studies,I pulled the two lives together, frantically writing
papers on the history of communications technology—
which has always been a history of bloody squabbles
over who was allowed to write and read the official story
of human destiny and human desire. In the late 15th cen-
tury, when printing technology first took off in the West
and literacy became more common, the moral panic
over ordinary unecclesiastical people being allowed
to read, interpret, and have opinions about the Bible
almost tore Europe apart. Movable type changed the
structure of storytelling, and so has every technological
shift that has followed, from television to the internet.
That, in precis, is what Marshall McLuhan meant when
he wrote “the medium is the message”—that the nature
and format of a communications technology, far more
than the content of that communication, rearranges the
furniture in the collective head.
That sort of theorizing was good enough for Oxford,
but you can’t stay at wizarding school forever. Life was
about to get a lot less theoretical. There was a plot twist
coming, and none of us were prepared.
BEAT THREE
AUTUMN 2008
Nine former and associate members of the Oxford Fan
Fiction and Folklore society are crammed with all their
various flavors of frustration and panic into a filthy Lon-
don flatshare. We have stumbled out of college right into
the teeth of the financial crisis.
In those days, we rarely left the house, because none
of us had any money and all of us were exhausted and
depressed, and besides, there wasn’t much community
for us to partake in on our battered street in inner Lon-
don. Our community was online. We all put in as much
cash as we could afford to download as many shows as
possible and discuss them at length in the downtime
between minimum-wage jobs. Fan sites, bolstered by
the launch of archival projects like the Organization for
Transformative Works, functioned as our proxy public
square. This shift was happening everywhere, as the
media critic Howard Rheingold observed, because of
“the hunger for community that grows in the breasts of
people around the world as more and more informal
public spaces disappear from our real lives.” If anything,
it made us even more political.
The narrative structure of our lives was splintering.
It wasn’t playing out as it was supposed to. My fanfic
friends and I hadn’t grown up expecting to be the pro-
tagonists of every story, but we thought the story was
at least supposed to make sense. “I’m writing fiction,”
Jen said in an email at the time. “As a kind of last-ditch
last-shot attempt to stop my life becoming what I don’t
want it to be ... I’ve got to do something at some point: I
fucking point-blank refuse to be as miserable as I think
I’m going to turn out.”
Me, I was juggling two jobs with a journalism training
course, trying to follow some version of a script for mil-
lennial aspiration that had become, all at once, terribly
outdated. In the evenings, I started blogging, moving
from LiveJournal to a public-access blog that gained a
following, because apparently people wanted to hear
about what it was like to be young and broke and queer
and female and incandescent about the insidious plot
shifts of the 21st century.BEAT FOUR
SPRING 2014
New York. Same girl, with a better laptop and a better
understanding of real-world stakes, is hunched at the
foot of a bed where she ought to be sleeping but isn’t,
because something is very, very wrong on the internet.
I’ve been a journalist for six years now, writing about
welfare, youth protests, and the women’s movement for
whatever publications would pay me—The Guardian,
the New Statesman, The Independent—and blogging
when nobody would. I had come to America to cover
Occupy Wall Street and stayed in a futile attempt to
escape the thunder of harassment that plagued me
in England. This time, though, it’s worse than it has
ever been.
While many millions of people out there felt that they
had been written out of the future, not all of them agreed
on who to blame. Some of us blamed the banks, blamed
structural inequality. But some people don’t pay atten-
tion to the structure. For some people, kicking up takes
too much energy, and it’s easier to kick down—to blame
women and people of color and queer people and immi-
grants for the fact that they aren’t leading the rich and
meaningful lives they were promised.
Every time I opened my laptop to write, I was bur-
ied under an avalanche of rage and rape fantasies from
strangers who believed it was morally unconscionable
for young women to speak about politics and pop cul-
ture. It took its toll. I wasn’t a fiction writer of Jen’s cal-
iber, but just as she did years earlier, I decided to start
writing fiction seriously again, even if it sucked, as a Hail
Mary attempt to take my own life down a narrative arc
that wouldn’t end in despair.
Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces,
the best-selling book about the “hero’s journey” formula
and the supposedly universal rules of storytelling, was
released in the late 1940s. It’s the simple idea that almost
every story worth telling is really, when you boil it down,
about one guy and his personal growth as he overcomes
obstacles, fights monsters, gains wisdom, falls in love,
and comes home changed but safe. In 1985, the Holly-
wood story analyst Christopher Vogler put a summary
of the book into the hands of friends, colleagues, and(^05)