I don't wanna live forever, I just wanna die a king.
This is not an essay about the End of Twitter.
I really, really, really wanna reiterate. This is not an essay about the End of Twitter (the reports of whose demise may possibly be greatly exaggerated, but that’s neither here nor there).1
To be honest, events have sort of outrun this newsletter, as several weeks have passed between me writing that first graf and me writing this one. Deadlines on smaller projects cleared the way for a novel, a draft of which I sent to my agent only a few days ago. It’s the second novel I’ve written this year and the process of its birth was similar and similarly taxing. I’m Millennial to the bone marrow, but utterly unable to multitask when in the thick of a manuscript. The rest of my life falls away. It’s 40 days and 40 nights where I self-exile from social media, where I barely feel the sun on my face, where text messages from friends go unread. A solitude that rejuvenates and drains in equal measure, as the certainty wavers more and more that the life I left behind for the duration of the project will still be there waiting for me upon my emergence from the Batcave. But it’s done. And just about all my other deadlines for the calendar year have been met. I have, at long last, the mental real estate to linger on my own preoccupations and think through my own personal fascinations.
There is one question in particular that I’ve come back to with increasing frequency over the years, and that has gained an added urgency given the current tumult in the shifting of online spaces of congregation.
Are emotions culturally and sociotemporally contextual? Or is anger in 2022, at its core, the same as anger in 2022 BCE?
The way this question used to formulate itself was as follows: are infants limited in their range of human emotions by the fact of their inarticulateness? There’s fear and hunger, but (and this may simply be my own poverty of imagination) so much of infant expression seems powered by want. I want the security of my mother’s embrace. I want my formula. I want the toy dinosaur that fascinates me endlessly. I want to test my teeth on it. The ad infinitum end of this flavor of the question suggests that an infant could not possibly feel ennui. But I’ve seen infants show boredom, bounced on a parent’s lap while the grown-ups grouse about the political situation in the homeland. Even there, it’s I want to be somewhere else.
In the 4 Apr. 2022 issue of the London Review of Books, Erin Maglaque reviews the book Love: A History in Five Fantasies, and has the following paragraph:
What part of emotion is biological, and what cultural? To what extent are emotions subject to historical change? Can historians adjudicate this boundary between biology and history without training in the neurosciences? How are they to understand ephemeral and material expressions of emotion if they were left unrecorded? The history of emotions has provided an occasion for historians to debate some thorny problems, to examine our desire to attain proximity to our subjects, and prod at the impossibility of ever doing so.
Which is essentially what I’m trying to get at.
The review and the book are backward-facing, grappling with the problem of a past person’s ultimate unknowability, the idea being that we in the present are always dealing with incomplete information. We only have what evidence we have—letters, daguerrotypes, travelogues—that, in turn, only give us the expression and in-the-past interpretation of those expressions of emotions.2 I was less interested in that than I was in taking that question, turning it around, and facing it towards the future.
Andrew O’Hagan writes in the same issue about his mother and the particular brand of technophobia she took with her when she passed. Technophobia. I’m sure Alexander Graham Bell’s electromagnetic telephones with their amplitude modulation had folks in the late 1870s murmuring whispered entreaties for God’s protection from evil. But what does technophobia look like to an infant when so much of their existence is impelled by the prospect of discovery? How many children have I seen tap commandingly on an iPad?3
There is a charming and funny anecdote in the essay about O’Hagan getting his mother a smart TV so that she can have as many channels as her neighbor. When she’s told that she can pause Coronation Street, she balks. “What about the other people?” she asks, believing that if she paused the show, it would be paused for everyone watching, the entire nation waiting for her to finish whatever she was doing so that she could return and they could all together resume the program. That seems like such a hyper-specific brand of caring. It would be inconsiderate to pause a TV program for everyone simply because I need to answer the door or attend to the stew on the stove.
A dear friend once told me over text “I love how much you love your family.” It was in response to a TikTok I’d sent her. And the statement struck me because of how many tranches of feeling it involved. It was a layer cake of sentiment. The overwhelming and individual love I have for my family unit (a tapestry with individually colored threads for each member and yet another set of colors for specific groupings) was the object of another person’s ardor/affection/admiration. And I too was a part of that equation so that it was all triangulated in a geometry of tenderness. All of that came from her watching a TikTok.
Has the Internet changed my emotional vocabulary? I want to say yes. There’s a particular pang of longing that attends wanting to return to a TikTok you saw and scrolled past at 2.30 in the morning but that has, because of something that has happened to you the next day, grown another layer of funny or meaningfulness. Does that contain the same DNA as wanting write your friend in London about a funny incident you witnessed on a cobblestoned street in Colonial-era Northampton, Massachusetts? Maybe, but what antebellum corollary is there for “I want Lady Dimitrescu to step on my neck”?4
What has the Internet done for my emotions? To them? It is odd. There is this grand, ever-present opportunity to commune with others, and yet I have never seen so many around me so alienated. We know too much about too many of us. And yet not even close to enough. Twitter becoming the private company it has become prompted a mass user exodus, many searching for another place where they could preserve, recreate, curate their community. Fleeing this conflagrating simulacrum of the Town Square for something more akin to Westfarms Mall where we could hang out after school and shop at Hollister and flirt with members of other friend-groups who went to the school across town. Where we could gush over the new Linkin Park album and laugh too loudly and eat Sbarros.
Maybe what the Internet specifically and technology more broadly has done has been to expand the palette of human experience, as well as the vocabulary for it. I don’t know what doom-scrolling would have looked like to me in high school. But I remember that part of my homework for my class on the making of the modern Middle East entailed reading the front pages of The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal every morning over breakfast and cataloguing which Hamas lieutenant was killed in a missile strike and which town in Iraq had just been secured by Coalition Forces.5 Did the Internet introduce to me the capacity for morbid fascination braided with the idea that there is some inherent nobility and civic-mindedness in information-gathering or did it simply give me the words for what was already there? Would I have appreciated the magnificent, overabundant, maximalist RRR the same way absent knowing the approving opinions of friends whose assessments I trust tweeted to or at me in the months leading up to it? Is Infinite Jest the same book absent the financialization of USian society turbo-charged by fiber optic connection?
The first book I drafted this year was, in my estimation, an evolution of my very conception of the novel. It was a vast and, in some senses, vastly misguided experiment in form that, by virtue of its page count and it being bound between two hard covers, would still nominally constitute a novel. It’s been scrapped and in its place is likely to be something more traditional but that still stretches my narrative muscles in satisfying fashion. Still, I could not help thinking in macro-fashion about the novel as form and, more generally, about what we write about.
I think the causal arrow only reveals itself in hindsight. It’s always a genealogy and never a family planning exercise, at least from the critic’s standpoint. It’s like the plight of the economist, whose charge it is to identify our ideal social situation via data sets just as it recedes from view.6 Back in the day (for whatever your value of back in the day), the novel was the province of escapism and buried treasure, but simultaneously an avenue for grand social critique. The Count of Monte Cristo and Les Misérables are less than twenty years apart. And in between came Madame Bovary. Even there in the limited ecosystem of 19th century French literature post-Balzac, there’s this huge heterogeneity of subject matter. A decade or two after all that comes the Symbolist science fiction novel L’Eve future. It’s not that one leads to the other which presages the next so much as I think it’s a matter of parallel tracks, branches in the multiverse. L’Eve future eventually leads to Ghost in the Shell, Les Mis is the foundation for so many grand social novels that litter early American literature. I think there’s a palimpsest of Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart cycle in the shared universe of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County stories.7
But what I think time and technology have done for the novel8 is give us more. There are, quite simply, more books. And more people writing them than ever before. And the Internet, with its democratizing, blew up the ecosystem in as fundamental a way as the printing press did. Before, only certain creatures existed on land, then with the drying up of rivers, those below water were afforded an opportunity topside to make their way to shore, and whole swathes of writing talent suddenly revealed themselves. But the Internet also gave us noise. So much noise. Between the online journalism, the so many books published, the blogposts, the newsletters landing in your inbox, any arrow that may have existed is lost to us. I don't think that's something for writers to worry about, but it does make it much more difficult for prognosticators to chart the future of the form. If there is an arrow, I think it has been bent into a circle, or perhaps a spiral.9
The novel won't die because, in the modern age, it was never born. There can be further geometric patterns within the circle, melding of genres here, experimental forms there, and over there a grafting of tropes onto new subject matter and peoples. Or perhaps I'm suffering from a failure of imagination. Maybe the new thing simply hasn’t happened yet or is happening on such a large scale that it is impossible for me to perceive. And maybe it is the same way with feeling. With emotion. If everything is context, and if change is constant, then the new thing is inevitable. The new novel, the new braiding-together of feeling. Us marching in all our different directions, digging in all our different plots of land, eventually one of us will find it.
It is easier to mourn what’s been lost than it is to rejoice in what yet hasn’t been found. “They don’t write big social novels like they used to.”10 Or "we all don't go bowling anymore."11 An unattributed epigraph appended to a collection of short stories, entitled Antiquities, by novelist and documentarian John Crowley, states: “We say that to console us for the loss of Paradise God gave to us alone among all his creatures Hope and Memory. We might rather say, Only because we are creatures burdened with Hope and Memory do we intimate a Paradise that we alone have lost.”
Having grown up in the internet, taken it for granted, come up at the very tail end of the Promise Era where it seemed that only (or mostly) good would come of it, I’ve developed over the years a truculent resentment of the whole thing. It’s difficult, when you watch conspiracy theories flourish on it, when you see how it has turned the United States into a shareholder society, when you witness enough live-streamed massacres perpetrated by white nationalists, not to believe it’s been a net-bad. That it has lessened us in a very foundational way. It’s given us all this power, all this ability, but at what cost? It’s as easy as a few keystrokes to send money back to relatives in need a world away, and yet I can’t help but feel relieved at the idea of Twitter’s collapse. Countless are the moments where I find myself wishing social media could be deleted. Like cassette tapes and floppy disks. The idea of pausing my account pausing everyone else’s is entirely too seductive. “I’m doing this for your own good,” the villain hisses. But maybe my itch for the antediluvian can be cured simply by going outside and touching some grass.
I’m pretty sure that every child has, at one point, giggled at a fistful of field and the simple, joyful prospect of capturing another.
Currently reading: Tinderbox: HBO's Ruthless Pursuit of New Frontiers by James Andrew Miller
Currently listening: 33rd Blakk Glass - City Morgue, ZillaKami, SOSMULA
I believe it’s like climate change. We’re not losing the Earth, so much as we’re losing our ability to live on it. And similarly, some of us have had to deal with the platform’s wildfires and earthquakes and flash flooding for longer than others.
This speculative exercise was the foundation for the Jonathan-David relationship in Goliath. With our 21st language regarding sexuality and desire, a queer reading of the relationship between the historical Jonathan and King David is legible. Growing up in a fundamentalist Baptist environment, we were inculcated with a different homosocial interpretation: not that David and Jonathan were bros, but that the “version” (if you could call it that) of love they felt and practiced involved a devotion isolated from homosexual desire. “I would give my life for you” can exist outside of the romantic context. What was the historical-emotional backdrop, with its Israelites and Philistines, that gave meaning to that statement? Is it “I want to bring you honor”? Is it “I am bonded to you as fundamentally as I am to my own blood-relations”? Is it “you are my best friend”? And is it all of those things plus or minus other expressions? This isn’t at all to say that queerness and queer relationships did not exist in antiquity and that there wasn’t an emotional vocabulary for them. It’s only to say that Gender & Sexuality Studies may not have been a school discipline in them days. But I, here in the 2020s, have read Judith Butler and have seen gay friends gloriously, complicatedly in love, so an imagining of Jonathan and David in the 2050s could possibly resemble such a thing.
The answer is “too many.”
I don’t actually. That is not where I kinesthetically locate desire. It is just something I saw a lot of people say when Resident Evil Village dropped.
The US had been in Iraq for a year at that point, and the bloody Second Intifada was raging through Israel-Palestine.
Much as I drag economists as a professional class, I do think their mission is essentially utopian in nature. It’s just that the priorities are misdirected. What are the ideal inflation rates for X outcome? How much unemployment should there be for Y situation to be established? Those are all rather horrible questions to ask, as they demand some level of societal suffering, but I think they’re of the same genre as “is a worker-managerial corporate ownership structure conducive to more widely-spread social benefits?” and “how much democracy do we really need to enable a baseline for ‘everyone has a home and money for food’?” I think the true difference between morally upright and morally bankrupt economists is how they define the “living” part of “living wage.”
And I think Turgenev taught us all a bit about “show, don’t tell.”
Even in Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s novel, we see the same preoccupations surrounding the female android and the contrasting futures posed by tools (which improve us) versus machines (which will replace us) as exist in science fiction today. So I don’t think the Internet has fundamentally altered our concerns in that respect. (Although, I wonder what the environmental novel, or cli-fi, was back then.)
A corollary to this is that any trends or literary epidemics are much more localized than lamentations about them make them seem. A surfeit of astringent, unreliable, emotionally opaque protagonists doesn’t seem to be a problem those outside of a specific subset of realist fiction have to worry about. Though the trite physicality that Brandon Taylor writes about so eloquently is a cross-genre issue.
Except they do. See A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James, The Lives of Others by Neel Mukherjee, The Parisian by Isabella Hammad, Vagabonds by Hao Jingfang. Also tons of crime fiction by George Pelecanos and Dennis Lehane with plenty of Walter Mosley as part of the bargain.
Have you heard of Dungeons & Dragons perchance? I increasingly think tabletop gaming is the new bowling, but that’s the subject for another essay.
I don't wanna live forever, I just wanna die a king.
It's a thrill to find you asking the same question (and articulating it far far better than I) that I've been wondering about. I grew up with parents and a community entrenched in thinking that (a) there's nothing new under the sun, and (b) that history is a pendulum and that each position is an echo of the last oscillation. So the anger and intensity we feel today existed before; that each generation has its allotment of crises it must deal with. Pretty fatalistic stuff.
But to bring this to the more intimate level of emotion and whether the nature-nurture debate could be applied here is and wonderful discussion here. Thank you!