Who Needs Fiction After the Internet

“When I think about the internet (which is impossible),” Natasha Stagg writes, “I feel similar to when I have a crush. I feel crushed.” The line comes from an essay, first published in her 2019 collection Sleeveless, titled “To Be Fucked,” and here in miniature are the thematic and stylistic signatures of Stagg’s writing. The title suggests at once a discourse on sex and an anatomy of despair, a punk aggression and a passive subject. If the internet is impossible to think about, what are we doing when we write and read about it—and on it? You try to think but are left with only a feeling: a mixture of desire and hopelessness, a sense of excitement and power that is also an emptiness and inertia. Something you thought that you were doing, that was under your control (your crush, your browsing) becomes something that is being done to you (you’re crushed). Everything is at once manifest and obscure, right there on the surface for the world to see and somehow enigmatic, unresolved and unresolvable: a link, only, to something else. This internet affect is, despite its novelty, now probably as universal a feeling as that of romantic desire, but like the latter, it is also private and hard to pin down. To catch this mood one can’t try too hard.