Rejection: Fiction

by Tony Tulathimutte

Dating online, he realizes, one has to choose between fraudulence, or the sort of honesty that can’t compete with fraudulence.

Words by themselves have no substance, he realizes, they are only ever meant to underscore acts. Being correct has been its own reward and no reward at all.

Love is not an accomplishment, yet to lack it still somehow feels like failure.

she feels like a martini without its glass, a sloppy puddle of poison.

Every emotion besides anger and regret becomes blunted.

she finds solace in the simplicity of hate—how

Everyone just listens to the voice that makes them feel least alone, and the lonely are the easiest to manipulate.

always already alone,

an unwelcome outsider in the land he was born to.

maybe it’s just cathartic to microdose trauma, without the protective salt circle of fiction.

I’d been acting nonchalant, but I was, to be real, torridly chalant.

I’m embarrassed that I thought it’d work, that appealing to white people would make them see me as anything other than a charity case, could change a fascist’s mind or get a liberal to do anything besides vote and hold signs, that debate ever did anything besides harden whatever position you started with.

Identity is diet history, single-serving sociology; at its worst, a patriotism of trauma, or a prosthesis of personality.

what do you call it when you want everyone who plays the game to lose?

Online everyone is their own Citizen Kane, raging for monopolies of endearment.

The shitpost is the opposite of self-expression, it is expression minus the self. Whereas sadposts and thirst traps, teleologically identical forms of validation-seeking, are driven by ego, as are opinions, those being (in my opinion) the dangling silk of the toreador.

The hermeticism of posting disease is exactly its appeal. The difficulty of describing a single event online without offering detailed case histories, associated subcultures and rap sheets, and beyond that the meta of the platform: the valences of blocking vs. soft blocking vs. muting, DMs vs. mentions vs. subtweets, going private vs. deactivating vs. suspension, these uncodifed cues and tacit slights spawning an infinity of faux pas. This was salon culture, blue checkmark as painted birthmark.

I hated that I liked being liked.

Emerson’s line about the man who carries the holiday in his eye, fit to stand the gaze of millions—we know who that asshole is now, it’s PewDiePie, it’s MrBeast. I now saw the peril of forging a persona to escape all assignations, only to end up searing it into yourself. Not for nothing is it called a brand.

But how nice to find a form of revenge accessible by Wi-Fi.

Happily, in the court of public opinion everyone is their own incompetent counsel—you happen to earnestly plead the case that raising the minimum wage incentivizes child labor, or indoor cat owners are the moral equivalents of Josef Fritzl, and you get torched. If you’re smart, you ragequit. But the best ones are those dauntless donuts and gormless corncobs yanking full force at their fingertraps, who triple-down and rearrange their whole belief systems around their stupidest opinions just to avoid publicly admitting they’re wrong, and by day’s end find themselves unemployed and divorced with 50,000 Blackpink stans skywriting their Social Security number.

you can’t not identify. So since I couldn’t be no one, I would be everyone.

What’s hard about discussing anything on social media, beyond the embarrassment (but we’re way past that), is that no account of it is as exciting as watching it unfold in real time.

the easiest way to get people online to do your bidding for free is to make them think they’re forbidden to.

I guess we feel responsible to the image of ourselves we’ve installed in other people’s heads. But real accountability requires a community. Online you can meet people, hang out, hook up, meet your soulmate, but it’s not a community. In a real community bonds are hard to dissolve and antagonisms must be sustained, there’s continuity, and unavoidable neighbors. The internet is millions of solitudes blinking in and out of existence, each dreaming the others, where “consensus reality” is less an agreed-upon reality than a reality made of agreement. With identity it’s the same—this idea that a checkbox on a form is a service tunnel to a stranger’s soul. People will always fall for it.

But discourse is loneliness disguised as war. What people there really want is to be perceived on their own terms, which is so, so funny. Because if the grand promise of the internet was to be whoever you want, in reality it will make of you whatever it wants, and beneath every mask is another mask mistaken for a face.

One has to appreciate a commitment to introducing mystery into the world, for no apparent credit or profit.

no one misses what they didn’t know they might’ve had; loss only hurts when there ever was a possibility.