If writing about music is like dancing about architecture, perhaps writing about the internet is like libretto about algal bloom. It’s totally fundable but also pitched to miss the point. While there’s now a tradition of writing about the internet (as opposed to internet writing, which has no truck with anything as traditionale as tradition) it often falls short of its object.
This is partly because writers can’t resist drawing conclusions about something doggedly non-conclusive. The thing about the internet is it just keeps going. I also have the sense that you need to be below a certain age to see it clearly. Rebecca Solnit’s writing on the topic, for instance, feels academic and fence-peering. An approach framing the internet as something that crept up on us like synthetic opioids or depression suggests bogus possibilities for containment or cure.
The question of platform and audience matters too. Jia Tolentino graduated from AOL to the New Yorker too quickly to be a spokesperson IMHO. I don’t care how many bong-ripping selfies she posts on Instagram, it’s impossible to write about the internet in a prestige publication without also elevating it, or at least performing elevation as though it’s still a thing.
Perhaps writing about the internet is like libretto about algal bloom.
Into this ‘bullshit job’ (a job that doesn’t need to be done, as opposed to necessary ‘shit jobs’, which most of us do) steps Cher Tan, and she’s excellent at it. Her debut essay collection, Peripathetic, might evoke reflective nostalgia for Winamp skins and Pentium processors, but within its pages the internet is not a distraction from so-called real life. Rather, it’s a vibe—the ‘all-seeing internet’ is ‘built with fantasy in mind’ and ‘always meant to be about things just out of reach’.
Tan’s internet is not a utopia or a heterotopia (or not wholly/only) but an inestimable part of the whole existing-in-late-capitalism deal. It’s the space in which Tan could simultaneously be an anonymous individual with vast sourcing capability, gain the minor thrill of an upvote or the major thrill of her name made public. It’s also kind of like ‘the classifieds of yore’. In every instance time moves forward and branches off. Platforms, like philosophies, rise and fall. Tan keeps seeding and leeching.
The title riffs on Tan’s life experience as well as the pseudo-genre of pathetic literature, which poet Eileen Myles claims can ‘make political meaning with the messily colloquial, the hand-writ, the felt’. Tan’s essays fit this aesthetic as well as Myles’ description of a restless, discomforted literature exceeding its own category; ‘work that acknowledges a boundary [and] then passes it’. Tan writing is peripat(h)etic because boundary crossing is innate to her experience of the world—digital, literary and IRL.
The writer’s autobiography is in her essays: a fraught and solitary childhood in Singapore. Punk scene protected adolescence. Immigration to Australia. An insatiable, autodidactic education with source materials lent, pirated and downloaded. Tan’s writing train-hops thematic, temporal and geographic borders to consider the real and the virtual, cultural hegemony, Big Tech, WG Sebald, Mark Fisher, ‘Indian Cannibal Corpse Soundalikes’, statehood, the Pirate Bay, the precariat, literary hoaxes.
Her primary interest, however, is boundaries. Tan writes about the inside, the outside and how the insidious centre somehow keeps its hold, even when we know it cannot, should not. ‘How does one draw the parameters of outsider-hood?’ she asks, considering how DIY ethics prepped her friends for entrepreneurial identities with the advent of social media. There’s more than enough uneasy irony in discovering ‘the system that we hated actually loved us so much’: ‘They saw edge and novelty and lives fully lived. But what else could we have done in this cruel world—we would either be wastoids or houseless or dead.’
Tan writes about the inside, the outside and how the insidious centre somehow keeps its hold.
In the essay ‘Shit Jobs’, Tan takes us through a resume that includes Maccas, a cybercafe, an Adelaide football club, the Wheeler Centre. She bids for gig work on a Task Rabbit-esque platform: ‘The app becomes a game: every job is a quest and I don’t progress to the next level until I receive my five-star rating.’ When she’s eventually paid for her ‘thought vomit’ it feels like she didn’t work for the sixty-dollar remittance because deep thinking, research and writing are activities she associates with leisure.
For Tan, language and writing are playful—peripat(h)etic!—and deadly serious (they make us). I find her voice as infectious as she finds Seinfeld, Masters of the Sea, the Aussie ocker-cunt she ventriloquises for a Singaporean friend. If the internet was a real voice, would it sound like Cher Tan? (I wish.) How to respond to such a voice? I considered writing this review in aphorisms, though this would be a grift (inauthentic). Is it okay to have fun reading or do you need to find a position? Tan asks herself similar questions when the shoplifter’s high of being paid to write wears off and Australian literary scenes begin to resemble ‘a combination of high school and the corporate world’. She and a friend manically affirm their choice of the writer’s life even as it sticks and grinds: ‘[W]e love reading and writing, don’t we?’
It’s tempting to read Tan’s book as a happy ending, a down-tempo yet upbeat conclusion to the hustle which, like the internet that incorporates it, just keeps going. Afterall, Tan once harvested her ‘very fertile 24-year-old eggs’ for cash, and now she is a Writer with a Book. Sadly, we know better. Pretending otherwise would make us like the client who mentions Tan’s literary journal editorial role as she cleans their apartment.
Oh well. If you’re not born into it, easy money is a beach read. Though Tan’s got a way with words, her vocabulary refuses to define ‘selling out’. The point, in the end, is the veracious energy of ideas expressed in language. Tan practises speeches in front of a mirror, takes beta blockers, whisky and diazepam as she approaches the stage to read or answer questions. I hope, for our sake, that she finds the right cocktail, and readers buy her persona, grift, identity or whatever we are pouring on our cereal this month. Because Tan can write, and she has important things to say. Job completed. Five-star rating.
Peripathetic is our Debut Spotlight book for May. Find an interview with author Cher Tan here.
Debut Spotlight is a paid partnership with Australian publishers designed to promote the critical discussion of new authors’ work to a wide audience. Titles are selected by KYD, and all reviews have editorial independence.
