Social media is a pernicious spreader of disinformation. The 45th president of the US used it to his advantage. Never has the prevalence of conspiracy theories been so widespread than during the rule of Donald Trump and Trumpism. Though these wacky theories have always existed, social media provided the ultimate channel for the superspreading of insidious disinformation.
Imagine then the horror of the young, unnamed privileged millennial protagonist of Lauren Oyler’s debut novel, Fake Accounts, when she discovers while scrolling through her boyfriend’s phone that Felix has a secret life as an online conspiracy theorist.
It’s in the opening lines of the novel that she captures the neurotic zeitgeist of a generation: “Consensus was the world was ending, or would begin to end soon, if not by exponential environmental catastrophe then by some combination of nuclear war, the American two-party system, patriarchy, white supremacy, gentrification, globalisation, data breaches and social media.”
The bewildered narrator opts to dump Felix, a decision she has been contemplating for some time anyway, but then a bizarre circumstance robs her of the opportunity to do so and sends her into an existential crisis. She quits her job as a blogger in an office where she is “one of only two people on staff who knew how semicolons worked” and moves from Manhattan to Berlin — the city in which she first met Felix.
Remember those heady days when Web 2.0 turned all the planet’s unemployed, disaffected, narcissistic and self-proclaimed experts into bloggers? In quitting her job, an act that causes her co-workers to congratulate her and experience no small amount of envy at her release from a phenomenon made famous by boring people who weren’t loved enough as children, the narrator writes: “I would have liked to claim a more dignified title, journalist or writer or critic or reporter, but I didn’t, because I didn’t want to contribute to the rapid deterioration of those titles … my job was to write two to three articles per day about ‘culture’ — items about celebrities or suggestive studies or, latterly, politics …” She had quickly developed a tone, a rote, pseudointellectual dismissiveness that could be applied to any topic.
How do fiction and reality play out in the internet age? That’s one of the questions that lies at the heart of Fake Accounts. Oyler has crafted a reputation for herself as a tough, insightful critic of celebrity millennials, offering searing insights into their worlds in the likes of the New Yorker and the London Review of Books. It’s no surprise, therefore, that the novel engages in self-indulgent contemplation of the almost tediously nihilistic narrator herself.
Most of us will understand the kinds of online activity she finds herself engaging in during a dating disappointment — procrastination, online stalking and impersonation. During a series of vacuous dates she invents different stories about herself, turning her online persona into her in-real-life being. Dating apps, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the rest all become important plot drivers.
Of the novel she is writing, which may or may not be the novel we are reading, the narrator asserts: “Why would I want to make my book like Twitter? If I wanted a book that resembles Twitter, I wouldn’t write a book; I would just spend even more time on Twitter.”
In the wake of the election, she observes that for her “cohort”, the incoming “administration … would not affect them particularly sweepingly” and that suddenly, “being a white woman living in Brooklyn began to feel, very briefly, less repugnant; the white women living in Brooklyn, in the end, were ultimately just annoying, point-missing and distracting, not the biggest problem”.
A cynical book that is a product of its time, Fake Accounts is brutal and funny, and it may well leave you feeling even more listless and depressed than the pandemic and the alt-Right. It’s a ruthless interrogation of our era and has no intention of making the reader feel good.
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