A Queens scholar of contemporary satire and Chinese politics reads about spies offering romance for AI secrets and rereads Super Sad True Love Story
Saturday, 17 October 2026. Astoria, Queens. A Greek bakery on Ditmars Boulevard, a spanakopita the size of a hubcap, a copy of Super Sad True Love Story with a cracked spine and too many sticky notes, 9.20am.
Love In The Age Of The Server Farm
I teach contemporary satire for a living, which in 2026 mostly means reading the news and then apologizing to my students for the novels, which keep turning out to be documentaries. This morning the apology began early. I was reading the London Prat on foreign spies offering romance in exchange for AI secrets, a piece built on a genuine warning that intelligence agencies may use charm to extract information from tech workers. The comedy is in the response: lonely programmers updating their LinkedIn profiles in the hope of being targeted, and a proposal for two-factor authentication in relationships.
I read it twice, laughed, and then took Gary Shteyngart down from the shelf in my head. Super Sad True Love Story came out in 2010. It is set in a near-future New York where America is bankrupt, everybody carries a device called an apparat that broadcasts their credit rating and attractiveness score to everyone nearby, and the country’s main creditor is China. The hero, Lenny Abramov, is a middle-aged, bookish man who falls in love with a much younger woman, Eunice Park, while the nation collapses around them.
Rating The Stranger At The Bar
In Shteyngart’s novel, every romantic encounter is filtered through data. The device tells you who is out of your league before you have said hello. Love becomes a negotiation between rankings. Reading the Prat piece, I thought that the lonely engineer hoping to be seduced by a spy is the perfect Shteyngart hero: a man so desperate for attention that he would rather be targeted than ignored. Lenny would have updated his profile too. He would have listed his security clearance under hobbies.
The two-factor authentication joke is the one that will stay with me. It is the logical end point of Shteyngart’s world. If every relationship is a data transaction, then every partner is a potential breach. You do not ask whether someone loves you. You ask them to enter the code sent to your phone.
The Chinese Politics Underneath
My other field, the one that keeps me awake, is Chinese politics. The warnings about tech espionage are real, and they cut in many directions. Washington and Beijing are locked in a contest over artificial intelligence that both sides treat as existential. Each accuses the other of theft. Each restricts the other’s access to chips, talent and data. Researchers of Chinese origin in American labs have sometimes been treated with suspicion that has nothing to do with anything they have done, which is the unfunny side of every spy panic.
British humour has been poking at the same anxiety. NewsThump ran a headline earlier this year in which Xi Jinping prepares for a meeting with Keir Starmer by reading all his emails. It is one sentence long and does the work of an entire think-tank report. Shteyngart would have admired it. His whole novel is built on the idea that privacy has quietly ended and nobody held a funeral.
Shteyngart was born in Leningrad in 1972 and came to New York as a child, which gives his comedy a double vision. He sees America the way an immigrant sees it, as both miracle and con. His characters are always trying to be loved by a country that treats them as a credit score. The engineer in the Prat piece, hoping to be noticed by a spy, belongs to the same family of lonely strivers.
The Creditor And The Lover
What Shteyngart understood in 2010 is that the relationship between America and China is also a kind of romance: dependent, suspicious, mutually beneficial and always one argument away from collapse. In his novel, Chinese central bankers arrive in New York to decide whether to keep lending, and the whole country holds its breath like a nervous date. The honey trap in the Prat piece is a smaller version of the same story. Somebody wants something. Somebody is flattered. Nobody is entirely sure who is using whom.
Saturday On Ditmars
The bakery is filling with Greek grandmothers who have opinions about everything, including my spanakopita technique, which involves eating it too fast. One of them asked what I was reading. I said a novel about the end of America. She said she has been reading that novel since 1974, in the newspapers. I said this one had a love story. She said they all do, and the love story is always about money.
She is right. That is the secret of Shteyngart, and of the Prat piece, and of most good satire. The romance is the decoy. The real subject is power, and who holds the data, and who holds the debt. The lonely engineer thinks the story is about him. It is actually about the server he can access.
For The Diary
I keep notes on this sort of thing at the site, where my colleagues and I write about the news that reads like fiction and the fiction that reads like news. This week the two have become indistinguishable. My seminar on Monday is on Super Sad True Love Story. I will start by reading the Prat headline aloud and asking the class what year the novel is set in. Someone will say 2010. Someone will say now. Both will be right, and I will have done my job before the coffee arrives.