Algorithm Is Gonna Get You: Ad Tech and the Homeland Security State

Abstract This article considers how ad tech companies in the early twenty-first century developed an infrastructure and algorithmic experience that quantifies users as consumer subjects. From the start, these quantifications have been supported by the American security sector, but after 9/11 the Homeland Security state has increasingly appropriated these tools and their constructed subjectivities. The author looks at Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story (2010) and Jarrett Kobek’s Do Everything Wrong! XXXTentacion Against the World (2018) to analyze contemporary predictive analytics and the production and securitization of the “neoliberal data subject” after 9/11.