The World’s Worst Journalist

In 2014, the year Ben Lerner’s second novel, 10:04, came out, I was a recent college graduate doing freelance reporting for digital-media companies. On the surface, my life seemed organized around the pursuit of truth, but I was simultaneously being drawn into the heady distortions of the digital sphere, spending more and more of my time online. My job required it, I reasoned. Social media was where I got ideas for stories and disseminated my own. I could even record the interviews I did over the phone with an app that only occasionally failed, ensuring that the bulk of my work could be done from my bedroom. It was only later that the absurd contradictions began to dawn on me: a reporter at home, screened-in, undetectable, passing her days on websites designed to polarize, advertise, and addict.