Photo courtesy of Gurmeet Singh

NER fiction reader Lee Holden talks to Gurmeet Singh, author of the short story “anonymous user” (44.1), about the relationship between anonymity and fantasy, the idiosyncrasies of fictional speech, and how our brains betray us.

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Lee Holden: In “anonymous user” and some of your other work online, you center digital media, and especially online conversation, in the narratives. Do you think this is something of a signature of yours? Do you find being ‘chronically online’ an inescapable element of writing a story about life in the 21^st century?

Gurmeet Singh: It’s true I’ve written about this—sometimes seriously, sometimes jokingly—but I don’t see it as a signature. I’ve just found it interesting to consider especially as these technologies and our habits continue to change society, relationships, subjective experience, and so on. (Although I have told a couple of friends that they should log off from time to time; I don’t want their gravestones to read “They were online.”)

I guess I think that the condition of being ‘chronically online’ is necessary when trying to write something “true to life,” but I don’t think that means a character has to be so—just that the world has to be, in one way or another. It would be unusual if in a realistic depiction of 21^st century London, say, the city wasn’t embedded in global supply chains and financial and information flows, i.e., if it wasn’t possible for characters in that world to order clothes instantly online, despite those clothes being produced in sweatshops, and contributing to climate change, non-recyclable waste, microplastics etc.

When it comes to individuals, it’s probably important to acknowledge that the internet’s made us and our world pretty deranged. Being waist-deep in online ‘discourse’ is one way the internet’s made people weird. Creating dramatic shifts to the far right is another. Addiction is yet another. But it’s also made us very odd in mundane ways: endless scrolling, communicating mainly through images, searching online for a place to get coffee ‘near us,’ and deciding where to get that coffee based on the reviews and verdicts of complete strangers—it’s actually quite bizarre behaviour. Fiction probably should try to pick up on this kind of thing. I think a lot of writers already have.

LH: Similarly, there’s a tension between the narrator’s real life and his online life. Being an ‘anonymous user’ allows the narrator to venture into unsavory elements of his personality (calling Rich a “paedo” online). What’s worse, he begins to see the ‘anonymous user’ bleeding over into his real life. Do you feel like this is a real threat to our personal lives? Or do you think that these overlapping anonymities are “not harmful”?

GS: I guess the more serious problems online go beyond anonymity and how forums and comment sections seem to be gateways to extremism, into a scary-looking area of non-human information organisation. Algorithms—which aren’t free from human imprint—are changing people. Young people (particularly young men) might watch a video on YouTube about sports or gaming. They’ll follow a trail of recommended videos. A few months later, they hate women. It’s really a weird and unpleasant situation.

But on the human level, anonymity is as much an opportunity as it is a threat. In his autobiography Experience, Martin Amis says something like that “in the future everyone will be famous all the time—at least in their own heads.” I think this is what being online enables for most people: the ability to live out some kind of fantasy.

Anonymity, avatars, and role-playing help sustain individual fantasies in their own ways. That might be the fantasy of exceptional popularity and relevance (Twitter), for example, or the fantasy of extreme competence and success (LinkedIn)—the point is, you get to be someone you’re not, or wish to be. I don’t know whether anonymity and role-playing are harmful or harmless in a general sense, but they do enable disconnection between what one says and what’s actually true; in the story, the narrator says something awful and unfounded online anonymously, and he thereby gets to live out a fantasy that not even he’s aware of—that he wants to harm others.

LH: There’s a theme throughout “anonymous user” that the brain is, somehow, different from the I that is narrating. (“Apparently your brain makes a decision before you realize it.”) This disconnection is presented later on as the brain betraying the narrator. I think everyone can relate to the idea of “why did I do that?” or “why did I think that?” and this story digs into that feeling with precision. Are there any philosophical positions you were taking or rejecting (I’m thinking here of Hume’s bundle of perceptions) when you were writing this story?

GS: Ah funny you should mention that. I studied philosophy, and it’s unusual that the philosophy of mind and neuroscience have become abiding interests of mine, because I found the philosophy of mind module at university deeply boring.

However, I don’t consciously endorse or reject any one viewpoint from the Western philosophical canon, partly because to do so would require much more connected, thorough reading on my part, but also because it sometimes seems to me that those philosophers (Hume, Locke, Descartes, etc.) were wrestling with what are essentially cultural or personal problems, and not just “purely” philosophical ones.

When it comes to writing a story about the brain, you have a lot of freedom to explore its weirdness, and some justification in doing so. I think scientists like Oliver Sacks and A. R. Luria have written wonderful popular works illustrating how the brain and mind are far stranger than we like to imagine; that goes for what we call “I,” and what’s actually doing the work “behind” it.

LH: I love the recurring element of the narrator stating how he feels and then immediately retracting it, usually with a more “acceptable” statement. Having read some of your earlier fiction, I notice that your characters often have difficulty expressing themselves, or at least, expressing themselves in ways that feel appropriate. What attracts you to characters who struggle to present themselves to those around them, and to the audience?

GS: I guess there’s an autobiographical aspect, but from a craft point of view, having an anxious perspective in a story is basically just a way of introducing an unreliable narrator (or character) whose unreliability is grounded in personal history.

More broadly, I’m really taken with the way people speak, and I often find myself thinking about individual people’s voices, vocal mannerisms, and idiosyncrasies in addition to the content of what they say.

Obviously, fictional speech isn’t real conversation, and it doesn’t need to be; real human beings in our culture aren’t hyper-ironic and constantly cracking wise like TV and movies tend to present them.  However, if you try to make fictional speech as naturalistic as possible, you’ll have to include the ways real people hedge, retract, and contract, as well as their general uncertainty—their fear of being taken seriously.

It’s really not just something that applies to handsome, bumbling, Hugh Grant-esque, upper-middle class people. My background is very working class, and I grew up around people constantly prefacing what they said with “no offence, but . . .,” or “to be honest . . .,” for example, as though they were momentarily acknowledging they were about to break an accepted convention of courtesy and tell you something they “really thought.” Of course, there was always the assumption that you as a listener should be prepared to forget what they said instantly.

LH: Children, and the desire to have children, pervade the story. The narrator and Pia clearly never resolve their desire to have children (though she later goes on to have one with her new partner). Rich’s storyline revolves around his attempts to adopt a child without a partner. What about having a child, and perhaps what it says about being an adult, and/or aging, did you find so important in writing this story?

GS: Well, I’m 35, so kids are very much in the picture. With many of my friends having kids, it’s like the solar system steadily acquiring all these new minor planets and moons—so there’s just an interest in writing about that change.

But the starting point of the story was a little bit different than simply “my friends are now having kids”; rather it was very much to do with fatherhood. My girlfriend’s friend recently wanted to have a baby, and she wanted to consciously raise it alone. Everyone rightly celebrated this decision, but it also made me wonder what the reaction would have been if a single, straight man wanted to raise a child on his own.

When I asked around, nearly everyone said they couldn’t imagine a single, straight guy wanting to do that; and the imaginary adoptive man’s heterosexuality seemed to be a significant part of why they couldn’t imagine that happening. If a straight man did adopt alone, my respondents uniformly answered they’d find something questionable about it.

I first thought of writing about what it would be like to do that, but I quickly realized those reactions were probably a more interesting area to explore; because there’s so much implicit and unexplored—and potentially prejudicial—in this viewpoint.

The narrator’s viewpoint doesn’t, incidentally, reflect my own regarding children; but in writing the story, it became obvious to me that assumptions about the future are bound up in our attitudes towards our own notional children. In this case, the narrator’s own messy brain and past preclude him from conceiving of the future as something undetermined.

LH: Did any books or recent reading inspire this piece? And, more pointedly, do you have any recommendations for readers who enjoyed this piece and may (like myself) identify a little too heavily with the “terminally online” narrator?

GS: Embarrassingly, I can’t point to any books which directly inspired this piece—I wrote it during lockdown, and like a lot of people, I lost my capacity for reading books for about a year and a half during that time. I think I may have been online a lot then, which might help as an explanation.

There are of course plenty of great “terminally online” books—I think Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School is one, and it manages to be one despite hardly ever mentioning the internet. You’ll just have to read it to see what I mean. Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts is terrific, as is Nick Drnaso’s Sabrina. Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Message is still probably the best exploration of the technology-consciousness mesh, even though it’s several decades old. Apologies if these are all obvious recommendations.

Though there are plenty more books to recommend, I believe many of these books are not about “being online” per se, but rather, “being white online.” There’s still a lot of unexplored territory when it comes to looking at non-white onlineness. I look forward to reading those texts as they emerge.

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Lee Holden lives and writes in Vermont. He reads fiction for New England Review.

Gurmeet Singh is a British, working-class writer of color based in Berlin. His short fiction and essays have appeared in Sand, Sinn und Form, 3am Magazine, and elsewhere. The story featured in this edition of New England Review was shortlisted for the 2022 Bridport short story prize. He is currently working on a novel.