In “The Winged Thing,” your story in this week’s magazine, we meet a nameless protagonist who is immersed in the language of the Internet—she’s completely fluent in the social-media logic that converts jokes or “takes” into social capital. For the uninitiated, how would you describe what it means to be “extremely online,” and how might a person end up that way?
If you’ve ever whispered to your cat to “show the feet, sweetie,” then you’re extremely online. If you have shirtless images of Geraldo Rivera saved in your photo roll, then you’re extremely online. If, when you’re lying down at night, a bubble seems to open, just off to the side of your left temple, where the discourse continues even as you sleep, then you’re extremely online. And, if, in the mornings, you feel a physical lurch toward your phone to pick up the conversation again and continue yourself in it, then you’re probably extremely online.
Growing up, I was in many ways unfit for the real world. I was the kind of child who was scared not just of fireworks but of the half hour it took to find parking before the fireworks. The Internet represented, to me, a place of safety. But it was also a place of education, a place to deprogram myself after a highly eccentric upbringing. To someone operating with the sort of informational deficit I had, the Internet shines like a city on a hill, with a vast library at the center. It started out as the place where I could go to find answers; it became the place where I ended up seeing the pic of a pig with poop on its balls like ten thousand times over a period of ten years.
You may have heard the term “irony poisoning” before—an “online” attitude in which everything is a potential meme, even a historical atrocity. Is this a widespread condition? Should we be seriously worried that the digital information glut is distorting our ability to think about one another, about the world outside?
When I was writing the second half of my novel, I found myself thinking about a set of terms tossed around with great frequency on social media: smooth brain, big brain, galaxy brain. How we used them against others but also about ourselves, and how they did seem to describe a real phenomenon, some shortcut that had happened among our circuits. What we were doing had changed us—reshaped our cognition, limited certain pathways, pruned conversational possibilities. Drinking a triple espresso and calling Ted Cruz “baby brain” on Twitter was fun, on the one hand. But, on the other hand, as the second half of the novel shows, this shorthand can do violence to a real human being, a mind it is a privilege to contemplate, a child that one loves.
So it is possible to see, in yourself, the limits of the ironic approach to life. But, rather than going door to door telling people to fix their hearts or die, I think it’s much more important to direct our attention to how the new speech now rings in the halls of power. In my novel, I write of the feeling that we are having a private conversation, hardly realizing that the oppressor is standing in the doorway listening in, taking up the new vocabulary, turning it to his ends. Basically, a world where Hillary Clinton is posting “how it started/how it’s going” memes is not a world that anyone wants to live in.
Do you think that, in recent years, in part owing to the Trump Administration and the “online activism” that it has spurred, there’s been a shift away from the ironic Internet? Are we inheriting a better, kinder cyberspace, or is there something else we’re losing?
In times of crisis, the Internet rises to the level of a jewel, an eye. It becomes a pure organ of documentation, and its completeness is even frightening—as the protagonist muses at one point in the novel, she might have seen the video of Heather Heyer being struck by a car before Heyer’s own mother heard the news. This ability to be remotely present in these crises is also a product of the panopticon, the surveillance state. People are finding ways to subvert it, but it is still a repurposing of the weapons that have been turned on us. It is not better or kinder. It is fierce, the new face of the fight.
The narrator’s sister’s pregnancy is harrowing—it’s an event that can’t be neatly summed up or contained by ready-made language. As the protagonist might put it, she can’t post her way out of it. Does this difficult pregnancy, along with the real-life politics that shape it, pull the protagonist back from the “online” into her immediate life? Or has the chaos of the Internet actually equipped her, in some way, to understand it better?
Yes, I think she is plucked out of it immediately and put back into the body that suffers. The condition of being in a body that suffers is one of the reasons that many of us enter the Internet so completely: it is an ether where you can move as a stream of air, of thinking, of Terminator fluid. But anyone who has ever been interrupted in that life by something more immediate—anyone who’s ever looked at Twitter in the waiting room of a hospital—understands the feeling of being returned back to your fingertips, your hair hackles, your most urgent instincts. A monitor is beeping; run to it, go. The baby has stopped breathing; shift her head so that her airway opens. But the chaos of the Internet has provided the protagonist with a language, and a language is ultimately what helps us speak of our suffering to ourselves. I think it doesn’t matter much what the language is. A mind that is wallpapered with bodega cats is still a real place, where real human scenes happen. A person who thinks, I was a mythology girl, when the doctor says the words “Proteus syndrome” to her, is still being served by her own private language, no matter how or where it was obtained.
Abortion is an issue that maybe doesn’t have viral priority on the left in the same way it does on the right, where the response is driven by outrage. Raw emotion, personal tragedy—these are the messy things that, as Internet browsers, we “avert our eyes” from, as the piece puts it. Is there a role for forms of writing like fiction or poetry to shelter these vulnerable experiences outside (or alongside) the dominance of the Internet?
There must be. I note in my memoir, “Priestdaddy,” that I’m uniquely positioned to observe this issue because I was raised in the white-hot fervor of the Midwestern pro-life movement that coalesced in the late seventies and early eighties. The outrage of seeing someone like Amy Coney Barrett nominated to the Supreme Court was, for me, compounded by the fact that, if I had continued along my teenage ideological path, I would have greeted this nomination with jubilation. I would have believed that she was the answer to my nightly prayers. There is a physical horror, an encounter with a possible self that did not come to pass, which becomes an animating force of fiction. In the novel, the real through line is that the protagonist’s ambient dread of something bad happening is replaced by the understanding that it already has. We already live in the country that we fear. It is absolutely a mark of privilege to come to this realization so late. But it is also true that when it comes to abortion rights, most people have no idea how much they have already been eroded, state by state. It is a physical shock to find yourself or someone you love in a situation like this—a life-threatening situation—and realize that the access to safe care is almost entirely out of reach.
It’s particularly interesting because one of the great bogeymen of my childhood was “partial-birth abortions,” which we believed were performed recreationally by doctors who hated children on women who hated children. In fact, this procedure might be recommended for a case just like the one presented in the novel, in order to preserve the mother’s fertility or her life.
