I choose to believe you've described your audience as "of high quality" purely because I have recently subscibed (non-paying). Please praise me specifically in all future posts. Thanks.
I loved this piece, it was such a good and refreshing read. The biggest thing for me is your REFERENCES - they are across a few things and I can see the integration of digital referencing and the clash with the historical/purely physical, and because of this you so accurately situate Lockwood within a broad, specific timeline of literary evolution.
It's exactly the kind of framing that makes criticism valuable—placing a writer within their era, their influences, and the shifts that shape. Your piece captured something beyond just Lockwood herself: the way she exists at a hinge point between the physical and digital literary realms.
Also I'm so sorry for the absolute SAGA of thought and response I'm going to put here, but it's because there's this part of me when I see work like this, that triggers the instinct to collaborate with the writer - so please, I'd love if you could read and share your thoughts!!!!
I get compared to Lockwood all the time with the way I speak IRL, conversationally, but I have thought well, isn't that what everyone does because conversation is just your own interpretation of random thoughts being spat at you and causing you to "spat back" - difference being with the internet, it's contained by the people you're conversing with, and framed contextually by where ever you're sitting - cafe, bender at 3am, bookshop, dinner with family. Conversations and writing on the internet / digital spaces, are really really different and incomparable - yet we're forced to depending on our experiences and our knowledge, because we gotta keep steady in this clusterfuck of clash.
In 2025, we're enmeshed in the reality of a world where time as a structuring principle has collapsed—not just in the sense of historical movements but in the micro-generations of digital experience. You hit on this indirectly when you talk about pre-Musk Twitter and the dispersal of that era’s intelligentsia, but I think it goes deeper than that.
Lockwood’s work, whether it succeeds or fails, is a test case for how literature deals with the internet not just as a subject but as a structure. And that's where this gets weird when we try and write about it - and god damn, I was so delighted to see you write about this subconsciously - filtering, exploring, pulling tangents.
When you point out that her writing is overwhelming, consuming, recursive—how she forces the reader into her world rather than illuminating another’s - that’s true, but it also makes me wonder: isn’t that the most honest depiction of digital consciousness we have?
Because what is the internet if not a recursive maze, a hall of mirrors where every door leads back to a slightly different version of the same place? Particularly with algorithmic influence, and the interruptions of the physical landscape, including the self (mood, vibe, journey).
This is why the literary world seems particularly pinned to Lockwood as an example of a safe bet when critiquing the evolution of "literature", and so it nudges something larger than just her: the way we expect literature to function versus the way thought functions now.
When Borges did this, it was a labyrinth of books and mirrors.
When DFW did this, it was a footnoted self-consuming dialogue with knowledge itself.
When Pynchon did this, it was paranoia laced through the grand conspiratorial systems of history.
When Lockwood does it, it’s a maximalist internet-brain writing itself in real-time.
And the thing is, all of those projects were in some way overwhelming, obsessive, and isolating—but we tend to read the pre-digitally social versions of this as intellectual ambition, whereas Lockwood’s gets interpreted as self-indulgence.
That’s is absolutely not to say she’s above critique. When I read her book "No One is Talking About This" - I felt similarly - she was totally caving in on herself and what she was interacting with. Interestingly, reading her work before, is a haunting timeline of her cognition morphing in real time, as she's validated in the online sphere - so she persists within it. She's a writer after all, she wants to be read and noticed!
You’re absolutely right that her literary criticism is more of a filtering mechanism than an excavation—it’s always Lockwood refracting rather than Lockwood revealing. But I wonder if that, too, is a reflection of the current conditions of reading. After all, how do we engage with culture online? Through individualised, fragmented, hyper-personalised lenses. This is not like, a sickness of the digitals pervasion on our psyches, but just something that genuinely is the evolution of what we've built in the technological sphere.
You can compare it with the evolution of thought due to the advent of the printing press (liberating thought with more access) or even "The Metropolis and Mental Life" by Georg Simmel (1903). It's a foundational sociological work about how urban environments shape cognition, perception, and interpersonal relationships.
Simmel argues that living in a modern city fundamentally alters the way people process information and engage with the world—the constant bombardment of stimuli forces city-dwellers to develop a blasé attitude (a kind of detached indifference) as a defense mechanism against overstimulation. He contrasts this with rural life, where interactions are slower, more personal, and shaped by tradition rather than rapid change.
This ties directly to what we are all talking about with Lockwood and digital consciousness—just as city life forced cognitive adaptation in Simmel’s time, the internet forces new ways of thinking and processing reality in ours. The fragmented, hyperactive, overstimulated nature of Lockwood’s writing could be seen as the literary equivalent of Simmel’s metropolitan mind—a way of dealing with the sheer excess of digital life.
There is no “neutral” or context unaffected reading of a book in 2025 unless you've been living in a bunker for 50 years surrounded with the classics. Fuck that would be interesting to see how they'd react to the reading of today, their brain would probably electrocute them. Anyway, there is only the version of the book that filters through the endless layers of self, social positioning, digital culture, and shifting memory. And Lockwood is, in some ways, just turning that process into the prose itself.
That’s why your framing of her as a product of time is so so so so important. We’re at a moment where literary tradition and digital consciousness are in direct conflict. The institutions of literary criticism, publishing, and academic discourse are still operating on old time—slow time—linear time. Meanwhile, writers like Lockwood are working at internet speed, where six months can create an entirely different reference point for cultural experience.
And this is where I think the real debate about Lockwood should sit—not just in whether her work is good or bad, but in whether literature itself is ready for what she represents.
Because if the structures of literature and criticism don’t evolve to engage with digital-native consciousness, they’re going to fall into irrelevance—not because they lack depth, but because they’ll be speaking a language that no longer maps onto the reality of how thought functions in the present.
So maybe Lockwood isn’t a Borges or a Pynchon or a Wallace—maybe she’s something else entirely: the first writer to fully commit to writing in a way that mirrors what thought feels like in the 2020s. Whether that’s sustainable or even desirable is still up for debate, but it’s happening whether literary institutions like it or not. But she's made the grand decision to enter the literary pit, and thus, you're up for slaughter because generationally, the publishing world is still arguing from the past - I've literally never seen a reference in a piece of recent criticism, that uses a person producing words or pieces from a purely digital standpoint, or at the very least isn't published under a traditional publication, because there's this inherent belief, they just aren't fully credible. But it's kind of the same as only comparing to the classics, the reality being, they are contextually irrrelevant as comparison now.
Your piece makes me think about all of this not because it’s necessarily arguing in her favour, or destroying her entirely (THANK YOU) but because it frames her as an inevitable moment in literary evolution, rather than a one-off anomaly. And that’s exactly the kind of criticism that feels useful right now—because the biggest question about Lockwood isn’t Is she a great writer? but rather What does the way we respond to her say about the state of literature itself?
Anyway, I loved this, and I appreciate the way you’ve mapped the terrain here. You are such a great writer you have inspired me to work harder and think better :)
Thank you, I’m glad you responded so strongly to it, it really does mean a lot. Here are some notes in response but be warned it’s definitely not trying to be a cogent argument, just a bunch of stuff your comment put to mind.
— I’m unconvinced that being “an honest depiction of a digital consciousness” is a point in anything’s favor. Scrolling Twitter for too long makes me feel bad, reading a novel that is basically a physical manifestation of Twitter made me feel bad in a similar way. Is this desirable? It’s like the old joke about the Marxist professors who are rude to the waiters, because to do otherwise would be to obscure the true brutality of class relations.
— In general I feel like when any new technology emerges there is a rush by the old forms to try and capture it, to speak in its voice. But those usually end up looking very dated and the way that new technologies influence older forms is much more subtle and diffuse. But in that sense NOITAT is an interesting novel if not imo a successful one and as I read it I remember thinking it will definitely get an NYRB classics reissue if they’re still around in 30 years.
— When TikTok first got popular, I spent about half an hour going through it on my girlfriend’s phone and basically instantly came to the conclusion that I had to choose total abstinence from it or it would fry my brain. Maybe without TikTok I am missing something about The Way We Live Now but I also know with almost total certainty that I could not have written this if I had it.
— A section I had cut mentions Marvel Universe by Bruce Wagner, which I’m in the middle of right now. Wagner is nearly 30 years older than Lockwood but I think Marvel Universe does the sort of frenetic, hyperactive digital thing really well. It’s an extremely odd novel in some ways, parts of it are like a fable or a folktale, the characters are pretty wacky archetypes, and it does the (now almost cliche!) thing of using Instagram commenters as sort of a greek chorus to the novel. But it’s also very traditional in other ways, it’s a big, multi-protagonist social novel that ranges across all levels of society to form this kaleidoscopic portrait of LA, it almost feels like a very very weird version of Dickens or something. And honestly the same thing is there with Lockwood— it’s not as radical as all that, it's a bourgeois sentimental humanist novel about learning to better appreciate life at the end of the day (not that there’s anything wrong with that, some of my best friends are sentimental bourgeois humanists!).
— (If you were around for the "brodernism" contretemps the other day, those supposedly ultimate forbidding tomes of bleeding edge experimentalism are working in registers that are literally one hundred years old)
— I think another instructive point of comparison is Ulysses. Ulysses is great, I love Ulysses, and obviously it’s true that after Ulysses every succeeding novel, whether the authors had read Joyce or not, was subtly changed. But all novels did not become Ulysses. Actually, a few of the criticisms in here could apply to Joyce verbatim— there is something totalizing, something colonizing about his consciousness. Yknow again I think Joyce is a world-historical genius but sometimes you get 15 pages into a chapter that’s like “Must buy eggs later. Great Achilles was dipped in the river by his mother. Bumbly mumbly milk carton.” and you’re like stop!! stop!! Ofc Joyce also has that gift for characterization, that clear view of other people, and part of what keeps Ulysses alive is that Bloom, Stephen, and Molly are so different and so vivid. Which was something that was lacking in PL.
Yessssssssss you are an intellectual sparring partner, and this is fantastic because I never want to troll—I wanna chat and learn! Thank you for this.
I think people in the lit world write about Lockwood’s oeuvre like they went on a few bad dates with her and decided to ghost. But that’s the thing—her writing is invasive, recursive, deeply personal, a forced intimacy that makes the reader complicit. It’s not just that she overshares; it’s that she overshares in a way that traps you inside her perception.
The fact that it’s boring or brain-rot or whatever is beside the point—what really makes people uncomfortable is being stuck in a single, unfiltered consciousness. Most maximalists allow distance; you can admire the structure, analyse the machinery. Lockwood doesn’t. She immerses you in relentless, intimate, slightly-too-much cognition.
Tik-Tok rejection, that’s re-wiring in real-time—you think it’ll melt your brain because it is. It introduces a mode of thought that pre-internet experimentalism couldn’t even conceive of. Even those working in fragments, tangents, surrealism—they weren’t operating in this kind of nonstop, layered simultaneity. And that’s why critiques of Lockwood often feel personal, almost visceral. It’s not about literary merit—it’s about how people react to a book that mimics contemporary thought itself. I'd argue you would've absolutely blown shit out of the water if you spent 45 minutes on Tik-Tok melting and then written this article - doesn't take long for that stuff to absolute electrocute your brain somewhere else.
Digital immersion doesn’t just change how you consume content—it rewires interaction itself. It doesn’t isolate you; it makes you hyper-adaptive to conversation, context, and cognition. Your brain trains itself to recognise patterns in fragmented input, which means you can talk to anyone, anywhere, at any level—because you already understand how thought functions at different speeds and depths.
And this is where we differ.
You talk about TikTok like it’s a contaminant, like opting out gives you a purer understanding of The Way We Live Now. But no one gets to opt out—it’s everywhere, just in different forms.
I’ve been the most digitally immersed person you’ll ever meet, and yet I write by hand, run a printed zine, and am writing an experimental book that also integrates AI. I’ve read every classic, absorbed every text handed to me physically, and explored every evolving narrative construction—books, games, emergent storytelling, ARGs, deep-dive forums, multi-threaded discourse networks.
And here’s what’s funny. This hasn’t wrecked my ability to engage—it’s made me exponentially better.
I don’t treat digital and physical spaces as separate realms. I treat everything I encounter as a natural evolution of thought. If the internet was supposed to disconnect me, I should be incapable of meaningful conversation, unable to track subtext, bad at reading people.
However, when your brain is trained to surf tangents, track niche discourse, and synthesise meaning from chaotic, nonlinear information—you can talk to anyone. Any conversational dead-end, I can pivot. Any half-formed thought, I can locate its reference. This isn’t abstract theory—it has real, material application.
I work in hospitality. I’m surrounded by Gen Z and Gen Alpha workers who are fully digitally fluent. And they gravitate toward me. Not just for casual chat, but for guidance, mentorship, training. Why? Because I don’t condescend to them for existing in the world they were born into.
This is what people fail to grasp about digital cognition. It isn’t just about how we consume media. It’s about how we construct meaning. If you think abstaining from digital fluency preserves humanity, all you’ve done is opt out of the need to evolve.
I haven’t read Marvel Universe, but from what you’ve described, it sounds like an attempt to channel the hyperactive, fragmented energy of digital culture into a narrative form that commerciality can still process. No digital true chaos, it seems more like an amplification palatable maximalist style—excessive, grotesque, and satirical. If anything, it’s less ‘cosplaying digitality’ and just excess for the sake of it, which is totally fine by publishing standards with an author who has a reputable track record.
So, instead of engaging with the internet on its own terms, we get pre-digital writers treating digital existence as an aesthetic exercise.
Lockwood isn’t radical. She’s just the most viable translation of internet logic into an outdated literary space. And that’s fine. But let’s not pretend this is a grand literary leap forward when it’s bourgeois sentimental humanism with a digital filter.
The most radical storytelling isn’t happening in books—it’s happening in a medium literary critics refuse to acknowledge as legitimate. GAMES.
If critics were actually interested in new forms of storytelling, they’d be studying:
Elden Ring — A game that tells its entire story through world design, not dialogue.
Disco Elysium — A game where your own inner monologue is a multi-voiced entity warring for control.
Death Stranding — A game where physical resistance is a narrative experience.
Open-world RPGs — Where the order of discovery literally becomes the narrative.
Instead, we get hand-wringing over whether Twitter-thread novels ‘count’ as literature—which is hilarious, considering the nerds are owning everyone in the background. And, making an absolute fortune doing it. People still need stories, proof is in the Python (tech joke).
You say experimentalism isn’t new. Okay. Then why pretend the digital shift isn’t real?
By your own metric:
If all experimentalism is just a variation of the past, then nothing new has happened in literature in decades.
If some contemporary literature is meaningfully innovative, then digital-native writing has to be part of that conversation.
So which is it?
You either admit that digital-native writing is a legitimate literary evolution—or you admit that nothing in contemporary literature is actually innovative. And if nothing today is experimental, then why are you engaging with contemporary literature at all?
I actually don’t think you dislike digital-native writing because it’s “bad.” I think it makes you uncomfortable to realise that cognition has shifted without your permission. Which is universal and I fucking hate it sometimes too.
But here’s what makes you different from most literary critics—you actually engage with this. You’re more digitally fluent than you realise.
And honestly? That’s why this debate is interesting. Because for me, the best part of this is seeing where you actually embody digital literacy in your own writing—the way you weave references, the way you construct parallel arguments, the way you process literature as a network, not a single track.
That’s not pre-digital thought. That’s digital-native cognition, applied to literary criticism. Which makes me wonder—do you work in a tech-adjacent field? Because that kind of pattern fluency tends to show up in people who have one foot in each world.
The discomfort I have with the backlash to Lockwood (or anything digital-native) is that it follows the exact same pattern as previous ruptures in literary history:
Modernism disrupted realism.
Postmodernism shattered grand narratives.
Cyberpunk turned technology into existential philosophy.
Now? Digital cognition is dismantling print logic. This isn’t subtle. It’s not an aesthetic trend. It’s a rupture. And just like every rupture before it, you can either engage with it or pretend it’s not happening. Either way—it’s happening.
So...why are people still so afraid to admit that literature has to evolve with digital cognition, not just against it? Why aren’t we beating Lockwood at her own game—instead of just critiquing her for playing it?
Anyway, chefs kiss for making me absolutely rinse myself intellectually. This was a workout. I even had to edit this down—which should tell you how deep I went.
P.S. I can’t let this slide—the joke about Marxist professors being rude to waiters as some kind of intellectual stance. If you think “revealing the true brutality of class relations” is best demonstrated by being an asshole to a waiter, or that reference is comparable, I cry.
Hospitality workers do not exist as theatre props for ideological performance. If people, particularly "Marxists" want to understand class dynamics, power structures, or how meaning is constructed in real-time, then you should be WATCHING service work.
Nothing is a purer test of cognition, adaptability, and social fluency than a job where you have to anticipate needs before they’re expressed, absorb a person’s entire energy in two seconds, and decide whether to engage, deflect, or disappear.
Digital cognition? Service workers have been running on it for decades.
Anyone who has worked the floor knows:
The greatest social intelligence is possessed by the people who have the fewest resources.
Every conversation is a test in real-time meaning-making and an openness to the tangential and relational.
The purest depiction of modern cognition isn’t found in a novel, but in a bartender juggling five conversations at once, mentally processing every interaction as a live, multi-threaded discourse network.
So no, being a jerk to a waiter doesn’t prove anything about class relations or digital interaction in that way. If anything, it proves how ideas about social power being recycled in today's day and age, are still fundamentally grasping at straws and dead peoples comments to try and articulate something they don't really want to understand.
And if we’re talking about literature failing to grasp contemporary cognition—maybe it’s not just that it hasn’t caught up to digitality. Maybe it’s that it still doesn’t know how to look at the people who already embody it.
This is fantastic. Lol I can’t remember if I blogged this at the time but when I read this book in 2023 the first half partially convinced me Trump wouldn’t win again because I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to go back to 2019 twitter. That prediction didn’t exactly pan out but that impression of the first half remains. The second is more successful-I really liked your comparison of it to Company last year-but the whole is really not to my taste.
HAHHAHA so many great lines in here. "If you went to a performance of Beckett or Ionesco, it would be deflating if midway through the actors turned to you and gave an impassioned monologue about how but seriously folks, Democracy is On the Ballot." HAHHAHA reminds me of when the Hamilton players lectured to Mike Pence in 16
I greatly enjoyed this essay. I recall when "No One is Talking About This" first came out, so many people said it was amazing. And my response was "you may be correct, but I will not read a novel about the internet." There's just too much to read and I can't bring myself to do it. It's up there with "novels about novelists" and "movies about the movies" as topics that I just can't abide, with rare exceptions.
I appreciate that the word Chungus hangs over this piece without ever once appearing in it. That this past decade of writing so unambiguously deserves to be named after that word communicates all the feelings I would ever want to express about it. Very glad that we seem to be moving somewhere else.
I'm so confused as to why, in a mostly very thoughtful and observant critical assessment, you suddenly veer into being bothered that she didn't write the novel you wanted/expected her to. Like, per your description, isn't the swerve into the political earnestness EXACTLY the experience of online birding? Why SHOULDN'T that be included?
And why the cowardice about whether that voice/tone/style can sustain an entire novel? Have you ever read Maldoror? Against the Grain/Against Nature? Mad Love? Basically anything by Genet? (the fact that these examples are all French may or may not be related to my own critical tastes, but also might be indicative of who writes this way). I mean, you're entitled to think they failed but the sense of your review is that you have never encountered a work like this novel, and therefore believe it must have been intended/expected to fail. And despite the dismissable opinions of John Pistelli, there is merit in reading translated work that doesn't accord with our current conceptions of narrative but mines an older and less malleable form.
Again, your piece is good and I enjoyed it; my reading just flagged these moments as places where you found yourself at the place you seemed to want to avoid. If I am mistaken about that intention my apologies.
It would certainly be dishonest to write a novel mirroring twitter and not include earnest political stuff! But I found that most of the novel is written in this god's-eye view that I think is trying to highlight the strangeness of the activity of endless scrolling, and then certain parts undermine that by just being indistinguishable from normal anti-trump tweets. A charitable reading would say this is just the consciousness of the protagonist, but I don't think there is enough authorial remove there. I realize it is oh-so-Substack to complain about mainstream liberal art being too didactic, but what can I say, it really does throw one out of the novel. Later in the plot her sister's birth complications are thrown into further distress by Ohio's draconian abortion laws, and I found that section a much more effective and natural way to integrate her political sympathies than just turning to the camera and doing Orange Man schtick.
I do obviously think a novel can be largely plotless/descriptive and sustain itself mostly on style (whether a novel can be mostly descriptions of tweets is a different question) -- my issue is she fails to! It starts well and then slides into "lyrical descriptions of stuff from online" and then in the second half brings in this very standard sentimental narrative. I think if it had sustained the initial energy, I would have respected it more. Actually last night I couldn't sleep and I was wondering why I have a problem with her being too much in her own head and not, say, Kafka. Definitely not everything has to have nice fully fleshed out 3d characters. But for now I have to satisfy myself with the unsatisfying answer that art is what you can get away with.
Freddie de Boer wrote a great review of Lauren Oyler's Fake Accounts wherein he said, essentially: this book exists because Oyler felt she ought to write a book, not because she had any particular impulse to write a book or anything to write about. She had a brief moment of literary celebrity, earnt because she was willing to say what everyone was thinking about someone else's shitty millennial progressive online essays, and that translated into a book deal. But she had nothing to write about except for the endless tedious recursion of millennial progressive online essays.
We are now entering into a phase where we can say explicitly that this stuff is bad even when it's good. Like, even a talented and capable writer can't obscure the basic pointlessness of the form. Luckily Twitter is dead / hitlerised now so we shouldn't have to endure too much more of it.
Loved the Schjeldahl quote. One of those critics who pushes the limits and usually gets away with it. A tossed-off phrase of his in a review of some exhibition (I think it was Jasper Johns) has stuck with me for years: the definition of boredom as "the forced consciousness of the passing of time."
Fantastic. There’s a frustration in knowing an internet writer didn’t go through the “figure drawing” stage before advancing to abstraction, but it’s worse when they kind of sort of did. It makes hating them harder.
This was so good. Lockwood’s memoir Priestdaddy was super formative for me in wanting to become a writer, but that did end up making my prose super indulgent and self obsessed
I choose to believe you've described your audience as "of high quality" purely because I have recently subscibed (non-paying). Please praise me specifically in all future posts. Thanks.
OMG YAY.
I loved this piece, it was such a good and refreshing read. The biggest thing for me is your REFERENCES - they are across a few things and I can see the integration of digital referencing and the clash with the historical/purely physical, and because of this you so accurately situate Lockwood within a broad, specific timeline of literary evolution.
It's exactly the kind of framing that makes criticism valuable—placing a writer within their era, their influences, and the shifts that shape. Your piece captured something beyond just Lockwood herself: the way she exists at a hinge point between the physical and digital literary realms.
Also I'm so sorry for the absolute SAGA of thought and response I'm going to put here, but it's because there's this part of me when I see work like this, that triggers the instinct to collaborate with the writer - so please, I'd love if you could read and share your thoughts!!!!
I get compared to Lockwood all the time with the way I speak IRL, conversationally, but I have thought well, isn't that what everyone does because conversation is just your own interpretation of random thoughts being spat at you and causing you to "spat back" - difference being with the internet, it's contained by the people you're conversing with, and framed contextually by where ever you're sitting - cafe, bender at 3am, bookshop, dinner with family. Conversations and writing on the internet / digital spaces, are really really different and incomparable - yet we're forced to depending on our experiences and our knowledge, because we gotta keep steady in this clusterfuck of clash.
In 2025, we're enmeshed in the reality of a world where time as a structuring principle has collapsed—not just in the sense of historical movements but in the micro-generations of digital experience. You hit on this indirectly when you talk about pre-Musk Twitter and the dispersal of that era’s intelligentsia, but I think it goes deeper than that.
Lockwood’s work, whether it succeeds or fails, is a test case for how literature deals with the internet not just as a subject but as a structure. And that's where this gets weird when we try and write about it - and god damn, I was so delighted to see you write about this subconsciously - filtering, exploring, pulling tangents.
When you point out that her writing is overwhelming, consuming, recursive—how she forces the reader into her world rather than illuminating another’s - that’s true, but it also makes me wonder: isn’t that the most honest depiction of digital consciousness we have?
Because what is the internet if not a recursive maze, a hall of mirrors where every door leads back to a slightly different version of the same place? Particularly with algorithmic influence, and the interruptions of the physical landscape, including the self (mood, vibe, journey).
This is why the literary world seems particularly pinned to Lockwood as an example of a safe bet when critiquing the evolution of "literature", and so it nudges something larger than just her: the way we expect literature to function versus the way thought functions now.
When Borges did this, it was a labyrinth of books and mirrors.
When DFW did this, it was a footnoted self-consuming dialogue with knowledge itself.
When Pynchon did this, it was paranoia laced through the grand conspiratorial systems of history.
When Lockwood does it, it’s a maximalist internet-brain writing itself in real-time.
And the thing is, all of those projects were in some way overwhelming, obsessive, and isolating—but we tend to read the pre-digitally social versions of this as intellectual ambition, whereas Lockwood’s gets interpreted as self-indulgence.
That’s is absolutely not to say she’s above critique. When I read her book "No One is Talking About This" - I felt similarly - she was totally caving in on herself and what she was interacting with. Interestingly, reading her work before, is a haunting timeline of her cognition morphing in real time, as she's validated in the online sphere - so she persists within it. She's a writer after all, she wants to be read and noticed!
You’re absolutely right that her literary criticism is more of a filtering mechanism than an excavation—it’s always Lockwood refracting rather than Lockwood revealing. But I wonder if that, too, is a reflection of the current conditions of reading. After all, how do we engage with culture online? Through individualised, fragmented, hyper-personalised lenses. This is not like, a sickness of the digitals pervasion on our psyches, but just something that genuinely is the evolution of what we've built in the technological sphere.
You can compare it with the evolution of thought due to the advent of the printing press (liberating thought with more access) or even "The Metropolis and Mental Life" by Georg Simmel (1903). It's a foundational sociological work about how urban environments shape cognition, perception, and interpersonal relationships.
Simmel argues that living in a modern city fundamentally alters the way people process information and engage with the world—the constant bombardment of stimuli forces city-dwellers to develop a blasé attitude (a kind of detached indifference) as a defense mechanism against overstimulation. He contrasts this with rural life, where interactions are slower, more personal, and shaped by tradition rather than rapid change.
This ties directly to what we are all talking about with Lockwood and digital consciousness—just as city life forced cognitive adaptation in Simmel’s time, the internet forces new ways of thinking and processing reality in ours. The fragmented, hyperactive, overstimulated nature of Lockwood’s writing could be seen as the literary equivalent of Simmel’s metropolitan mind—a way of dealing with the sheer excess of digital life.
There is no “neutral” or context unaffected reading of a book in 2025 unless you've been living in a bunker for 50 years surrounded with the classics. Fuck that would be interesting to see how they'd react to the reading of today, their brain would probably electrocute them. Anyway, there is only the version of the book that filters through the endless layers of self, social positioning, digital culture, and shifting memory. And Lockwood is, in some ways, just turning that process into the prose itself.
That’s why your framing of her as a product of time is so so so so important. We’re at a moment where literary tradition and digital consciousness are in direct conflict. The institutions of literary criticism, publishing, and academic discourse are still operating on old time—slow time—linear time. Meanwhile, writers like Lockwood are working at internet speed, where six months can create an entirely different reference point for cultural experience.
And this is where I think the real debate about Lockwood should sit—not just in whether her work is good or bad, but in whether literature itself is ready for what she represents.
Because if the structures of literature and criticism don’t evolve to engage with digital-native consciousness, they’re going to fall into irrelevance—not because they lack depth, but because they’ll be speaking a language that no longer maps onto the reality of how thought functions in the present.
So maybe Lockwood isn’t a Borges or a Pynchon or a Wallace—maybe she’s something else entirely: the first writer to fully commit to writing in a way that mirrors what thought feels like in the 2020s. Whether that’s sustainable or even desirable is still up for debate, but it’s happening whether literary institutions like it or not. But she's made the grand decision to enter the literary pit, and thus, you're up for slaughter because generationally, the publishing world is still arguing from the past - I've literally never seen a reference in a piece of recent criticism, that uses a person producing words or pieces from a purely digital standpoint, or at the very least isn't published under a traditional publication, because there's this inherent belief, they just aren't fully credible. But it's kind of the same as only comparing to the classics, the reality being, they are contextually irrrelevant as comparison now.
Your piece makes me think about all of this not because it’s necessarily arguing in her favour, or destroying her entirely (THANK YOU) but because it frames her as an inevitable moment in literary evolution, rather than a one-off anomaly. And that’s exactly the kind of criticism that feels useful right now—because the biggest question about Lockwood isn’t Is she a great writer? but rather What does the way we respond to her say about the state of literature itself?
Anyway, I loved this, and I appreciate the way you’ve mapped the terrain here. You are such a great writer you have inspired me to work harder and think better :)
Thank you, I’m glad you responded so strongly to it, it really does mean a lot. Here are some notes in response but be warned it’s definitely not trying to be a cogent argument, just a bunch of stuff your comment put to mind.
— I’m unconvinced that being “an honest depiction of a digital consciousness” is a point in anything’s favor. Scrolling Twitter for too long makes me feel bad, reading a novel that is basically a physical manifestation of Twitter made me feel bad in a similar way. Is this desirable? It’s like the old joke about the Marxist professors who are rude to the waiters, because to do otherwise would be to obscure the true brutality of class relations.
— In general I feel like when any new technology emerges there is a rush by the old forms to try and capture it, to speak in its voice. But those usually end up looking very dated and the way that new technologies influence older forms is much more subtle and diffuse. But in that sense NOITAT is an interesting novel if not imo a successful one and as I read it I remember thinking it will definitely get an NYRB classics reissue if they’re still around in 30 years.
— When TikTok first got popular, I spent about half an hour going through it on my girlfriend’s phone and basically instantly came to the conclusion that I had to choose total abstinence from it or it would fry my brain. Maybe without TikTok I am missing something about The Way We Live Now but I also know with almost total certainty that I could not have written this if I had it.
— A section I had cut mentions Marvel Universe by Bruce Wagner, which I’m in the middle of right now. Wagner is nearly 30 years older than Lockwood but I think Marvel Universe does the sort of frenetic, hyperactive digital thing really well. It’s an extremely odd novel in some ways, parts of it are like a fable or a folktale, the characters are pretty wacky archetypes, and it does the (now almost cliche!) thing of using Instagram commenters as sort of a greek chorus to the novel. But it’s also very traditional in other ways, it’s a big, multi-protagonist social novel that ranges across all levels of society to form this kaleidoscopic portrait of LA, it almost feels like a very very weird version of Dickens or something. And honestly the same thing is there with Lockwood— it’s not as radical as all that, it's a bourgeois sentimental humanist novel about learning to better appreciate life at the end of the day (not that there’s anything wrong with that, some of my best friends are sentimental bourgeois humanists!).
— (If you were around for the "brodernism" contretemps the other day, those supposedly ultimate forbidding tomes of bleeding edge experimentalism are working in registers that are literally one hundred years old)
— I think another instructive point of comparison is Ulysses. Ulysses is great, I love Ulysses, and obviously it’s true that after Ulysses every succeeding novel, whether the authors had read Joyce or not, was subtly changed. But all novels did not become Ulysses. Actually, a few of the criticisms in here could apply to Joyce verbatim— there is something totalizing, something colonizing about his consciousness. Yknow again I think Joyce is a world-historical genius but sometimes you get 15 pages into a chapter that’s like “Must buy eggs later. Great Achilles was dipped in the river by his mother. Bumbly mumbly milk carton.” and you’re like stop!! stop!! Ofc Joyce also has that gift for characterization, that clear view of other people, and part of what keeps Ulysses alive is that Bloom, Stephen, and Molly are so different and so vivid. Which was something that was lacking in PL.
Yessssssssss you are an intellectual sparring partner, and this is fantastic because I never want to troll—I wanna chat and learn! Thank you for this.
I think people in the lit world write about Lockwood’s oeuvre like they went on a few bad dates with her and decided to ghost. But that’s the thing—her writing is invasive, recursive, deeply personal, a forced intimacy that makes the reader complicit. It’s not just that she overshares; it’s that she overshares in a way that traps you inside her perception.
The fact that it’s boring or brain-rot or whatever is beside the point—what really makes people uncomfortable is being stuck in a single, unfiltered consciousness. Most maximalists allow distance; you can admire the structure, analyse the machinery. Lockwood doesn’t. She immerses you in relentless, intimate, slightly-too-much cognition.
Tik-Tok rejection, that’s re-wiring in real-time—you think it’ll melt your brain because it is. It introduces a mode of thought that pre-internet experimentalism couldn’t even conceive of. Even those working in fragments, tangents, surrealism—they weren’t operating in this kind of nonstop, layered simultaneity. And that’s why critiques of Lockwood often feel personal, almost visceral. It’s not about literary merit—it’s about how people react to a book that mimics contemporary thought itself. I'd argue you would've absolutely blown shit out of the water if you spent 45 minutes on Tik-Tok melting and then written this article - doesn't take long for that stuff to absolute electrocute your brain somewhere else.
Digital immersion doesn’t just change how you consume content—it rewires interaction itself. It doesn’t isolate you; it makes you hyper-adaptive to conversation, context, and cognition. Your brain trains itself to recognise patterns in fragmented input, which means you can talk to anyone, anywhere, at any level—because you already understand how thought functions at different speeds and depths.
And this is where we differ.
You talk about TikTok like it’s a contaminant, like opting out gives you a purer understanding of The Way We Live Now. But no one gets to opt out—it’s everywhere, just in different forms.
I’ve been the most digitally immersed person you’ll ever meet, and yet I write by hand, run a printed zine, and am writing an experimental book that also integrates AI. I’ve read every classic, absorbed every text handed to me physically, and explored every evolving narrative construction—books, games, emergent storytelling, ARGs, deep-dive forums, multi-threaded discourse networks.
And here’s what’s funny. This hasn’t wrecked my ability to engage—it’s made me exponentially better.
I don’t treat digital and physical spaces as separate realms. I treat everything I encounter as a natural evolution of thought. If the internet was supposed to disconnect me, I should be incapable of meaningful conversation, unable to track subtext, bad at reading people.
However, when your brain is trained to surf tangents, track niche discourse, and synthesise meaning from chaotic, nonlinear information—you can talk to anyone. Any conversational dead-end, I can pivot. Any half-formed thought, I can locate its reference. This isn’t abstract theory—it has real, material application.
I work in hospitality. I’m surrounded by Gen Z and Gen Alpha workers who are fully digitally fluent. And they gravitate toward me. Not just for casual chat, but for guidance, mentorship, training. Why? Because I don’t condescend to them for existing in the world they were born into.
This is what people fail to grasp about digital cognition. It isn’t just about how we consume media. It’s about how we construct meaning. If you think abstaining from digital fluency preserves humanity, all you’ve done is opt out of the need to evolve.
I haven’t read Marvel Universe, but from what you’ve described, it sounds like an attempt to channel the hyperactive, fragmented energy of digital culture into a narrative form that commerciality can still process. No digital true chaos, it seems more like an amplification palatable maximalist style—excessive, grotesque, and satirical. If anything, it’s less ‘cosplaying digitality’ and just excess for the sake of it, which is totally fine by publishing standards with an author who has a reputable track record.
So, instead of engaging with the internet on its own terms, we get pre-digital writers treating digital existence as an aesthetic exercise.
Lockwood isn’t radical. She’s just the most viable translation of internet logic into an outdated literary space. And that’s fine. But let’s not pretend this is a grand literary leap forward when it’s bourgeois sentimental humanism with a digital filter.
The most radical storytelling isn’t happening in books—it’s happening in a medium literary critics refuse to acknowledge as legitimate. GAMES.
If critics were actually interested in new forms of storytelling, they’d be studying:
Elden Ring — A game that tells its entire story through world design, not dialogue.
Disco Elysium — A game where your own inner monologue is a multi-voiced entity warring for control.
Death Stranding — A game where physical resistance is a narrative experience.
Open-world RPGs — Where the order of discovery literally becomes the narrative.
Instead, we get hand-wringing over whether Twitter-thread novels ‘count’ as literature—which is hilarious, considering the nerds are owning everyone in the background. And, making an absolute fortune doing it. People still need stories, proof is in the Python (tech joke).
You say experimentalism isn’t new. Okay. Then why pretend the digital shift isn’t real?
By your own metric:
If all experimentalism is just a variation of the past, then nothing new has happened in literature in decades.
If some contemporary literature is meaningfully innovative, then digital-native writing has to be part of that conversation.
So which is it?
You either admit that digital-native writing is a legitimate literary evolution—or you admit that nothing in contemporary literature is actually innovative. And if nothing today is experimental, then why are you engaging with contemporary literature at all?
I actually don’t think you dislike digital-native writing because it’s “bad.” I think it makes you uncomfortable to realise that cognition has shifted without your permission. Which is universal and I fucking hate it sometimes too.
But here’s what makes you different from most literary critics—you actually engage with this. You’re more digitally fluent than you realise.
And honestly? That’s why this debate is interesting. Because for me, the best part of this is seeing where you actually embody digital literacy in your own writing—the way you weave references, the way you construct parallel arguments, the way you process literature as a network, not a single track.
That’s not pre-digital thought. That’s digital-native cognition, applied to literary criticism. Which makes me wonder—do you work in a tech-adjacent field? Because that kind of pattern fluency tends to show up in people who have one foot in each world.
The discomfort I have with the backlash to Lockwood (or anything digital-native) is that it follows the exact same pattern as previous ruptures in literary history:
Modernism disrupted realism.
Postmodernism shattered grand narratives.
Cyberpunk turned technology into existential philosophy.
Now? Digital cognition is dismantling print logic. This isn’t subtle. It’s not an aesthetic trend. It’s a rupture. And just like every rupture before it, you can either engage with it or pretend it’s not happening. Either way—it’s happening.
So...why are people still so afraid to admit that literature has to evolve with digital cognition, not just against it? Why aren’t we beating Lockwood at her own game—instead of just critiquing her for playing it?
Anyway, chefs kiss for making me absolutely rinse myself intellectually. This was a workout. I even had to edit this down—which should tell you how deep I went.
Love to hear your thoughts.
P.S. I can’t let this slide—the joke about Marxist professors being rude to waiters as some kind of intellectual stance. If you think “revealing the true brutality of class relations” is best demonstrated by being an asshole to a waiter, or that reference is comparable, I cry.
Hospitality workers do not exist as theatre props for ideological performance. If people, particularly "Marxists" want to understand class dynamics, power structures, or how meaning is constructed in real-time, then you should be WATCHING service work.
Nothing is a purer test of cognition, adaptability, and social fluency than a job where you have to anticipate needs before they’re expressed, absorb a person’s entire energy in two seconds, and decide whether to engage, deflect, or disappear.
Digital cognition? Service workers have been running on it for decades.
Anyone who has worked the floor knows:
The greatest social intelligence is possessed by the people who have the fewest resources.
Every conversation is a test in real-time meaning-making and an openness to the tangential and relational.
The purest depiction of modern cognition isn’t found in a novel, but in a bartender juggling five conversations at once, mentally processing every interaction as a live, multi-threaded discourse network.
So no, being a jerk to a waiter doesn’t prove anything about class relations or digital interaction in that way. If anything, it proves how ideas about social power being recycled in today's day and age, are still fundamentally grasping at straws and dead peoples comments to try and articulate something they don't really want to understand.
And if we’re talking about literature failing to grasp contemporary cognition—maybe it’s not just that it hasn’t caught up to digitality. Maybe it’s that it still doesn’t know how to look at the people who already embody it.
This is fantastic. Lol I can’t remember if I blogged this at the time but when I read this book in 2023 the first half partially convinced me Trump wouldn’t win again because I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to go back to 2019 twitter. That prediction didn’t exactly pan out but that impression of the first half remains. The second is more successful-I really liked your comparison of it to Company last year-but the whole is really not to my taste.
HAHHAHA so many great lines in here. "If you went to a performance of Beckett or Ionesco, it would be deflating if midway through the actors turned to you and gave an impassioned monologue about how but seriously folks, Democracy is On the Ballot." HAHHAHA reminds me of when the Hamilton players lectured to Mike Pence in 16
I greatly enjoyed this essay. I recall when "No One is Talking About This" first came out, so many people said it was amazing. And my response was "you may be correct, but I will not read a novel about the internet." There's just too much to read and I can't bring myself to do it. It's up there with "novels about novelists" and "movies about the movies" as topics that I just can't abide, with rare exceptions.
I long for her 1,000 page Victorian realist novel
I'm laptop only too, my friend. Good choice.
I appreciate that the word Chungus hangs over this piece without ever once appearing in it. That this past decade of writing so unambiguously deserves to be named after that word communicates all the feelings I would ever want to express about it. Very glad that we seem to be moving somewhere else.
thanks, I really just wanted to do a stupid riff on "The Pound Era"
I'm so confused as to why, in a mostly very thoughtful and observant critical assessment, you suddenly veer into being bothered that she didn't write the novel you wanted/expected her to. Like, per your description, isn't the swerve into the political earnestness EXACTLY the experience of online birding? Why SHOULDN'T that be included?
And why the cowardice about whether that voice/tone/style can sustain an entire novel? Have you ever read Maldoror? Against the Grain/Against Nature? Mad Love? Basically anything by Genet? (the fact that these examples are all French may or may not be related to my own critical tastes, but also might be indicative of who writes this way). I mean, you're entitled to think they failed but the sense of your review is that you have never encountered a work like this novel, and therefore believe it must have been intended/expected to fail. And despite the dismissable opinions of John Pistelli, there is merit in reading translated work that doesn't accord with our current conceptions of narrative but mines an older and less malleable form.
Again, your piece is good and I enjoyed it; my reading just flagged these moments as places where you found yourself at the place you seemed to want to avoid. If I am mistaken about that intention my apologies.
It would certainly be dishonest to write a novel mirroring twitter and not include earnest political stuff! But I found that most of the novel is written in this god's-eye view that I think is trying to highlight the strangeness of the activity of endless scrolling, and then certain parts undermine that by just being indistinguishable from normal anti-trump tweets. A charitable reading would say this is just the consciousness of the protagonist, but I don't think there is enough authorial remove there. I realize it is oh-so-Substack to complain about mainstream liberal art being too didactic, but what can I say, it really does throw one out of the novel. Later in the plot her sister's birth complications are thrown into further distress by Ohio's draconian abortion laws, and I found that section a much more effective and natural way to integrate her political sympathies than just turning to the camera and doing Orange Man schtick.
I do obviously think a novel can be largely plotless/descriptive and sustain itself mostly on style (whether a novel can be mostly descriptions of tweets is a different question) -- my issue is she fails to! It starts well and then slides into "lyrical descriptions of stuff from online" and then in the second half brings in this very standard sentimental narrative. I think if it had sustained the initial energy, I would have respected it more. Actually last night I couldn't sleep and I was wondering why I have a problem with her being too much in her own head and not, say, Kafka. Definitely not everything has to have nice fully fleshed out 3d characters. But for now I have to satisfy myself with the unsatisfying answer that art is what you can get away with.
Freddie de Boer wrote a great review of Lauren Oyler's Fake Accounts wherein he said, essentially: this book exists because Oyler felt she ought to write a book, not because she had any particular impulse to write a book or anything to write about. She had a brief moment of literary celebrity, earnt because she was willing to say what everyone was thinking about someone else's shitty millennial progressive online essays, and that translated into a book deal. But she had nothing to write about except for the endless tedious recursion of millennial progressive online essays.
We are now entering into a phase where we can say explicitly that this stuff is bad even when it's good. Like, even a talented and capable writer can't obscure the basic pointlessness of the form. Luckily Twitter is dead / hitlerised now so we shouldn't have to endure too much more of it.
Loved the Schjeldahl quote. One of those critics who pushes the limits and usually gets away with it. A tossed-off phrase of his in a review of some exhibition (I think it was Jasper Johns) has stuck with me for years: the definition of boredom as "the forced consciousness of the passing of time."
Fantastic. There’s a frustration in knowing an internet writer didn’t go through the “figure drawing” stage before advancing to abstraction, but it’s worse when they kind of sort of did. It makes hating them harder.
I love 'No One is Talking about This' but it's hard to disagree with your critiques. I may have to revisit it. Great piece
very good
This was so good
This was so good. Lockwood’s memoir Priestdaddy was super formative for me in wanting to become a writer, but that did end up making my prose super indulgent and self obsessed
I feel like the magic trick of Priestdaddy is to make you realize that she's actually a lot like her dad. (I loved it too!)