Millennial Horrors Part Two: Internet Novels
“At some point, you have to admit that doing things ironically can have very straightforward consequences.” Lauren Oyler, Fake Accounts, 2021
In recent months, I’ve been reading some discussion on what exactly constitutes an “online novel,” how one might construct comprehensible fiction about the act of “being online.” Novelists have, it has been argued, been loath to incorporate the internet as a whole, begging the question of why?
Are such accounts of the everday experience of using the internet possible or useful? Does anyone want to read them, really? Does the pace of change, both in technological and cultural markers that shift continuously make it impossible to express any thought about the internet that is not rendered immediately obsolete? It is, I feel, important to use fiction to interpret just what is this new facet of experience we all have in common. These technologies have created such open and accessible tools to allow unprecedented information sharing and community building that has enriched so many of our lives.
But, of course, so much of what lurks in the dark places of the internet fuels a good deal of contemporary horror by itself, without even dealing with supernatural “creepypasta” or liminal spaces popular online. The internet, and the corporate entities that control it, know all about you, and their intentions may not be for the best. The hidden, festering spaces online have helped propagate an upsurge of hate and extremist thinking all over the world. And now, in the offices of the powerful, plans are being made attempting to replace reality itself! Okay, that’s a bit hyperbolic, but the control certain powerful men have over such a monolithic mode of communication and information is frightening by itself.
In 2021 in particular, there were a few books that appeared to tackle these questions in very different ways, and to grapple with the existential fears that can result from peering into the “portal.”
Lauren Oyler’s novel Fake Accounts, for instance, is a vivid and troubling examination of the zeitgeist of the last half-decade, and its themes and ideas will stay with me, though not quite in the most positive light. Like skimming any of my social media feeds, Fake Accounts left me feeling uncertain, unsettled, drained, and vaguely upset, even if Oyler writes with a tongue-in-cheek tone that often left me laughing.
Fake Accounts follows an unnamed millennial narrator, bearing distinct and recognizable biographical similarities with the author herself, as she snoops on her artist boyfriend’s phone to discover that he has been living a secret life, all under the backdrop of the US 2016 Election. Being “very online” herself, her discovery that Felix, a distant and enigmatic figure at the best of times whom she met in Berlin spinning tall tales to hapless tourists, is a spreader of antisemitic conspiracy theory on Instagram seems less disturbing to her than as a convenient excuse to dump him. Unfortunately, before she is able to drop the bum, he dies in a tragic cycling accident.
Unable to process her feelings (a running theme throughout the novel), she leaves New York to return to Berlin, wandering aimlessly around the city with some fellow expat’s children she picked up as a babysitting gig. Both the narrator and Felix appear to have developed acute cases of irony poisoning and over the course of the novel both express skepticism about the ability of themselves or anyone else to experience ideas untainted by the vortex of the internet.
All in all, this feels like an effective rendering of the “very online” feeling, and though the novel doesn’t really deal with internet culture directly, the narrator’s usage of Twitter or OkCupid or Instagram drives much of her actions. As I have read it described recently, being online is “malleable and permeates our real world,” which for many has become a worrying situation. Throughout the novel, Oyler feels very concerned with ideas of identity and how they might be twisted or distorted by the fakeness of our own understandings of other people and ourselves.
This is where I find her explorations the most worrying. In delving into critiques of political and social theories, from feminism to socialism to climate change, the novel seems to express doubt that any authentic identity or change is possible through them. That is, Oyler critiques how the lived experience of curating a persona (or many personas) online, viewing and being viewed by others in a way both more distant and more intimate than in physical space leads to a fracturing of identity. We don’t know ourselves let alone anyone else, which leads to the novel viewing expressions of earnestness with disdain, as if admitting to a genuine belief is self-delusion.
To paraphrase the narrator’s statement to another expat, “our problems are imaginary, so imaginary solutions work best.” This has some troubling implications for me, ignoring the very real role the internet had in fermenting the deadly rise of the white nationalist far right taking advantage of the very ironic detachment both the narrator and Felix exhibit, while also denying agency to people experimenting with new ways of understanding themselves online. Extremely, self-awarely white, heteronormative, and privileged, Oyler or her narrator’s self-deprecatingly arch denunciations of herself notwithstanding, the novel feels more cynical than anything else.
All in all, there is a darkness throughout Fake Accounts that feels evident, even through the humor, even through the online drama, that can feel suffocating, even horrific. While effective in its goals, the underlying nihilism gives me pause, though I can say it is all entirely redolent of the now.
In contrast to Oyler’s work, No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood, also published in 2021, is a semi-autobiographical internet novel steeped in emotion and feeling. The narrator uses evocative, poetic language to recreate the nonsequitur barrage of being online, entering what she calls “the portal” to encounter the profane, the humorous, the horrific, and the captivating. It is interesting how, in contrast to Fake Accounts, the internet is depicted in a much more physical sense. Rather than describing using the internet passively, Lockwood brings this fractured, endlessly addicting world of drifting information into the center of her work, traversing the portal synonymous with directing our attention to the digital landscapes of social media, search engines, and databases our minds encounter in waves.
The internet is part of the real world, of course, and was never “just” the internet, but it still in many ways feels like a separate, disembodied place, one which Lockwood brings to life in all its bizarre, engrossing chaos. However, as Lockwood’s narrator’s personal life is hit with a family tragedy, the lack of relevancy of these online feeds to the pain and love of her physical life shifts the work into the personal. Living with a terminally ill newborn, celebrating the few months of her niece’s life with her sister is heart wrenching but focuses the narrative. This is, I feel, a much more relatable way to think about the way the internet and digital media affects our lives in general on a day to day basis. As big a part as it is to our contemporary existence, it is still illusory to the big events in our lives, a feeling that is particularly relevant for me in recent months after the birth of my first child. It is also interesting to think about how the idea of the internet being a “portal” works both ways, opening ourselves to the thoughts and feelings of others (not unlike literature itself).
In the end, No One Is Talking About This is an affecting and lovely work that inspires me to think of my writing in new ways.
However, the work that best captures the role that the internet plays in “real life,” both the horrifying extremes that it can bring to our doorsteps and the liberating powers that it can also create is A.E. Osworth’s novel We Are Watching Eliza Bright. In their tense, gripping page-turner, Osworth attempts a novel, and in my view effective, strategy to tell their topical, continuingly relevant story, which, not unlike the internet itself, is subject to multiple interpretations, used to build community or ferment hatred. Drawing from #GamerGate and other harassment campaigns highlighting the endemic sexism, racism, and toxic politics of much of online culture and the video game industry, in particular, Osworth fills their work with both humor and an urgent, frightening seriousness.
Following the eponymous Eliza Bright, a talented coder hired to work in development for the up and coming MMORPG studio Fancy Dog and their popular superhero themed property, as she pushes back against the institutional misogyny of her coworkers and inadvertently triggers a hate mob, the novel is told primarily by the anonymous, communal voice of hostile, insular online discourse, with interludes by the communal voice of a radical, inclusive online space. As Fancy Dog fails to deal with their issues, putting their launch into VR higher in priority than the safety of their staff and with leaks from the inside broadcasting everything, their complacency in the face of this abuse highlights their role in it.
Osworth captures the memes, the lulz, the irony masking hatred and resentment of the very diversity that the internet was supposed to build, poignant and disturbing but accessible even for those less deeply ingrained in the subculture. Punctuated by excerpts taken from the social media and communications of Eliza and her friends, and the harassment she faces led by the sinister InSpectre, We Are Watching Eliza Bright provides thoughtful insights into how the shared experience of social media and information networks can be used to the benefit and harm of individuals. As the hivemind only has whatever information they were able to glean from leaks, media articles, and inferences, there are many instances where we are not sure exactly what happened, but that the collective is all too willing to assert their assumptions.
While set in the recent past, the novel remains as timely as ever as the abusive underbelly of the video game industry continues to be exposed, making the story of the eponymous Eliza Bright feel all too realistic and topical.
In the last entry of this Millennial Horrors series, I will be critiquing the rise and fall of so-called Alt-Lit, which captures more than any other genre the alienation and weird cosmic horrors of late-capitalist mostly digital life in its most concentrated form, one which I have struggled with since first encountering its stable of oddly endearing but kind of frightening writers.