Who Needs Fiction After the Internet? | The Point Magazine

A few years ago, there was a panic over the rise of the “internet novel,” in which the “reference novel” finds tradition. Web 2.0–informed writing “is dystopic in its moral vision,” author and frequent tweeter Brandon Taylor wrote in a “Substack post.” “‘Internet novels’ have succeeded too entirely, which is to say that they are too exactly like be... See more

“‘Internet novels’ have succeeded too entirely, which is to say that they are too exactly like being online,” wrote critic Becca Rothfeld. The fear was of a cheapened literary experience that leaves you as empty as a scrolling binge. Today’s internet novel doesn’t recount a person using websites and social media so much as those websites and social

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the point of life is other people. I agree with David Rudnick’s diagnosis that we’ve moved from “digital dualism,“ falsely asserting the Internet was “not real life,” to what he calls “digital prime,” realizing the Internet is perhaps the most space we have. But this means there will be a new insistence that URL serve IRL—not replace it.

Like so many technologies that came before, it seems to be here to stay; the question is not how to escape it but how to understand ourselves in its inescapable wake.

In his new book, “The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is,” Justin E. H. Smith, a professor of philosophy at the Université Paris Cité, argues that “the present situation is intolerab... See more

The internet was dramatically increasing our ability to know about things, while our ability to change things stayed the same, or possibly shrank right in front of us. I had started to feel that the internet would only ever induce this cycle of heartbreak and hardening—a hyper-engagement that would make less sense every day

In the future—not the distant future, but ten years, five—people will remember the internet as a brief dumb enthusiasm, like phrenology or the dirigible. They might still use computer networks to send an email or manage their bank accounts, but those networks will not be where culture or politics happens. The idea of spending _all day online_&... See more

In theory, we crave authoritative information, but authoritative information can be dry and boring. It reads more like a government form or a textbook than a novel. The internet that many people know and love is the opposite—it is messy, chaotic, unpredictable. It is exhausting, unending, and always a little bit dangerous. It is profoundly human.

The internet is also in large part inextricable from life’s pleasures: our friends, our families, our communities, our pursuits of happiness, and—sometimes, if we’re lucky—our work. In part out of a desire to preserve what’s worthwhile from the decay that surrounds it, I’ve been thinking about five intersecting problems: first, how the internet is

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