Who’s Afraid of the World Wide Web?

FIVE YEARS AGO, the editor Emily Temple pointed to a conspicuous gap in literature at the time. “Relative to the amount of space it takes up in the collective and capitalist imagination, the internet has had less of an impact on contemporary fiction than one might expect,” she wrote. “It is increasingly acknowledged in novels but it seems oddly difficult to represent well.” One can speculate about the many reasons why this might have been the case: social class restricting access to the internet, or authors not having much of a reference point while sketching out social media’s minute intricacies. In her book Never Logged Out: How the Internet Created India’s Gen Z, Ria Chopra observes that “digital platforms are built to support writing about digital experience.” It is possible, for instance, to hyperlink references, embed or edit posts to corroborate claims or respond to developments, but the dynamic nature of the internet means it “resists portrayal in any medium other than itself.” To write about it is no doubt daunting—after all, the web is no longer just a means of escaping reality but a parallel universe in itself, complete with its own languages, subcultures, currencies and social hierarchies.

Published late last year, Chopra’s book is one of many recent attempts by South Asian women to articulate their experience of existing on the internet. In the last year, other works of non-fiction—Vauhini Vora’s Searches and Sukhnidh Kaur’s Your Perfect Dream Girl: Influencers, AI, and the Future of Desire—also study the dread users have been expressing about certain aspects of the internet, particularly with artificial intelligence now added in the mix. In the burgeoning fiction about the same theme, meanwhile, two features seem constant: a seemingly self-aware first-person narrator unable to break out of destructive patterns, and a sense of mounting anxiety as the consequences of their online interactions start to bleed into their offline lives.

One of the most ambitious in this catalogue is Meena Kandasamy’s new novel Fieldwork as a Sex Object, in which a scandalous deepfake video of the protagonist suddenly goes viral. Overnight, Amrita—“Amy”—Chaturvedi becomes a trending hashtag, embroiled first in a media frenzy and then a vicious legal battle, shunned by friends and family, persecuted by right-wing trolls and left-wing puritans alike. “The main aggressors are a disparate bunch of Nazi-loving, Islamophobic vegetarian dicks with profile pictures that are either the Joker or V for Vendetta,” she scoffs. “If these trolls are to be believed, I am a leading member of the tukde-tukde gang of academics who want to balkanise India. I am on Pakistani payroll. I am funded by George Soros.”

Meanwhile, Amy gets flak from others for not being woke enough. “They claim offence because I apparently retweeted, a long, long time ago, that the porn industry should be banned,” she explains, adding that someone on X is doing a multipart thread on “how ethical, homemade, organic, fairtrade porn helped them embrace their own sexuality. No, it is not a parody.” When a single user finally jumps to her defence, it is because of Amy’s caste privilege. “Ms Chaturvedi has been targeted because she is a Brahmin,” tweets @DesiInNYC, incensing both Amy and Nimmi, her only ally through this ordeal, who is Dalit. By embodying this polarisation, and the fast-paced chaos, Kandasamy’s novel reckons with how conversations tend to unravel on social media. Like other recent books, it approaches the subject of the internet not as a vast, complex, interconnected network but instead from the inside, through the singular experience of someone who is a victim of Big Tech, aware of their addiction yet unable to extricate themselves from it.