Reading about the Internet
Remember "afk"?
What makes an Internet book? If I’d written that sentence a few years ago, it would probably read as ungrammatical. At this point of the 💿🐎 however, it feels like a natural construction. A lot of people are talking about Internet books now, specifically Internet novels. When I mean “a lot of people”, I mean Anglophone media types who spend a lot of time on Twitter. That’s because two writers from that demographic recently published books that poke at the Internet beast and, unfortunately, have been compared to each other at every turn. Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This and Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts are similar books at face value. Both protagonists are loosely based on the writer herself (meaning they’re creative millennial white American women coming to grips with Trump’s presidency), deal with grief over the course of the book, and are very very Logged On. The last trait is what most descriptions tend to focus on. This is understandable. I read mostly contemporary novels and it’s not often that I see the Internet incorporated seamlessly into fiction. I can think of several books set in the present era where plots either exist independently from the Internet or treat it as something that can be separated from real life. This isn’t my experience; I spend an average of 6 hours a day having screen time with my phone and that doesn’t even touch my laptop usage. I will readily admit that I’m more online than most but the Internet isn’t only meaningful for those of us who are hopelessly plugged in to social media. My parents have no web identities but are constantly online too – they read the news, watch videos about dogs, and look up recipes. Wireless Internet has fundamentally changed almost everybody’s relationship to information and connection and that’s why I find the framing of the “Internet book” so unsatisfactory. The novelist Brandon Taylor expressed this perfectly in his newsletter post about the two aforementioned novels:
We do not think that being online is healthy. We distrust what being online has done to us. We pantingly paw at our screens.
In the view of the Internet Novel, the internet is a corrupting force, persuasive and totalizing in its effects. This to me is one of the more Gothic impulses in the Internet Novel.
His entire post is well worth reading but I’ll skip ahead to his conclusion. For Taylor, the aesthetic project of the so-described Internet Novel fails to capture the “transformative capacity or will to change that animates so much of online life for black and brown and queer people.” The Internet described in these books (not just Oyler’s and Lockwood’s but others in the genre) is only a sliver, a White Media sliver, of what online life is like. My own frustration with the conversation around the Internet Novel is more pedestrian. I don’t remember life before the Internet, I’ve been online since 2001. I think my life is better for it but there’s no way I could know that. Being logged on is incredibly mundane, to me. The thought that the Internet is a discrete part of life seems absurd and almost Sherry Turkle-ish. (Turkle famously wrote Alone Together, a tedious book that pathologises being connected. The title is really all you need to read to get her argument.) I always come back to Nathan Jurgenson’s 2012 essay about the “IRL Fetish” which perfectly described the truth about modern connectivity almost a decade ago.
The notion of the offline as real and authentic is a recent invention, corresponding with the rise of the online. If we can fix this false separation and view the digital and physical as enmeshed, we will understand that what we do while connected is inseparable from what we do when disconnected. That is, disconnection from the smartphone and social media isn’t really disconnection at all: The logic of social media follows us long after we log out. There was and is no offline; it is a lusted-after fetish object that some claim special ability to attain, and it has always been a phantom.
Some books I’ve read
No One Is Talking About This, Patricia Lockwood
How fucking frustrating for you, my reader, to stumble over 700 words of me yapping about how I don’t think the Internet Novel is a meaningful construct just to reach this review where I tell you that Patricia Lockwood’s book is the most perfect description I’ve ever read about being on the Internet. I didn’t lie to you, but I am clearly not that principled. I read this back in December and bought it recently because I loved it that much. Part of my excitement over this book is personal – I spend a lot of time online (don’t know if I’ve mentioned that enough) and so does Lockwood. There are entire segments of the book that are lifted from Twitter and associated Internet dramas that I recognise simply from being constantly plugged into The Portal, as she describes it. Reading the book felt like spotting my freakish friends at a party; it’s nice to see them but that we even know each other says a lot about me too. (see: Experience: I was swallowed by a hippo)
The book is written entirely in fragments that resemble the continuous drip feed of social media sites. The reader is submerged immediately, there is little exposition to orientate you. Given that the protagonist’s vaguely defined career has something to do with her going viral on the Internet, it tracks that the book feels tailored to these platforms: pithy, funny, absurd. Lockwood is economical with words, giving you just enough to grasp onto before speeding away towards the next thought.
Every day we were seeing new evidence that suggested it was the portal that had allowed the dictator to rise to power. This was humiliating. It would be like discovering that the Vietnam War was secretly caused by ham radios, or that Napoleon was operating exclusively on the advice of a parrot named Brian.
***
Some people were very excited to care about Russia again. Others were not going to do it no matter what. Because above all else, the Cold War had been embarrassing.
The tone of the first half is entertaining, the book is full of smart observations and well-curated snippets of the 2010s Internet. I won’t spoil the major shift that occurs midway through the book but I will say that it propelled this book from “clever novelty” to “profound” in my estimation. Where it excels is its recognition that Online is fun and stressful and pervasive and inescapable. Something fragile and human breaks through the plastic sheen of the protagonist’s irony poisoning in a way that doesn’t feel forced or invented. The transition from the erratic and irreverent first half to the intimacy of the second is masterfully done. I’m curious to know how this book comes across to people who have a completely different Internet diet from me so please let me know if you’ve read it.
Wow, I really hated this book. My disdain for it has nothing to do with how it depicts the Internet – in fact, I don’t really think it’s about the Internet in any meaningful way. The protagonist finds out (by snooping) that her not-on-social-media boyfriend runs a secret conspiracy theory account. Stuff happens between them (redacted because this plot point was one of the only glimmers of emotion in the novel and I shan’t rob you of it) and she ends up moving to Berlin where she spends her time inventing up fake personas to go on OK Cupid dates and lying to everybody she meets. The narrator is tiresome and knowingly unlikeable. I wonder if she was written defensively (“yes, I am detestable”) as a way to preempt the reader’s disgust before they can identify it for themselves. The protagonist, and the book in general if I’m being honest, feels allergic to being vulnerable.
I had this book on my 2021 read list as soon as it was announced because I wanted to see what sort of novel Oyler would write. I’m part of an online community made up of mostly women who don’t know each other. This means that many conversations take on the familiar “don’t worry if not!” tone, people gingerly navigating around each other’s feelings even when they don’t warrant it. Oyler’s writerly persona is the exact opposite of this person. She’s made a name for herself as a literary critic who’s unafraid to step on toes. She was one of the first critics to pan Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror when it was very much at the centre of the media world’s and Instagram’s adoration.
Tolentino’s [flaws] calibrated for success in a media culture in which acknowledgment equals absolution and absolution is seen as crucial to success. Because no negative realisation about herself seems to keep her from committing the same crime in the next essay, the effect is akin to getting in ahead of criticism, PR-style, in the hope of lessening its impact on the brand.
She takes Eula Biss’ Having and Being Had to task for a similar sin in a different review.
“Having and Being Had” is meant to be the kind of book most authors have dreamed of: one that does not sacrifice any of the writer’s egalitarian, socialist principles while nevertheless earning her a hierarchical, capitalist income, which can then let her produce more books. “I will sell a book — this book — to buy myself time,” Biss writes near the end. “My time, already spent on writing, will pay for itself.”
Given that Oyler seems to scorn excessive self-awareness and the declaration of one’s political stakes to no end in writing, I was surprised that Fake Accounts essentially reproduces elements that she criticises other writers for. The protagonist watches herself do things and then quickly and coldly distances herself from her own actions. She goes to the Women’s March, describes the now-derided pink pussy hats at length, and gives this justification for her presence: “everyone was going to the protest, so I, someone who actually cared, someone who had, after all, served as president of her (red-state) high school’s Young Democrats of America for not one but two years, should go, too.” This knowing and defensive tone carries on throughout the entire book.
I suppose there is something to be said about how this book reflects a form of alienation that can arise from having multiple personalities played out on the Internet. Oyler is an intelligent writer and every other page contains a clever quip about our present era. (“There seemed to be two options for engaging with the world: desperate close reading or planned obsolescence. They were both so clearly rooted in natural impulses and so clearly wrong.”) There’s just no heart in it. Every character who isn’t the protagonist is depicted as an unenlightened being, the perfect opportunity for the protagonist to show how switched on and worldly she actually is. She strings men along on dates, constructing a personality to match every zodiac sign (ironically, she doesn’t really believe in astrology of course), just to give herself something to do. This makes up most of the book and it is uninteresting. Oyler knows this. We know because she titled that section of the book “Middle (Nothing Happens)”.
I emerged on the other side of the book unconvinced that it had been a good use of my time. What confused me is that the writer clearly knew better. Perhaps this whole book, like the protagonist’s boyfriend’s conspiracy Instagram and her invented dating profiles, is an inside joke crafted to fuel the originator’s sense of superiority. Maybe Oyler is laughing at all the good reviews she’s received, knowingly, always knowingly, as part of a larger project to deflate Big Literary Criticism. Or maybe it’s just a bad book.
Follow Me, Akhi, Hussein Kesvani
Follow Me, Akhi, is a non-fiction title that looks at the online lives of British Muslims. It is very simple in concept and execution. The writer, who is a journalist by training, looks into the different aspects of Muslim life that exist on the Internet: Preachers, Mosques, Sex and Dating, Islamophobia, Extremism etc. This is more of a survey text than one with a strong point of view. I don’t mind that, I actually appreciate how mundane many of its observations are. This is a world of secret Facebook groups for queer Muslims, Whatsapp groups for minority Ahmadi Muslims, and Discord servers for Muslim gamers. What clearly emerges is a picture of a heterogeneous Islam and the power of the Internet to provide safe spaces to express that diversity, mirroring Brandon Taylor’s sentiment:
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.
I imagine the book would seem more perceptive to someone who doesn’t know a lot of Muslims in person or who doesn’t spend much time on social media. The careful and conversational tone of the book would go a long way toward demystifying these worlds that might seem intimidating to the uninitiated.
Thank you for reading
Great stuff. I was sickened by how many of the references I got in NOITAT. A superb book.