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apexpreythis is an edited version of a public post on flover. you can hear me read this here. sharable version on substack.
The first book we read for the Experiments in Experience nonfiction class last semester was Patricia Lockwood’s 2021 novel No One Is Talking About This, which is about grief, performance, social media fame, the ways in which the Internet has transformed communication and our abilities to impact others around the world, and what happens when our online and offline worlds converge.
It’s split into two parts, the first of which resembles Twitter with its one-liners and short passages, its disparate ideas and absurd musings and sharp observations written by the unnamed female protagonist, who went viral prior to the events of the novel by asking, “Can a dog be twins?” The latter portion is prose-heavy: longer paragraphs and fleshed-out thoughts, as the protagonist tries to pivot from the unserious to grapple with not only the horrors of “the portal” in her phone, but also a tragedy impacting her family. She never quite transcends what Mark O’Connell for The Guardian calls “irony poisoning”, but we get to see her complex human messiness, once she grounds herself in the offline world and interacts with people in person, in a way that feels “authentic”, as in unmediated by a screen and online persona. As in not commodified or presented for public consumption. As in raw. As in real.
I loved this book. It wasn’t a quick read, but I flew through the pages, underlining and adding margin notes and trying hard not to laugh loudly on a crowded weekend train. I have a shortlist of works I turn to when most in need of immediate creative inspiration and human reassurance that my artmaking is valuable and necessary and that, yes, I should be where I am right now, writing and experimenting the way I have been. Works to emulate, works that strip me down to my bones. As soon as I was finished reading No One Is Talking About This, it joined the list.
In my class, this glowing response was a minority opinion. A fragment of a remark made during one discussion that stuck with me was, “If this is where literature is going, then… [grimace]”
I was a little over a month shy of being on Twitter for ten years when I finally pulled the plug and deleted my account. My most recent one, anyway. Over the years, I’d had several fan accounts, public and private. My first fan account opened on Christmas Eve 2014, dedicated to a shortlived boy band created on The X Factor UK (without looking them up, if the name Stereo Kicks means anything to anyone, I will Venmo you $5).
By the time I deleted my final account, I still had one mutual from those early days. My most recent primary fandom has, of course, been Formula 1 and motorsports in general, while hers was the Netflix regency drama Bridgerton. We rarely interacted after those first boy band years, but I still have her phone number saved, because one time she accidentally messaged me using her iCloud account. We had a good laugh after that.
While talking about Lockwood’s book in class, I mentioned that a key reason it resonated so much with me was because I was intimately familiar with Twitter and its ouroboros of pain and joy.
During my time on the platform, I made and lost many friends. I learned about everything from architecture criticism to how to navigate translating K-pop content for an English-speaking audience to which soccer position classically corresponds to which number between 1 and 11—despite playing soccer for 11 years, I didn’t know I played in the number 4 spot. Twitter used to be good for those kinds of mini revelations.
Also during my time there, I fell deep into a dissociative hole in the spring of 2021, and almost every month, it seemed, I witnessed strangers and former friends alike pile on dear friends for daring to say reasonable things on the no-nuance website. I had my own fair share of blowback too.
Despite its several, shallow, serotonin-laced pockets of good times, I can’t say I was ever purely happy on Twitter, or with Twitter. If it hadn’t been for my friends and my locked lists of sports-related and fandom-related accounts I read like newspapers, I would’ve left sooner.
I deactivated in early November of 2024. In the weeks that followed, the bird-shaped cavity in my chest was full of quicksand. I’d been trying to grab onto a sturdy branch to pull myself out, but my reach is short, and I have sweaty hands. Nearly ten years I spent scrolling this microblogging platform. Still, I have social media I can check for sports scores and pictures from my friends’ lives, but it’s not the same. Not as fast, not as addictive. My fingers kept slipping.
I missed it a lot. But I left because of the continual changes to X’s terms of service, and here I will use its current name instead of its forever one, because this is very much X’s fault, as in it’s Elon Musk’s fault, as in it’s the fault of where capitalism and white supremacy and their shareholders and pallbearers have trended in past twenty years, aggressively toward a world that won’t last more than a couple generations from now, not in the way we’ve come to know it, because it’s a world whose consequences they won’t have to bear.
Unfettered generative AI training on posts and awful chatbots are why I left. Before the quicksand, I fought a broken search feature, squashed numerous far right / crypto / gambling / dropshipping ads, and swam across an endless blue sea of checkmarked bots. That’s not to say the other websites I wander around are free of these things, but I would rather deal with Tumblr’s busted search function and the two-minutes-of-malaise-before-leaving hellhole of Instagram.
I am also trying to be someone offline, a student and writer who is attempting to be successful in these times, whatever that means. I am very much a person who has been shaped and remade several times by Twitter, and while there’s no need to disregard those ten years I spent clinging to that part of the social Internet, now is the time to regain control over myself and my psyche. Be who I am without the mediation of a screen or online persona. Complex and messy. Real.
In November, I’d like to reread No One Is Talking About This to see how it will land. A fresh copy, since my hardcover is so thoroughly marked up. Probably I will be somewhere between the giddy, breathless admiration of my first read and the distaste of my classmates. Not listing it first, if asked for book recommendations.
A major theme of this first year in an MFA program has been taking what serves me, in terms of approaches to artmaking and what I might pursue in terms of a writing “career”, and leaving the rest. I hold onto this book and leave behind writers whose work I didn’t enjoy. I maintain most of the friendships and life lessons gleaned from Twitter (and all the data I downloaded before I left!) while no longer feeling beholden to stay on the ship until it sinks for good. I take some wit and leave my attention-seeking tendencies. Mostly. I’m still a writer, after all.
Though, it’s a shame I don’t get to see menswear expert and fragile masculinity sharpshooter Derek Guy on my timeline anymore. Good thing there’s YouTube.
flover. you can hear me read this here. sharable version on substack.The first book we read for the Experiments in Experience nonfiction class last semester was Patricia Lockwood’s 2021 novel No One Is Talking About This, which is about grief, performance, social media fame, the ways in which the Internet has transformed communication and our abilities to impact others around the world, and what happens when our online and offline worlds converge.
It’s split into two parts, the first of which resembles Twitter with its one-liners and short passages, its disparate ideas and absurd musings and sharp observations written by the unnamed female protagonist, who went viral prior to the events of the novel by asking, “Can a dog be twins?” The latter portion is prose-heavy: longer paragraphs and fleshed-out thoughts, as the protagonist tries to pivot from the unserious to grapple with not only the horrors of “the portal” in her phone, but also a tragedy impacting her family. She never quite transcends what Mark O’Connell for The Guardian calls “irony poisoning”, but we get to see her complex human messiness, once she grounds herself in the offline world and interacts with people in person, in a way that feels “authentic”, as in unmediated by a screen and online persona. As in not commodified or presented for public consumption. As in raw. As in real.
I loved this book. It wasn’t a quick read, but I flew through the pages, underlining and adding margin notes and trying hard not to laugh loudly on a crowded weekend train. I have a shortlist of works I turn to when most in need of immediate creative inspiration and human reassurance that my artmaking is valuable and necessary and that, yes, I should be where I am right now, writing and experimenting the way I have been. Works to emulate, works that strip me down to my bones. As soon as I was finished reading No One Is Talking About This, it joined the list.
In my class, this glowing response was a minority opinion. A fragment of a remark made during one discussion that stuck with me was, “If this is where literature is going, then… [grimace]”
I was a little over a month shy of being on Twitter for ten years when I finally pulled the plug and deleted my account. My most recent one, anyway. Over the years, I’d had several fan accounts, public and private. My first fan account opened on Christmas Eve 2014, dedicated to a shortlived boy band created on The X Factor UK (without looking them up, if the name Stereo Kicks means anything to anyone, I will Venmo you $5).
By the time I deleted my final account, I still had one mutual from those early days. My most recent primary fandom has, of course, been Formula 1 and motorsports in general, while hers was the Netflix regency drama Bridgerton. We rarely interacted after those first boy band years, but I still have her phone number saved, because one time she accidentally messaged me using her iCloud account. We had a good laugh after that.
While talking about Lockwood’s book in class, I mentioned that a key reason it resonated so much with me was because I was intimately familiar with Twitter and its ouroboros of pain and joy.
During my time on the platform, I made and lost many friends. I learned about everything from architecture criticism to how to navigate translating K-pop content for an English-speaking audience to which soccer position classically corresponds to which number between 1 and 11—despite playing soccer for 11 years, I didn’t know I played in the number 4 spot. Twitter used to be good for those kinds of mini revelations.
Also during my time there, I fell deep into a dissociative hole in the spring of 2021, and almost every month, it seemed, I witnessed strangers and former friends alike pile on dear friends for daring to say reasonable things on the no-nuance website. I had my own fair share of blowback too.
Despite its several, shallow, serotonin-laced pockets of good times, I can’t say I was ever purely happy on Twitter, or with Twitter. If it hadn’t been for my friends and my locked lists of sports-related and fandom-related accounts I read like newspapers, I would’ve left sooner.
I deactivated in early November of 2024. In the weeks that followed, the bird-shaped cavity in my chest was full of quicksand. I’d been trying to grab onto a sturdy branch to pull myself out, but my reach is short, and I have sweaty hands. Nearly ten years I spent scrolling this microblogging platform. Still, I have social media I can check for sports scores and pictures from my friends’ lives, but it’s not the same. Not as fast, not as addictive. My fingers kept slipping.
I missed it a lot. But I left because of the continual changes to X’s terms of service, and here I will use its current name instead of its forever one, because this is very much X’s fault, as in it’s Elon Musk’s fault, as in it’s the fault of where capitalism and white supremacy and their shareholders and pallbearers have trended in past twenty years, aggressively toward a world that won’t last more than a couple generations from now, not in the way we’ve come to know it, because it’s a world whose consequences they won’t have to bear.
Unfettered generative AI training on posts and awful chatbots are why I left. Before the quicksand, I fought a broken search feature, squashed numerous far right / crypto / gambling / dropshipping ads, and swam across an endless blue sea of checkmarked bots. That’s not to say the other websites I wander around are free of these things, but I would rather deal with Tumblr’s busted search function and the two-minutes-of-malaise-before-leaving hellhole of Instagram.
I am also trying to be someone offline, a student and writer who is attempting to be successful in these times, whatever that means. I am very much a person who has been shaped and remade several times by Twitter, and while there’s no need to disregard those ten years I spent clinging to that part of the social Internet, now is the time to regain control over myself and my psyche. Be who I am without the mediation of a screen or online persona. Complex and messy. Real.
In November, I’d like to reread No One Is Talking About This to see how it will land. A fresh copy, since my hardcover is so thoroughly marked up. Probably I will be somewhere between the giddy, breathless admiration of my first read and the distaste of my classmates. Not listing it first, if asked for book recommendations.
A major theme of this first year in an MFA program has been taking what serves me, in terms of approaches to artmaking and what I might pursue in terms of a writing “career”, and leaving the rest. I hold onto this book and leave behind writers whose work I didn’t enjoy. I maintain most of the friendships and life lessons gleaned from Twitter (and all the data I downloaded before I left!) while no longer feeling beholden to stay on the ship until it sinks for good. I take some wit and leave my attention-seeking tendencies. Mostly. I’m still a writer, after all.
Though, it’s a shame I don’t get to see menswear expert and fragile masculinity sharpshooter Derek Guy on my timeline anymore. Good thing there’s YouTube.
no subject
Date: 20 Apr 2025 16:14 (UTC)Your essay really resonated with me. I've lived my whole life relatively online, both long-term partners I've ever had were from different continents, met through the internet. My job, my friends. Navigating my relationship with spaces like twitter or the internet as an entity of its own, and how it's changing and how and why that bothers me has been a bit complicated. Seeing how others deal with similar sentiments helps. Especially when written so nicely.
Most of my experience with the internet was always the scrappy sort, IRC chats, forums, obscure online pet games somehow still going strong after 15 years, that sort of thing. The sort of place that builds community. I think as I grew older and got on the 'grown up' version of the web, aka social media I think I found it very isolating. Even before Musk, actually being sociable on socmed has always felt very difficult for me. Maybe it's because I'm an artist, so I've always seen myself more like a service than a person engaging with others whenever I'd post (seeing my more personal posts more like a nuance because it wasn't 'content'). So this 'persona' as you put it, is almost like an annoying barrier to actual connection.
I'm sorry for all the rambling. I think I'll reread your essay and mull on it a bit. Just a stranger passing by to thank you for sharing your thoughts and giving the world a glimpse of your experience with Twitter.
I'll give the book you mentioned a read. Take care.
no subject
Date: 28 Apr 2025 23:55 (UTC)recently, youtube recommended me a video essay called the internet used to be a place, which hit hard because i'm young enough to have lived my life mostly online but old enough to remember a before, when we had a computer room, and i think that's part of why i feel disconnection is possible. so much of early internet was bonding offline about these things, and i still feel incredibly awkward online in a way i don't (anymore) irl: huge agree about how being an artist influences that. i'm trying in some ways to get back to that before, or at least remember the joys of that time and find them in the life i'm living now...jury's out on how well that'll work for me!
thank you for your rambling, i'm really glad you read my own! i'd love to hear what you think of the book and i'd be happy to chat or give dreamwidth tips anytime ^^