Why it seems hard to write about the Internet
- It’s awkward and frivolous to render artistically, like doing an oil painting of a PS4
- The Internet is fast-paced and writing about it contains the risk of dating horribly. Websites go offline, social media companies change themselves, even the terms we use for and on the Internet go out of style rapidly
- “Watching someone at a computer is dull”
The Internet in speculative science fiction
William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer is one of the most discussed and referenced cyberpunk. Its content is full of exploration about the good and bad possibilities of living in a computer-connected world.
There are novels about Silicon Valley: Microserfs (1995) by Douglas Coupland, The Circle (2013) by Dave Eggers, Book of Numbers (2015) by Joshua Cohen.
Eggers’ The Circle is about Mae Holland, a recent college graduate, who lands a job at a powerful tech company run by “Three Wise Men.” The company, called The Circle, links users’ personal emails, social media, banking, and purchasing with their universal operating system, resulting in one online identity and a new age of civility and transparency. Stardust Goodreads user Stephanie Sun called it “The Fountainhead for Big Data.”
- The Circle has subsumed Facebook, Google, Twitter and many other social media sites, giving the company greater influence over the general populace
- The popularity pressures politicians into going “transparent,” a condition which causes them to be recorded at all times, thereby quashing political corruption
- The company later develops a system of voting called Demoxie, which requires every citizen to publish their vote through a Circle account
- According to Kathrin Maurer and Christian F. Rostbøll, this creates a vision of the future in which “the Web not only supplements democratic institutions but becomes the only institution in society — knowing, organizing, and administering everything.” ^[“Demoxie: Reflections on digital democracy in Dave Eggers’ novel the Circle”]
- Paraphrasing Orwell’s 1984, The Circle devises three mantras: “Secrets are lies, sharing is caring, privacy is theft.” The company’s anti-privacy branding is represented as utopian, linked with the wide-scale reduction of crime and corruption. Once Mae goes transparent, she is unable to have authentic conversations with others, who often use her camera as a means of self-promotion.
Finally, there are novels about how normal individuals (outside of Big Tech) might experience humdrum online life.
The Internet outside of spec sci-fi
Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This (2021) and Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts (2021) tackle the terrible things birthed by the Internet: trolls, alt-right, fake news, awful men in power.
As for prose, Olivia Laing’s Crudo (2018) used a stream-of-consciousness style with references to ultra-contemporary news events. Jenny Offill’s Weather (2020) as well as Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This employs narratives built up of short, loosely connected paragraphs that like social media browsing.
Some contemporary authors choose to write unmediated instant message exchanges into their novels.
Lockwood’s book contains a list of Internet searches:
I miss my son who died
I miss my son so much quotes
I miss my son in heaven
My son died and I miss him
Missing my son sayings
Stephen Marche put it recently, “In a world of total information, the essence of the human will become what is not information, and the essence of intimacy will be in sharing what cannot be shared over the networks.”