Why I Write (and Care) About the Internet, and What So Many People Get Wrong

Let's begin with a couple books. When Patricia Lockwood's No One Is Talking About This and Lauren Oyler's Fake Accounts came out in 2021, critics called them "Internet novels." Sally Olds, in her essay United States v. The Internet, counted six reviews covering the two books together, five of those reviews using "internet" or "online" in the headline. She noted that one Washington Post review used six of the same stock, boring keywords in its first six sentences. Olds argued that neither book is a very good Internet novel—and that neither needs to be read as one. In both, the Internet supplies the scenery, but the central concern is something else. For Olds, Oyler's book is a satire of the American left's moral posture, and Lockwood's is about how shared language takes over private thought, and about a family losing a baby. "All the mysteries are human ones." Brandon Taylor also wrote how "Internet Novel" is a misnomer, because both books are really about Twitter and its effects on a…