Tuesday
I’ve just finished listening to Patricia Lockwood’s 2021 novel No One Is Talking about This, in which a social media personality describes life in the age of social media through non-stop snippets. Harvard Review Online describes the book as “a novel retrofitted to tiny attention spans—like a feed, but on paper, with only one voice,” Indeed, the first half reads like a smart twitter thread. It was because someone on Bluesky shared one of the novel’s “posts” (if you can call them that) that I became aware of the novel. Here’s that passage:
Why did rich people believe they worked harder? Her theory was that it was because they identified with the pile of money itself. And gathering interest, multiplying hotly, climbing its own slopes like a fever, heightening its silver, its gold, its green – what was that but work? When you thought about it that way, they never slept, but stayed wide-eyed as numerals 365 days a year, every last digit of them busy, awake in the clinking, the shuffle, the rustle, while eagles with pure platinum feathers swooped above them to create a wind. When you thought about it that way, of course they deserved it all, and looked with rightful contempt at the coppery disgraces all around them: those two cents that refused to even rub themselves together.
Because the widening wealth gap between the very rich and everyone else has become one of our most pressing issues, it’s important that we better understand rich people. We can add Lockwood’s observation to those offered by F. Scott Fitzgerald in “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” “Rich Boy,” and The Great Gatsby.
Because I am not a heavy social media user (blogging in my eyes is more like old-fashioned essay writing), I didn’t like Lockwood’s novel as much as some reviewers. Nevertheless, I appreciate how it is helping me better understand why people spend hours chatting with each other. Here are some insights I appreciated, delivered by the narrator in the third person:
Why had she entered the portal in the first place? Because she wanted to be a creature of pure call and response: she wanted to delight and to be delighted.
And then:
When she set the portal down, the Thread tugged her back toward it. She could not help following it. This might be the one that connected everything, that would knit her to an indestructible coherence.
At one point she talks about the high that comes with having a post go viral:
When something of hers sparked and spread in the portal, it blazed away the morning and afternoon, it blazed like the new California, which we had come to accept as being always on fire. She ran back and forth in the flames, not eating or drinking, emitting a high-pitched sound most humans couldn’t hear. After a while her husband might burst through that wall of swimming red to rescue her, but she would twist away and kick him in the nuts, screaming, “My whole life is in there!” as the day she was standing on broke away and fell into the sea.
Ultimately, however, the portal, like drugs, delivers diminishing returns:
The people who lived in the portal were often compared to those legendary experiment rats who kept hitting a button over and over to get a pellet. But at least the rats were getting a pellet, or the hope of a pellet, or the memory of a pellet. When we hit the button, all we were getting was to be more of a rat.
There are multiple ways in which people become this rat. Here’s one of my favorites:
[T]he generation following (hers) had spent most of its time online making incredibly bigoted jokes in order to laugh at the idiots who were stupid enough to think they meant it. Except after a while they did mean it, and then somehow at the end of it they were Nazis.
She describes users descending into a herd mentality:
Every day their attention must turn, like the shine on a school of fish, all at once, toward a new person to hate.
As a result, much of what we value takes a hit, including wit and language itself. “What began as the most elastic and snappable verbal play,” the narrator writes, “soon emerged in jargon, and then in doctrine, and then in dogma.”
Suddenly, certain words lose their potency:
The word toxic had been anointed, and now could not go back to being a regular word. It was like a person becoming famous. They would never have a normal lunch again, would never eat a Cobb salad outdoors without tasting the full awareness of what they were. Toxic. Labor. Discourse. Normalize.”
And then there’s “Merry Christmas”:
The words Merry Christmas were now hurled like a challenge. They no longer meant newborn kings, or the dangling silver notes of a sleigh ride, or high childish hopes for snow. They meant ‘Do you accept Herr Santa as the all-powerful leader of the white ethnostate?’
“Why were we all writing like this now?” the narrator asks at one point and then responds,
Because a new kind of connection had to be made, and blink, synapse, little space-between was the only way to make it. Or because, and this was more frightening, it was the way the portal wrote.
To be sure, new media has always released new energies. I think of how, in the 18th century’s explosion of print, there would be pamphlet wars, such as that conducted between Jonathan Swift and self-proclaimed astrologer and almanac writer John Partridge. People would breathlessly await the next exchange in that battle. But the speed and accessibility of the portal—“the cursor blinked where her mind was”–has upped the stakes. She fears that the portal is responsible for Donald Trump:
Every day we were seeing new evidence that suggested it was the portal that had allowed the dictator to rise to power. This was humiliating. It would be like discovering that the Vietnam War was secretly caused by ham radios, or that Napoleon was operating exclusively on the advice of a parrot named Brian.
And:
Previously [our] communities were imposed on us, along with their mental weather. Now we chose them—or believed that we did. A person might join a site to look at pictures of her nephew and five years later believe in a flat earth.”
This drama continues throughout the first half of the novel and then takes an abrupt turn when the narrator’s sister is diagnosed as having a fetus with a fatal abnormality. The world of the portal seems irrelevant in the face of both tragedy and beauty as the narrator both decries Ohio’s harsh anti-abortion laws and falls in love with the baby. “There is still a real life to be lived,” she writes, “there are still real things to be done.”
The Marxist scholar Frederic Jameson, faced with the endless relativism of deconstructionists, once wrote that “history is what hurts.” In other words, there is a limit to the endless framing and reframing of people who take refuge in irony and claim that everything is a construct. For her part, Lockwood’s narrator rediscovers sincerity, so much so that she wants to physically shake her former portal followers, exclaiming, “No one is talking about this.”
To do so, she discovers, means returning to a language that has gone out of fashion.
