Do Cyborgs Think in Viral Tweets? On Persona, Performance & Art

Why writing sucks now, the image triumphing over the word, Anne Carson, the death of the Panopticon and the Society of the Cyborg.

“Difficult in Pink Ribbon.” Meghann Stephenson, oil on canvas.

1

You have at your disposal an infinite number of ways of beginning a piece of writing. And you chose that? That’s what you chose? Of all the things you could have written, you wrote that? Girl.

Take the incendiary beginning of David Wojnarowicz’s blistering memoir Close to the Knives: So my heritage is a calculated fuck on some faraway sun-filled bed while the curtains are being sucked in and out of an open window by a passing breeze.

Then there’s Sally Rooney’s Normal People which starts with the short graf: Marianne answers the door when Connell rings the bell. She’s still wearing her school uniform, but she’s taken off the sweater, so it’s just the blouse and skirt, and she has no shoes on, only tights.

Oh… Okay.

Or, Andrea Lawler’s Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, which begins: Like a shark, Paul had to keep moving. He slept only when necessary. He had business with the world, codes to crack, so many questions. Tonight, for example, Paul needed to know what fucking was like for girls.

Well, yes!

Let’s try The Guest, by Emma Cline. This was August. The ocean was warm, and warmer every day.

Right, right. Whatever the fuck that means.

2

When attempting to diagnose what she calls the “Pity Me!” essay for New Gawker (rip), Rachel Connolly begins with Rene Ricard’s 1978 essay “I Class Up A Joint” as a counterexample to the sedate, humorless writing she’s lambasting.

As Connolly says, “It begins: ‘I’ve never worked a day in my life. If I did it would probably ruin my career, which at the moment is something of a cross between a butterfly and a lap dog. I never went to high school either.’ An opener which made me laugh out loud. The best way I can describe how much I liked this essay is to say I felt like it had been written just for me. As if, somehow, long before I was born, Ricard knew the exact thing to write to make me, specifically, laugh. As if I was being told a great story by an old friend.”

This essay has become a foundational text in my writing arsenal. I return to it again and again any time I feel stuck, Ricard’s insouciance reminding me that there’s writing with the burning desire to share something so badly the only way to say it is to say it smart.

3

One of the worst things I wrote in grad school — and the bar is high — was a piece of autofiction where I attempted to retread a weekend I spent at the Waldorf Astoria Atlanta for work through my Instagram posts. I wish that wasn’t a sentence I just typed for you all to read but here we are. To be fair, the instinct wasn’t wrong. This seems to be the height of literary success now: How stubbornly the words can hammer themselves into the shape of an image.

I didn’t attend a writer’s workshop to get feedback on my work, or, rather, this wasn’t my primary motive, but a fine side effect. I went to meet other writers and so I could put the degree and the school in my author’s bio. I got exactly what I wanted — and some — from those two years; but even I was surprised by how much I hated the workshop model. Being in a writers workshop didn’t feel like I was connecting with other writers over craft and creativity. It felt like going to a meeting at my marketing job.

Rarely, has anyone pulled me aside to share niche books I would have never heard of otherwise, that might tap some undiscovered spring of creativity within me. They just ask me if I’ve read Sally Rooney. Have I read Sally Rooney? Yeah. Oh my god, babe, I’m not a 100-year-old in Texarkana. I don’t want to talk about Sally Rooney!

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The aformentioned beginnings, in all their sundry styles, perfectly illustrate Stephen Marche’s concept of the Literature of the Voice (a style no longer in vogue) vs the Literature of the Pose (the epoch in which we currently find ourselves). As Marche puts it for LitHub, authors of the voice, like Philip Roth or Toni Morrison, are defined by their ability to convey their own distinct vision of the world in the most embodied, distinctive language they can manage.

“Philip Roth has the most delicious voice because the limitations of his empathy are so extreme. He is a Jewish man from Newark. No other perspective makes sense to him and he expends little to no effort trying to make sense of what others might feel or think.”

To paraphrase Connolly, these writers make us feel as if their work were written to make us, specifically, laugh.

Meanwhile, in the literature of the pose “the style grows less personal even as the auto-fictional content grows more confessional. The more prominent the writer, the less individual the style.”

Like the opening of Normal People’s imagistic chicken scratches that tell us nothing beyond how the opening scene of the upcoming miniseries might be directed. This writing is defined by control, which Marche goes on to characterize as a profound desire for erasure: “The writing of the pose is, first and foremost, about being correct, both in terms of style and content. Its foremost goal is not to make any mistakes. Its foremost gesture is erasure and its foremost subject is social anxiety and self-presentation.”

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We’re currently living through a plague of unfuckable writing.

Every day, we log onto the screens in our hands and read vapid musing too pedestrian for even a personal notebook. Writing “with the combed-through feeling of cover letters to job applications in which a spelling mistake might mean unemployment,” as Marche puts it. Or, as I previously pointed out in this publication, “A stranger online tweets about people who only write to self-mythologize. The résumé generation. We were told to gather bylines for our Twitter bios.”

The act of writing is no longer interesting. That is, there no longer exists the need to express something so badly the only way to say it is to say it smart. Not when you can simply appear to be a writer. We’re living in the age of Caroline Calloway, who sold multiple books years before she ever wrote a word. And who cares if the resulting words constitute nothing more than sophomoric rubber stamp reproductions of something you feel like you’ve heard somewhere before when she has a screenshot of a Lili Anolik profile of her she can post to her Instagram?

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Speaking of delusional, I was once engaged in that modern mass hysteria known as Taylor Swift’s fandom, scrolling past a picture of her in New Jersey in a dress that sent the internet into a frenzy of conspiracies about how the print of the fabric means 9/11 was an inside job or whatever — and I thought, my god, this woman lives in a hell of her own making. Imagine not even being able to wear a dress to your friends’ wedding without it being part of your “lore.”

Then again, maybe I’ve overextended my sympathy here, as a wedding is as good of a marketing opportunity as any. Like Charli XCX’s recent birthday party that happened smack dab in the middle of her brat album cycle, which she spent playing her own album from start to finish while standing awkwardly on a banquet alongside a cadre of online It Girls in an overly lit room before of a sea of stock-still guests, arms dutifully raised to captured all the fun no one was having like a vignette from the right panel of The Garden of Earthly Delights. In a recent interview, Charli admitted that brat began as a branding exercise instead of an artistic expression. “I was thinking about marketing before I was making the music,” she told Variety.

After all, the literature of the pose is the literature of the image. Or, as Marche says, it’s the “Image triumphing over the Word.” Your personality, your voice, is no longer something you develop through experience and taste — but the thing you buy from targeted online ads and then recycle into a feed curated to fit what might be called your aesthetic.

When Swift releases an album, instead of experiencing the music, listeners rush to pull up the lyrics on their phones as they analyze each word for any relation they may have to the real life celebrity melodramas Swift may be writing about that we’ve already seen play out in photos online.

We don’t want writing anymore; we want Instagram captions. Instead of art, we get lore. Instead of thoughts, we have posts.

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A few missives from the void:

In a recent Substack essay, writer-bon-vivant Marlowe Granados chastises us about taking the easy way out of developing our own personal taste: “The asinine conversations about what people signal by way of what they read or how they dress is really the death of what is beautiful about taste. The importance placed on symbols as a shortcut into creating an identity without any real lived experience, in fact, sells everyone short. Just because you can paint by numbers does not mean you’re an artist.”

When comparing two poems by Rupi Kaur and Seamus Heaney, Marche write, “Rupi Kaur’s poems are not manipulations of language like Heaney’s are. They are manipulations of the images of language.”

I especially like the way author Stephanie Danler described her aversion to BookTok: “On it, you can’t just show a book by Clarice Lispector. The successful accounts performed being a ‘woman who reads Clarice Lispector.’”

And, even more to the point: “Being visible on these apps is antithetical to the act of writing.”

Or, as Barry Pierce wrote for GQ of internet communities like BookTube and BookTok: “It was like entering a parallel universe where reading wasn’t just something that someone did for fun, it was a lifestyle, an aesthetic, people were ‘readers’… The act of reading became replaced by the act of being a reader.”

Or, perhaps it can be summed up by this screenshot of a tweet I sent to my friend last summer:

TL;DR: The Image has slaughtered the Word and is parading its head around on a spike.

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In her treatise on “online girlhood,” Michelle Santiago Cortés points out, “The countercultures have lost their primary points of reference. What we have now — in the clean girls, bed rotters, deerposters, trad wives, shitposters and even in the depths Manosphere — is a thick haze of synonymous moods. A generalized ache. A blur of malaise.”

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The blur of malaise is what I thought of when I saw a screenshot from a Sam Kriss essay about Girls on Twitter: “The only type that’s survived is Shoshanna. Hard and dense, compact, virginal. Shoshanna is Hannah’s negative. They’re both narcissists, but Hannah’s is a primary narcissism; she’s obsessed with the raw sensuous experience of being herself, being jammed into the world at her particular awkward angle. Shoshanna’s is secondary narcissism, the narcissism of the image of the self, the self as an object, the only object.”

But this narcissism isn’t internally motivated — it’s externally inflicted. And it doesn’t feel gratifying, this self-expression. From the way we talk about social media (often on social media) and from the literature of the pose, we can tell it feels really fucking bad, actually. All my friends are disassociating and they all blame life under late-stage capitalism. All (popular) writing is about this now — even if we already know how it feels.

As Connolly says in her critique of the “pity me” essay, “Noting the existence of a near universally experienced external phenomenon is not the same thing as enunciating some shared element of internality: from almost everyone’s perspective the sky is blue, but you don’t need me to tell you that.”

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But regardless of its origins, the anxiety — Cortés’ generalized ache — is undeniable.

“Perhaps,” Christian Lorentzen posits, “it’s these pains that turn our eyes away from the pleasures of literature to the disenchanted explanations of political economy, to the suspicions of paranoid reading, to the preening pondering about what the books we enjoy say about us rather than what they say to us.”

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To briefly look back at Rooney — the cornerstone of Marche’s concept of the pose — in an essay on the use of sexuality in her novels, Sadie Graham writes, “And when we consider the market, it makes sense that lesbian sexuality, queer sexuality, does not exist in Rooney’s novels — it is just a cool thing about you, a queer woman who does not have queer thoughts or desires or hookups, like being a Marxist who does not organize or protest or sabotage or even so much as attend a Marxist book club meeting on campus.”

And the literature of the pose always considers the market.

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Kriss, again, on the Shoshanna-fication of culture: “She survived because her type is typification itself, the process of mutilating the self into categories. That’s how you get ahead in the marketplace, and every last vestige of social life is a marketplace now. Everyone has turned into Shoshanna, men and women alike. The Shoshanna-machine spits out holographic versions of Hannah (‘literary it girl,’ ‘thought daughter’) and Jessa (‘indie sleaze’), but it’s all just Shoshanna underneath, one planetary Shoshanna spinning autistically through predetermined space.”

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In their essay on Bo Burnham’s comedy special Inside, CJ the X touches on the anxiety that results from the impetus to perform your image for the marketplace.

“The normalization of the performance of everything online and the Pavlovian conditioning of addictive little dopamine boosts that are notifications and then the resulting performance anxiety incurred when you're not participating, but you know it's all at your fingertips — All this drives engagement! It captures your attention and then sells the attention to advertisers. That just want you to be more anxious and need more things!”

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The attention economy not only seeks to colonize our attention but cultivates in us a desperate desire for that of others. Or, as Burnham says in his special, “Apathy’s a tragedy and boredom is a crime.” The social currency is attention and it’s come to define how we relate to each other — and ourselves.

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The image is the primary language of this society. Look no further than the meme, which has infiltrated nearly every aspect of culture, from politics to film to our understanding of life itself.

As CJ the X says, “The most abstract, existential emotions and complicated social realities can be condensed into the meme format easily.”

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So, we’re as anxious to perform as we are from the act of performing itself. Or, as YouTube essayist Morbid Zoo says, “Social cohesion is based on identity, so if fame is a virtue, then identity performance also becomes a virtue.”

CJ the X explains, “Seminal sociologist Juliet Schor codified something called ‘the new consumerism,’ which describes a cultural shift from horizontal aspiration to vertical aspiration, which simply means this: At some point, through technology, we stopped comparing ourselves to our neighbors and peers and started comparing ourselves to celebrities and brands. … We're watching the most famous and powerful people in the world perform on the same medium that we're performing on. Vertical aspiration feels like horizontal aspiration.”

Online, we’re producer and consumer at once, creator and audience in tandem. And the primacy of the image has imbued us with the need to flatten ourselves into the simplest version we can to be readable, scannable, easily digestible.

Morbid Zoo points out, “You may not, as a person on the internet, be more complicated than what can be described in a series of nouns, pronouns, and emojis in a Twitter bio.”

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In her analysis of Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring, film scholar Anna Backman Rogers writes, “[The] film suggests implicitly that these adolescents can only see themselves through the refracted gaze of the other and, more broadly, social media: their sense of self resides almost entirely in images. ... Power, then, is measured in one’s ability to embody an ideal version of oneself.”

Power is not just determined by our narrativizing but by the way we’re read by online audiences, from friends and lovers to haters and strangers.

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Michelle Santiago Cortés says, “To become or make oneself through memes or movies means that we can only feel ourselves fully realized in the eyes of our beholders. Followers, friends, families, algorithms — they witness and structure how our every move coalesces into the aesthetics of [you].”

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To be appealing to the “gaze of the other,” or to “chat,” my image must be coherent. In becoming coherent, I become cliché, a thing to be read, not a person to make meaning with. Our sense of self has become inextricably linked to the image of ourselves in other people’s eyes. Another term for this is a brand.

Backman Rogers theorizes, “The Bling Ring suggests that what it means to be a human being – and, by extension, to embark on reciprocal and respectful relationships with others – is fundamentally altered and reduced when one acquiesces to becoming an image (to becoming-surface) and, moreover, to becoming a socially mediated form of image (a commodity or brand). In short, what is at stake in coinciding with the cliché is a form of internal death.”

To wit: We’re no longer people with personalities but brands with consistency.

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Bringing in Guy Debord’s ideas from The Society of the Spectacle, Backman Rogers says, “As Debord (2010) and Baudrillard (1994) already predicted with the rise of commodity fetishism and a culture of spectacle, the virtual image has now lost its representative function and has come to stand in for the totality of the person or object it pertains to represent.”

Your image is your brand is your identity is your income is your social capital is your personality is your value.

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“[But],” as Backman Rogers says, “as an overwhelmingly popular – and therefore important – current iteration in the history of self-portraiture, it is a telling indication of the ways in which young people have come to regard themselves through the other (that is, through the structures that surveil them).”

The anxiety around the panopticon used to be that we never knew when we were being watched — but under surveillance capitalism and in the current social media landscape, there's an anxiety that we’re not being watched at all. Because in the attention economy, no attention means no capital. Our market value plummets.

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We structure our lives around content we see online, then broadcast these content-lives back to the internet, creating more content and on and on. Soon, our lives become a performance whether there’s a camera there or not.

Essayist Broey Deschanel speaks about this in a video about self-regulation and surveillance in the reality TV show Love Island. Referencing philosopher Gillez Deleuze’s answer to Foucault’s interpretation of the panopticon:

[Deleuze] argues that we’re shifting from a society of discipline to a society of control. In Foucault’s society, we move between different physical enclosures — a prison, an office building, a school, a factory — which contribute to our self-discipline. But in the society of control, these barriers are broken down — we’re encouraged to travel about, because all the information necessary to discipline us now lives in a database. The further we travel, the more information the database can collect from us.

It’s a society where, rather than being confined to a space where you never know if you’re being watched, you’re encouraged to embrace the fact that you are watched everywhere. In fact, it’s a privilege to be watched. Deleuze says, “The disciplinary man was a discontinuous producer of energy, but the man of control is undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network.” … What’s insidious about this new society is that we’re given the illusion of freedom, while being less free than we ever were before. The boundaries of Foucault’s enclosure have broken down and now, we are always self-regulating, we are always working.

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Soon, there’s no difference between the performance of your image and your living, breathing reality.

As CJ the X says, “You can call your public activity ‘work’ and your private activity your ‘life.’ But most kids automatically plugged into the Internet before they had the capacity to speak a grammatically correct sentence. Don't have any boundary between their time as a performer and their time as an audience member. Performance through social media is so integrated into their existence that they don't see a difference between performing and living most of the time. They've absorbed the anxiety of a performer into every second of their lives.”

You wear Lululemon so you can seem like you’re the type of person who wears Lululemon online, until one day your entire closet is full of athleisure. And soon you have a personal and financial stake in never deviating from this image. Because if you ever turn to wearing band t-shirts, people will be there to harshly remind you that you’re the Lululemon girl, reprimanding you back into the “authenticity” you’ve already trapped yourself in. The children long to be cops.

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Ultimately, Broey says, “This is the greatest trick of the society of control — while the [Love Island villa] is a confined space where the panopticon can take shape, a workplace for the contestants to generate revenue, the society of control has made it so that they clocked in on the project of self-regulation long before they entered the villa.”

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So now it bleeds beyond the screen.

It looks like this: when your internal monologue manifests as a TikTok narration, when a funny thing you saw must be tweeted, when you decorate your nightstand to look like a picture you saw on Instagram and then post it on Instagram.

It’s when Sandra from Accounting turns on her front-facing camera and begins an Instagram video with “So, you’ve all been asking —” Who? Who the fuck has been asking, Sandra? Who are you?

Every day people speak like content creators who speak like celebrities who have mostly ceased to speak at all. We all have Instagram faces and speak in TikTok voice in a lingua franca of Twitter memes.

Is this the anxiety to perform our personalities? Or have we simply replaced our personalities with performance?

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In Eros the Bittersweet, when writing about identity and literature and all things erotic in 1986, Anne Carson traces our modern sense of self to the introduction of the written word to society.

According to Carson, when we moved from an oral to a literate society, we were forced to gather ourselves into discrete individuals separate from the world around us. We became aware of our own thoughts and what they meant about us. We developed individual personalities. Words and writing became the main medium facilitated by sight, as opposed to the spoken word, or sound, facilitated by the sense of hearing.

Now, we’ve moved from a literate culture to a visual one, facilitated by a brand new appendage beyond our eyes or ears: our phone.

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In their work, CJ the X returns again and again the concept of the cyborg.

“You are a cyborg,” they write. “We are not awaiting the impending apocalyptic circumstance of a microchip being inserted into your brain. There is already a microchip hacking your brain. It’s outside of your body, but you carry it on your person 24/7, every day of the year. You look at it when you wake up and right before you go to bed. You know where it is right now. It’s never too far away. You use it for work, you use it for school, it mediates your relationships, and you intuitively reach for it when you’re bored. Your brain chemistry, your body and your conscious experience, has completely integrated your phone into itself as an appendage.”

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This has not only affected, as previously mentioned, how we see ourselves through other people, but how we see other people in relation to ourselves. In Carson’s thesis, the concept of the self as separate from the other makes desire painful, shifting our relationship with others as a problem to be solved. In our current cyborgian concept of relationships, if we’re brands, other people are value to be added to the product that is our idea of the “self.”

In my extremely brief fling with dating apps, I quickly realized I was engaging the same part of my brain as I did when I was online shopping. But with human beings.

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So, you're a product and your ultimate purpose is to increase shareholder value. And yes if you make your living as a content creator then you can maybe say you're maximizing your value, but let's be honest, for every poster (professional or not) the value is being extracted from, not added to, us (the creator-consumer class) for men like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Dan Clancy.

The medium’s the message so when you tweet "twitter sucks,” the message isn't “twitter sucks" but that it's easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of Twitter, or whatever that guy said.

This is the basis of our self-worth now.

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And it ultimately leads to the alienation woven into every word of the pose. Commodity fetishism takes on a whole new meaning when you're the commodity. Your image has been catastrophically prioritized over your voice.

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You’re not writing to express an idea, to connect with people, to say something novel — you’re writing to create a product.

Of course Caroline Calloway doesn’t want to write a good book and of course Lili Anolik would want to profile her for it. Beyond being friends with Calloway’s publicist, Anolik has always been more interested in literary personas than in literature.

On her decade-long project of writing about Eve Babitz: “I have a theory. I believe Babitz didn’t catch on in her day, when she was actually living and writing, because she was too much the embodied creature to construct a persona, at least a public one. (Why would she worry about presenting as the thing? She was the thing.) In that Vanity Fair profile, I constructed a persona for her… I gathered the details she’d left scattered in various pieces, collected and un-, and in the chapters of books that were fiction posing as non- … shaping it into a coherent narrative, making it all pop… In short, Babitz is now a brand.”

Alright, damn, the woman’s already dead for god’s sake.

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In an essay for Spike, Conor Truax discusses all of this, this thing I’ve been doing here, and more — ultimately creating a way forward for the “internet novel,” which he decides has been defined by autofiction for too long.

In discussing the subgenre, Truax says, “In most cases, the autofictional novel concedes to a relational paradigm that positions the novel itself in the shadow of the authorial persona, meaning that what the author performs becomes the primary subject of critical evaluation rather than what they produce. This is the hazard of [Delia] Cai’s proposition that people readily understand personae relative to novels, when we only think personae are easier to understand because we’ve become accustomed to consuming them en masse on social media, however shallowly. When an authorial persona becomes fundamental to a novel, literacy becomes conflated with social media literacy, and critical evaluation becomes reduced to ad hominem critique.”

It’s interesting to note that throughout his LitHub essay, March — somewhat frustratingly — employs the fictional characters of Beautiful World, Where Are You as stand-ins for Rooney’s personal thoughts and feelings. It’s not that I doubt the autofictional qualities of Rooney’s work, but rather that like Truax, I’m weary of the ad hominem critiques that have arisen in the the genre’s supremacy. It’s a little like critiquing Taylor Swift’s music based on who she was dating, or what dress she was wearing, when she wrote it.

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In another essay for LitHub, Jess Row discusses the way today’s writers capitulate to the demands of “self-franchising” through autofiction and social media marketing. Drawing on theorist Anna Kornbluh’s concept of content overload in what she terms “too late capitalism,” Row suggests that self-franchising is “compulsory” in a world where life mimics a marketplace. Where “our selves are the only thing we have left to sell,” flattening writers into personas and confusing the point of art, which Row sees as “to make something, to assert something, that has never existed before.”

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All this performance has resulted in a collapse of meaning.

Marche says of the literature of the pose, “Rooney’s misery is neither fake nor unjustified. It’s registering reality. Sociological explanations come easily enough. There’s the rise of the internet, of the smartphone, of social media rendering and distributing banality through satisfying fragments of unmeaning, all the stages of a visual culture replacing a lingual one. Beautiful World, Where Are You is also registering a dead end, both creatively and spiritually. The literature of the Pose is unsustainable. Ultimately, in the process of erasure, you erase yourself. The perfect pose is silence.”

A different CJ the X essay introduced me to Noam Chomsky’s “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously,” a sentence that’s constructed to appear beautiful and correct while saying nothing. Or, as Marche said of Rupi Kaur’s poetry, it’s the “[manipulation] of the images of language.”

I love when I see a piece of content where someone is speaking in the familiar patois of political engagement, but I can tell that they’re just repeating words and phrases they heard on other apps with no context for what they mean.

The Male Gaze. Intersectionality. Community Organizing. Blah. Blah. Blah. All abused in a race to seem smarter than we are in an ecosystem that values engagement over understanding.

Or as the Morbid Zoo essay reminds us, “That’s what social media is: a place where you can perform the act of thinking without actually retaining any thoughts at all.”

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I can tell most people don't enjoy writing now because the writing isn't enjoyable.

It’s not even writing exactly, which is where you take an idea and shape it into something meaningful, but the unfiltered barrage of thoughts most associated with a gag reflex that’s not about communicating something, but so that you can be seen doing it. Perhaps the most honest expression of this is the act of livestreaming. Pure, nonstop information. Where every idea you have is worth being said simply because you had it.

We're reading and writing more than ever on text-heavy sites like Twitter, Tumblr and even Instagram, where captions unfurl in CVS receipt lengths. More than ever on this very app. Yet literacy has never felt further away.

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I don’t want to alarm you, but you’re all saying the same thing. Like, lately, you’ve all been saying the same thing. And now we’re at an impasse because I have something to say about the thing you’ve all been saying but I don’t want to just be repeating what you’ve already said, adding another echo into the endless vacuum of meaning, the discourse hall of mirrors. Everyone seems to have reached their breaking point with personas and performance, cyborgs and surveillance, content and consumption. You’re feeling your humanity push up against your product. How you’ve become your own limit. The seams are starting to show.

What’s more concerning is that you’ve all been saying it in the same way. I don’t need you to tell me the sky is blue. I want to know how that particular piece of blue makes you feel. Which day of your childhood it reminds you of. How the blue hurts you. Can we live in this blue? Should we want to?

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CJ the X interprets the end of Inside as our struggle to reclaim our attention, our self-respect, ourselves from the internet: “[Burnham] strips naked and burns a spotlight on himself. At first, he squints at the intensity, surprised all this happened without him noticing it was happening. Then, he hangs his head in subjected acceptance. After this final goodbye and a full show inside this tiny room, he finally tries to go outside. The special is over. It's time to stop performing. So he tries, but outside he just finds a sound stage where there's nothing but more lights and another audience. Outside is gone. It’s all inside. And you can't get back inside yourself.”

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Burnham is the grandfather of this essay and all the rhizomatic thoughts gathered herein from various writers and thinkers across different corners of the internet.

Burnham’s a millennial’s millennial, who began his career making content on the internet and has been sounding the alarm about the effect of social media on our lives (or, more often, those of Gen Z and Gen Alpha) for years. He provides a clear-eyed, cogent voice in the conversation that rises above technophobic fear-mongering, in part because of his own complicity in the subject he’s critiquing. Anyone who’s watched Inside knows that it could only be created by someone who’s terminally online, someone who’s as drawn to these spaces and subcultures as he is unsettled by them.

(And, where some of the internet novels Truax discusses in his article have failed, Burnham’s one of the only artists who’s successfully captured the way being online feels — the vibe, if you will.)

I’m just as complicit in all this. There are days when I spend more time on Twitter than I do thinking. I’m publishing this on Substack. I pay my rent with a marketing job. I speak (in memes) from the center ring of the circus.

I loved brat, even as I recognize that I don’t necessarily love it for the same reasons it became a cultural phenomenon, which had more to do with the image of brat — the Apple dance, the brat generator, limesicle green — and how easily it could be coopted by a million personal and professional brands online.

This essay was about many things (probably too many). How entitled we feel to attention. How little we think about what we think. How everyone’s been thinking and writing and talking about the same thing for a while now. Or maybe it’s just been me sifting through words, holding them up to the light, looking for something I’ve never experienced before, trying to get back inside myself.

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As with the switch from an oral culture to a literate one, new technology and the socio-cultural shifts that come with it are not destructive in and of themselves, even if the powers behind them are. There’s nothing inherently wrong with marketing or personas or promoting your work. Rather, our current era of anxiety arises from the contradiction that occurs when the persona begins to replace the person, when private life becomes confused with public property, when branding is the only avenue for authenticity.

And, ultimately, the only power we have is over what we choose to do next.

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Personally, I like words. I like how the beginning of Close to the Knives (again: So my heritage is a calculated fuck on some faraway sun-filled bed while the curtains are being sucked in and out of an open window by a passing breeze.) dives right into the middle of this life, implicating me in all that’s to come.

I like how this sentence hits my ear: In my younger and vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

And I like how this one hits my libido: Don’t let me wash it out, so when I talk to those people, I can have your cum swimming in my mouth, and I will smile at them and taste you.

I like how words can delight (It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.); and shock (I flinched when he lurched forward and began scribbling on the pad. He ripped the sheet off and held it out to Arty. I took it and held it for Arty to read. The script was a fast block print, very legible. It said, “I’m glad to see you again. I shot at you in a parking lot ten years ago.”).

Often they do both at once:

Sometimes, Marie got a little drunk at work.

Vision, It was spring here, too, last week — Sunday afternoon I walked down the steps off Columbus Circle into Central Park, and the odor of piss rose up from the rest rooms, and I knew a year had passed.

Did I mention that when I was fifteen I took it out of my pants and whacked off on the 107 bus from New York?

They can charm (The tap water tasted thick and salty. I imagined the sink filling up with starfish and shells.); and disgust (It was then that I noticed a tiny maggot — no bigger than the tip of a dressmaker’s thimble — squirming across the piece of meat. Even a carcass can carry life, so why not me? Before I allowed my mind to wander too freely, I took a bite. It was like chewing on cooked rubber, little maggots squishing like jelly between my teeth as I gnawed. I took another bite. And then, another. I vomited once. But I kept eating. Just like you told me to.).

I like how they can hide shame (The man at the Apple store who helps me is named Chris. The store is real busy. Lots of folks are talking and walking around. Sometimes when Weston’s friends would come to visit, he’d film me having sex with them. “Come for me, baby,” he’d say. I didn’t want to be with anyone but him. Me and Chris look down at my iPhone on the table in front of us. “I just need this fixed please,” I say. Chris says he understands. I’d like for him to hug me.); or reveal it (Eleanor Vance was thirty-two years old when she came to Hill House. The only person in the world she genuinely hated now that her mother was dead, was her sister. She disliked her brother-in-law and her five-year-old niece, and she had no friends.).

41

i do not long for these minimalist, little gestures of writing that are so in vogue at the moment. these aborted thoughts: fragments, slim novels, short stories with no endings, sentences that feel optimized past the point of comprehension. little suicides that stop readers short of having any true emotional investment. i prefer the grand, the melodramatic, the maximalist, the messy thing that propels me through the work of a long, fully realized life. when i feel myself pulling up short in my writing, leaning on minimalist aesthetics, it's almost always because i’m trying to hide that i have nothing of value to say. it's because i’m trying to make vapid, vague, confused thoughts look like a style. write a novel — give it an ending — finish your fucking thought.

42

Resist the image. Release yourself from the reflexive need to surveil yourself and your community. Kill the cop in you. Stop worrying more about the marketing than you do the artistry. That’s not a brand — that’s a person.