There are no good novels about the internet because the internet itself is too powerful a text, it’s rife with ambiguities and inconsistencies and bracing shocks, hidden meanings, fathomless mystery. It’s not the role of the novel to dilute anything, and I doubt you can write the internet without diluting it in some way. You can watch teens eat Tide Pods on it, you can watch people die on it, you can sign a petition to change the ending of a videogame on it. On Amazon, you can buy print-on-demand books beloved by white power terror groups (but why would you, when you can download the .pdf?), you can buy phone cases adorned with cropped images of Jeff Bezos’ nose. There are 24/7 live streams of free-range chicken farms. Kids in Macedonia make non-partisan profit delivering hyper-partisan fake news to the world’s flailing superpower. The internet is no longer an interface, it’s an ever-present thrum, a vapour in the air offering convenience and knowledge and catharsis and anguish in exchange for behavioural data.  

I read a novel recently, Amygdalatropolis by B.R. Yeager, about a man addicted to online imageboards like 4chan and 8chan. The most striking thing about the book—and perhaps the only striking thing about it—is how it changed my instinctual imagining of Anon (shorthand for anonymous imageboard users) and the internet in general. In real life, when I hear of mass gatherings of deliberately nameless and faceless internet users, there had previously been a certain face and figure that would involuntarily come to mind. I won’t describe it, except to say that it was a kind of human shape or shadow with no specific eye colour or expression.