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What’s kept me fascinated about the internet is how deep a contradiction it inherently is. You conduct your business on a screen, this business affects your life. It’s like money, or beauty, or education, but much more subject to one’s imagination. Fantasies are made and ambitions destroyed. One’s life could practically change overnight. Perhaps this is why—even though it’s been around for at least the last two decades—many still can’t seem to reconcile life online and life offline. They must remain separate.
The proliferation of the so-called ‘internet novel’ genre indicates this anxiety. What does it mean to exist as a person online right now, and how is it different to life conducted offline? The problem is that this question is the wrong question, and consequently the answers you get are almost always fucking awful. In Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This, an ironic Twitter-esque cadence is replaced by earnestness after Something Bad Happens to the narrator offline. Or look to the ‘other’ internet novel, Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts, where the narrator (again, an ‘I’) generally defers to prevarication, so much so that what she expresses are Thoughts, not Opinions (‘I don’t think positivity works, not least because it’s alienating, but then again so is being a bitch.’), the most important thing being that they are ‘relatable’ to a certain milieu (‘I hate it when people sign emails with their first initial because it seems pointlessly literary, but I also wanted to convey a curt yet ultimately unbothered seriousness, so I didn’t sign it.’). A defensive stance, as Hassan Abul and Dženana Vucic have explored elsewhere, permeates the text. It’s a vibe, I guess. Early in the book, Oyler describes Safari as ‘the internet browser that was a compass but also a safari’ and iMessage, ‘in which the owner’s text bubbles are bright blue and the correspondent’s are light grey’. This is reminiscent of Anna Weiner’s memoir Uncanny Valley, wherein the author presents ‘obvious’ references to tech companies in an oblique manner (for example, Airbnb is referred to as a ‘millennial-friendly platform for renting strangers’ bedrooms’)—as if itemising now-ubiquitous objects in such vague ways gives them a new lease on life. Imagine describing a water bottle as ‘the cylindrical, portable device people hold to their mouths to drink water from’, or a HDTV set as ‘the rectangular, flat, black box that shows the lives of other, sometimes famous, other times infamous, strangers’.
What drives this anxiety might be that the internet is an inherently unstable form, something that evolves as quickly as it cements. In other post-2020 novels, such as Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You, character interactions with the screen present a palpable rigidity, as with bad sex scenes:
Squinting at the screen of her phone, she tapped the icon of a social media app. The interface opened and displayed a loading symbol. Eileen moved her thumb over the screen, waiting for the page to load, and then suddenly, as if impulsively, closed the app.
What does it mean to exist as a person online right now, and how is it different to life conducted offline? The problem is that this is the wrong question.
The idea seems to be that artists and authors might be very interested to depict this Thing that everyone is supposedly doing and knows by experience, but their subconscious reveals otherwise—even if, and perhaps in spite of, the increased frequency with which we have been looking at our screens since the pandemic. Basically, if you feel anxiety around what you desire, then it’ll be nearly impossible to project that ideal self, except literally admitting to it then working backwards. But most people would rather not.
There is, of course, the direct descendant of the epistolary novel: ‘chat fiction’—stories written as verbatim chat logs, with the reader left to intuit its nuances, much as one would do in a group chat with housemates or colleagues. Calvin Kasulke’s Several People Are Typing (2021) is the most recent, set entirely in Slack. Some post-millennium novels, such as Ready Player One (2011) and JPod (2006) lean into aspects of it, although the mode is currently more in vogue and widely accepted within the YA genre. And what is sometimes (dubiously) hailed as the original ‘internet novel’, Tao Lin’s Taipei (2013), does it a little bit, but generally adopts this literal affect, as if something is being reverse-engineered. He had, after all, written something like this three years prior, with the controversial Richard Yates.
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In ‘The IRL Fetish’, an essay published in The New Inquiry in 2012, Nathan Jurgenson observes:
How proud of ourselves we are for fighting against the long reach of mobile and social technologies! […] People boast about not having a profile. We have started to congratulate ourselves for keeping our phones in our pockets and fetishising the offline as something more real to be nostalgic for.
A year earlier, Jurgenson coined the term ‘digital dualism’—the belief that the digital world is ‘virtual’ and the physical world ‘real’—and while it may sound somewhat unwieldy now, what he described is exactly what it is. Fast forward ten years, and we’re still stuck in the same rut, especially as op-eds penned by Gen X-ers and baby boomers proliferate, Sherry Turkle-style. Put down your damn phones and ‘have a conversation’ for once! Turkle may very well be the original Internet Karen, she who famously wrote, ‘We expect more from technology and less from each other.’ Of course, those who made it such that they profit from our attention, the Zuckerbergs and Thiels and Bezoses and Pichais and Dorseys and Kalanicks and Jobses and Musks and Nadellas and Mas and Sandbergs of the world, say shit-eating aphorisms like ‘We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters’, and ‘If you don’t optimise for the consumer on the internet, you’re dead.’ One can compare these to the earnestly wacky tone of 1990s/2000s-era motivational posters.
Meanwhile, serious interrogation into internet culture by digital natives remain niche. It could be that we are living in Nietzche’s eternal return, now more than ever, with a little sprinkling of Baudrillard’s hyperreality, where copies exist without originals. The latter has called it once already, observing that computers don’t really remember, because they don’t have the ability to forget. In Ghosts of My Life, Mark Fisher notes something similar:
This fixation on materialised memory led to what is perhaps the principal sonic signature of hauntology: the use of crackle, the surface noise made by vinyl. Crackle makes us aware that we are listening to a time that is out of joint; it won’t allow us to fall into the illusion of presence.
They call it the ‘roaring twenties’—everywhere I look it feels as if we are looking at another version of the past. Culture gets remixed and recycled as if brand new, lost to context collapse, decontextualisation and what Safy Hallan-Farah calls ‘hyper-real individualism’. But it’s not that new things aren’t happening; there seems to be an overarching disinterest in entertaining them. Recurring patterns are treated as one-offs, as if we’re all living in a funny reality TV show. Blockchain is one; YouTube child influencers are another. Who would have thought Beeple would get rich and have his NFT art shown at Christie’s? As I write, crypto is—all in the span of two years or so—no longer the revolutionary currency many thought would ‘decentralise finance’ and ‘change the world’; instead it is experiencing the equivalent of a stock market crash, no thanks to inflation, and ruining (real) lives. Nobody has yet figured out what problem NFTs actually solve; some have called them the ‘monetisation of hope’, which recalls the allure of gambling. Worker precarity driven by the notion of ‘convenience’ inside the gig economy is something else—people are literally dying on the streets due to errors in an opaque algorithm, their loved ones mostly unable to seek recourse (‘Not me! It was the machine!’). Buy now, pay later. Place your bets on an UFC match from the comfort of your couch. The false dichotomy between ‘IRL’ and ‘URL’ is clearest when looking at authoritarian regimes: what you post online will almost immediately have direct, often legal, consequences, as in the case of places such as Myanmar, Cambodia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Egypt, and more recently—Russia. In Ukraine, a campaign to digitally preserve heritage sites and artefacts is under way.
That said, authors today can dodge this problem by writing novels set in the past (The Netanyahus; The Unpassing), or those set in a world of unreality (Sterling Karat Gold) or the fantastical, except those might be just too hard. Too much work, too much research, too much attention perhaps, at least when the rolling newsfeed continually takes over our consciousness every single day. What else could you be thinking about other than the present moment? Instead what we are seeing—at least in mainstream, commercial circles here in the anglosphere—are novels about ‘the world we live in now’. This would be perfectly fine if they portrayed the current screen reality in the same way many of us encounter it: seamless, consequential and culminating in tangible and/or material outcomes. Like the physical Zoom Room, URL bleeds into IRL into URL again, a looping GIF of an ouroboros. And we continue to stare right into its barrel, hypnotised and removed.
Online life is affecting offline lives, both for good and for ill, and often at great cost. URL bleeds into IRL into URL again, a looping GIF of an ouroboros.
In many ways, though, it feels as if I’m being forced to pick a side; the pandemic is currently engendering similar ideas. Out of sight, out of mind. But I’ve made lifelong friends via the internet. The fact that I am writing this essay now—which will add $400 of actual cash to my bank balance eventually—is because of the internet, which you are reading because you have access to the internet. Nevertheless, there are days where looking at the internet exhausts me, its affect overload and its upended social contract, wherein outrage generates attention and impact does not necessarily translate into meaning (and vice versa). What is hegemonic sticks; same same but different. And many people can say the same, unless they choose to live off the grid. You can’t even use the ‘developing country’ excuse anymore: the past five to seven years have seen previously ‘unconnected’ countries go online en masse as smartphones become more affordable. Online life is affecting offline lives, both for good and for ill, and often at great cost. You’d think we’d have figured that out by now, considering how much time people spend looking at their screens; get on public transport in any major city in the world and you will see this unfold in real time. Sit ramrod straight without any distractions and you may be perceived as a creep. According to Tim Cook, when Apple rolled out the ‘Screen Time’ function in 2018, it was to ‘try to give people a true reading of the amount of time they’re really spending on their devices because generally it’s a lot more than they say.’ It’s techno-optimism gone rogue: something is ostensibly lost, and consequently solutions are devised to mitigate that loss. It reminds me of the ways diet culture is marketed to women: you can have your cake and eat it too, for there will always be yet another workaround, another ‘hack’.
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A good example of a novel—at least to me—that effectively tackles and teases apart these inherent contradictions is Jarett Kobek’s I Hate The Internet (2016). Written in an omniscient third person, Kobek begins the story in a world where the protagonist, a famous graphic novelist named Adeline, experiences rape and death threats on Twitter following a comment made at a public event. Alongside her friends J. Karacehennem, Baby and Christine, they navigate San Francisco gentrification and the murk of identity politics. There are many (delightful) digressions into the Arab Spring, the CIA’s funding of American literary fiction and the history of Marvel Comics—its form mimics the experience of clicking through Wikipedia for hours. Where in Lockwood and Oyler’s books ‘the internet’ seems to refer solely to social media, Kobek situates it within a larger ecosystem of news, reactions, information and subjective truths, engendered by preexisting human foibles and easily manipulated by the whims and interests of its Silicon Valley creators and funders. What makes I Hate the Internet an eviscerating yet enjoyable dissection of the internet’s distasteful pleasures is that it’s not something that’s ‘over there’ and limited to a certain well-heeled, educated milieu; it’s a part of many people’s day-to-day lives and informs our daily realities in minute and overt ways, whether we like it or not. In other words, not only artists and media workers—aspiring or otherwise—are ‘extremely online’, and one person’s echo chamber may be another’s anomaly. In what could be a portentous critique of No One is Talking About This, Kobek writes:
But Twitter was only the symptom. The internet was the disease. […] Very few cared that they didn’t understand the complex mechanism. They had been inoculated against any such concerns through repeated exposure to another complex mechanism about which they knew nothing and over which they had no control.’
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Elsewhere, and much closer to the present, Gary Shteyngart’s Our Country Friends (2021), set during the onset of the global pandemic, follows a group of friends and acquaintances who find themselves with the luxury of hiding out from the pandemic in a house in upstate New York. Their amalgamated social capital, through their jobs in the academia, art and tech worlds, end up biting them in the ass in various ways. A writer named Dee enjoys literary success through ‘a modest uptick in sales’ after getting together with a celebrity character simply called ‘The Actor’, as his fans direct their dissatisfaction at her online, and as news outlets designate them as ‘the first couple in the age of the virus’. Karen, the app developer of a fictional online dating platform named ‘Tröö Emotions’, stops herself from taking a photo, swearing ‘to stop uploading photographs to the very social media that had made her rich, to enjoy moments instead of imprisoning them’. Later, Dee’s newfound fame comes up against the perils of ‘cancel culture’ after an old essay—which she wrote with the intention to ‘skew provocative at that point, while still functioning within the safety of the left’—is dug up and circulated on Twitter. To Shteyngart, it’s evident that ‘online’ and ‘offline’ function within an inevitable, conjunctive loop.
What makes I Hate the Internet so eviscerating is that the internet is not something that’s ‘over there’; it informs our daily realities in minute and overt ways, whether we like it or not.
On a similar tangent, Marlowe Granados’ Happy Hour (2021) charts the day-to-day lives of two close gal pals, zoomers who, while disenfranchised, have fun scamming their way into haute circles and basking in the fantasy of being in closer proximity to their excesses. In one scene, as she notes down a thought in her phone during a party, main character Isa Epley thinks to herself, ‘I look as though I am being aloof and texting, but I am noticing and observing all the time.’ Published a few years before that, even if it isn’t about the internet at all, Nell Zink’s Nicotine (2016) presents technological use seamlessly as well: characters send each other text messages that, to use two choice examples, is described as ‘written in the style of an NYU student he occasionally “dates”’ and ‘… terse and controlled, masterly at condensing major life events into bite-size texts’; in another scene, a character says of her estranged brothers, ‘I follow them on social media. That’s how I know they’re alive.’
There is a certain symbiosis between the online and offline; like television, as David Foster Wallace wrote in ‘E Unibus Pluram’ (1993), the internet is about desire, both ‘real’ and projected as humans accelerate in the search towards true authenticity akin to camels moving in the direction of an oasis. In what could be read as satire nearly three decades later, it’s almost hilarious to see these anxieties appear once again:
Surely we all have friends we just hate to hear talk about TV because they so clearly loathe it […] and yet are just as clearly obsessed with it, somehow need to hate their six hours a day, day in day out. Junior advertising executives, aspiring filmmakers and graduate school poets are in my experience especially prone to this condition where they simultaneously hate, fear, and need television, and try to disinfect themselves of whatever so much viewing might do to them with weary irony instead of the rapt credulity most of us grew up with.
To that end, discussions surrounding the online continue to wrestle with this same disjunction. While realist novels will construct scenes and locations that seek to build images in the reader’s mind, an ‘internet novel’ may expect you to look up its myriad references: Just as there is no one way to engage with a person, there is no one way to engage with the internet, even if so-called internet novels may try and tell you otherwise. Much like Wallace’s junior ad execs, aspiring filmmakers and grad school poets, tech criticism and internet novels today are still produced by and cater to a certain sociality and atmosphere.
As a genre, the ‘internet novel’ seems increasingly like a marketing schtick for those who still believe in a clear distinction between online and offline.
But there are some shifts. In Natasha Stagg’s Surveys (2016), Raven Leilani’s Luster (2020), Mieko Kawakami’s All The Lovers in the Night (2022) and Olivia Sudjic’s Sympathy (2017) and Asylum Road (2021), characters are food delivery cyclists, mistresses, aspiring influencers, lonely freelancers, refugees, lurkers, users and stalkers; instead of what Wallace calls the ‘weary contempt for television as a creative product and cultural force, combined with beady-eyed fascination about the actual behind-the-glass mechanics of making that product and projecting that force’, the above-mentioned novels don’t succumb to nor relish a binary between optimism and pessimism. These novels say that the internet is not that of ‘alien’ or ‘artificial’ intelligence but aggregated human intelligence writ large, and act as larger comments on morality, power, society and capital as they are wrung through the spin-cycle of mortal neuroses such as scarcity, replaceability, envy and competition. No points for guessing the system that underpins it. If there’s a universal flattening of culture as a result of the globalised attention economy, encouraged by the ouroboric circle-jerk of the media, art and tech worlds, novels that replicate this same dynamic may only be ‘realist’ to these same people, monopolising how we perceive and engage with online use and consequently ourselves.
As a genre, the ‘internet novel’ seems increasingly like a marketing schtick for those who still believe in a clear distinction between online and offline: a war between the pleasurable and the abject, a nostalgic impulse towards the old (read: the predictable) versus the new. It’s as Brandon Taylor points out in an essay on Oyler’s and Lockwood’s books: ‘None of the transformative capacity or will to change that animates so much of online life for black and brown and queer people exists in these novels. For some of us, the democratic dream and the populist impulse of digital life is alive. Not perfect, no. Not entirely democratic even. But it’s still there. Singing.’ If metafiction is a direct postmodern product of television, then autofiction may be the internet equivalent. Another feedback loop appears.
