divest them of both interiority and subjectivity” (87). This conception of interiority-as-data, I argue, generates a new set of affective problems for Lin and his protagonist.

Take Lin’s composition methods, which reveal the continuity between his literary practice and data-based surveillance. For Lin, the impulse to record the real is at one with the impulse to write. “With Taipei, I started out with hundreds of thousands of words of diary-like notes that I typed quickly,” Lin says in an interview from 2017 (“Tao Lin”). “I researched my Gmail account, behaviors, thoughts, feelings, and history.” Lin planned to use the same technique for future writing. “I’ve been taking notes every day since October 28, 2013,” he says:

Using this archive of his life, Lin transformed the raw data of his “behaviors, thoughts, feelings, and history” into literary art. This technique bleeds into the novel’s cold and relentless style, in addition to supplying narrative content and character.

Such recordings, be they the self-generated note or the data captured by ordinary use of digital platforms, provide the concrete grounding for Lin’s novels, from Richard Yates (2010) to his most recent, Leave Society (2021). Consider the example of Richard Yates, Lin’s first major success. The novel is a postmodern roman à clef based on his affair with a teenager named E. R. Kennedy. To write it, Lin copied and pasted his Gmail correspondence with Kennedy directly into his fictional text. Years after the novel’s publication, this use of personal data prompted Kennedy to publicly accuse Lin of plagiarism and abuse. “Tao Lin literally copied and pasted my emails into his ‘novel,’” wrote Kennedy in a now deleted tweet thread from 2014—“He took credit for my words, for my painful memories, and for my story” (qtd. in Broderick and Medina Mora). Lin financed the writing of Richard Yates by selling shares in it, thereby turning his and Kennedy’s personal data into a speculative asset (Crosthwaite 1–3).

Framing Lin’s writing as a kind of data extraction brings the philosophical reflections on the digital age embedded in Taipei’s romance plot into clearer focus as masking the more worldly dilemma of the creep. Paul’s disquisitions on love in the modern world are abetted by his musings on the ubiquity of computation. In Taipei, the Internet is not just an object within the world but an all-pervasive part of the background, the meaning-giving context of the world itself. Chingshun J. Sheu, borrowing a term from N. Katherine Hayles, describes Taipei as a novel of “digital subjectivity.” Throughout the book, Paul renders his world intelligible through a series of computer metaphors, likening himself to a user navigating a vast computational interface. “He couldn’t ignore a feeling that he wasn’t alone,” the narrator relates in one lyrical aside,

Paul’s embodied experience has undergone a curious doubling as retrievable information. Yet, having “the information of his existence” permanently etched into space-time does not seem to be a problem for his sense of privacy or singularity. It is not that Paul is upset at being the object of a surveillant gaze—rather, Paul’s surveillance of others becomes the main source of his social anxiety. His knowledge of other people becomes a problem for him.

Like Joe in You, Paul does not know the rules of intersubjective etiquette. His social ineptitude (and his resulting despair) is traceable to this new existential situation in the computable world, in which knowledge about people invariably precedes embodied interaction with them. But it also evokes the problem of the modern novel as a source of social knowledge—that is, as a kind of guidebook or training manual for subjectivity. The novel is Paul’s great alibi; the novelist, like the detective or the data analyst, is allowed to know everything about the social field. But this knowledge quickly presents a dilemma that is at once existential and social. The source of Paul’s loneliness—his all-seeing novelistic gaze—cannot be revealed to his peers for risk of scaring them away.

Since most of his social life comes prefigured and augmented by knowledge he has gleaned from the Internet, all of Paul’s interactions carry a sense of cognitive anticipation, gamification, calculation, and programmability. For Paul, sociality is a sort of logic game, and people are more like programmable objects to be manipulated than autonomous subjects to be acknowledged. In a scene early in the novel, after a fight with his partner, Michelle, Paul “felt himself trying to interpret the situation, as if there was a problem to be solved…but he was three or four skill sets away from comprehension, like an amoeba trying to create a personal web-page using CSS” (10). Later, Paul catches an acquaintance faking surprise when he shows her images on his phone—though he knows, from his StatCounter software, that this person has already viewed the images on his website: “she made a noise that indicated she was seeing something new, but when he asked if she’d seen them before she said ‘yeah,’ but seemed to continue feigning ‘no’” (32). This quasi-omniscient view does not help Paul become closer to others but, rather, disconnects him even further from the social world, isolating him in what he describes as “the vacuum sealed tube of his own life” (25).

The dilemma of the creep is expressed most poignantly in Paul’s relationship with Erin. Their relationship begins online, when Paul posts a comment on Erin’s blog. Such interactions constitute a definable, measurable, and predictable process of courtship. Long before meeting Erin in person, Paul has “internalized her existence” by regularly reading her “pensive, melancholy, amusing accounts on her blog of her vague relationship and part-time bookstore job and nights drinking beer” (91, 90). He “allowed himself to become ‘obsessed’…with her,” Lin writes, “reading all four years of her Facebook wall and…looking at probably fifteen hundred of her friends’ photos to find any that she might have untagged” (109). Paul regards his small-data surveillance as part of the “self-fulfilling process” of their courtship: “They would gradually communicate more and maybe begin e-mailing and—if neither died, entered long relationships, or left the Internet—eventually meet in person” (91). Through his cultivation of an extreme form of intimacy, Paul manages to seduce Erin, persuading her to begin a long-distance relationship with him.

Paul’s creeping becomes a secret to be guarded with utmost care, while simultaneously undermining the possibility of authentic connection. His expectations of romantic fulfillment begin to decrease in proportion to the knowledge he accumulates about Erin. One of Paul’s most acute disappointments comes when Erin pretends to confide in Paul about her childhood desire to be “abducted by aliens,” insisting that she had never told anyone this quirky biographical fact. Yet the ever-vigilant Paul recognizes Erin’s tale, tracing it back to something that he read on her blog in the months before their courtship. Paul’s encyclopedic knowledge of Erin’s inner life not only negates the significance of her story but, more importantly, erases the singularity of her narration of it. The story—designed to make Erin seem intimate and vulnerable—suddenly strikes Paul as rehearsed and false. He is heartbroken—why is she being “fake” with him? But he is also caught within a curious dilemma: he cannot catch her in the act of false intimacy without revealing himself as a creep. Paul’s attempt to confront Erin about her lie is tainted by his embarrassment about his own surveillance of her blog: “‘You lied…to me,’ said Paul, and felt dramatic and self-conscious …” (106). Cut off from his tenuous connection to Erin, Paul is thrust deeper into “the vacuum sealed tube of his own life,” forever severed from “the unindividuated, shifting mass of everyone else” (15).

Here, Paul’s creeping is registered in a tragic mode as the origin of his feelings of isolation and confusion. Hence Taipei’s tone of sublime—even cosmic—melancholy. This sublime melancholy reaches its apotheosis in a sort of zoom-out effect, in which Paul’s consciousness leaps over and above itself to see the earth as a drone or a data analyst might see it. In one of these passages, Paul imagines himself as a “dot” moving through the Googlized grid of the world:

Throughout Taipei Paul hangs his hopes of redemption on the ultimate technology of connection—the Internet—to escape his individuated existence. But the Internet, despite its communitarian potential, ends up individuating Paul to an extreme extent. Profoundly alone, Paul learns to regard “90 to 95 percent of people…as separate and unknowable” (38). Despite knowing the details of their private lives (as captured by digital apparatuses), Paul resigns himself to a form of extreme philosophical skepticism, giving up on the possibility of acknowledging his fellow beings. For Paul, the other’s inner life is always reducible to something like an informational model of interiority, which, for all its seeming comprehensiveness, still leaves him lacking.

Paul posits the novel as a solution to the problem of this lack: “Lying on his back, on his mattress, he uncertainly thought he’d written books to tell people how to reach him, to describe the particular geography of the area of otherworld in which he’d been secluded” (247). Behind this conventional definition of the novel’s powers of intersubjective communication, however, lies an apologia for its other purpose: the rendering of personal data into an aesthetic object. Paul’s account of the novel is a curious kind of alibi for his everyday computer-aided recording, snooping, and theft. The institution of the novel, in Taipei, becomes the poetic extension of the operations of surveillance capitalism, a veritable archive of lightly fictionalized personal data.

What can the novel reveal about digital culture? And what can digital culture illuminate about the novel? In his preface to The Novel and the Police, Miller writes that “[t]he ‘death of the novel’…has really meant the explosion everywhere of the novelistic, no longer bound in three-deckers but freely scattered across a far greater range of cultural experience” (x). I take Miller to mean by “the novelistic” a certain style of thought, an ideological framework subjects use to make sense of the relation between their “private” interiority and the institutions that discipline and determine social life. Miller’s study shows that the novel produced and upheld the barrier between public and private in capitalist modernity. Understanding digital culture and its surveillance imperative as part of the novelistic culture of the early twenty-first century can shed light on how the feeling of privacy continues to be managed and upheld by surveillance capitalism itself. Wherever one encounters the feeling of privacy and fear over its violation, one is bound to find the novel’s ideologies and forms lurking quietly behind.