The Hive

This is me when I read:

In response to all of my asks: No. I mean, my new novel Hollywood, Ending is about the experience of sudden fame and the ways that real human beings must navigate being seen as More Or Different From Regular Persons, but I started writing it in 2018 before HudCon existed.

If anything, it is about what I saw my friends go through, and to a lesser extent what I went through even though I was grown up and married and everything when my work got near the center of U.S. pop culture.

In the novel, I try to write about the cost of publicizing one's private life, but just to state the obvious, the heated rivalry fandom is not the first time this has happened--in fact, on some level, it happens to everyone who participates in the social internet.

Like, it used to be that the business of commodifying one's private experiences was primarily an issue for movie stars, but now everyone who uses the social internet understands the costs and benefits of trading your frailties for public attention.

This is hard for me to remember on a minute-by-minute basis, but when I visit insta/threads/twitter/tiktok/googlenews/etc, I am seeing a feed of information that does not reflect a complicated and multivalent reality but instead was created by an algorithm designed to maximize the amount of time that I spend on social media sites.

These algorithms do not give a shit what is true or useful or humane; they want me in bed spending as much time on those feeds as they can possibly get me to spend.

For example, if your information feed fails to remind you that global literacy rates have never been higher, that fewer children are stunted due to malnutrition, and that the rate of child mortality is the lowest it has been in human history ... there is something inadequate about your information feed.

But of course the fact that the world used to suck more doesn't negate the fact that the world still sucks (and in important ways sucks more than it did ten or thirty years ago). Injustice permeates every facet of human-built systems and social orders. This should dishearten us. It should anger us. But the proper response to this anger, imo, is not idle despair but engagement.

Progress happens (and it does happen) when hundreds of millions or billions of people work together to make it happen. We reduced the likelihood of a child dying by 65% over the last 30 years not because it was inevitable or ordinary but because hundreds of millions of people refused to accept so much needless suffering and built more inclusive systems to expand access to healthcare, clean water, and adequate nutrition.