Cher Tan

A subscription to the world’s most popular streaming service comes with artist exploitation, pseudoscience and the funnelling of profits into the war machine.

Sally Rooney’s much-anticipated fourth novel, Intermezzo, looks for a way out of the structures that bind us from within.

Each month we celebrate an Australian debut release of fiction or non-fiction in the Kill Your Darlings Debut Spotlight feature. For May that debut is Peripathetic by Cher Tan (NewSouth Books), a collection of luminous and inventive essays that look beyond the performance of everyday life, seeking answers that continually elude.

The most authentic literary depictions of online life today do not foreground the internet’s otherness, but recognise the minute and overt ways it envelops and informs our daily realities.

Eating with My Mouth Open, Growing Up Disabled in Australia, Born into This, Fake Accounts

Many assume that asserting your right to privacy means you have something to hide. Experimenting with burner accounts has allowed me to glimpse another way of being online that doesn’t hinge on being seen or known. 

The on-demand economy trades on the seductive promise of simplicity – but as labour is devalued and depersonalised, new problems are created instead. When convenience becomes codependence, and leisure gives way to efficiency, who really benefits?

New Critic: Once the realm of skilled professionals, social media has made photography a hugely accessible method of self-expression and self-performance. Nathan Jurgenson’s The Social Photo poses the question: what does it mean to be your ‘authentic’ self when everyone is watching?

New Critic: As physical and online spaces grow increasingly uniform and indistinguishable, a feedback loop of taste is created. What does it mean when culture and language are informed by the algorithm, fed back into it, and repeated?

New Critic: As more of our lives are lived online, what does it mean to be bored? Jenny Odell’s How To Do Nothing seeks to carve out a space for silence in an attention economy where logging off is a luxury.

Why do we need to revert to traditional constructed gender binaries in order to relate to artificial intelligence?