You're like waiting for something to happen and you don't necessarily know what it is, but you expect it, and it creates this real anticipation that something is going to happen. You’ve not posted anything new and there’s nothing interesting on any of these sites, but your brain is just hoping for or craving these sparks of engagement. Now I’m going to look at Twitter again, now I’m going to look at Instagram. One of the parts that felt so embarrassing to me is when the protagonist is in Berlin and she’s just cycling: now I’m on Twitter, now I’m on Facebook, now I’m on the New York Times website. It colours her interpretation of the people around her. It's always around, even if she's not literally looking at her phone or looking at the computer, it colors how she acts when she's not on it as well. Since I wrote it, the internet has gotten a lot crazier, so sometimes I see things happening online and I'm like, Oh, I wish I could put that in the book. And that book came out like several years ago.ĭo you feel like the way that you use the internet is pretty similar to the way that the protagonist uses the internet? Which is to say, as a lazy but all-consuming obsession? The person that comes to mind who has always done a good job is Tao Lin.

And also this sense of deep, pathetic, debased internet addiction that I thought was important too. I just didn't feel like they got the feeling of being on and the feeling overwhelming hatred and bitterness and euphoria that comes with being on it. But there are some sort of like, quirky internet books that attempt to vaguely satirize it. I'm not gonna name any names of books that I think do it particularly badly because it's not nice. People were doing vaguely historical, like setting their stuff in the nineties for too long. It has all these implications, and all these social implications that you have to be very careful to represent. I think for a long time, the internet was sort of avoided in very convenient ways. What were some of the books that you were thinking about where people were maybe being too nice or that you felt like someone was getting it wrong? And I felt like the people who wrote about it were being too nice, basically. They're my favourite thing to read and I thought that there wasn't anyone writing particularly well about the internet when I started it.

Lauren oyler jia tolentino