Internet Fiction

[remember_summer_days]

Lol I'm in those discords as well yes. What a mindfuck. Truly the internet is like 200 people max. I've yet to read anything else in issue 015 tbh. Actually I'm also looking forward to reading the new &amp issue.

Read the Apocalypse now story, the WWE essay, and the story about an anon in love with a sitcom character (And skype)

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[nakadashi]

I'm also interested in this but have came up mostly disappointed. In my experience, extremely online people are not good writers and good writers are not extremely online people.
The only book I can come up with is Thomas Pynchon's Bleeding Edge, which, given its themes about conspiracies and the Internet of the late 90s and early 00s, I'm surprised it's not widely discussed here.
I'll be checking your recs, man.
Some other Internet-y novels are theMystery.doc by Matthew McIntosh (which I didn't like) and maybe House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, which is better but I still didn't quite enjoy, although some of you might find it interesting.

 

[remember_summer_days]

Thomas Pynchon's Bleeding Edge

Bleeding Edge sucks and it's aesthetic boomercore. Biggest disappointment in my life since Fire Emblem Fates

 

[nakadashi]

Bleeding Edge sucks and it's aesthetic boomercore. Biggest disappointment in my life since Fire Emblem Fates

So I guess you won't be coming to my Thomas Pynchon-themed birthday party.

 

[remember_summer_days]

So I guess you won't be coming to my Thomas Pynchon-themed birthday party.

If its Gravity's Rainbow themed, 100% I will. (Or if you invite cute asian girls)

 

[remember_summer_days]

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naglrNWbU6Q&t=4237s

 

[nakadashi]

I liked the beginning of The Gig Economy, it figured to me as a hyper-modern retelling of "The Lottery in Babylon", but he lost me at the Theseus story (also it started giving me House of Leaves vibes. I don't know why that book keeps coming back to me. Maybe because I've only read two books in my whole life, or maybe the real House of Leaves were the friends we made along the way), at which point it read to me as a kinda tiresome social media=bad point of view.
Maybe my expectations are too high, specially when I am a mediocre writer myself, but this exemplifies my dissatisfaction with most Internet-era literature: it rarely makes any critique that goes deeper that what any person would conclude after reading the tech news sections of NYT. A lot of them feel like Black Mirror episodes lookalikes, when literature is a lot less restricting medium that should allow to do deeper explorations to the relationship we have with technology.
It is a lot like cellphones in early 10's movies. It was easier to pretend that they did not exist, or that they did not work for some reason than to write a conceivable way in which the plot can survive the usage of phones. Take for example the cryptocurrency topic. It is always "John Doe sold his kidney for crypto" or "Jane Doe killed somebody for some NFT" and never exploring how crypto exposes our relation to fiat money, which is in no way more real than some Internet Tokens. If one reads closely, one can realize than crypto could be replaced by Benjamins or seashells, so that it the story becomes not so much Science Fiction but mere technobabbling (which I personally think the story makes use of a little too much), just as Star Wars is King Arthur in Space.

 

[GhostInTheMachine]

Here is a Mega folder containing a large selection of works produced by the users of 4chan's /lit/ board I found on a thread there recently:

752.55 MB folder on MEGA

114 files and 3 subfolders

mega.nz

While I don't think all of these works are directly about the internet, they are written by people willing to post their works on 4chan, such a degree attachment to the site already implies the type of author we are looking for (not meant as an insult lol.)
@№56 This also contains a third volume of Londonfrog for you to add to your post, if you want.
Edit:
I am currently reading Sadly, Porn by the blogger https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/
While I am unfamilliar with the blog itself, I know that while lesser known, it is highly regarded. In 2021 after years of radio silence he dumped this behemouth of a book on the internet and on amazon self-publishing under a completely different name, drawing no attention to it. If that wasn't obscure enough, within the book he states that his goal is to structure, format, write this book in such a way as to alienate as many as possible. And I believe it. I am about half-way through and all I can say is that it is not only insightful but also thoroughly entertaining, and I never thought I would enjoy a book released 2021 this much. As the title implies he talks about the silent epidemic of porn addiction we are currently experiencing in the western world and confronts you, the reader, why you, and we all, have become lunatics because of it: The Pornification of society. He uses this as a basis to go off in all sorts of directions, from Thucydides to The Giving Tree, and back to porn plots, all somehow relating to his plea of insanity for the average individual in our internet-brained age. A reviewer I read described this book as the litererary conflict of "man vs reader". This book gives me the feeling that literature isn't dead, but not in a nostalgic "like the good old times" sort of way, this book couldn't have possibly been made in any other time than now. If it stays this good till the end, I highly recommend. (Especially to those who feel like they are stuck in a rut, even for a long time, feeling like they are powerless to do anything with themselves, overflowing with ideas, but stuck in loops of endless habit. This book will make you change! This is precisely his diagnosis of contemporary Man: That you are unable to act.)

Edit 2: Just realised this is a thread for fiction, but I'll keep it since you said creative non-fiction also counts. (And creative this definitely is!)

 

[WhoGoesThere]

Here is a Mega folder containing a large selection of works produced by the users of 4chan's /lit/ board I found on a thread there recently:

752.55 MB folder on MEGA

114 files and 3 subfolders

mega.nz

While I don't think all of these works are directly about the internet, they are written by people willing to post their works on 4chan, such a degree attachment to the site already implies the type of author we are looking for (not meant as an insult lol.)
@№56 This also contains a third volume of Londonfrog for you to add to your post, if you want.
Edit:
I am currently reading Sadly, Porn by the blogger https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/
While I am unfamilliar with the blog itself, I know that while lesser known, it is highly regarded. In 2021 after years of radio silence he dumped this behemouth of a book on the internet and on amazon self-publishing under a completely different name, drawing no attention to it. If that wasn't obscure enough, within the book he states that his goal is to structure, format, write this book in such a way as to alienate as many as possible. And I believe it. I am about half-way through and all I can say is that it is not only insightful but also thoroughly entertaining, and I never thought I would enjoy a book released 2021 this much. As the title implies he talks about the silent epidemic of porn addiction we are currently experiencing in the western world and confronts you, the reader, why you, and we all, have become lunatics because of it: The Pornification of society. He uses this as a basis to go off in all sorts of directions, from Thucydides to The Giving Tree, and back to porn plots, all somehow relating to his plea of insanity for the average individual in our internet-brained age. A reviewer I read described this book as the litererary conflict of "man vs reader". This book gives me the feeling that literature isn't dead, but not in a nostalgic "like the good old times" sort of way, this book couldn't have possibly been made in any other time than now. If it stays this good till the end, I highly recommend. (Especially to those who feel like they are stuck in a rut, even for a long time, feeling like they are powerless to do anything with themselves, overflowing with ideas, but stuck in loops of endless habit. This book will make you change! This is precisely his diagnosis of contemporary Man: That you are unable to act.)

Edit 2: Just realised this is a thread for fiction, but I'll keep it since you said creative non-fiction also counts. (And creative this definitely is!)

I bought the physical of Porn, Sadly on Amazon on the recommendation of a friend. Read maybe a quarter of it (up until the Deveil Wears Prada Meryl Streep scene analysis) and I can say that I have no idea what I read and, if asked, would not be able to tell you a single thing about it. It takes obscurantism to a whole nother dimension which, admittedly, is its goal but then I wonder why write a book at all. What is the author trying to do if he's unwilling to coherently convey thoughts and ideas? For what its worth I did feel magnetized to it, desperate to understand the author, I like the aesthetic, the style, I want to like it badly which is more than I can say for a lot of net lit which is morose and life denying and repugnant. Is the author a poseur? If you chastize those who try to understand your ideas then keep it in your personal diary desu. Why publish it on a mass marketplace?

On a separate note, that folder of /lit/erature is fairly outdated at this point. Doesn't include any Unreal or newer /lit/ novels.

 

[WhoGoesThere]

If anyone wants to go through a net-lit rabbithole here's a chain of 3 articles replying to each other ostensibly regarding the aesthetically net based Forever Magazine (which was/is the impetus for a real life literary scene in NYC dubbed Dimes Square) but more broadly exploring the topics of the modern alt-lit scene, its relation to right-wing metamodernism, overton window aesthetics, and internet culture. The first (chronologically last) article is incidentally written by the author of a selfpub book called INCEL. (Yes that's nothing to brag about, but thought I'd mention the connection for curious scavengers such as myself)

Literary culture is purity culture: On the Verso books piece and the state of literary fiction

Or how to hammer the borders of the Aesthetic Overton Window

www.decentralizedfiction.com

The Right-Wing Avant-Garde in American Fiction

Image: Jon Rafman, You Are Standing in an Open Field (Pandemonium), 2020 Unfortunately, I have to report that downtown New York does indeed have a cohesive avant-garde. Here is an insular community, committed to the repulsion of the status quo, that has produced at least one new literary mode...

www.versobooks.com

The Girls of Forever Magazine Have No Editorial Standards

Reports say the lit mag is dead. Madeline Cash and Anika Levy of the small but mighty Forever Magazine aren't so sure.

www.interviewmagazine.com

 

[remember_summer_days]

If anyone wants to go through a net-lit rabbithole here's a chain of 3 articles replying to each other ostensibly regarding the aesthetically net based Forever Magazine (which was/is the impetus for a real life literary scene in NYC dubbed Dimes Square) but more broadly exploring the topics of the modern alt-lit scene, its relation to right-wing metamodernism, overton window aesthetics, and internet culture. The first (chronologically last) article is incidentally written by the author of a selfpub book called INCEL. (Yes that's nothing to brag about, but thought I'd mention the connection for curious scavengers such as myself)

Literary culture is purity culture: On the Verso books piece and the state of literary fiction

Or how to hammer the borders of the Aesthetic Overton Window

www.decentralizedfiction.com

The Right-Wing Avant-Garde in American Fiction

Image: Jon Rafman, You Are Standing in an Open Field (Pandemonium), 2020 Unfortunately, I have to report that downtown New York does indeed have a cohesive avant-garde. Here is an insular community, committed to the repulsion of the status quo, that has produced at least one new literary mode...

www.versobooks.com

The Girls of Forever Magazine Have No Editorial Standards

Reports say the lit mag is dead. Madeline Cash and Anika Levy of the small but mighty Forever Magazine aren't so sure.

www.interviewmagazine.com

Very interesting reads. I'm honestly surprised 'reactionary writers' are popular enough to get articles written about them. Though I don't think I've read anything by anyone mentioned in what you've shared. How do you even find this kind of stuff?

Googled one of the names, Madeline Cash, and her website is awesome. Already ordered her short story collections. I can't go on without pointing out the irony that it doesn't seem to be available on ebook form.

As for forever magazine, I read a couple of the stories they're featuring in their website and they are... Fine, they're about the level of quality of the stuff that gets put on &amp, all of them read very tame to me too. Almost inoffensive, it's nothing I haven't read from similar, 'establishment' published authors like Kate Folk or Mary South. (Though I consider their short stories to be somewhat on a superior level to &amp and what I've read from Forevermag)

Do you know of any similar mags? Honestly, I should start looking to get published on somewhere else than &amp, even if I have to tryhard.

 

[WhoGoesThere]

How do you even find this kind of stuff?

The author of the substack article is a friend and then I leapfrogged back through the responses via the in article links lol

Do you know of any similar mags? Honestly, I should start looking to get published on somewhere else than &amp, even if I have to tryhard.

Honestly it's slim as far as I can tell. But I'm always on the lookout. Worth looking deeper into the Dimes Square scene. Bloodknife.com is worth a look as well, though it's decidedly left-leaning.

 

[GhostInTheMachine]

I bought the physical of Porn, Sadly on Amazon on the recommendation of a friend. Read maybe a quarter of it (up until the Deveil Wears Prada Meryl Streep scene analysis) and I can say that I have no idea what I read and, if asked, would not be able to tell you a single thing about it. It takes obscurantism to a whole nother dimension which, admittedly, is its goal but then I wonder why write a book at all. What is the author trying to do if he's unwilling to coherently convey thoughts and ideas? For what its worth I did feel magnetized to it, desperate to understand the author, I like the aesthetic, the style, I want to like it badly which is more than I can say for a lot of net lit which is morose and life denying and repugnant. Is the author a poseur? If you chastize those who try to understand your ideas then keep it in your personal diary desu. Why publish it on a mass marketplace?

To me the obscurantism stems more from the structure, especially the footnotes (holy shit), and the constant insulting of the reader, which can be frustrating. The arguments themselves, even though he jumps from topic to topic like crazy, I find easy to follow, if a bit hard to swallow. At the same time this book, and all of these "annoyances" just add to the overall experience for me, because I think this book is simply a perfect fit for me. (That of course makes it something of an echo chamber) He thinks the way I think, not that he has the same opinions, but the way he has come to his conclusions, I can very much relate to that. Maybe it just isn't the right book for you. With advice, whether or not it saves or destroys someone, wholly depends on the recipient. Not in terms of following it "correctly" or "incorrectly", but what type of person they are. Some think self-development is best aided by continental philosophy, while others say it is a waste of time, and fiction is a far better method etc. These two stances maybe true for each of them, it is just that they are different people. To get what I get out of this book, you might have to look elsewhere, and whatever proves successfull may in turn be completely lost on me, who knows.

On a separate note, that folder of /lit/erature is fairly outdated at this point. Doesn't include any Unreal or newer /lit/ novels.

True dat