How to give nervous losers the main character treatment
It’s really no surprise that there has been a scattering of people on social media to the wind, as if they didn’t need another reason to move to other platforms. I remember that moment when there was topic, blue skyTwitter, Mastodon and a few others—and I thought, this is the fucking War of the Roses.
I use Twitter constantly—I never call it X—but can’t seem to quit. It remains important and useful for many reasons.
From my vantage point, the benefit to the writer is that it provides a range of eccentric behavior that you would never have access to otherwise.
All trolls.
Well, you’ll have examples of pathologies that you wouldn’t encounter in normal life, but on the other hand, it has also expanded people’s imaginations about the kind of people out there. This becomes even more interesting and complicated when you consider that people aren’t really themselves online either. I think a reader who picks up a book now will be less skeptical about the extreme behavior of an internet character, which gives you more freedom to be absurdist in a way that’s not follow realism.
Why did such a fascinating figure pursue this project?
The answer is obvious—that’s what I had in mind. In my opinion, being someone who has experienced a lot of rejection and hasn’t really found a ton of books that focus on that topic or books that go beyond just treating it as a brief plot point, is the driving force for it.
What topics do you feel are important to unpack?
As far as how I connect it to the internet, first, it’s where people regularly look for answers, especially answers to questions that are too embarrassing to ask in real life. They look for people who have been through similar things. This used to be the main task of literature.
Another thing is, when you’re lonely, especially when you’re lonely in a hurtful way, it’s incredibly appealing to be on a medium that can’t reject you. The Internet never turns off. Unless you’re somewhere without access, there’s never a time when you’re denied use of it. It creates a zero-calorie form of socialization that placates lonely people, at least temporarily. When writing about contemporary life, that’s hard to avoid.
Is loneliness one of the characteristic symptoms of the current era?
No, loneliness always exists. In a strange way, our ability to witness loneliness has radically increased. There is something about the fact that the availability of an alternative to socializing, rather than meeting face-to-face, has contributed to that quite a bit. Social media is entirely responsible for its creation, there’s a bit of a moral panic.
