All This Badness
by Huda Awan
Serpent's Tail 304pp ISBN 9781788165778 £12.99
The Disconnect: A Personal Journey through the Internet constitutes Irish writer Roisin Kiberd’s ‘attempt to make sense of what we’ve lost, and to consider the lonely dystopia in front of us.’ The essays comprising this debut collection grapple with subjects that include but are not limited to: 24-hour gyms, Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, vapourwave music, energy drinks, a visit to a nap hotel, and dating apps (specifically Bumble). Descriptions and critiques of technological surveillance and self-optimisation are woven throughout the book, which itself exemplifies a growing genre of non-fiction writing about technology.
The essays contained within The Disconnect draw on Kiberd’s experiences working in and around technology in Dublin and London — first, as a marketing analyst running social media accounts for a cheese company, and later, as a freelance journalist covering tech and internet subcultures, most notably for VICE’s tech vertical, Motherboard. Some of the work featured in the collection include essays previously published in The Stinging Fly and the Dublin Review, as well as new material that draws on her work for Motherboard and others. Those essays specifically feel a little outdated in terms of content and critique — do we really need another essay that, in essence, reiterates how bad Mark Zuckerberg is?
This begs the question: how should one write about the internet in 2021? A closer reading of The Disconnect reveals its attempts to be more than straightforward commentary and critique on tech giants. Yes, the internet and its various advocates and detractors feature, but this collection is as much about Kiberd’s struggles with mental health in a tech-centric world as it is about the technology itself. She writes, 'I had to lose my mind before I was able to write this book,' and discloses that, following a period of depression and growing alienation fuelled by her online activity, she made an attempt on her life in 2016. This serves as an anchoring point in the book, and most of the essays, through a blend of memoir and social critique, describe the circumstances and events leading up to that point, outlining the numerous ways in which tech culture have affected her psychological well-being, as well as society more broadly. She writes, ‘or me, and likely for others, the internet and mental health were closely intertwined.’
And intertwined they remain throughout the collection. Eating disorders, obsessive exercising, extreme insomnia, burnout, anxiety, alienation and depression — Kiberd has experienced each one, and describes them in horrifying detail. Her essays demolish the emotional detachment so often constructed in tech writing (more on that later), and give way to a depiction of suffering that sometimes borders on melodramatic: ‘At times I believe that I am evolving against my will, attaining the state the internet has long prodded us towards: eternal vigilance, instability, consumption. Like a battery animal, glutted on information, I am static and manic at once, seeking the scrolling feed’s impossible endpoint,’ she writes, describing her insomnia. Later, on a love she feels to be unreciprocated, she declares, ‘I feel like a nun wedded to the internet. I pour love into writing the perfect email, night after night, uncertain if he will ever love me back.’
If you read books and are on Twitter, you might’ve heard that ‘Internet Writing’ is having a moment. Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts and Patricia Lockwood’s No One is Talking About This, two recently published and hotly anticipated novels, have served the basis of numerous reviews and essays, all of which, without fail, consider the question of how literary fiction should treat the internet, and indeed, whether the internet can even be literary in the first place. The Disconnect is not a fictional work, nor does it attempt to be under the guise of auto-fiction, and so it falls more neatly into a category of writing I’d label the ‘Contemporary Tech Essay.’ Recent Internet Novels and Contemporary Tech Essays bear some similarity to one another, in that the authors have tended to be female and use personal experience to ground the works (in the novels, through the use of auto-fictional elements). But the Contemporary Tech Essay differs from the Internet Novel in the overtly critical stance the former takes towards its subject matter; it will usually be written from the vantage point of a tech user and/or tech worker, blending together personal accounts, some research or reporting, and critique. Noteworthy examples of Contemporary Tech Essays are chapters from Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror, Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley, as well as essays in literary journals such as n+1 editor Dayna Tortorici’s account of pivoting from Twitter to Instagram, and a damned-if-you-scroll-damned-if-you-don’t assessment of Twitter by Lauren Oyler for The Baffler.
At its core, the Contemporary Tech Essay sets out to show how the internet and tech industry are warping our lives. In doing so, it will tend to cover one or two dominant themes. The first is self-optimisation, such as tech’s fixation on bio-hacking, evolutionary psychology, and nutrition over gastronomy. The second is surveillance: writers often return to areas such as data, targeted ads, and ‘God View.’ Take ‘The Night Gym’ and ‘Monstrous Energy’ from The Disconnect, both of which exemplify the former theme, and both of which link the availability of contemporary products and services geared towards maximising the hours in the day (in this case, 24-hour gyms and Monster energy drinks) as stemming from a techno-capitalist culture. Both reminded me of ‘Always Be Optimising’ from Trick Mirror in which Tolentino draws similar conclusions, this time taking barre, a punishing exercise regime with roots in ballet, and Sweet Green, an American chain of restaurants that sell salad-based fast food, as her metaphors for techno-capitalist efficiency. Surveillance is another major theme of The Disconnect, particularly the ways in various tech companies, products and services keep track of their users through ‘God View,’ described by Kiberd as 'the ability to see all your users, their actions, their current whereabouts and other data from behind a screen in your company’s war room.' God View is also a subject of discussion and (similar) critique in Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley, a memoir of her time working in customer service at a number of high-profile tech companies.
Where The Disconnect offers a different perspective to both Tolentino’s and Wiener’s works is in its account of displacement by and through tech, specifically in the offline realm. Uncanny Valley is, on the whole, a memoir of Wiener’s immersion into the San Francisco start-up scene, and can only provide outsider observations of the social and demographic changes that have disrupted the Bay Area community. In contrast, Kiberd details a more painful experience, that of being priced out: ‘I didn’t know if I could even afford to live in Dublin, the city I’d grown up in, but which was rapidly transforming into one solely meant for the rich,’ she writes, exploring her relationship to the city following its transformation into an EU outpost for some of the world’s biggest tech companies, and the gentrification that that has brought with it.
Contemporary Tech Essays have a tendency towards flat and detached prose, producing (perhaps inadvertently) an uneasy and inescapable sense of passivity. Uncanny Valley exemplifies this tone most strongly: often, the writing feels maddeningly controlled, every sentence tightly managed, every reference to tech companies and their staff coyly obscured through the swapping of real names with more general descriptors. The Disconnect is admittedly far less restrained emotionally, but shares with both Uncanny Valley and Trick Mirror the sense that things are happening to the authors that they cannot resist, but can only make sense of through writing.
Take Trick Mirror; no one author was ever going to be the voice of the millennial generation, but given the intense popularity of the collection since its publication in 2019, it seems that Tolentino might come close. The designation is warranted — partly for the subject matter of that collection (the failure of mainstream feminism, of the internet, of the millennial ethos at large), but really for its avoidance of prescriptive writing, which, perhaps inadvertently, produced a sense of equivocation — ‘The last few years have taught me to suspect my desire for a conclusion, to assume that nothing is static and that renegotiation will be perpetual,’ writes Tolentino in Trick Mirror’s introductory pages.
The inability, or perhaps refusal, to follow critique with any conclusive action is a feature of The Disconnect, too. Throughout, Kiberd successfully conjures the sense of dread tied to realising just how much the internet has consumed one’s life. But Kiberd doesn’t see her misery as being simply rooted in her addiction to the online realm; in her view, it is never just a matter of kicking the habit, of logging off, of putting the phone on airplane mode. References are made to Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, a text whose most important takeaway is that contemporary depression is inextricable from late stage capitalism. This idea pervades The Disconnect: to quit technology is not enough, because the tech industry has so profoundly altered both economy and society. And yet, Mark Fisher’s prescription towards the end of Capitalist Realism is for those disenchanted with capitalism to leave behind ‘a certain romantic attachment to the politics of failure, to the comfortable position of defeated marginality.’ Kiberd’s opinion remains that ‘the internet today is boring’ but what is perplexing is how her recognition of that truth, her statement of it, is never enough to inspire a full transformation. The opening pages of The Disconnect are wholly upfront about that uncomfortable fact; the essays that make up the collection were 'written during and about a process of recovery, but not withdrawal, from the internet’ (emphasis added), and this message is reiterated in the collection’s epilogue: ‘There is no recovery, only pain management. I would be a fraud if I told you I’d fully withdrawn from the internet, deleted my accounts, or if, as the experts smugly remind us is possible, I had finally pressed the off button.’ That’s all well and good, and perhaps it is too much to suggest a complete retreat from the internet, when so much of our day-to-day lives are carried out on it. But for most of The Disconnect, Kiberd doesn’t counterbalance the doom and gloom by offering any positive or even practical reasons for staying online, which might help a reader understand why, when confronted with so much awfulness, she remains reluctant to fully withdraw.
Nor does she elaborate on what exactly ‘pain management’ entails, or how it is distinct from full withdrawal — in a book that focuses so intensely on depicting mental illness, some attention to recovery would be a welcome reprieve. Evoking the anxiety and restlessness of being perpetually online through literary means is an interesting project and doing so effectively is clearly a preoccupation of millennial writers. That said, Contemporary Tech Essays position themselves not just as aesthetic projects, but critical, and in some cases political ones, too. If the intention here is to help us understand something fucked up, then frankly, I’m tired of understanding. There are only so many ways in which one can describe a product, an industry, a lifestyle, an ideology as being bad before the enterprise becomes wearisome, and before readers begin to ask what they ought to do in the face of all this badness — either in seriousness, or exasperation.
The Disconnect does offer some glimmer of hope, but perhaps too late in the collection for its overall efforts to be redeemed entirely. Only in her final essay does Kiberd break away from the despairing and yet impotent conventions of the Contemporary Tech Essay, by proffering something of an alternative in ‘the real, the immediate’. In Kiberd’s case, IRL human connection and romantic love is her salvation from technological dystopia — which is, admittedly, a bit clichéd. Nonetheless, this is one of the collection’s more interesting essays, in part because of the more ambivalent tone it uses to describe Gmail, the platform through which Kiberd’s current romantic relationship developed — ‘Those emails [to her love interest], watched over by Google ad bots and possibly the odd NSA agent, became a place for me to speak honestly with you [the love interest], to be melancholy, uncertain, vulnerable.’ Here, finally, we are given a slightly more complex image of what the internet is — a place to be surveilled against our will, yes, but also a place to develop meaningful relationships with other people. While some of the preceding pieces are either too grim or too tedious to inspire a sense of morale, the journey, much like life itself, is made somewhat more gratifying with some good, old-fashioned human connection.