At the SexStack Debate

It often feels like digital life moves too fast for ten fingers to capture it on a keyboard. Only the thumbs, busily pounding at their smartphone, can keep pace. Online life is inherently short-form, a series of blurts, and long-form writing generally struggles to match its rate of acceleration. If someone were to write a book on current internet trends (sexual, political, cultural), it would automatically be out-of-date by the time it was released—likely several years after the manuscript’s completion, given the trundling speed of publishing companies. The digital melts down and remolds human desires at a startling velocity. Daily. Hourly. To keep up with it, to really understand it, one would have to willingly submit oneself to the same process of fragmentation and reformation. This is a problem because we can’t understand our lives in bits and pieces. We require continuity, a sense of the causal chain, which we can only get through longer-form writing.