Not finishing my novel
And thinking about what comes next
I’ve been writing a novel for the better part of 20 years.
Some of the details have changed over that time, as the world around us has, but the framework has largely remained intact. I know my characters. I know my arcs. I know how it ends. I’ve written more than 40,000 words of prose and notes, some of which is nearly publishable, and some of which I’d rather excavate my eyeballs with a potato scooper than go back and try to rework into something salvageable. I hope that means my writing has improved over time.
The basic plot is thus: One man, down on his luck to the point of desperation, left behind economically by a country mired in an exponentially growing class divide, resorts to carjacking. The man he tries to take the car from, though, sees his exasperation and talks him out of it, offering a chance at something better — no guarantees, just an opportunity to join him as he drives around the country to meet with old friends, in their communities, to try help, however he can, and to try to find a way to cobble back together the broken pieces and frayed fabric of our society.
As they travel the country, they realize the only way back from the brink is together, recognizing the value in each other’s work and contributions, finding the community we’ve lost to our fear, and our hate, and our screens. When one of our protagonists' interactions is recorded, it is inevitably shared to the world through alternative media (note: Twitter didn’t even exist when I started writing), which catches the eye, and the ire, of a fringe, reactionary provocateur who has a rabid and growing following. He spotlights the moment to put a crosshairs on our protagonists’ backs, but ends up accidentally turning them into figureheads for an oppositional movement.
Both movements grow in popularity within their own online communities. However, it’s not until his embrace of a professor from a stuffy, east coast private university’s own, privately-performed genocide of the local homeless population that the provocateur — and the movement of bloodthirsty followers he commands — becomes too powerful to contain.
While our desperate man latches onto the growing popularity, getting sucked deeper into his own online world, buoyed by reaction and endorsement from legacy media, our carjackee withdraws further and further into isolation, disillusioned by what his journey has become. The division, the opposition, the tension all build into an inevitable clash…but I won’t ruin the ending. After all, it’s yet to be written.
As mad as I was for not finishing it at that time, I’m much more angry at myself for not doing so in recent years. The thought of a voice circumventing traditional media to become a powerful political figure felt nearly impossible in 2007. We now have terms for the phenomena threaded throughout the book — the Streisand Effect and filter bubbles, as well as more established concepts like confirmation bias and the boiling frog. Somehow, each day makes the prospect of trying to finish the story simultaneously more urgent and more impossible.
A couple of years ago, I wrote about a movie I truly hated, called “Don’t Look Up.” One challenge the filmmakers talked about in an interview was that many of the things they had written into the film kept happening in real life. As you might imagine, I can understand this frustration. But that only served to underscore the fact that the film’s core objective wasn’t to offer any sort of better pathway, or any solutions to the problems it presented. Its takeaway is, simply: We’re all doomed.
That’s not a message worth the run time of the movie. The other part, though, is worth exploring more. The acceleration of pace — not to mention the pace of accelerationism — that’s become endemic in our society has made it harder than ever to keep any freshly corralled idea tied to the hood. But it’s made the core of any argument, something I’m teaching in my class this week, that much more crucial to understand and to get right. Because underneath all the noise and headlines and scrolling tickers and talking heads, we’re being presented with a basic choice about whether we should continue trying to tinker with, iterate on, and hammer the dents out of our imperfect democracy, or cast it aside entirely.
That, of course, is not how many people would frame the election we’re facing. That’s because our information ecosystem has fractured in ways that the existing standard-bearers have only begun to come to terms with.
One of the more interesting expressions of our growing partisan divide has revealed itself through comedy. Never was this more clear than in the appearance, and the reaction to it, of little-known roast comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who appeared at Donald Trump’s hate- and anger-fueled Madison Square Garden rally Sunday night. The most noted one of these was a set up about how there is a floating island of garbage in the ocean. The punchline was that it was Puerto Rico.
Hinchcliffe is best known for his work at roasts, which is telling. The biggest difference between a roast and a rally is the audience for whom the comedian is performing. Sure, there’s a crowd at both, but a roaster is specifically speaking to, and about, the person in the roast chair, generally a famous and powerful guest of honor. The insults work, when they do, because the comic is punching up, delivering barbs to someone in a higher class than them and the rest of the room. It’s the core of the humor, that we’re all human and we all have flaws, and that even those of us with authority and prestige are not immune from the human condition.
Compare that to Sunday night. The groups Hinchcliffe mocked not only were not there to defend themselves, they were precisely the marginalized underclass of American society. This was the very opposite of punching up — it was gleefully pressing the boot down on the very necks of the people that the man on the marquee would later promise, on “Day 1,” to expel from America. That not only aren’t we not all in this together, but that some of you aren’t even people.
There’s a good reason that the least funny part of any roast is when the celebrity guest of honor gets up for their turn to dish it back out, with jokes clearly written for them, delivered stiltedly back at people with a small fraction of their fame and fortune. Everyone smiles, because it’s their night; because they’re in charge; because we’re all having fun, aren’t we?
Something else happened around the same time that highlighted this same gulf in what we understand comedy to be. In the midst of a contentious panel discussion on CNN in which they were discussing Hinchcliffe’s remarks, Medhi Hasan said that he had gotten used to being labeled an antisemite, due to his public support of Palestinians. In response, Ryan Gidursky told him, “Well, I hope your beeper doesn’t go off,” referencing Israel’s coordinated attack on Hezbollah via explosives planted in electronic devices that killed nine and injured thousands. The implication was clear — that Hasan was a terrorist. But, of course, this was also just a joke.
I’ve written before about this phenomenon, which I call Schrodinger’s Scat. It’s the act of saying something vile with the full understanding that it will be taken seriously by the section of the audience you want to take it seriously, while claiming you were just throwing some shit at the wall and joking for those who call you to task on it. The phenomenon itself is nothing new, and has been an unfortunately recurring feature of the last 10 years of American politics.
But those kinds of statements have mostly remained in tighter, less mainstream spaces. How they broke contain into the mainstream is instructive to the parallel realities we see presented heading into the most contentious and consequential election of our generation. Gidursky’s remark echoed Ilya Shapiro’s since-deleted tweet, seen below, in which he references Israel’s beeper attack against Hezbollah, while quote-tweeting a sitting member of Congress.
This is where Elon Musk’s transformation and destruction of Twitter as a reliable source of information has begun to manifest unintended consequences. Creating a right-wing echo chamber was always the aim, clearly stated in Musk’s text messages prior to the takeover. That has led to the impression, among the paid-for-blue-checks volleying the same talking points back and forth at each other, that Donald Trump is not just set to win the election, but do so by a landslide. When that’s all you see and hear all day, of course you’re going to believe it. When mysterious figures pump millions into the election markets to bet on behalf of Trump, and those betting markets are advertised all over that platform, there’s a calcifying effect of the narrative.
This all comes to head on Tuesday, when the actual results of the election will unfold. If reality doesn’t match the feverish expectation that’s been built, then what?
This boiling point has been building for years with partisan news feeding fear and lies, but the last 10 years have seen at least four major events supercharge our divide. Gamergate broke the information age, turning its tools into weapons; Trump broke the accepted truths that our social norms would hold; the pandemic broke the social contract, leaving people to fend for themselves; and the Supreme Court broke the guardrails of our democracy.
For four years, up into the pandemic, every day felt like we were barreling uncontrollably toward total collapse. That downward momentum slowed to a crawl in the intervening years, but it never stopped, and it certainly didn’t turn around.
We were already retreating into our silos. Headphones in ears, heads buried in our phones on the bus. But then pandemic atrophied our connective tissue, fraying it at the edges. We stopped using public transit. We stopped shopping in stores. We stopped going to church, and to the playground, and to our rec centers, and to bingo halls. We retreated into comfortable boxes, our houses and cars. We stopped seeing the pores on peoples’ faces, their wrinkles when they smiled at the sight of our face. Everyone became an avatar, with words delivered in a text message or a reply on the screen.
Meanwhile, none of the moral or existential problems we’re facing as a nation, or as a world, have been fixed. Most haven’t even really been improved upon. They just stopped getting exponentially worse, and the decrease in our downward velocity felt like enough of a reprieve that it was easy to stop paying such close attention.
Now, we’re driving the car toward a sharp curve in the cliff line, with nothing between us and a thousand-foot drop. There are two sets of hands on the wheel, one trying to keep the car on the road, the other trying to send it headlong into oblivion. Even if we wrestle the tires back from the edge, that other set of hands isn’t going anywhere. We will still have to find a way to start seeing each other as human once again, spending time together, getting away from our screens and reconnecting to the fundamental ties that bind us. It’s the only way back.
There was a good reason that, in the novel, the disinformation network begins as a weather service. Even nearly 20 years ago that idea had crystalized in my brain, that climate change denial would be the root of every further erosion of science and expertise — from Sandy Hook hoaxers, to flat Earthers, to pandemic truthers, to January 6ers — to come.
After all, when the foundation of an agreed upon set of basic truths has been washed away in the floodwaters of disinformation, who is left with the authority to really say who won an election? As we learned last week, evidently not two of our three biggest national newspapers.
It’s not the non-endorsements, mind you, but the clear reasons for them that created a further erosion of our information systems. Because if two of the biggest newspapers in the world will preemptively censor themselves in their own feeble attempts at self-preservation for their billionaire owners, what steps will they take to avoid the ire of powerful figures, Trump or others, in the future? What stories will be ignored, or quashed, to stay in the good graces of those they might expose? What future “layoffs” of certain employees will be used as cover to exenterate newsrooms of anyone who might write such stories? And more to the point, if any of these things happen, who will even be left to report these stories to the public?
Even if they don’t — even if coverage is, somehow, unimpacted by these decisions; even if the papers still work just as stridently to uncover malfeasance and corruption as ever; even if nobody is quiet fired — last week’s editorial decisions will permanently undercut the fundamental mission and integrity of the institutions. That’s not simply obeying in advance — it’s doing the extra work of authoritarianism for the authoritarians by destroying the public’s trust in you.
How much was that worth?
Identifying all of this is important. Calling out hatred for what it is matters, because it is both just and correct, but also as a means to offer those who don’t really believe their neighbors deserve what is being promised a better alternative. But that alternative, and the path toward a less fractured future won’t just come together magically on its own.
Now, do not get me wrong — it’s not just futile, but actively self-defeating to meet people who want you dead halfway. Some people do not deserve an olive branch, especially until they are willing to treat people on the other side as human beings.
No matter what happens on November 5, we are in for a long couple of months. We already know what this looks like to some degree, having lived through it four years ago. Be good to each other, take care of each other and, if you haven’t already, go vote. But after that is when the real work will begin.
That remains a pretty good and pretty pressing story about America. Maybe I’ll get around to writing it someday.
I’d read that book.