34. the twitter novel
on social media, manufacturing consent, and literature in a multipolar world
She jumped on me with both feet as did a group of Mexican poets later in Habana. She called me a “cowardly bourgeois individualist.” The poets, or at least one young wild-eyed Mexican poet, Jaime Shelley, almost left me in tears, stomping his foot on the floor, screaming: “You want to cultivate your soul? In that ugliness you live in, you want to cultivate your soul? Well, we’ve got millions of starving people to feed, and that moves me enough to make poems out of.”
- Amiri Baraka
Lately, me and my butch have found ourselves getting very annoyed by what I have started calling The Twitter Novel.
The Twitter Novel can appear in a variety of genres. Some, like Torrey Peters’ work, seem to sell themselves as LitFic. There’s also horror, such as Tell Me I’m Worthless by Alison Rumfitt. These books are big names, but there are dozens of others less worthy of singling out. What unifies these books is not that their characters are Online, maybe even Very Online, but that their narrative concerns are too.
For example, social media doesn’t necessarily feature heavily in the plot of Tell Me I’m Worthless. The events of the narrative are catalysed by a ‘twitter storm’ when the character Ilya is falsely accused of sexual assault by someone who in fact assaulted her, to pre-empt Ilya going public. That this assault happened in the context of a TERF conference she attended creates a crisis in Ilya, that drives her and Alice, her trans ex-best friend, to meet up again and face their past. The use of twitter as a narrative device here could have been interesting, or at least just honestly reflective of how twitter appears in people’s lives now, except that it is hard not to come away with the sense that Rumfitt’s use of twitter was also an attempt to say something about twitter too. Twitter, in this case, becomes an instantiation of the wider sense of social hostility pervading the book - as the reviewers constantly remind us, ‘this is a book about fascism’.
I don’t know if I want to defend twitter, but I did feel that this was less a book about fascism and more a book about ‘the culture wars’. Ilya is universally seen as guilty, even guilty in advance, by virtue of being a TERF - another twitter user recounts an earlier sexual encounter with Ilya in which Ilya used a transmisogynist slur, and also she is South Asian but her dildo is Black so we shouldn’t be surprised she’s an abuser. Earlier, another character criticises Alice for having a poster of Morrissey up, not realising the poster is haunted and has been terrorising Alice for years. I could say more but I don’t necessarily want to write spoilers for the book. But the book’s building sense of horror, politically indicating, I guess, the slow penetration of fascism into every facet of our daily lives, seems more to indicate an inability to imagine anything not caught in the crossfires of arguments on the internet that we call ‘discourse’.
In principle, I guess there’s nothing wrong with being Very Online. I guess I fit that description, in many ways. And I am not against integrating that into literature, any more than I’m against having anything in literature. Social media is a part of life, and in fact, like any technology, represents a material instantiation of social relations more broadly. Actually, I think it would be fully possible to deploy that in writing in ways that could be interesting, compelling, and fun. What I do not want is to come away from your book feeling like I’ve watched a twitter beef play out without character limits. Like writing fanfiction about your daily newspaper.
(I also want to say that Rumfitt is a talented enough writer that I stuck all of this out, and finished the novel even. She is good at her craft, and I really wanted to like the book, but I really didn’t.)
As I said above, social media represents a material instantiation of social relations more broadly - but it is only one instantiation of them. And just as with other forms of technology, these instantiations serve as forms of concretisation the control of certain classes over those social relations. In the case of social media, there are of course the corporate conglomerates who own them like Meta and Jack Dosey, but also the wider media monopolies behind them, from the Daily Mail to the Spectator to the Guardian. At this point, we are of course describing a series of institutions for maintaining ‘hegemony’, a broad consensus about how society is and should be run (and thus consent for the violence necessary to enforce this). And before social media, the publishing industry itself was already one of these institutions.
One of the distinctive things about social media is that the movement from decentralised, fragmentary social formation to towering bourgeois monopoly behemoth has been observable in real time. A lot of what people my age are complaining about when they complain about the internet is the cultural whiplash this has created. Social media is now simultaneously both central to consent making in the West at the highest levels - such as the White House briefing TikTokers on the war in Ukraine - but also increasingly only experienced as representative of ever narrowing realms of experience. The Twitter Novel, therefore, as a vehicle can deliver the most myopic of concerns (like whether you’ll be cancelled for liking Morrissey) as universally relatable, and can position itself as both alternative and culturally dominant.
Today, to make it in the established institutions like media and publishing, it is at least encouraged that you use the ‘new media’ to market that cultural production. This creates a similar dynamic to the one Charlie Markbreiter recently pointed out in a conversation with Ayesha A. Siddiqi, that if you don’t do an MFA, writing criticism is one of the main ways to make it as a writer, “because people will pay for reviews in a way they won’t pay for short stories”; but this is also why many writers are so defensive about criticism - or, if you prefer, ‘discourse’ - because industry pressures demand criticism from everyone but criticism of you could jeopardise your chance in the industry. Siddiqi writes;
The entire function of the social web was to dissolve the barriers between self expression and commerce. Instagram is functionally a mall now. Google’s search engine powers ad placements, not information access. The social web draws on our expression of ourselves to marry us to a marketplace that sells us back to ourselves. I don’t just mean by data harvesting and targeted ads placed next to photos of our friends and family. I mean that America was already a society shaped by conspicuous consumption—expressing who you are by what you buy. Now we’re pressured to express who we are by what we sell too
Maybe it is a coincidence that a lot of these books are by trans people, with trans characters - after all, we are as much spectators of the Representation Matters Industrial Complex as everybody else (see image 1). But, as Siddiqi and Markbreiter discuss, this applies as much to the people writing, editing, marketing, selling, and loving these books too. (And of course, to those hating them, as the fury over Torrey Peters being awarded a women’s literature prize indicates.)
Either way, it’s certainly not a coincidence that this seems to have become a trend in recent years, in the long decay of the United States, not to mention the British bourgeoisie’s own flailings for any position that isn’t just going down in the wake of someone else’s ship. “England is the only place,” reads Tell Me I’m Worthless, at the novel’s climax, “England swallows every place.”
A few years ago, being someone who creates social media for a living was being hailed as the new normal. But the full time influencer/content creator was just a trend that benefitted a handful, not a sea change. It didn’t represent the emergence of a new economy; it was the death throes of an old one
It is clear, even to liberal commentators, that the days of American capitalist hegemony worldwide are rapidly coming to an end. What will replace this is less clear - but I’m hopeful. It is not only that imperialism is retreating, but it is being forced back. Recent victories in Cuba, Venezuela, and Mali, as well as the possibility of a free Palestine and a sovereign Yemen in our lifetimes are all signs on a global stage that progressive forces have a plan for a multipolar world, beyond capitalism’s imagination. And without the American empire, sure, people will still be annoying online. But it won’t be stuck in a feedback loop, or rewarded with branding sponsorships or (Lord willing) book deals. There will be other communicative technologies, other networks, other forms of art or culture or whatever that aren’t just selling you consent for its own existence.
When LeRoi Jones visited Cuba in 1960, before he became Amiri Baraka, he had a similar realisation.
The rebels among us [Baraka meant in the United States, but I would add in the West more broadly] have become merely people like myself who grow beards and will not participate in politics. A bland revolt. Drugs, juvenile delinquency, complete isolation from the vapid mores of the country – a few current ways out. But name an alternative here. Something not inextricably bound up in a lie. Something not part of liberal stupidity or the actual filth of vested interest. There is none. It’s much too late. We are an old people already. Even the vitality of our art is like bright flowers growing up through a rotting carcass.
But the Cubans, and the other new peoples (in Asia, Africa, South America) don’t need us, and we had better stay out of their way.
But I’m not so sure I agree with Baraka on everything. Even flowers are living, and not just for decoration. But they’ve accepted they are not the centre of the world.