Criticism in the Internet Age
I have had an encounter by proxy with novelist and critic Lauren Oyler. My wife once tweeted, innocently, “nothing in the world is better than a husband who is good with children.” It’s true: I am good with children. Oyler quote-tweeted, “Why am I seeing tweets like this constantly. It’s this and stuff like some videogame addict who makes $250k/year claiming you don’t need to eat vegetables because all the nutrients are in whole grains and meat.”
Now I thought this was a bad tweet, but not because she’s annoyed at seeing my beautiful and wholesome family on the timeline. She’s entitled to be annoyed that her For You page does not deliver tweets that she can reasonably infer are for her, an internet critic who lives in Berlin and writes about her throuple. But the secondary character she describes doesn’t make any sense, and I would know, because I follow video game addicts, people making boatloads of money, and strange paleo diet people, and not only them but people who eat only potatoes, influencers who swear by a shot of rum and pat of butter in Earl Grey every morning, Bulgarian Peaters, megafauna nationalists, Nazis who run cute animal accounts, and those who fast every other day—I can tell you that the character she is describing isn’t a real human type on the internet.
Which is a shame, because Oyler’s great essayistic strength is stringing together smooth, individually well-formed accounts of internet subcultures into a necklace of related vignettes. When her accounts are frustratingly off, it’s a letdown for those of us who enjoy them at their best.
Oyler’s new book of essays, No Judgment, follows on from her first novel, Fake Accounts, about (loosely) perceptions of people on the internet. In No Judgment, Oyler again focuses intensely on these perceptions, and on how we respond to them. There are essays about gossip and how to engage it productively, about perceptions of expats at home and abroad, about how her autofiction is received, about responding to online reviews of one’s work, and so on. Some of the insights are relatively banal, albeit true: Scorsese was wrong to walk back his criticism of Marvel movies, for instance, because to criticize is a great human endowment.
Early reviews of No Judgment griped about Oyler’s avowed penchant for writing about “things that annoy me,” her “slightly defensive, periodically anxious” style and “ironic, somewhat callow tone,” and for a perceived millennial myopia in her choice of topics.
The griping reviewers had points. The essays, taken as a whole, are rather squished, online, interior. It is a book of criticism in both high- and low-brow senses of the word.
On the other hand, contra reviewers, there are many long lucid passages of which any writer would be proud. Her essay on the pleasures of gossip provides a capsule history of Gawker and its influence on “what might be called the proliferation of journalistic standards.” Its analysis is precise: “The more you seek out information, the more you know; the more you know, the more you may be tempted to justify your position as a particularly canny distant observer, monitoring the foibles and hypocrisies of the object of your attention… you’re merely gathering anecdata for something bigger and better than the pathetic contretemps of human relation.”
Of course this is a self-description, and a sharper critique than those of her critics. Oyler doesn’t check her internet-native vituperation so much as she constantly acknowledges it: “Things that annoy me.” Elsewhere, she pulls in Renata Adler’s takedown of Pauline Kael, a paradigmatic case of critic-on-critic violence, to discuss “the obnoxious self-image one can develop as a professional critic.”
Oyler enjoys the jittery energy of these critical battles, whether past or present. In response to a review in The Guardian that referred to her, oddly, as a “poor little squirrel,” Oyler lambasted it on Twitter as “the most sexist review I’ve ever gotten.”
Whether one enjoys No Judgment will largely depend on one’s tolerance for and interest in this kind of back-and-forth, internecine battle. I enjoy this stuff and have been known to engage in it, and I appreciate that Oyler and I share a common enemy. Once, I tweeted something gleefully vicious to Roxane Gay, feminist writer and poster; I don’t remember what it was. She responded, “I know you are but what am I.” I was swamped for days with gifs of sassy women from her legion of fans. But Oyler has my back: in her review of Gay’s Bad Feminist, she avers, “The essays in Bad Feminist exhibit… the kind of style that makes you wonder whether literature is dead and we have killed it.” Criticism in a world where writers are their own PR managers is maybe more fraught for the soul. But it is awfully stimulating.
Santi Ruiz is the Senior Editor for Institute for Progress (IFP) and author of the Statecraft newsletter. Before joining IFP, Santi ran a global community of technologists, started an agriculture outlet, and tracked civilian casualties from airstrikes.
