It is really not surprising that there has now been so much dispersion of people on social networks, as if they did not need another reason to migrate to other platforms. I remember that moment when there were Threads, Bluesky, Twitter, Mastodon and a few others, and I thought: this is the fucking Wars of the Roses.
I dunk on Twitter constantly (I never call it X), but I can’t seem to stop doing it. It remains important and useful for many reasons.
From my point of view, the usefulness for the writer is that it provides a variety of strange behaviors that they would never have access to otherwise.
All the trolls.
Well, there are examples of pathologies that you wouldn’t encounter in your normal life, but on the other hand, it has also expanded everyone’s imagination about what kind of people there are. This becomes even more interesting and complicated when you consider that people are not themselves online either. I think a reader who reads a book now will be less skeptical about the extreme behaviors of a character who is on the Internet, which gives him much more freedom to be absurd in a way that doesn’t border on realism.
Why was the, in quotes, loser or reject such an attractive figure to follow in this project?
The obvious answer is what I have in mind. Being someone who’s been through a lot of rejection and, in my opinion, not really finding a ton of books that dealt centrally with that topic, or books that went beyond treating it as a brief plot point, was the impetus for doing it.
What topics seemed important to unpack?
As for how I connected it to the Internet, first, it’s where people very often look for answers, especially answers to questions that are too embarrassing to ask in real life. They look for people who have been through the same thing. This used to be the main task of literature.
The other thing is, when you are alone, especially when you are alone in a wounded way, it is extremely tempting to be in a medium who cannot reject you. Internet never turns off. Unless you are somewhere without access, there is never a point where you will be denied use. Create a calorie-free form of socialization that will calm lonely people, at least temporarily. When writing about contemporary life, it’s hard to avoid it.
Is loneliness one of the defining symptoms of this current era?
No, loneliness has always existed. Interestingly, our access to witnessing loneliness has increased radically. There’s something about the fact that the availability of a substitute for socializing, rather than in-person meetings, has contributed a little to that. That social networks are solely responsible for generating it is a bit of a moral panic.
