Novelists, like the rest of us, have long been engaged in hand-wringing about social media. At the end The Circle, Dave Egger’s frothy 2013 dystopia featuring a thinly-veiled Facebook stand in, an employer of the company stands over a woman in a coma and ponders how long it will take to develop the technology to read her thoughts. “The world deserves nothing less and would not wait,” Egger writes, the most ominous note he could muster about our technological future.
Ten years later, and algorithms are already reading our minds pretty effectively – anyone who has emerged blinking from TikTok’s ‘for you page’ will attest to that – and writers have largely moved on from casting big tech as a pantomime villain to fretting over what is turning us into, from John Boyne’s incandescent The Echo Chamber (2021) to younger writers, like Lauren Oyler (Fake Accounts) and Patricia Lockwood (Nobody is Talking About This), who have channelled their more ambivalent concerns about Twitter, Instagram et al at a more stylistic level.
