Abstract
The so-called ‘internet novel’ has been predominantly analysed in relation to social media, fragmented online discourse, and identity formation in the virtual realm. While these themes persist across a range of internet novels, from speculative fiction to recent literary prose that mimics the internet itself, less attention has been given to the genre’s engagement with the production of increasing quantities of personal data online, otherwise known as datafication. This article examines Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This (2021) in the context of datafication, language, and the effect of the internet on human subjectivity. The article takes up Deborah Lupton’s concept of ‘data selves’ and Legacy Russell’s theorisation of ‘glitch’ to consider the aesthetic, affective, bodily, and subjective critique of datafication in Lockwood’s novel. It argues that contemporary literary fiction is not only a site for representing and imagining the implications of datafication, but that it can also function as a self-enclosed intelligent system that is indispensable for understanding how the internet is fundamentally changing the way we speak, write, and think.
Beautifully mundane: The Internet and everyday language
In a 2020 interview with Publishers Weekly, the American poet, novelist and essayist Patricia Lockwood commented: ‘If you’re going to construct a fake internet, you have to make it as funny as the internet itself’ (Wyndham 2020). Having drawn considerable attention online for her comedic, semantically inventive Tweets and her association with the Weird Twitter movement, a sub-genre of internet humour dedicated to conceptually abstract and erratic material, Lockwood has become synonymous with the ironic, self-deprecating tone that typifies the internet 1 in the social media age (Notopoulos and Herrman 2013). 2 Over the past several decades, scholarship aimed at explaining the evolution of this tone has come to be known as internet linguistics, a field that considers phenomena such as metalanguage, stylistic diffusion, patterns of social interaction, and computer-mediated communication as they exist in the context of the internet. As Gretchen McCulloch contends in Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language (2019), the internet was the ‘final key’ in a process that ‘began with medieval scribes and modernist poets’ in which we are now ‘all writers as well as readers’ (15). 3 The current, and perhaps final, stage in this trajectory is one in which the unedited, unfiltered, sarcastic, and ‘beautifully mundane’ vernacular of the internet has given rise to new forms of colloquial and imitative discourse that exceed the virtual milieu and have taken up root in everyday speech (McCulloch 2019, 3, 15).
Many critics have discussed the implications that this change in human communication would have for the reception of the novel, even as contemporary fiction itself offers a highly nuanced and self-reflexive account of the subjective and social effects of online worlds. While some have argued that the internet would come to disrupt and eventually displace the concentration and continuity of thought required to read and comprehend novels, others have touted new forms of textual innovation and imitation that the internet has inspired. Mark McGurl (2017), for instance, has argued that although the ‘sweet drip-feed of sentiment and savagery’ instigated by online interaction might absorb the attention people would otherwise devote to reading books, ‘the effects of the internet on literary life have not been purely negative'. Similarly, Merve Emre (2021) has pointed out the potential of literary fiction to speak ‘over’ rather than ‘in the voice of the internet’, thus establishing ‘a stronger claim for the value of the novel to our virtual lives’. These responses suggest that even if the practical conditions of reading in the present moment have been irrevocably transformed by the instantaneousness and omnipresence of the internet, the imaginative and intersubjective qualities of the novel remain crucial for explaining the effects of digital technology on our personal and collective existences. Yet instead of drawing explicit attention to this reality, many contemporary novelists are formulating fictional worlds that eschew a direct representation of the tension between online and online lives. This new form of literature, writes Timothy Bewes, exhibits a ‘quality of not only refusing to connect the work and the world but of thinking, inhabiting, even forging the space of their disconnection’ (2022, 6). In other words, the so-called contemporary ‘internet novel’ is motivated less by an attempt to directly represent the internet in content and theme than it is by the potential of using experimental literary form to help us better understand the internet's distributed and elusive effects.
Moreover, novelists writing today are responding not just to the ubiquity of the internet as an inextricable part of everyday life, but also to emergent forms of online interactivity that involve ‘three-dimensional Internet experiences’ organised around ‘input devices such as cameras, augmented reality, virtual reality and biometrics’ (McStay 2023, 2). This enmeshment of internet infrastructures into routine experience was first theorised by Michael Heim as ‘virtual realism’, a term also taken up by David Chalmers, who argues that ‘virtual realities are genuine realities’ that are meaningful beyond the realm of fiction (1998, 2022, xvii). More recently, Andrew McStay has used the term ‘surveillant physics’ to describe the ‘outcome of when data collected about biometrics, neural activity, behavioural gaze, history and avatar behaviour is added to data about situational context to inform the laws of how that reality operates’ (9). As I will expand upon later, the possibility of total digital enmeshment and the effects of digitality on speech, human relationships and how we understand the human body, forms the basis of many recent internet novels including Darcie Wilder's Literally Show Me a Healthy Person (2017), Calvin Kasulke's Several People Are Typing (2021), Lauren Oyler's Fake Accounts (2021) and Samit Basu's Chosen Spirits (2020). However, although these and other similar narratives have been reviewed and discussed in relation to the internet novel genre, their subject matter is less about ‘the Internet’ per se, than it is to do with the discursive and dispersed experience that the ubiquity of the internet produces in human subjects and their interpersonal relations.
In Lockwood's debut novel No One Is Talking About This (2021), the internet finds its literary equivalent in a narrative that conveys the inherent awfulness of online interactivity—alienation, inauthenticity, addictiveness, depravity—yet stages the virtual world in strikingly lyrical terms that both explain and challenge its psychologically destructive qualities. The novel's central conceit, in which continuous engagement with datafication online transfigures both subjective and corporeal experience, turns on the suggestion that the online world (‘the portal’) might itself be sentient or, at the very least, share an overlapping consciousness with those who use it. Described by the critic Christian Lorentzen (2021) as ‘virtual realism’, in notable connection to Heim's prior coinage, Lockwood's novel tests out the possibilities of poetic and imagistic prose as a medium for representing human thought, memory, and emotion under the conditions of ubiquitous datafication. By self-consciously accentuating the aesthetic and affective force of literary language, in and of itself a uniquely subjective and expressive form, the novel instantiates a persuasively representative and, by extension, a powerfully imitative instance of the ‘extended mind’ of the online world; a portal into a new way of understanding the effects of the internet on human cognition. 4 For Lockwood's narrator, I argue, ‘the extended mind’ is a kind of nowhere place that is neither wholly human nor wholly digital. The eventual corrective to this digitally induced liminal space takes the form of the novel itself, which uses literary prose to find a way out of the reductive datafication of subjectivity that takes place online.
With this in view, I use Lockwood's novel to examine the potential of contemporary literary fiction to not only represent and imagine the consequences of datafication on human subjectivity but to also function as a self-contained intelligent system capable of speaking back to the technological, linguistic, and semantic conditions of its own existence within a rapidly evolving digital ecosystem. To do this, I use Deborah Lupton's theorisation of ‘data selves’ (2020) to interrogate the relationship between the affective intimacy of Lockwood's novel and its attentiveness to the disclosure, aggregation, and analysis of personal data online. I show how Lockwood employs an experimental and formally ambiguous mode of lyrical narration to complicate the status of the subjective narrator within the genre of the internet novel. I suggest that this stylistic innovation works to challenge the representational conundrums that datafication and dataveillance impose on critical thinking, creative expression, interpersonal relationships, and everyday aesthetics, with implications that extend beyond the study of literature and into a range of other fields. I also take up Legacy Russell's concept of ‘glitch’ in Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (2020) to consider the role that corporeality and resistance play in Lockwood's literary depiction of virtual worlds. Russell's foundational ‘manifesto’ articulates critical links between digital culture, feminist theory, queer theory, and critical race theory to read the deconstructive computational glitch alongside forms of disruptive activism, art practice and political resistance, especially by Black and Indigenous people. I employ Glitch Feminism on two fronts. First, I use Russell's work, which critiques technology as already inherently embodied, biopolitical and racially biased, to draw attention to the extent to which the representation of datafication in the contemporary internet novel is myopically skewed towards the experiences of upwardly mobile white protagonists, such as Lockwood's. Second, I borrow from the ontological, semantic and computational logic of Russell's project to consider the role of the novel, as both artwork and critique, in resisting the effects of datafied communication and self-expression. While for Russell the ‘glitch’ is a political tactic, I argue that the glitched aspect of Lockwood's text is in fact its very literariness, in the face of a datafied online discourse that strives towards aesthetic and philosophical reductionism, reproducibility and artificially generated content.
In the first section of the article, I define datafication and its relationship to subjectivity and the social and cultural effects of the internet today. I introduce the distinction between ‘data selves’ as a recent offshoot of algorithmic and social media-driven surveillance and the earlier theorisation of ‘data doubles’ developed by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus. I also expand upon Russell's concept of glitch as it relates to the domestic, bodily, familial, and feminist threads in the second half of No One Is Talking About This. In the second section, I read Lockwood's narrative against the established genre of the internet novel with attention to the overlapping and divergent characteristics that facilitate scrutiny of datafication and dataveillance in the novel's prose. In the final section of the article, I consider the fluid and shifting border between datafication and corporeality in the context of virtual worlds. Using Russell's emphasis on glitched bodies in cyberspace as a model, I argue that Lockwood's novel engages a strategic recourse to irony and sentimentality to reconceptualise and challenge what it means to step outside of the habitual and increasingly addictive experience of online environments. Across these thematics—data selves, datafication, subjectivity, corporeality, and glitch—I return to a fundamental question for not only internet and surveillance studies but for the future of the novel and artistic representation: How does literature operate as a self-contained intelligent system that is capable of representing, critiquing, and resisting the conditions of data (in all its forms) in today's world?
Data others, data selves
In 2018 Lockwood read her essay ‘How Do We Write Now?’ to participants at the Tin House Poetry Workshop in Newport, Oregon. ‘If I look at a phone first thing’, she writes, ‘the phone becomes my brain for the day’: The feeling you get after hours of scrolling that all your thoughts have been replaced with cotton candy – or something even nastier, like Runts or circus peanuts – as opposed to the feeling of being open to poetry, to being inside the poem, which is the feeling of being honey in the hive.
By invoking the widely circulated and, for many, unsettling image of Donald Trump's ‘bunched ass’ as he plays golf, Lockwood plays into the ‘soft biopolitics’ of web analytics that have come to shape human identity and subjectivity (Cheney-Lippold 2011, 164). Under the conditions of online, algorithmic life, the categorical ‘self’ takes shape predominantly in relation to instantaneous, correlative patterns of structured and unstructured information that configure users in accordance with the commercial value of their data. Personal online data, to borrow Julie E. Cohen's terms, subsequently become ‘dividual’ rather than individual as updated algorithmic ‘toolsets’ work to ‘configure’ the conditions of online activity and, by extension, our day-to-day lives (Cohen 2012, 185). By taking up the novel as a genre through which to expand these concepts, Lockwood is attentive to the ways in which datafication, as a governing paradigm of twenty-first-century life, has come to have not only technological and economic consequences but is also palpably felt at the social, psychological and emotional level. As the narrator of No One Is Talking About This engages ‘every morning’ with ‘an avalanche of details, blissed, pictures of breakfasts in Patagonia, a girl applying her foundation’, and other images, she confesses how ‘the spiderweb of human connection’ grows so thick ‘it was almost a shimmer and solid silk’ (Lockwood 8). These peripheral exposures, so distant and yet highly intimate in their execution, each represent a data point that can be consumed at the individual level and subsequently be made algorithmic at scale.
First introduced by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier in their book Big Data (2013), datafication refers to the quantification of social information into online data that can be ‘tabulated and analyzed’ for purposes such as real-time tracking and predictive analytics (78). Through routinisation and automation, over the past several decades ‘datafication has grown to become an accepted new paradigm for understanding sociality and social behavior’ (van Dijck 2014, 198). Alongside Web 2.0 and the birth of big data, the exponential proliferation of social networking sites has quantified, codified and algorithmically rendered core aspects of social interaction that had previously existed independently of the internet: ‘friendships, interests, casual conversations, information searches, expressions of tastes, emotional responses, and so on’ (van Dijck 2014, 198). These datafied components of everyday life also form the foundation of Lockwood's narrative stream. From political expression (‘NOT my America, a perfectly nice woman posted’) to decontextualised clickbait (‘16 Times Italians Cried in the Comments Because We Put Chicken in Pasta’), the novel interlaces a poeticised stream of online content with a self-reflexive evaluation of the purpose of encountering such material in the first place (Lockwood 40, 59). The narrative effect is to blur the line between voluntary and involuntary disclosure, truth and misinformation, in order to show how the ‘gradual normalization of datafication as a new paradigm in science and society’ has meant that notions of ‘trust’ and ‘belief’ have come under renewed interrogation (Lupton and Michael 2017, 197). In this new model, the contemporary algorithmic subject is comprised of the interplay of systems of ubiquitous surveillance and, increasingly, the unique combinations of distributed transactional metrics that reveal who they are through online disclosure.
Deborah Lupton and Legacy Russell write from different disciplinary perspectives to that of Lockwood, working in the fields of sociocultural theory and feminist media studies respectively. However, their texts nevertheless help explain and, in many ways anticipate, the critique of datafication and subjectivity at the centre of No One Is Talking About This. Lupton's Data Selves (2020) explains how the current state of ‘personal digitised information—derived not only from self-tracking activities but also from a wide variety of humans’ engagements with digital technologies—are conceptualised, used, and interpreted as part of subjectivity, embodiment and social relations’ (6). With a focus on perspectives from feminist new materialism, Lupton uses the term ‘data selves’ to encapsulate the ways in which people generate and enact data and the way ‘data make and enact people’, much in the same way that Lockwood's novel conveys the disturbing interconnectedness of offline and online worlds (6). In one such rumination, for example, one of the narrator's fragmented vignettes simply reads: ‘Everything tangled in the string of everything else. Now, when her cat vomited, she thought she heard the word praxis’ (Lockwood 84). Here, as we encounter multiple times throughout the novel, the complex dimensions of living with and through our personal data are shaped not only by the technologies with which that data is collected, processed and analysed but also by ‘affects and sensory and other embodied experiences, as well as discourses, imaginaries and ideas’ (Lupton 6). Personal digitised information, according to Lupton, is therefore valuable and should be considered akin to the ways that we understand the biovalue of physical human materials such as human tissue, blood or cells (8).
The twenty-first-century paradigm of datafied subjectivity (and bodies) that Lupton theorises differs somewhat from the ‘data doubles’ first described by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus and later picked up by Haggerty and Ericson in the field of surveillance studies (2000). For the former, the proliferation of personal digital data leads to the convergence of what were once discrete surveillance systems into a ‘surveillant assemblage’, that operates by abstracting human bodies from their original settings and demarcating them into ‘discrete flows’. These flows, Haggerty and Ericson deduce, ‘are then reassembled into distinct “data doubles” which can be scrutinized and targeted for intervention’, especially those who were previously exempt from or on the margins of systematic, routine surveillance (2000, 606). The advent of machine learning and predictive analytics subsequently took the concept of a data double and rendered it commercially exploitable beyond its immediate trade-off as abstracted information. Lockwood frequently invokes the eerie consequences that this development is having on human subjectivity, often with a sardonic undertone. As the narrator walks the street of an unnamed international city with her husband, for instance, her experience of suddenly smelling freshly baked Subway bread becomes inextricably tied to the internalisation of targeted advertising as she ruminates: That she should know it so instantly, that she should stop in her tracks, that she and her husband should turn to each other joyously and sing in harmony the words EAT FRESH. No, it should not be true that modern life made us each a franchise owner of a Subway location of the mind. (44)
Russell's Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (2020) also investigates the effects of constant digital connectivity but with a focus on gender, race, and the body. Across themes of performance, internet idolatry, new-media ritual, and digital selfdom, Russell advocates for a deliberate and radical failure to identify in a contemporary environment defined by the circulation and commodification of personal digital data online. Taking up the concept of ‘glitch feminism’
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in the context of a technoculture where a ‘glitch is an error, a mistake, a failure to function’, Russell outlines the conditions upon which a ‘strategy of nonperformance’ might be celebrated as a new feminist paradigm that refuses the gendered body as a binary of male or female (2020, 7, 8). For Russell, the glitch is therefore regarded as an act of dis-identification and a framework with which to critique ‘the idea of the body itself as a constructed metaphor whose very definition only creates more opportunities for control, especially in the lived experience of queer and trans people’ (Pow 2023). In contrast, Lockwood's narrator often willingly submits to the conditions of datafication inside ‘the portal’, even when she comes to desire an alternative way to connect with the world outside the confines of her own home. ‘At nine o’clock every night she gave up her mind’, Lockwood writes: ‘Renounced it like a belief. Abdicated it, like a throne, all for love’ (10). Later in the novel, the narrator begins to experience forms of seemingly involuntary glitching as a direct result of spending too much time online: Her teacup rose to her lips, tilted, floated away again. Raising her head from her spellbound reading a moment later, the cup was nowhere to be seen … She spent half an hour looking, increasingly spooked, for what hummed in her right hand was the feeling that she had put it somewhere inside the phone. (37)
While Russell acknowledges the pitfalls of a tokenistic notion of disembodied cyberfeminism, she nevertheless outlines the possibilities that glitch offers for the creative ‘capacity to perform different selves’ in a way that works to increase the visibility of, rather than figuratively flatten, ‘intersectional bodies’ (123). For Russell, these performances have the capacity to exist as much ‘away from the keyboard’ (AFK) as they do online. In this way: The passage of glitched bodies between the Internet underground and an AFK arena activates the production of a new visual culture, a sort of bionic patois fluent to the digital native … There is no return to the concept of “the real,” as digital practice and the visual culture that has sprung from it has forever reshaped how we read, perceive, process all that takes place AFK. (45–46)
The Internet novel everyone is talking about
Published in 2000, The New English Library Book of Internet Stories is an anthology of short stories exploring how the Internet was transforming the way that ‘human beings communicate, think, speak and work’ at the turn of the twenty-first century (Jakubowski 2000). Featuring work by well-known science fiction, speculative fiction and noir fiction writers including Brian Aldiss, Stella Duffy, Michael Marshall Smith, and China Miéville, today the collection reads more like a satirical relic than a serious prediction of what was to come. While many of the authors were interested in the cultural, political and interpersonal consequences of global digital connectivity, artificial intelligence and cloud computing, few could have anticipated the challenges to democracy and human subjectivity posed by the late capitalist merging of big data, social media, and predictive analytics. Described by Shoshanna Zuboff as ‘behavioural surplus’, the dominant data-centric paradigm is now one in which data are ‘fed into advanced manufacturing processes known as “machine intelligence,”’ and fabricated into ‘prediction products’ designed to anticipate precisely what people will ‘do now, soon, and later’ (Zuboff 2018, 8). The value of these products resides in their utility as tradable commodities, which are then sold in what Zuboff calls ‘behavioural futures markets’ (2018, 8). For the authors of the internet stories anthology, this current state is perhaps far more data-centric and therefore a more mundane outcome than those imagined several decades prior. Yet the internet that Zuboff and others have recently theorised has exacted far more impact on our daily lives and interactions than even the most dystopian speculative fiction estimated.
In direct response to this accelerating techno-social environment, writers have produced fictional works that reassess the conventions and scope of the internet novel. As the web evolved in complexity and scale and datafication came to dominate how people lived, socialised and worked, a key question for the aspiring internet novelist emerged: ‘[D]oes the internet itself—a fully formed alternative world, with its own pre-emptively metaphorical language—leave much for the novelist to do?’ (Orlando 2017, 28). Reflecting on this query, critics became attentive to the formal challenge faced by authors wanting to depict the chaotic subjective experience of the internet while simultaneously retaining ‘a broadly linear, tightly structured form’ (West-Knights 2021). Exploiting the internet's literary possibilities necessitated more than simply imitating broken text and interactive superficiality. At the same time, the internet's patent contradictions—its creativity, anonymity, surveillance, public expression, and depravity—were fruitful territory for the linguistic and imaginative terrain of the novel. Adding to this new site of literary interest, the mass uptake of mobile internet and the explosion of social media worldwide prompted a wave of fiction aimed at explaining the social, affective, technological, and emotional implications of lives lived almost entirely online. 6
Characterised most markedly by linguistic and typographical fragmentation, the contemporary internet novel not only dramatises the experience of spending time online but strategically equates form with content to engender the dizzying and disintegrated effect of the internet itself, an ecology of datafied relations Mary Flanagan has usefully described as a ‘combined subject position’ (Flanagan 2002, 440). From the inclusion of fictional email exchanges, exemplified in the work of Sally Rooney, through to the use of hashtags, emojis and internet slang found in a host of other recent novels, novelists have met the formal challenge of depicting the internet in fiction with a proliferating range of motifs, experimental typography, linguistic abstraction, and other techniques aimed at mapping the fragmented mosaic of the online world into a marketable and legible narrative form. Darcie Wilder's Literally Show Me a Healthy Person (2017), for instance, is a highly stylised, disjointed collection of thoughts narrated from the perspective of a young woman coming to terms with the erosion of privacy that defines the age of datafication. In its unnerving critique of the ways in which the manufactured intimacy of social media has ultimately fetishised private anxiety as a public commodity, the novel probes whether the words we ‘tap out on our phones, that we save as notes or send to ex-lovers, or post publicly on social media, the ones we send without bothering to correct for typos, are the words we mean the most?’ (Wilder 2017).
Taking the disjointed grammar of the internet novel a step further, Calvin Kasulke's Several People Are Typing (2021) is narrated entirely as a series of Slack messages sent between employees at a New York-based PR firm. After having his consciousness accidentally uploaded into the company's Slack channel, the novel's protagonist Gerald experiences the dystopian abyss of a fully disembodied life online and must navigate his new digital reality via the assistance of Slack's AI assistant, Slackbot. While its central focus is the intricacies of virtual work and the data-driven milieu of contemporary corporate culture, Kasulke's novel also engages a complex critique of the subjective states and cognitive frameworks that our digital environments now produce. Just as digital communication has come to facilitate instantaneity, new forms of accessibility, and information at scale, so too have its computational shortcuts and technological gimmicks occluded meaning and impoverished empirical logic. In an attempt to convince Slackbot to release him from the disembodied space of the company channel, for example, Gerald ends up in a communicative feedback loop where language completely breaks down:
return to body return return to body please self self.exe
I’m afraid I don’t understand. I’m sorry! …
go back leave slack leave slack
I searched for that in our Help me! Center. Perhaps these articles will help: •Reduce noise in Slack •Leave a channel
Despite its explicitly computational typographical arrangement, designed to be representative of the vacuous tenor of online workplace exchanges, the novel nevertheless engages a series of intersubjective relations (Slackbot to Gerald, Gerald to Slackbot, Slackbot to colleagues, etc.) that position the reader inside the world of the corporate database. Such an effect is akin to what Melissa Gregg (2015) metaphorically describes as data ‘sweat’ to emphasise the materiality of digital and digitised information that moves like a liquid in and out of various bodily states. As Gerald travels erratically between various conversations inside Slack, his desperate commands to the Slackbot are recorded and left behind like sweat on the body or ‘breadcrumbs’ on a trail, ‘denoting the by-products of other interactions’ within a broader digital network (Lupton 2020, 46).
In No One Is Talking About This, the linguistic and metaphorical devices used by Wilder, Kasulke and others are less explicitly employed in exchange for poetic, imagistic prose. The novel is comprised of short, lyrical vignettes narrated in a highly stylised third-person speech that moves fluidly between an abstract form of a stream of consciousness and observational expression. Through a representational mode that Lockwood calls the ‘communal stream-of-consciousness’, the novel charts the experiences and subjective reflections of an unnamed narrator who is preoccupied with her immersion in an online world she refers to as simply ‘the portal’. ‘She opened the portal’, the novel begins, ‘and the mind met her more than halfway inside … Why did the portal feel so private, when you only entered it when you needed to be everywhere?’ (Lockwood 2021, 3). In its opening lines, Lockwood alerts readers to the novel's metafictional project, which is to interrogate the concurrent awfulness and absurdity of what it means to be extremely online and how the internet has come to fundamentally organise the way we think, even during moments when we are not technically ‘online’. We soon learn that the narrator rose to social media stardom after her tweet ‘Can a dog be twins?’ went viral, echoing Lockwood's own Twitter fame that grew from her laconically profane yet intelligent and incisive online style. Turning her sudden celebrity status into a career, the narrator then travels the world to present at conferences and public events on the topic of online culture, speaking ‘from what felt like a cloudbank, about the new communication, the new slipstream of information’ (Lockwood 2021, 13).
The novel is comprised of two halves, which operate both metaphorically and literally to structure the narrator's relation to the portal. While ‘Part One’ takes place inside the disjointed consciousness of the narrator, ‘Part Two’ initiates a pivot in the novel's storyline as well as a conceptual split in the novel's account of the hyperreality of the online experience. As ‘Part Two’ begins, the narrator is in Vienna on one of her speaking engagements and receives a text message from her mother, which instantly jolts her out of the psychological numbness incurred by being constantly online: ‘Something has gone wrong, and How soon can you get here’ (Lockwood 2021, 119). The narrator is informed that her sister's unborn baby has been diagnosed with a rare congenital disorder and is unlikely to survive birth. Unexpectedly confronted with a real-world and, significantly, corporeal tragedy, the narrator's digitally mediated subjectivity is suddenly thrown into question as she grapples with issues that transcend the ostensible artificiality of the online world: sisterhood, abortion, childbirth, and motherhood. Her immediate personal response is one of intense frustration at the abortion laws preventing the termination of the baby. This instinctual feeling then becomes suppressed, however, when she is jolted back into the hyper-reflexive, publicly mediated dialectic of the portal; a social milieu in which the ‘prevailing tone is one of overworked irony’ and the expression of raw emotion is interpreted as ‘primitive and scary’ (Thomas-Corr 2021, 45).
And yet the unforeseen text message also induces a cognitive dissonance in which the narrator is positioned to objectively consider, for the first time, the material and discursive conditions upon which subjectivity inside the portal depends: The question that was the pure liquid element of the portal—who am I failing to protect?—had found its stopped-clock answer. She fell heavily out of the broad warm us, out of the story that has seemed, up till the very last minute, to require her perpetual co-writing. Oh, she thought hazily … finding tucked under her arm the bag of peas she once photoshopped into pictures of historical atrocities, oh, have I been wasting my time? (Lockwood 2021, 120)
Such a contrast has been theorised by scholars seeking to better understand the human-data assemblages that emerge from human participation in online worlds. Drawing together approaches from ‘critical life studies’ (Weinstein and Colebrook 2017), posthumanism (Hayles 2008, 2012), ‘companion species’ (Haraway 2003), and other theories that have articulated the relationship between humans and their nonhuman environments, Lupton's conceptualisation of ‘data selves’ explains how people incorporate data into their lives and bodies, creating ‘data-human assemblages’ (2020, 42). For Lupton, ‘even as our data selves engage in their own lives, they are still part of us and we remain part of them. We may interact with them or not; we may be allowed access to them or not; we may be totally unaware of them or we may engage in purposeful collection and use of them’ (2020, 42–43). The narrator's contemplation of a break from the ‘broad warm us’ of a multitudinous online world into the singular mind of the thinking subject is suggestive of Lupton's theory that, even when we objectively consider our data selves and the technological conditions out of which they have been generated, ‘they are still part of us’ (2020, 42). Lockwood's use of third-person introspective prose, in which the narrator contrasts quotidian experiences, family trauma, and the hyperreal context of the portal, thus contributes to our understanding of the intertwined nature of personal data, physical reality, subjective comprehension of the world, and human affect.
Losing our minds, reclaiming our bodies
The theme of corporeality (bodies in and out of cyberspace) in No One Is Talking About This is negotiated in equal parts through the narrator's ruminations on the technological dimensions and purpose of the portal and her exploration of her own subjectivity. Crucially, however, at several points in the novel the narrator conceptualises the portal not as a database or online platform such as Twitter, Reddit or Mastodon, but instead as an extension of her own mind. In one instance, she asks: ‘Why were we all writing like this now?’, before answering her own question: ‘Because a new kind of connection had to be made and blink, synapse, little space between was the only way to make it. Or because, and this was more frightening, it was the way the portal wrote’ (Lockwood 2021, 63). Anthropomorphising the portal as a writer, and by extension as a human, the narrator conflates her own capacity to think and write with the faculties of the portal. In these hyper-reflexive, call-and-response moments, the novel problematises the way in which the terms ‘real life’ and ‘digital life’ or ‘online world’ still exist in tension with one another, even though they now fundamentally overlap. In this way, through vivid poetic prose, the otherwise discrete contexts of ‘online’ and ‘offline’ or ‘portal speech’ and ‘everyday speech’ collapse into one continuous flow of consciousness that throws the idea of the body into question.
The fluidity that the novel crafts between online and offline worlds is further emphasised in the narrator's uncanny, surrealist depictions of the portal's physical characteristics. Often described in metaphorical or philosophical terms, the portal has no clear edges in time and space, even though those who use it feel a sense of quasi-physical entrapment. Questioning the paradoxical nature of the portal's simultaneously private yet ‘everywhere’ sensation, the narrator articulates an online world inside of which one is literally trapped: She felt along the solid green marble of the day for the hairline crack that might let her out. This could not be forced. Outside, the air hung swagged and the clouds sat in piles of couch stuffing, and in the south of the sky there was a tender spot, where a rainbow wanted to happen. (Lockwood 2021, 3)
In addition to probing the sense of physical, bodily entrapment that results from excessive time spent online, No One Is Talking About This also develops a subtle yet powerful critique of the dataveillance that results from life inside the fictional portal. Defined as ‘the systematic monitoring of people or groups, by means of personal data systems, in order to regulate or govern their behaviour’ (Andrejevic and Gates 2014, 190), 7 dataveillance now frequently operates at the nexus where individuals volunteer personal information for social, economic or cultural gain. In this surveillant formulation, ‘data selves’ are effectively bought and sold in an online environment where every taste, preference, disclosure, click, like, dislike, prevarication and Tweet is traded for its intrinsic analytical potential. Borrowing the concept of ‘assemblage’ from Deleuze and Guattari, Haggerty and Ericson observe how ‘surveillance is driven by the desire to bring systems together, to combine practices and technologies and integrate them into a larger whole’ (2000, 610). A defining feature of this ecosystem is that an increasing amount of surveillance is directed towards the human body, generating a cyborg-like flesh-technology-data amalgam (Haraway 1991).
The unilateral rendering of human lives as data, for the purposes of ‘new forms of social control’, is considered by most people a somewhat abstract undertaking that is understood as taking place away from or independent of the human body (Zuboff 2018, 55). However, in her ruminations on the social dimensions of dataveillance, as it takes place freely across Twitter and other platforms, Lockwood's narrator reveals the extent to which the monitoring of personal data online is invariably connected to some form of biometrics. Early in the novel, for example, the narrator considers the link between self-disclosure online and a form of incidental bodily surveillance: The amount of eavesdropping that was going on was enormous, and the implications not yet known. Other people's diaries streamed around her. Should she be listening, for instance, to the conversations of teenagers? Should she follow with such avidity the compliments that rural sheriffs paid to porn stars, not realizing that other people could see them? What about the thread of women all realizing they had the exact same scar on their knee? (Lockwood 2021, 7)
When Lockwood's narrator considers the ethical implications of bearing witness to a thread showcasing scars on other women's bodies, the implication is not one of unidirectional surveillance but rather unintended enmeshment in a collective, data-driven subjectivity. Brought together from the divergent strands of the surveillant assemblage, the narrator's data self thus becomes an additional self that splits and subsequently multiplies individual subjectivity. Moreover, as the body itself becomes a site of datafication, its composite parts are taken apart, abstracted from their ‘territorial setting’, reassembled in new settings through a sequence of data flows, and rearranged into a ‘decorporealised body’, a ‘data double of pure virtuality’ (Haggerty and Ericson 2000, 611).
For Lockwood's narrator and Russell in Glitch Feminism, the capacity to disrupt or exist outside of this form of bodily surveillance is a central preoccupation. For both, surveillance is constituted by ‘surfaces of contact or interfaces between organic and non-organic orders, between life forms and webs of information, or between organs/body parts and entry/projection systems’ (e.g., keyboard screens) (Bogard 1996, 33). Confronted with the conflation of datafication and corporeality, both also nevertheless identify progressive emancipatory possibilities. Crucially, however, the act of ‘glitching’ (as Russell theorises it and as Lockwood's narrator inevitably enacts it) does not necessitate one's removal from or disengagement from the online world. In a contemporary market economy now defined by the continuous flow of personal data, Lockwood and Russell recognise that to extract oneself to evade surveillance is to not only be profoundly disadvantaged but also to give up on the possibility of radically subverting datafication on one's own terms. For Russell, this subversion takes the form of performing invisibility and hypervisibility at the same time: We are encrypted: how we are coded is not meant to be easily read. We recognize that the care-full reading of others is an exercise of trust, intimacy, belonging, homecoming. We reject the conflation of legibility and humanity. Our unreadable bodies can render us invisible and hypervisible at the same time. As a response to this, we work together to create secure passageways both on- and offline to travel, conspire, collaborate. (Russell 2020, 147) No vehicle ever invented for the transmission of information—not the portal, not broadcast radio, not the printed word itself—was as quick, complete, or crackling as the blue koosh ball that the baby kept tucked against her chin as she slept, her small mouth open to say oh my answers. (Lockwood 2021, 179)
The question of corporeality thus comes full circle at the novel's end as Lockwood invokes a distinctly ironic form of sentimentality to draw attention to the complexity of what it means to step outside of (or to the side of) a life lived wholly online. While the first part of the novel creates the chaotic, numbing and mimetic experience of being stuck inside the portal, the second part functions as a strategic juxtaposition designed to imagine an alternative way of thinking, writing, and feeling; not necessarily completely detached from the portal but capable of seeing it objectively; glitched but not removed. In this way, the novel reconceptualises what it means to eschew the habitual and increasingly addictive experience of online worlds through a cautious but radical attentiveness to the inextricability of datafication, subjectivity, and the body.
Conclusion
Somewhat ironically perhaps, contemporary novelists have not only begun to imagine the more extreme consequences of the internet on human subjectivity but have also written speculative worlds in which a lack of connectivity presents a unique counter-response to the internet's sudden enmeshment in almost every aspect of contemporary life. ‘What we’re going to see more and more of’, predicted Toby Litt in 2012, ‘is the pseudo-contemporary novel – in which characters are, for some reason, cut off from one another, technologically cut off’. The capacity of the novel to present fictional alternatives to our current reality of hyperconnectivity is merely one formal achievement among a growing cluster of literary responses to the internet of the past decade, not least novels that have developed their own forms of internet linguistics to mimic and challenge the manipulative language and strategically addictive underpinnings of datafication. In No One Is Talking About This, the kind of ‘cut off’ Litt describes is anything but straightforward. For Lockwood, as first and foremost a poet, the reconceptualisation of subjective and bodily existence outside of the seductive forces of the portal is enacted more tellingly at the level of aesthetics than it is via direct thematic representation. Thus, while the novel's narrator experiences a significant life event that literally breaks her free of the internet—a bodily and mental glitch from datafication—and changes her life and reasoning in relation to how she views online interaction, her capacity to speak and think freely turns more forcefully on the lyrical and imagistic qualities of the literary text. Even at the novel's end, as the narrator returns home from visiting her family, the portal remains as compulsive and indistinct as when the novel began. As her plane takes off, she briefly recalls a holiday from her past before falling back into the habit of thinking about the relation between her life in the ‘real’ world and the images and content she scrolls past on her phone: Once, she had visited a little island with shocking white beaches and had worked her bare toes into its famous sand, which was used to make the glass for all our screens. There the sky was so crystal, and the sun so hot, and the air on her skin so unmediated, and the trees so full of koala bears, that she felt either like she had gotten inside the phone completely or else had gotten out. (204–205)
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Australian Research Council (Grant No. DE240101246).
