The New Yorker Radio Hour - Jia Tolentino on the Rise and Fall of the Internet

Episode Date: August 27, 2019

Jia Tolentino writes for The New Yorker about an extremely wide range of topics, but a central concern is what it has meant to her to have grown up alongside the Internet. In her new, best-selling collection of essays, “Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion,” she traces how the digital world has evolved and shaped our minds. Tolentino tells Remnick that, in the early, freer days of the Web, the Internet felt like “a neighborhood you could walk through, and just go into these houses decorated with all of these things you’d never seen before—and then you could leave.” Tolentino remains a very popular and influential figure online, but she has concerns about how the digital world has developed. Now that profit-seeking social-media giants dominate the landscape, there is fierce competition for our attention spans and the constant demand for people to perform their identities, all of which she finds “corrosive.” For Tolentino, writing—which takes “uncertainty and agony and work and devotion, and sustained attention”—is an antidote to that corrosion, and almost a kind of spiritual practice. “The fact of having time to think about something in private before it becomes public still feels like a real miracle to me.”Plus, David Remnick talks with two of the creators—one Israeli, one Palestinian—of HBO’s “Our Boys.” The ten-part series examines the forces that led to a crime that was shocking even by the standards of a country that is used to terror: the torture and murder of a Palestinian teen-ager, Mohammed Abu Khdeir, by Israeli right-wing extremists. “Our Boys” is a brutally truthful depiction of the effects of hate crime.   New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of The New Yorker and WNYC Studios. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Gia Tolentino became a staff writer for the New Yorker in 2016 after writing and editing at the website Jezebel. I think she's helped to shape the modern New Yorker voice far more than the New Yorker has helped shape Gia's, and I'm very grateful for that.

The range of her reference is so wide, it's a little hard to characterize, culture, political issues, all kinds of obsessions. But one of Gia's big topics is what it's meant to her as a 30-year-old to have grown up on the Internet. And she tracks how our digital world has evolved from the early, freer days of the web into one dominated by social media giants.

Gia Tolentino writes about all of this in her new collection of essays called Trick Mirror, reflections on self-delusion. The book appears in the number two spot for nine, nonfiction on the New York Times bestseller list. So the first sentence of the first essay begins like the Bible. In the beginning, the Internet seemed good. And now you described the Internet in the very same essay

is this feverish, electric, unlivable hell, and we're becoming, as you say, increasingly sad and ugly on the Internet. Tell me a little bit about that, because I did not grow up with the Internet. Why does that change consciousness and everything else? But were your first experiences of the Internet as a place that could surprise you? I think that's where that, you know, my early experiences with the Internet, and I was like, you know, fifth grader or whatever. But it seemed like this place where you were free to discover things.

You could discover things in private and it was just pleasure and it was generative and it was, you know, it was this zone of a new type of freedom. You were sort of free to be yourself. And increasingly, as the Internet evolved to be around, revolved to be constructed of social networks that revolve around personal identity, began to seem like the feeling changed. The Internet no longer became a place where things would surprise you. The Internet became a place where everyone was looking at the same stuff and it was miserable. And everyone was sort of chained to themselves rather than free to be themselves. Well, let's go back to the beginning. You write that when you were 10 years old, that you had something.

called an angel fire page, something I'm not quite sure what the hell that is. And you wrote something called the story of how Gia got her web addiction by Gia. I was blogging. Age 10. You were already blogging. I was blogging. Love to blog. But what were the specifics? What were the specifics of the things that you were getting at 10, 11? Well, you know, I was 10. So I was like, oh, I heard this smash mouth song on the radio. Let me look up the lyrics. Right. You know, or just just the idea that you could you could discover a website dedicated to something like trees or Ricky Martin or, you know, or like Lord of the Rings, right? Like you could just, the internet seemed to contain, it was like what it felt like to me was a neighborhood that you could walk through and you could just go into these houses that would be decorated with, you know, all of these things you'd never seen before. And then you could leave.

You've got a quote from Jason Kotke, who was an early voice on the Internet, and one of the original celebrity bloggers. And he writes, the web is the place for you to express your thoughts and feelings and such to put those things elsewhere seems absurd, unquote. Now, the personal essay was not invented by the Internet. Personal writing, the writing about the self was not invented by any of these things. What is he getting at here? Right. So right around the time that he was writing that was when blogging began its transition between being a hobby and being kind of a foundation for a readily monetizable practice and a career. And I think, and that's something that I think is interesting, right? Like the internet, the way we render ourselves for other people on the internet, it's not that different from how we render ourselves for each other in real life, right? Like talking about ourselves, thinking about our narratives, self-presentation. in general, it's certainly not internet specific. But that transition and the monetization of that transition, it's sort of like to put these

thoughts elsewhere, but where you could monetize them starts to feel absurd, I think. I think that's sort of the underlying thing in that. Is that what you're experiencing now as a bestseller? Do you think that the reason that it's a bestseller is not for the old conventional reasons, but at least in part because of a social media, I don't know, presence or voice? Yeah, I mean, that's certainly... Because that seems crazily self-deprecating to me. These essays are so good, and they've obviously connected to an audience.

Yeah. And you, obviously, with presence in the hairpin and Jezebel and, thank God, the New Yorker, I don't... It's hard for me to believe that just because you're amusing or otherwise on Twitter, that you're amusing on Twitter, that's the reason this book is taken off. Yeah, I mean, I would hope it's because I have, you know, consistently been a writer that people are down to read. But it's also, you know, I don't, the thing about the Internet, right, it's been this sort of civically corrosive. It's this, you know, it's this nightmare at the center of our culture and life.

At the same time, it's the only reason I have a job, you know. I don't think I would have ended up in media at all if it wasn't for the Internet. And I think that's, you know, it's a question of, I think this is a question that I just think about. so much generally, it's how systems that are corrosive, how many corrosive systems have benefited me and how they continue to. Like capitalism and patriarchy, right? Like systems that are punishing and horrible, but that I have somehow managed to benefit from in some way. Did you ever consider radically changing your relationship with the internet and kind of walking away from it or something, something different because it's starting to get its tentacles around you too much? I'm actually not

that uncomfortable with the way I use the internet because a couple years back, actually when I started working at The New Yorker, I no longer had to monitor the news cycle in the same way, because I didn't have to be interested in everything. Right. You were writing 72 times a day. Yeah, I wasn't writing 72 times a day. I wasn't editing 500 things a day. And I deliberately, I could feel at the end of Jezebel, I mean, which was one of the reasons that I was like, wow, this job offer is a miracle. Because I could feel that my attention span was just, it was corroded to nothing. I could feel that I couldn't calibrate what I actually cared about from what was, you know, what everyone was talking about. I just being on the internet constantly had done something to me. And that was when I was like, okay, you were going to keep this to a daily minimum and it'll still be more than what is probably humanly appropriate. But you were going to keep this to a minimum and you're going to interact with the internet through a lens of pleasure. And, you know, this is the only way you're going to survive being a writer in this. day and age and a writer of your, you know, demographic and cohort, you know, that's the only way.

Well, did you, are there writers in your reading experience, in your, in your spiritual experience, that were the model for you in some way? I, there are a lot of essay writers that there's, of course, there's like, you know, like Sontag and Didion, and I loved Ellen Willis's Village Voice criticism, and I love Rebecca Solnett and Zaddy Smith and Leslie Jameson and Yulebis. Actually, Zadie in particular, I remember reading her first collection of nonfiction and being so struck by how forceful she was as an intellect, but how clear it was that she understood that she could be wrong about anything she was saying.

And that was a real, like that really did something to me, you know? Neither one of you, well, maybe she more than you concludes in a given essay. All the nine essays in Trick Mirror, they do. They don't set out a thesis, tease it through, and then conclude in a standard way. As you say, they take the rock and put it under the light and look at it from all angles, and they argue with, you argue with yourself, you digress, you joke, you come back, you tell a story. It's a curvy journey. It's a curvy journey. It doesn't really land anywhere.

But, yeah, it was, I kind of, I wanted that, right? It's like, that's how my brain feels now. Like, it's, I think that was actually the other, I mean, that was the. animating impulse for the book was, I want clarity about the moment that we're in. I need it to function. It was like post-election. I was just like, I need to understand the world clearer than I do, but I cannot ever reenter that place of certainty that I was in pre-election because it's no longer correct to the world that we live in. And I was trying to figure out a way to do both at the same time. And I just never feel conclusive anymore. Do you know what I mean? Do you feel? I do. I do. But, you know,

I'm in the conclusive business sometimes because I'm writing these political, comments or we have to get a magazine out and there's a conclusiveness to that. This is a different thing that you're doing. Tell me this. As a person who's been trolled repeatedly online, what's the right way to deal with trolls? I think an important thing for online behavior is don't take the bait. You know, I mean, it's different. I think it's also, you know, there are different degrees of it, right?

There are some women writers that get death threats constantly, you know, that get SWAT teams sent to their house, you know, who get the, you know, letters sent to their parents' house, all this stuff, right? I don't get that. I just get emails calling me a bitch and, you know, sending me pictures of aborted fetuses and, like, you know, saying disgusting stuff. Like, that's okay. That's okay. I mean, it's not okay. Sounds horrible. As Whitney Houston said, it's not right, but it's okay. And it is horrible, but, you know, for better, like, this is, again, something that I worried about at Jesuit. that I got so used to this. And I worried about what that was doing to my heart, you know, if I have a heart that's hard enough to take this in my email every day and think it's okay. I didn't want that.

I wanted to be a little more sensitive. And I was afraid that that would make me, I was afraid that brushing off unfair criticism would make me brush off fair criticism. One of the things that I try to do is to not take the bait if I can afford to not to, which, you know, if you're getting death threats, you have to take the bait. you have to report them. But if I'm just getting mean emails, one thing that I try to do is understand, like, do I have more power than these people? Do I have more security than them?

Like, do I need to respond? If I don't, I try not to take the bait. And it's the same with, like, Trump tweets on Twitter, right? Like, everyone retweeting Trump, like, sir, Mr. President, like, this isn't. It's like we're taking the bait, you know? We shouldn't take the bait. What do you mean we shouldn't take the bait? We shouldn't pay attention to when the president of the United States tweets in racist terms or something.

or misogynistic terms, what should we do about that? I mean, that's the question of what it is to be in this field right now, right? But I do think that this idea that, like, I don't mean we shouldn't engage with what Trump is saying. But I do think that there's a certain thing that Twitter monetizes and systematizes where, you know, trying to like dunk on the president, you know, seems like a useful thing to do, like trying to get, like, it sort of incentivizes this thing. where you have this response to Trump that goes viral and then gets more attention to you and benefits you. And that is something, I think the Internet creates a situation where opposition can sometimes serve us.

I've always thought in my job that I sense that there are some writers that love the activity of writing. Yeah. And a lot of people who like having written, which is to say they love the fact that there's this book that it's done, but the act of doing it is so consuming, painful, boring, lonely, unsure that they hate the actual activity. I love having done it. Where do you fall on that? I'm 100%. I mean, I guess I'm glad that the book is done. I'm glad that I wrote it. But I love,

I love the agony of writing, right? I think, and like this might be, you know, the sort of self-flagellating holdover from having grown up in a you know the southern baptist church but it's like i think you saying that just now made me think that's kind of how i want to live in the world you know like like uncertainty and agony and work and devotion you know and and sustained attention i think that's a way that i want to be in the world and writing is the way that i can do that the fact of having time to think about something in private before it becomes public still feels like a real miracle to me. And that's what I want. You know, like that's this thing that I still crave more than anything.

Gia, thanks. Thanks, David. Bye. Gia Tolentino is a staff writer at The New Yorker, and her book Trick Mirror is out now. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour with more to come. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. I've been following the conflict between Israel and the people.

Palestinians for many years, and I've spent time there as a reporter, trying to understand what the conflict has done to the people who live with it every single day. I have not seen a depiction of the situation as complex and as deep as the 10-part series called Our Boys. A co-production of HBO in the Israeli studio Keshet, Our Boys, tells a horrible true story. In 2014, a Palestinian teenager named Muhammad Abu Qadir was kidnapped, burned, and brutally murdered. his body was left in the Jerusalem forest. The crime was an act of reprisal. Israeli extremists were retaliating for the murder

of three Israeli boys by a Hamas-linked group just weeks earlier. Our Boys thoroughly examines just about all of the forces that led to the death of Muhammad Abu Heder. It's not for the faint of heart. It just isn't. But if you want to understand the currents of extremism and violence, I really do recommend our boys to you highly. Two of the creators of the show are Hagai Levi, and Tofik Abu Wel.

I reached them in Tel Aviv last week. Hagi, what was the starting point for this project? How did you come to tell the story of the death of Muhammad Abu Hedere? So in the beginning, we wrote a pilot for HBO, and the pilot focused more on the far right-wing groups in Israel, like Hilltop Boys or Le Havana, you know, really. The Hilltop Boys being settlers, who were particularly radical in living in the West Bank?

Exactly. Most of them teens, actually, but very, very violent and very messiah ideology and so on. So in the beginning, we took the Abukhdiar case only as a starting point to go and explore those groups and actually to understand the connection to those radical groups to the more political leaders until all the way. way to the government. But I felt

he wasn't real enough. It wasn't true. He was a fictional series inspired by certain reality and certain events, but it wasn't like true. So by the time I called Joseph Cedar, the director of Joseph Cedar, whom I knew. And Joseph asked me to explore more the case

of Abhdadir itself. At that time, Trump was elected and we were in shock well not like you but we were and I felt that this is something different it's not about very it's not about religion or very extreme ideologies this is what I felt at the time but more about hate

and then we understood that what we want to do actually is to examine the nature of hate crime you know to make an anatomy of hate crime. And this is what we were trying to do. You also brought in a third person who's sitting with you right now, Tofik. And Tofik, I should explain that you live within Israel. You don't live in the West Bank. You are Palestinian-Israeli. And I wonder how complicated your decision to get involved was Tofik. Actually, it was like a story because usually, you know, I,

I get calls from Israel filmmakers or creators when they have something about Arabs and all the time I say no. This time when Joseph called me, I just met him for a while and then I found myself traveling with him and with Haggai Levy to visit Abu Ghedir family, the parents of Muhammad Abkhazen and Suha. And suddenly I watch their pain. And they're, you know, they're like something you can't imagine. You see especially in the in the mom in Soha face. They were very nervous about the fact that Israeli creators are going to tell their own story. And just when they realized that I am the one who is going to tell their son story and it's something changed in their faces. And I can't forget that.

You know, it's like something, all the tension they had, it suddenly became like something, you know, even sweet in their faces when they realized that I'm the one who was going to tell their own story. And after that, I had a lot of pressure from Palestinians, activist Palestinians, not to make this serious because it's an Israeli production, it's Israeli creators. And I'm not regular to this kind of pressure because I don't deal with direct politics and it was very hard for me. I hesitated. I almost left making this show. But I called Hussein, the father of Muhammad Bukhdad. And I just told him about my hesitation. And I remember he told me if your consensus is clear, do it.

If not, don't do it. He was so calm. you know, and then I understand that my own problems, it's like very tiny for him for such a person who passed such a tragedy, and I decided to make it, you know, despite all the difficulties and the pressure I had. So what was the collaboration like, the debates you had, the arguments you had in trying to conceive and write the story at such a deep level? The story not only features the three young religious men who committed the murder, it also is about the Palestinian family. It's about a woman who is a psychiatrist for one of the Israelis. It's an immensely complex story.

And I wonder what your debates were like, your conversations, your arguments. So we had to bridge not only artistic differences, you know. So that was one part of the problem, I should say. in the other words, to find the right narrative. I could bring the example of the interrogation of Hussein. So when Hussein's father, when he's brought to the police station. Where did you, the last time I saw Muhammad? Mara, in the night.

The scene that you're talking about is remarkable. Hussein, whose son is missing. and it will eventually be found dead, beaten and burned to death, is interrogated by the police, the Israeli police, not in a sense of sympathy, but in a sense of suspicion. They're from three of our own men, they're seeing here, they said, they're not saying they're not saying they're shuffer, and they're all of them miscellaneous.

And this suddenly dawns on him, and throughout the series, he's constantly in the middle. He has forces on the Palestinians, side who want him to not cooperate with the investigation and to become more politically radicalized and to be used as a symbol. And at the same time, he's a father. He's a husband. He's in the middle of so much in this drama.

Absolutely. And he has his own journey from just a very simple merchant to become a political figure and to take his pain into the political field. So that was, on that specific scene, I think Tofik felt different and told us I was there. I've been interrogated here and there by, you know, in airports and so, and this is how it looks like. So that was kind of debate we had. Now, Chaka, you mentioned somewhere that there is a parallel between what happened in 2014 in Israel. And the current political climate in the United States.

especially when it comes to something like the El Paso shooting. What's the parallel that you see there? So at a certain point, I felt that we are dealing with hate crime, which is not necessarily particular to Israel. Hate crime, you know, this is something is going on all over, yeah, America and Europe, towards immigrants, towards, I don't know, gays, some, all kinds of minorities. What I try to understand is how,

what would cause this kind of aid crime and what kind of theory that we try to put here is that it's kind of a layered structure in a way that you have, you know, you have someone with some psychological problem and some socio-economic problems, and he's from the suburbs, and there is kind of even certain, racism towards himself and some other problems.

And if that kind of person meets with incitement at the right point, that could create the perfect storm for a hate crime. This is what we try to say. You've gotten some good reviews in the left-wing Israeli press and Haaret's most commonly quoted left-wing Israeli newspaper. but in the right-wing Jerusalem Post, it said the series sins by encouraging the moral equivalency chorus.

Have you gotten a lot of pushback on the show from critics both in the press and elsewhere? I can understand that it is hard to understand our choice. You know, you could argue why would you do a series about Jewish terror when it's so rare comparing to Palestinian theory?

It is a legitimate question. So... Well, how do you answer? answer the question. Well, the answer that I have, you know, I can speak for myself, is that I always would like to dig into my own soul. This is what I'm doing in everything I do. So it was very obvious for me to understand and to inquire my own, personally, my own feelings of superiority, my own racism, you know, all of these things, I felt that there is, that I have some of them. And by searching, by dig into this specific story, I felt like I dig into myself, that I'm telling a very personal story.

It is not a series about terror at all, you know, not a Palestinian terror or just. Jewish terror. It's not about terror. It's actually mainly about understanding the nature of some killer or some killers or some murder and to understand how could it happen and what are the circumstances that it could happen in. So this is not about terror. It's about something else that I felt it's very personal for me. I just want to bring my point of view about your question. why you choose to make this story, you know, because it's all the time, you know, the same question. You know, as I see it, you know, here Israelis and Palestinians live in their injury. So mostly a lot of people will judge everything if it's against us, if it's, you know, good for us.

So you can't get away to satisfy everybody, you know, because from Palestinian point of view, The occupation itself is a terror. It's a everyday terror, you know, like, you know, Jewish people or settlers. Excuse me, I can't, it's not Jewish, you know, I prefer to use the word Israeli. Israeli people, it's, they don't need to do it, you know, because the system do it by itself. And so it's, it's complicated. It's complicated for everybody. And what I think, you know, that the theory, you know, didn't mean to satisfy.

anybody. It just, you know, to like, like Haggai said, it's to dig in a story, to dig in a character, to dig in yourself, and also to be critical about, you know, the situation and the society that you are dealing with. By the way, to the Palestinian society as well. Yes, as the Palestinian society as well, as we see in the series. Yeah. What does the telling of this story do to its audience? What can it do and what are the limits of what it can do. You know, I'll tell you something. I come from a bereaved family.

My brother died in the Lebanon War, in the first Lebanon War. And, you know, my sister, who just watched the couple of first episodes, said to me, it was amazing for me to see that they, the Abkhadir family, it's just a bereaved family as we are, you know. This is the same agony, the same pain. As simple as it is, you don't use to think about their loss or their agony. You think even if you are very liberal and self-aware. And I think that's something that could, that people can see in that series,

the pain in the other side. And that's, and, you know, and change just for a minute, their position from, you know, and let the other be the victim for a moment. Chagai and Tofik, I want to thank you so much for the work and your time today. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. Bye. Chagai Livi and Tofik Abuel. The 10-part series Our Boys is on HBO now.

I'm David Remnick. Thanks for listening to The New Yorker Radio Hour today and have a great week. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garvus of tune yards with additional music by Lexus Quadrado. Our team includes Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Cario, Rianan Corby, Jill Duboff, Karen Frillman, Callalia, David Krasnow, Caroline Lester, Louis Mitchell, and Stephen Valentino with help from Mung Faye Chen and Emily Mann. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.