Millennial Horrors: Alt Lit
“I am afraid of the past
I am afraid of the future”- Darcie Wilder, Literally Show Me a Healthy Person, 2017
“all i know is the only thing i want to look forward to is some idea that it’s not going to be ‘now’ someday, it’s always going to be now though, a lifetime of different nows”- Megan Boyle, Liveblog, 2018
“The end of history, he was now gradually learning, was feelable. It felt like being unwittingly poisoned, like something was pervasively wrong. The younger one was, the more one felt it, but it was a feeling everyone alive near the end of time, closely shared.”- Tao Lin, Trip, 2018
Alt lit is a controversial internet inflected literary movement that came to prominence in the early 2010s, and serves, I feel, as a microcosm of many of the unsettling elements I’ve been discussing in these “Millennial Horror” entries. Despite its focus on the everyday, something about the scene captured the growing sense of unease throughout US society, especially among the young. In hindsight, it also presaged the social horrors of the reactionary “vibe shift” of the last few years, as the internet appeared to burst open to reveal its festering underbelly. With a strong focus on self-conscious confession and a desire to capture life as it is, behind alt lit’s facade of non-judgemental flatness, signs of this darkness existed, if only in hindsight.
Drawing from evolving styles of social media that formed the nucleus of the movement, alt lit writers like Tao Lin, Megan Boyle, and Marie Calloway wrote about their lives with unguarded, bland candor, expressing often upsetting experiences with bad relationships, drug abuse, and depression as much as whimsical daydreams and absurd “what if?” conversations with friends. Often with an explicitly consumerist lens, sharing the brands and commercial products they engaged with, from fast food, to organic kombucha, to, of course, the tech companies their lives were filtered through, the hustle and branding these young creatives worked with to establish their voices was a strong element throughout. Along with this, another of the trademarks of alt lit is a paradoxical struggle between irony and sincerity, reflecting the same online atmosphere in which ironic misogyny and racism gave cover to very real beliefs. Under the Tumblrs and Twitters, Facebooks and Instagrams, the swirling toxic vortex of platforms like 4chan churned constantly, generating harmless cat memes and racist hatred alike, infusing into all online spaces. This undercurrent erupted to the surface in 2014 when, in a kind of prelude to the #MeToo movement, the scene came crashing down with the exposure of many of its most prominent male editors and writers as sexual predators, Tao Lin among them.
Perhaps because of this ignominious and disturbing end, there has been little discussion or analysis of the influence of these writers in the years since, which is odd when so much contemporary literature seems to be drawing from similar wells of confessional irony as I noted in earlier entries. However, I noticed some of its foremost writers, Tao Lin in particular, began to reemerge into the literary media, this time in more mainstream discussion, with little reference to the allegations which had supposedly killed the scene less than ten years before. I was curious to learn if the years had changed the perspective of the movement and its writers, if self-reflection had led to any revelations, but what I found only deepened my sense of unease. Before I go into this strange transformation, I want to reflect on how I had been drawn to the style in the first place and what it meant to me at the time, as I attempt to come to terms with what I found so intriguing about the style.
There was a time, around a decade ago, when I was fascinated by the work of Tao Lin and the nebulous movement that surrounded him and his friends and followers. Stumbling upon Lin’s book Shoplifting from American Apparel (2009) while hanging out at the Minneapolis Central Library branch, I was struck by this bizarrely mundane yet surreal cadence, which I called at the time “one of the most concentrated slices of the life of my generation that I’ve yet seen put to paper, dealing with banal hipster tropes via a backdrop of almost overdone literacy,” an “interesting and heady mix, equal parts vapid and brilliant.”
In between jobs after grad school, living at home once again in that post-Recession malaise, it really resonated with me even if I was a bit disconcerted by the blase lack of care seemingly injected into Lin’s “affectless” prose. To me, it captured a feeling I had not really been able to find at the time, a mood associated with the increasingly discussed “millennial” generation, and, in particular, the growing ubiquity of the internet in daily life. I looked for more of his work and those of writers with Lin’s indie Muumuu House press, particularly Megan Boyle, whose poetry collection Selected Unpublished Blog Posts of a Mexican Panda Express Employee (2011) I found very relatable and which, in my Goodreads review I wrote, imitating Boyle’s own lower case, languid style, “i feel like this might be the new literature of the internet age.”
Along with Lin’s earlier novel Eeeee Eee Eeee (2007) and his most acclaimed, Richard Yates (2010), I saw what I took to be a form of exaggerated confessional hyperbole emphasizing the worst tendencies of our generation, of a piece with the general ambiance of an internet shifting from anonymous to personal, drawing in a pensive existentialism that appealed to me during a searching, unsure time in my own life. Lin, Boyle, and other writers in the scene appeared to write about all of this with a refreshingly unprejudiced lens, or at least it seemed to me at the time. No matter how much drugs are taken, how toxic the relationships, or how often people engage in blatantly self-destructive behavior matter-of-factly described, the narrative remains aloof, which, for others in similar circumstances, making similar if not quite as extreme mistakes, can be a comfort. Of course, the relative privilege of most of the writers in the scene was evident, able to devote so much time to avant-garde literature, roaming New York shoplifting, looking at the internet, buying pharmacies of prescription meds, all without seeming to worry about rent. In between jobs and living with my parents, I could relate to this all too much. In addition, most are framed as “novels,” so, we assume, the narrator is a character, separate from the author no matter how autobiographical the subject matter.
While the writers represented this rarefied, insular NYC lit scene of the time, much of their subject matter seemed to me then as ubiquitous across the US if not the world. Emphasizing the mundane, it felt like a literature for those post-collegiate feelings of alienation, of being cut adrift, of not really knowing how to be an adult, what one wants, or where one is going. Of being a spectator in your own life in which nothing much happens and still wanting to write about it. Stuck between a nostalgic past and an uncertain future, with little to do but go online. It made perfect sense to spot copies of Shoplifting as I recently watched The first season of Lena Dunham’s Girls, another problematic bellwether for millennial angst and political ambiguity. All in all, the quirky melancholic ambiance I found so appealing as an overeducated, underemployed twenty-something belied a more ominous essence.
A few years later, after I finally obtained a job in my profession and moved back to the college town where I went to grad school, only to find myself stuck in an oppressive, demoralizing dead-end job, I read Lin’s Taipei. The novel created a near cosmic dread as Lin’s alter ego Paul struggled with drugs and alienation with Erin, the alter ego of his then-wife Megan Boyle and I was struck by its air of foreboding. This feeling culminated, for me, when I lost a close loved one to some of the very drugs used by Paul, which happened just as the scene exploded in harrowing revelations of a pervasive environment of toxic sexual assault and abuse. Lin himself was shown as the emotionally abusive boyfriend of a 16-year-old, harvesting the work of his ex to stuff his novel Richard Yates, whimsically disguised with the cute names of child actors.
I recalled reading the bleak, sexual violence and self-hatred of another alt lit publication I had read slightly earlier, Marie Calloway’s short story collection what purpose did i serve in your life (2013), with its frank and disturbing examination of gender and power dynamics but not quite putting it together or understanding it at the time. In hindsight, perhaps Calloway’s stories are the most important, prescient work that came out of the scene. While remaining an undercurrent in her work, Calloway dealt with the political issues in her experiences, which, in hindsight, rendered the passive apolitical stance of most alt lit all the more apparent. The troubling atmosphere in Taipei that I could not quite articulate at the time, like much of alt lit, held more than just a disaffected style of autofictional novels and poetry, but an irony-poisoned numbness that hid far darker currents. As the alt lit scene burned, I was left to consider what about Lin’s and his follower’s style had so interested me, and what it could say about my own attitudes. Looking back, much of this work was couched in deeply heteronormative, ableist, and privileged perspectives. The straights, as they say, were not okay. But in this, it was hardly unique.
There is much, I feel, in alt lit that follows similar traditions of youthful counter-cultural literary explorations of contemporary twentieth and twenty-first-century life over the decades, your Fitzgeralds, Kerouacs, or David Foster Wallaces, each exploring in their own way their own generations’ struggles with their changing worlds and artistic expressions. This time around, at least, it seemed to reflect the diversity of the modern US, including voices from women, from people with immigrant Asian or biracial backgrounds. At the same time, though, these identities are often downplayed in their narratives, making them feel, at least in subject matter, universal, but also indifferent.
It must be stated that these writers are all so intimately connected, appearing throughout each other’s works, and building close relationships among themselves, in discussing alt lit, it can feel less like critiquing a literary movement, and more like gossiping about the drama surrounding a specific friend group. Reflecting upon the idea of the “death of the author,” in attempting to examine how effective alt lit is in what we may think its goals are separate from the behavior of the authors, though, is in this case impossible. With the boundaries between fiction and reality so thin in much of their work, discussing it often necessitates discussing the author’s lives themselves. Whereas in works of memoir or creative non-fiction, authors mine their experiences to discuss some aspect of their life or they find meaningful, alt lit appears to desire to capture life itself, no matter how mundane or embarrassing, censoring nothing. Of course, this is impossible, so perhaps allowing a certain fictional ambiguity under the term novel makes sense. In any case, the reader knows far too much about them, even more than they might about some of their own friends. This is, perhaps, the essence of social media in general and there is something, I think, a little scary about that.
Most of all, the scene captured for me the distinctive voice and cadence of internet communication and how being “very online” shaped this generation’s experiences and literary expressions in new ways, including dissociation from the community against the irony of instant connection it makes possible. Whether through growing online outlets such as Thought Catalog, in addition to the many Tumblr blogs, YouTube channels, Twitter or Facebook threads, and email or chat conversations that dominated and shaped the writing sensibilities of those using these platforms, myself included. Tao Lin and poet Mira Gonzalez even published a joint volume of their Selected Tweets (2015), collecting choice pieces from their various Twitter accounts from 2010 to 2014, illustrating the importance of the 140-character form to their literary outputs. In particular, as I wrote, I was struck by how much they chose to share, how much of their lives they bore to the world, and, like all of us, how lost they seem in their own lives, as well as taking a somewhat self-destructive stance.
In an interview with autofiction writer Sheila Heti, Lin writes that he tweets what he would never feel comfortable saying in real life. I think that is a common feeling for many users, and it makes me wonder if there isn’t something cathartic about having such an outlet for such inexpressible feelings, especially evident in Gonzalez’s tweets. Her voice, in contrast to Lin’s cool, dispassionate style, feels much rawer, her emotions deeply expressed, hiding nothing. While also evoking comedy, phrasing a lot of pop culture references and puns, she writes her life in generally bleak terms, struggling with relationships, body image, and drug use, making for difficult reading.
At the same time sharing too much, giving the reader a sense of voyeurism in reading the work, while engaging in strange whimsies that cast each personal note into ambiguity, the ascetics of being online are, in these works, reflected naturalistically, highlighting a major theme that runs through much alt lit style, the tension between a confessional sense of radical candidness and a sense of self-conscious dissociation from their own emotions. As Boyle wrote in her 2011 poetry collection, “i think some moments exist to be simple sentences that don’t necessarily have a greater purpose than to be exactly what they are,” she echoed the slogan of Thought Catalog that “every thought is relevant,” reflecting the general vibe of the internet at the time, in which no topic was off limits. And, coupled with the ambiguous boundary between irony and sincerity, this is also where, in hindsight, their works not only captured this particular world but also presaged the darker effects of the internet.
While I’m in a better place now than I was in 2014, even if the same can’t quite be said of the country as a whole, what became of the alt lit scene stuck with me, despite the horrors of its implosion. As the 2010s came to a close, the world that spawned alt lit was in a very different place, politically, emotionally, culturally. Trump was elected after much online memeing, dashing complacent beliefs that liberalism had full hegemony of US culture. The MeToo movement took off, ripping the mask off of sexual predators in all levels of society to limited consequences. The reality of global warming became more evident by the year. And, of course, we had the combined effects of the Covid-19 pandemic and an uprising against the sustained white supremacist violence endemic in the US. As older millennials like myself, Lin and other alt lit writers began to push 40, moving inexorably from a quarter-life crisis into the beginnings of a midlife one, the world itself seemed to be in crisis, and the solipsistic ennui and transgressive honesty no longer felt relevant to me.
“He didn’t want to specialize in embodying and languaging confused alienation anymore, as he had for a decade writing existential autofiction. It seemed auspicious to have distrusted preconceptions, groups, and ideologies for so long. He had less to unlearn.”- Tao Lin, Leave Society, 2021
“Millennials suffer from the age-old delusion that material conditions of life are the primary cause of suffering, I typed, self-conscious about my didactic tone and the use of the word “millennial” and the phrase “age-old.” Much of human misunderstanding is caused by this delusion, I typed. Eric thinks that the main thrust of history is material, that humans are merely material, but that human suffering, which is largely immaterial- is real, I typed.”- Jordan Castro, The Novelist, 2022
With this in mind, why return to such fraught authors? When Tao Lin returned in 2018 with his first nonfiction work, Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change, with little mention of his unsavory past, I wondered if any of the above elements had tempered his style, since I felt he had captured something tangible in the zeitgeist, or if there would be any self-reflection regarding his abusive tendencies. The answer, I think, was a bit of both, but the ultimate direction he took should not have been surprising to me.
Upon reading Trip, in which Lin writes for the first time in first person, directly sharing his experiences which before had been cloaked by pseudonyms, the self-destructive, abusive lifestyle Lin described in his work that I had taken naively as artistic embellishment had been all too real, and that there were very real consequences. Breaking from the “bleak ideology” of existentialism he’d focused on in his earlier work, which left him feeling “zombie-like and depressed,” Lin discovered the lectures of the late psychedelic proponent Terence McKenna on YouTube, courtesy of podcaster Joe Rogan, sparking him to refocus his use of drugs from opioids and amphetamines to psychedelics.
Sharing his research into how psychedelics may be highly effective in therapy and dealing with trauma, exploring the societal effects of the war on drugs, Lin makes some very intriguing arguments, particularly as he seemed to recover from the years of aimless depression depicted in his earlier works. However, he also delves into disturbing, fringe directions involving fears that technology itself is the cause of these issues, talking of our current “degeneration,” of a yearning for some period in the past where things made sense. As elements of anti-vaxxing were introduced, I began to question where his arguments were going.
At the same time, other alt lit adjacent works like Darcie Wilder’s and Megan Boyle’s autofictional novels Literally Show Me a Healthy Person (2017) and Liveblog (2018) illustrated the continued vibrancy of the style, and reflected the continued importance of online platforms in shaping their voices. Wilder, for instance, was best known for her absurdist Twitter presence, and in her novel Literally Show Me a Healthy Person, she uses the immediacy and intimacy of her social media-derived cadence to express feelings difficult to process in less personal works. Her fragmented, raw writing style reveals the bleak humor and frightening desperation of dealing with grief, along with the self-aware self-destructiveness that so often accompanies trauma.
This is especially true with long time alt lit writer Megan Boyle’s novel Liveblog, which has been described as an “apotheosis” and end point of the style. An impressive undertaking, it represents a project of public self-examination and improvement Boyle embarked on between March and September 2013 on her Tumblr, compiled by Tyrant as a 707-page tome in 2018. Attempting to record as much of her daily thoughts and activities as possible, from her thoughts on music and film to witty and humorous observations of daily life, it quickly becomes apparent that these posts record some of the most difficult months in Boyle’s life as she spirals into harrowing bouts of increasing drug use, fasting, insomnia, and toxic relationships, making it an often disturbing, almost overwhelming, reading experience. In addition, the sense of voyeurism is unsettling.
Liveblog may serve, I feel, as a striking primary source for life in the early 21st century by future generations, but more immediately for this analysis, it makes an interesting snapshot of the scene at the time, including disconcerting feelings that I could see taking over Lin’s work. These entries capture much of daily life in all its mundanity, and there is much that is extremely relatable, from going to the DMV, the grocery store, or CVS, but also illustrates a lot of the edginess of being very online. Boyle, for instance, expresses disgust at her project being seen as ironic, but calls ridding her kitchen of fruit flies “doing the genocide.” This was a type of ambiguous rhetoric all too common in online discourse, I feel, and its ubiquity gave cover for disinformation and reactionary ideology to grow.
Reading Tao Lin’s latest novel, Leave Society (2021), these uncomfortable associations were, for me, laid bare. Writing again through the mask of a thinly veiled alter-ego, Li, Lin builds a positive, even inspiring, narrative, exploring his close and loving relationship with his family as he, as described by many reviews of the book, begins to “recover” from himself, continuing from Trip. It is obvious that Lin is in a better place in Leave Society, far warmer and more open than his previous works as he describes his transition to a healthier, more grounded life. The majority of the novel, though, is an extended lecture on the various fringe topics that he credits with this change, including a belief that a more equitable ancient society based on “partnership” once existed, in contrast to the harsh “dominator” societal model of contemporary modernity, with its toxins, culture, and other artificial burdens on the human spirit.
Writing with the zealous fervor of a recent convert, it becomes evident that he has traded in one self-serving, vapid worldview for another, one that can aptly be described as “conspirituality,” in which Lin recommends microdosing, an organic “inflammatory free” diet, communication with aliens, and other new age hidden knowledge. That the element of control Lin continues to exert on himself and the people around him, berating his parents for continuing to follow their doctor’s medical advice like he tracked the calories of his ex in Richard Yates seems to contradict this outlook is never really addressed.
For such an introspective body of work, laying bare one’s own harrowing struggles with physical and mental health, this type of self awareness is completely missing. While Lin is so enthusiastic about going back to a mythical matriarchal partnership society, he displays no consciousness of how this may apply to himself. Much of his conclusions, no matter how fluffy or reasonable, from his desire for environmentalism and peace, become reactionary, especially by unquestionably blaming autism and neurodivergency on environmental toxins and a poor diet.
In the end, Lin “leaves society” by moving to Hawaii to operate an Airbnb, the most privileged type of checking out from humdrum daily life while still operating deeply in the bosom of late capitalism one could imagine. After all, not everyone can leave society even if they wanted to, and most of us lack the inherited wealth to make such a lifestyle possible. Lin presents an ideology no different from the “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” myth, replacing it with a “detoxify yourself” from degenerate modern society. In each case, you are on your own and have only yourself to rely on, which is a little odd considering that he appears to view himself as somehow beyond ideology. Lin may be cutting various industrial toxins from his life, but his worldview itself is toxic.
Alt lit poet and editor Jordan Castro’s first novel, The Novelist: A Novel (2022), is the latest work to be published by a writer in the alt lit circle, and, in contrast to Lin’s overt preaching, the book maintains the fuzzy paradox of irony and sincerity common to the style discussed so far. Writing what he describes as “meta-anti-autofiction,” Castro’s unnamed narrator struggles to write his own autobiographical novel loosely fictionalizing his own alter ego Calvin’s years of heroin addiction under the influential shadow of the popular writer Jordan Castro. Undeniably a funny novel, The Novelist builds an almost painfully accurate rendering of the fraught experience of listlessly editing a document while being beset by the constant distractions of social media, taking us through a semi-productive morning of his narrator putting off writing, from the tea-making rituals to the weird, often scatological tangents as the narrator’s mind wanders, to the struggles with tenses and viewpoint.
However, much of the breezy 192-page tale is taken up by the narrator ruminating about the banality of online discourse and fretting about what literature is for, perhaps where each bleeds into each other. As a literary form birthed on and developed through the medium of online communication, literary styles like The Novelist feel both illustrative and entirely redundant. Burying the novel’s perspective under layers of deflection, this literary sleight of hand provides cover for the ideas being expressed; is it the narrator’s flawed myopia in his cliche rantings, however accurate his assessment of the follies of social media, or is it a deeper point about how people are abandoning artistic integrity for groupthink? Because of this ambiguity, I can’t take any of the points the narrator makes about art or politics seriously and this is a problem when so much of the novel hinges on these half-baked philosophical musings.
As Castro’s narrator refuses to engage with any “current events” but rails gleefully against his vapid leftie friend Eric with his concern for social justice, he claims he is interested only in writing truth, unconnected to the artificial distractions of politics. As if literature written “just for the sake of it” does not contain messages. As if only vain self-obsessed idiots could read messages into their works. As The Novelist’s narrator defends its version of Castro’s novel, a “satire about the Nietzschean response to a weakening culture,” against PC reviewers who take quotes out of contrast and read through the lenses of history, psychology, or social science to view it as “a reassertion of patriarchal values and aesthetics,” or even fascism, he gripes “What was the point of literature, I’d wondered, if it could only ever be something else?”
To Castro, these readings miss the point of writing novels as expressing a deeper, more human realness, perhaps. But this is, of course, in itself an ideological commitment, and one that is not so neglected as the narrator believes. The arch irony and ambiguity of the narrator’s experience highlight the continued insularity of the alt lit scene, as he chats online with Lin’s self-insert Li, his alter ego Calvin being the name Lin gives Jordan Castro’s character in Taipei. This stifling ouroboros of reference feels relevant as it continues the alt lit claim to just expressing thoughts, an apolitical “art for art’s sake” ethos that makes sense given the sordid history of the movement discussed so far.
Yep, I’m going to read politics into this like the vain self-absorbed idiot I am. I am not impartial, I have biases, yes, I am a political person who sees politics everywhere and I hold to a specific progressive, left-leaning understanding of the world, and I feel free to engage with these values while I engage with the world, literature included.
The main element shared by Lin and Castro’s books is a focus on a kind of individualism that places problems solely as the concern of individuals, which in a way makes sense as writing is one of the most solitary pursuits in life, but which neglects the very source of these issues. In Leave Society, Lin writes “novels crystallized dreams into prose, made them shareable through matter … they could be disruptive and unhelpful, fomenting fear and bitterness and confusion, or calming and uplifting, connected despair elements from history and memory into holistic stories with natural resonance,” a very good answer, I feel, for whatever literature, specifically alt lit, is for, but it lacks an essential understanding of the “culture” that Lin disdains. This vain focus on the self over the social is all a bit convenient for a mostly wealthy set of writers, isn’t it?
In The Novelist, the narrator angrily dismisses a smug review of Jordan Castro’s apocryphal novel “that it is not what we need right now,” but I have to agree with the reviewer, whether we are talking about the fictional Castro’s edgy weightlifting novel or the real Castro’s humorous but pompous account of the creative process. As I mentioned earlier, young, relatively privileged writers taking on the ennui and angst of their generational zeitgeists have been par for the course in literary fiction for more than a century now. These types of works are valuable to parse and understand the trends we are all living through, but alt lit has become stuck in its self-absorbed musings and lost that the world is not a static thing, aside from Lin’s and Castro’s nostalgia for simpler times, whether childhood or a mythical peaceful time before humanity became “degenerate.”
While identifying issues and questions that, in our current state of political instability, economic worry, and one deferred crisis after another, are pressing the young especially, they refocus from any hope to change these on a societal level. They excuse themselves from caring, putting the onus on each to solve their own problems, whether physical or emotional, and disdain those who identify ways to change society as collectivists or nihilists. They “leave society,” which, of course, those most affected by the industrial toxins of environmental racism or the gig economy, or rape culture cannot.
It is the literal embodiment of this “this is fine” dog meme, but as they begin to recognize that it is not fine, instead of looking around for solidarity, they begin to shift their shadowy rhetoric to outside forces. There was an overlap, it turned out, between “alt lit” and the “alt-right.”
It seems particularly striking, in hindsight, that in Taipei, Lin describes a panel on hipster culture that his alter ego Paul participated in with none other than Gavin McIness, the Canadian founder of both Vice Magazine and the Proud Boys, a lodestone in the countercultural reemergence of fascism with the “alt right.” Throughout these works, we can see endless examples of typical “hipster racism.” Boyle’s ex-boyfriend, who appears frequently in Liveblog, fronted the band Fishkind, which managed to slip both a swastika and a KKK in their name on Bandcamp, for instance. How edgy! While Castro is content to simply dismiss politics as irrelevant to art, an attitude that passively serves the right, Lin engages in a much more reactionary stance in his work, claiming in an interview to being not even able to “disavow” Qanon, a far-right extremist conspiracy theory with real influence on the Republican party itself.
Despite his increasingly fringe beliefs, though, Lin appears to be the only former alt lit writer who is reaching mainstream appeal. Boyle, Gonzalez, Wilder, and Castro’s books continue to be published by indie avant garde presses with blurbs from each other in the scene, but Lin’s work is coming out of the Big Five, Penguin Random House. It’s simply another example that the “Cancel Culture” so decried by the right does not actually exist.
In the end, does this critique make me an aesthetic puritan, a moralist? A hypocrite? I realize that I’m in no position to criticize alt lit authors in their self-indulgent, introspective subjects, I mean, this essay speaks for itself on that front, after all. Who am I to call out others for rambling philosophically in a world on fire? I just look at all of the writers working today, and I see people with a lot more constructive examinations of where we are and where we can go, from more diverse voices, from more dynamic thinkers, and from less toxic worldviews, and I’m left feeling like alt lit should remain as ambiguous primary sources from the before times. As Internet inflected fiction becomes more accepted in literature, alt lit seems to have lost what made it groundbreaking and as its authors stagnate in increasingly sinister influences, I find there are other writers offering critiques of contemporary life in fiction with much more interesting things to say, with more grounded perspectives, and with more innovative ideas.