I’ll admit to being a hater sometimes because there’s so much dog shit out there and I’m engaged in a practice of cultivation and aesthetic renewal and yes this obviously entails actively demeaning things I don’t like (by calling them “centralized” or by using some clever euphemism like that).

But, dear reader—you might be surprised to learn that the most important thing about being a professional hater is being humble.

Recently I saw some guy complaining about Andy Weir’s sci-fi slop book Project Hail Mary doing extremely well in spite of its severely reddit-fried prose and generally terrible aesthetics and it reminded me of general principle that is too often lost on us.

Slop is its own form of genius.

For the longest time I was loathe to admit this but if you really think through the extraordinary outperformance of YA slop like Harry Potter or Hunger Games it’s a little bit too easy to blame the luck factor.

The cynic’s perspective goes something like this:

1. Slop is more or less interchangeable.

2. Some combination of luck + marketing initiates a positive feedback cycle where positive attention begets more positive attention, and a book basically fooms into an exponential IP & sales success curve.

I think it is not quite right.

I think giga-slop authors are, in fact, truly special.

Not necessarily as artists but as narrative architects.

What’s actually happening, in my view, is something akin to a deep intuitive understanding of maximally-appealing narrative architectures.

If you analyze one of these books on a sentence-by-sentence level, you’ll miss the emergent metastructure of the story. Literary metastructure is the feeling that the reader gets from the work as a whole, and that is what makes it special.

The atomic subunits of this metastrucure (i.e. the sentences) are purely instrumental objects that exist to press buttons in the mind of an average person in the same way that you depress a sequence of keys on a piano. The truth is that a forest can be beautiful from a distance even if the trees are made of plastic.

Please note: it is extremely hard and functionally impossible to trigger a cascade of genuinely viral growth for a novel because the volume of books published every year is basically inconceivable. Almost definitionally, anyone capable of doing this possesses an innate kind of genius with regard to literary metastructure.

What Rowling does, for example, is some combination of immersive worldbuilding and British-elite school cosplay. Of course she’s not the first person to do this but the thing you need to understand about Rowling is the fucking Chinese hypersonic missile of Anglo-cosplay slop.

The Harry Potter series is basically a hyper-optimized anglophile status-pornography—something akin to orbital-dropping a British guy with an accent into the New York City dating scene in the late 90’s.

Hunger Games works because it’s a LARP that subconsciously convinces Americans they’re not the ones orchestrating the mass murder of poor people and children with advanced military technologies and are actually the underdogs in the meta-story of global historical geopolitics (i.e. pathological boomerism).

Twilight is the greatest vampire-fuck-fantasy that’s ever been weaponized against the 100-IQ millennial mind; it bypasses sequential layers of cog-sec with effortless limbic agility.

And all of it can be categorized as “slop",” but if making successful slop was so easy, everyone would do it!

The reality is that writers in this category essentially operate off of a kind of deep intuition about what normies want. And that intuition is sufficiently rare that we must accord it the respect that it deserves—as a legitimate form of genius.

Here’s Haruki Murakami basically calling the modal Japanese reader a slobbering retard and humble-bragging about how difficult it was for him to lower his IQ so that he could write a monster-turbo-giga-hit (which was great btw):

“Many of my readers thought that Norwegian Wood was a retreat for me, a betrayal of what my works had stood for until then. For me personally, however, it was just the opposite: it was adventure, a challenge. I had never written that kind of straight, simple story, and I wanted to test myself.”

There’s a certain type of genius that operates largely by feeling. It’s not IQ-gated in the way that truly masterful literary works are, rarther, it’s intuition-gated. The way Cesar Milan whispers to a dog is the way the midwit savant whispers to the zeitgeist.

It’s Michael Bay telling his CGI datacenter that they fucked up and it’s really too bad but the robots in Transformers need to have more moving parts and every transformation sequence needs to be about 30 minutes longer. That the robots need to have completely illegible vocal tracks in the style of Robert F. Kennedy blended with a vocoder even though it would obviously be computationally equivalent for them to speak perfect English if they were capable of that level of translation. That some of the robots need to communicate in a form of AAVE and randomly start breakdancing even though they’re literally from a planet of mechanical aliens.

I can tell you that Bay isn’t running his directorial process through a focus group. Bay has a mental model of what the people want and by god, he’s going to give it to them.

Game recognize game: Rowling has a mental model of the normie-brain stored in her skull that is so profoundly high-fidelity that she could serially prompt this bio-LLM into turning prep-school cosplay into multibillion-dollar slop machine.

J.K. Rowling lives in a mansion and I live in the Chinese- equivalent of a basement apartment.

And none of this bothers me. Because (a) I’m playing a different game, and (b) at least a human wrote it.

Where it might get weird

The progressive advancement of technocapital means that everything is being optimized.

If the economy can be modelling as a complex ring of demand-supply loops, you can also apply this model to the arts, and you can imagine a scenario where an even-more-advanced LLM ingests the context of your entire life, including data from things like non-invasive brain scans, and outputs a novel so penetrating and captivating that it subsumes the beauty of any other human produced work of literary art that you’ve ever encountered.

I call this hyper-optimized, synthetic novel the alphabetical basilisk.

If and when the machines can produce works of such great stature and beauty, my soul will die.

Until then, we live to fight another day.

I wanted to wait for it to blow over before writing about it but there’s been a lot commentary about Rucy Cui’s short story The Hatchling and the extensive communal embarrassment associated with it.

It feels like we are doomed, maybe, to repeat the same Asian-American literary discourse over and over again.

Of course, Cui is a symptom of a broader problem in the diaspora.

The problem, in my view, stems from the bowl of slop that we are all eating from. The bowl contains too many of the wrong ingredients and too few of the good ingredients. To start with, there’s a surplus of sanity, a surfeit of normality, an excess of professionalism, and all the other usual suspects that produce too much ying and too little yang1: some combination of liberal assimilationism, PMC-ification, MFA-credentialism, CV-assembly-line striving, people-pleasing, cargo-cult-transgressivism, identity-shredding, and the soul-flattening means-ends collapse of technocapital as it swallows us whole.

Rui’s story fails precisely because it represents a normal person trying to be a little bit more insane than they truly are. Every other failure is downstream of that.

Here we might have some empathy for her predicament, for the characteristic feature of modernity is the evacuation of true belief: nothing to die for and nothing to live for other than the vanity of material accumulation; a transaction of atoms for the ether of the soul.

So much of our community’s fiction boils down to stories about positional status games in the PMC-class anchored on a small and repetitive set of thematic regurgitations in the vein of ’s analysis. The analysis of white-adjacency holds in part because it’s at least directionally correct with respect to our class position if not entirely accurate due to our obvious phenotypic distinctions.

The Asian-American subject is a hollow man and a hollow woman and it is for this reason that the Asian-American writer is a hollow artist.

The God-shaped hole at the center produces an economic and cultural elite whose sole fixation to the exclusion of all other entities essentials reduces to the relentless pursuit of technocapital.

Broadly, this creates a structural problem on both ends of the patron-artist network:

• Asian-American elites are, as a class, born of technology and finance and almost universally disinterested in patronizing the arts—the very notion of someone like, say, Gary Tan, subsidizing an Asian-American literary project feels something like the punchline to a good joke. The incentive structure therefore orients around performing for the tastes of tote-bag liberalism.

• At the level of the artist, there is no core, no substrate, no energetic foundation for the Asian-American artist to draw from. His or her art rolls down, passively, to the level of the PMC-slop as a result. Real fire is nowhere to be found. We are living in an era of the complete annihilation of any semblance of belief. What good are our eyes if they are always closed?

Contrast the current crop of writers to the great Japanese modernists of the late 20th century—Osamu Dazai, Shusaku Endo, Yukio Mishima, Yuko Tsushima. All of these writers had the sauce, even if we can’t precisely pin down we think that is.

And all of these people were either a little bit insane or—alternatively—very insane.

So what’s the solution?

I’ve got one.

The central project of the contemporary Asian-American literary writer is to actively cultivate as much insanity as possible.

By “insanity,” I mean a kind of anti-rational volatility that has the potential to produce something truly great, something truly unmoored from NPR-slop and stinky-lunch slop and my-white-boyfriend-slop and my-traditional-parents-slop so that we can hit Super Saiyan 2 (or even 3) and wake up the latent psychosis of the Taiping Rebellion in the Asian-American soul.

And no, I’m not writing a Straussian article about Marxism (or even Confucianism) as the solution to our spiritual problems. Yes, it is indeed the case that every truly sovereign East-Asian country sent an army of peasants to fight the American death machine under terrifying conditions of extreme technological inferiority. There’s no romance to the blood and gore of a modern war, but martial conditions open the channel to a spiritual plane that we are manifestly no longer able to access with boba tea and matcha lattes.

What is a hopeless battle other than a form of madness?

What is the artist’s vocation other than a form of madness?

Here’s Joseph Andras on the type of soul—of a Ho Chi Minh—who is in urgent need of resurrection:2

And so, he would soon go to Moscow, to Crimea, to Hong Kong; he would be declared dead, cruise the oceans, end up in prison, write poems, and call on poets to coat their verses in steel. And then he would discuss, compose, negotiate, state that blood is only misery; reply that war will break out for a hundred years if the French state continues to ignore us, and then arrive, soft-spoken, at a resolution: let’s fight. Then he would raise an army whose black sandals are carved out of tire rubber, and he would smash the Empire.

Were you moved by this passage, anon?

It gave me shivers when I first read it.

Let me ask you a question, then.

Why did it take a white man to write it?

It used to be that I’d work my full-time job and I’d come home after the gym and instead of doing more work, or studying, or any of the other things that would’ve been objectively beneficial for the advancement of my career, I’d sit at my computer and loop some good music and work on my novel late into the evening.

And I did this for a long time.

I remember, as a consequence of this habit, feeling constantly tired, constantly burnt out, and always feeling that I lacked sufficient time for my art. My job felt like an obstacle to the thing that I wanted to be doing and my entire life felt like a series of obstacles preventing me from doing what I wanted to do—to be a writer. I felt like the constraint of nights and weekends was a set of chains holding me back from greatness.

(I was, after all, going to become the next Chuck Palahniuk, the next Bret Easton Ellis).

My experience of being a (primarily) self-taught writer was that my progress was decidedly linear over time. Successive manuscripts were hierarchically positioned above one another, and my rate of improvement continued year-over-year until I completed my first novel in 2023, some eleven-and-a-half years after I started.

Time has never not been a constraint for my personal development as an artist.

In 2014, I took a year off and lived in Southeast Asia for a couple months. I basically did nothing but work on my novel, lift weights, and walk around a lot. In addition to making some great gains, I finished my first manuscript of INCEL, which received positive feedback from my friends that sustained me for a couple more years.

It was the kind of thing I could do when I was young and it felt incredibly liberatory at the time. I’d been on NPC-rails for most of my life up until that point, and artistic freedom felt better than anything else I’d tasted before.

But I was living on debt. The clock was always going to run out.

I sometimes see this phase of my life as a road-not-taken and think about what might’ve happened had I committed myself to art full-time.

I didn’t have it in me.

Not even close.

It’s tempting here to do that Asian-American whining thing—in my culture, it’s really important to have a job—yeah, no shit, in every culture it’s important to have a fucking job!

When I really think about that moment in my life, my ultimate path came down to three overlapping factors:

1. I didn’t want to give up a certain minimum level of consumption-oriented, middle-class lifestyle.

2. This lifestyle required me to, at minimum, work a normal job and be a normie.

3. I felt like I couldn’t drop below a certain “status floor” in life, which similarly required having a job.

In economics, there’s a concept of something called the “revealed preference”—it’s the way your actions reveal your true priorities.

Roughly 2-3 years ago I read Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian at the recommendation of /lit/. It’s now positioned as something of a “meme” book, but I think the denigration of this novel is largely driven by contrarian status-signaling.

It’s astonishingly well-written, neo-Biblical, magisterial prose.1

What I find equally interesting is how it compares to one of his much earlier works, Child of God.

The comparison between Blood Meridian and Child of God is stark. The sentence-level craft and complexity of the former far exceeds the latter, although McCarthy’s signature is consistent throughout.

See, the thing about McCarthy—one reason he’s so respected as a writer—is that he deserved his success.

And the reason he deserved it is not just because he was willing to put the work in, but because he was willing to put the suffering in.

I remember always being annoyed when people would tell me that they were “spiritual, but not religious.”

For me, this was always the signal of an unserious person.

You might as well say “I’m willing to believe anything so long as I don’t have to pay a price for it.”

The strength of your belief is measured in what it cost you.

The same, I think, is true of art.

Yes, McCarthy eventually made it and found his deserved success, but that does not erase the years of living in cheap motels and being so poor that you need to read books with a light bulb stored in your bag.

What right, then, do I have to complain?

I chose what I chose, did I not?

One reason I think that literary fiction is dying is because the rewards of literary greatness are so paltry relative to other narrative or creative media (film in particular). I’m not going to add to the chorus of people bemoaning the sloppification of mass culture but I am going to note that human beings—including artists—follow incentives.

We are, plausibly, caught in a kind of doom-loop whereby individuals who could become great writers can no longer sustain the multi-decade marathon of practice required to achieve said greatness.

This deficit in contemporary literary greatness furthers the shrinking of the pool of readers, minimizing the rewards even moreso.

I mourn this process as much as anyone, but I can’t help but draw from my own experience in understanding why.

The failure-mode of the aging man is his attempt to recapitulate something that belongs only to youth, without realizing that this earlier phase has definitively passed him by.

In 2023, I took another break from corpo-world and had a year-long period where I was free to write as much as I wanted, more or less. I worked enough to sustain myself on a part-time basis, and no more.

But it didn’t feel like the first time.

It felt notably worse than my first sabbatical in 2014—in fact, it felt bad, because taking a year off has a very different feeling when you’re a middle-aged man versus a young one. And I felt a kind of despair about my future that was so overpowering that I had to promptly return to normie-world so that I could once again afford to eat food at restaurants and buy new clothes without feeling guilty about it or doing arithmetic calculations in my head.

Sometimes I wish I had it in me.

Sometimes I wish I could really walk away from everything and just give it all to art.

But I’m not that person—I am a lesser man, perhaps an inferior man—and that’s okay.

There’s a particular thing that I’ve always done which I’ve heard that other novelists do too—if I find a song that I think is very beautiful, a song that evokes a particular feeling or mood, usually a kind of melancholic beauty—then I’ll listen to that song on repeat for hours at a time while I’m working on a piece of prose.

This gives me less the sensation of writing than it gives the sensation of sculpting.

A novel, to me, is like a sculpture, the substrate of which is symbolic rather than atomic. People mistake text for being “flat,” I think. It’s not really a two-dimensional thing, it’s not even three or four-dimensional. Insofar as it’s a stream of consciousness frozen in the amber of written thought, it’s as expansive as any mood or feeling or experience that can pass through your soul.

The writer, then, is the entity that shapes that form, and gifts it to others.

The classic failure mode of the literary novelist who is just starting out is the act of straining—of trying to force an emotion in a block of prose rather than letting it emerge, organically, out of the deeper conduit of a flow state connected to a truth that lives outside of yourself.

So common is this cul-de-sac that much of the formal teaching in creative writing focuses on stripping things down, on subtracting, on removing adverbs, and so on. The convergence of this trend is just the modern realist style, which of course has been critiqued endlessly on this website as being simultaneously barren and overwrought (Ocean Vuong haters rise up, etc. etc.).

But I would argue that this characteristic over-reliance on the form of austere minimalism is the symptom, rather than the source, of our literary malaise.

Our problems as writers are identical to our problems as human beings: and that problem, if I were to locate it, is that I think for many of us, we have lost our connection to beauty.

By “beauty,” I mean a kind of transcendent feeling, not necessarily spiritual—and definitely not material—maybe it’s God, maybe it’s the Dao, maybe it’s the teleological thrum of ’s cosmopsychism.

The problem with a lot of contemporary autofiction is not merely the lingering on various forms of spiritual or psychological ugliness. It’s the despair at the root of this lingering. The despair forms a kind of carapace that takes the form of irony, detachment, dissociation, and so on. Certainly there is such a thing as “dark” beauty, but more often than not, this needs to be leavened with humor for it to work (this is what makes a Houellebecq novel bearable, for instance).

I think, what I’m trying to say, is that negative affect in the literary sense has the risk of being overly repetitive. To the extent that my first book is guilty of this, that is indeed a reasonable critique, but I sense that the meta has shifted.

I think, in this new wave of accelerationism, holding onto beauty will become the current meta.

2025 was a quiet year for Decentralized Fiction. It felt solid—solid to accrue some serious, credible reviews that helped to establish me further, and it felt remarkably solid to do my first reading. I am grateful for all of these things. It’s a privilege to be read in any capacity when you’re competing against algorithmically optimized dopamine slop. Perhaps this is just the natural bifurcation in the market for eyeballs.1

I hope to start and finish a new manuscript this year. Hopefully, this one won’t take another 11 years of writing. In an ideal world, maybe I’ll have something to show you in early 2027.

Much love to all my readers here, and thank you for being here.

-Han

This year hasn’t been a great year for my own personal reading.

I’ve only read about 30 or so books, which is well short of my goal for 50 books a year. A big part of this has been an excess amount of doomscrolling geopolitics/AI twitter late into the night instead of reading.1

Anyhow, this recent bout of increased distraction got me thinking about the relationship between book length and literary success.

Among the very small cohort of notable contemporary indie literary novelists, I am only aware of two self-published writers who have achieved a meaningful volume of sales: Mike Ma and .2

The majority of my literary analysis on this blog is focused on style, authorial craziness, ideological payloads, and politico-cultural context, but I want to set all of that aside and briefly focus on the simplest possible metric for analyzing a book’s ability to gain a readership—its length.

Mike Ma’s first novel, Harassment Architecture, has over 1,000 reviews on Amazon.3

I asked an LLM to estimate its sales volume based on Amazon Best Seller Rank (ABSR) + some other data like Amazon reviews, and it estimated that this book has sold ~10,000 to 25,000 copies.

By the standards of literary fiction, that is a very large number.

It’s 147 pages long—a short, novella-scaled read.

Delicious Tacos, who is now arguably more widely known (given that Mike Ma has withdrawn from public social media), has accumulated about ~500 reviews for his debut novel:

Tacos wrote a similarly short book (162 pages) which my LLM estimates as having sold ~4,000 to 10,000 copies.

Even by the standards of the median publisher-backed literary novelist, these figures would be considered very good (or even exceptional) outcomes, and I have to wonder if book length was one of the decisive variables that made these sales figures possible.

In the counterfactual scenario, where each novel is 2-3x as long, would these books have taken off in the same way?

Obviously, word count is not a sufficient criterion for literary success, but perhaps it is an increasingly necessary one—particularly for the non-established, indie writer.

I like short books in part because I am enormously distracted by the internet and because I enjoy the satisfaction of having read a book to completion.

On the other hand, a writer should not limit his or her ambition to the attention spans of the market, and you have guys like who’ve done great with longer works as well.

That said, I’m tempted to anchor on the brevity of Houellebecq’s debut, Whatever, which clocks in at 162 (Kindle) pages:

I have a theory.

From the perspective of a reader, a novel is a significant time investment.

Relative to the plethora of narrative entertainment options that are available, it’s a big ask.

A debut novelist is asking a reader for their time and attention. In sales, it’s easier to make a smaller ask than a larger one.

I greatly enjoyed writing a medium-length novel (about ~90k words or so), but I think that the length of the book was in part a “barrier to adoption,” as the techbros like to say.

Thus, for my next novel, I intend to write something much shorter—something that’s roughly the length of Osamu Dazai’s No Longer Human, or Houellebecq’s Whatever. I’ve convinced myself that this impulse is coming out of inspiration from the 20th century Japanese modernists and not from my craven desire for increased approval and recognition.

That’s the funny thing about book sales as a writer—no matter how many you have, it’s never enough.

I’m participating in a literary salon with this coming Wednesday (next week); tickets are available here. We’re talking about Osamu Dazai’s ‘No Longer Human’ in a series about the great Japanese modernists.

I recently read a novel manuscript from another Asian-American writer that made me reconsider my own approach to writing fiction.

As I made my way through the book, which I expect will be published in approximately the next year, I found myself, at numerous points, laughing—wow, he really did go there. Goddamn, that’s impressive…

The book is, I believe, positioned to become a breakout success. It reads somewhat like Whatever, like an American Houellebecq reborn into the body of a contemporary Asian male. This is doubly impressive, because, if we are being honest, most contemporary Asian-American novelists are massive cowards (myself included, unironically). Irrespective of race, many have tried (and failed) to imitate Houellebecq, and this almost never works because it’s too easy to lose the humor evident in his writing and to over-anchor on the dourness and grimdark-modern-sexual-marketplace elements of his fiction.

With regard to my friend’s manuscript, the thing that renders it distinct from the European flavour of Houellebecq’s writing is the uniquely Asian-American voice of the character. The reason I make a comparison here is because there’s another element of Houellebecq’s writing that is almost never successfully imitated—the guy is absolutely fucking deranged.

Being French, this is something Houellebecq does seemingly effortlessly (I’m thinking, for example, of Serotonin’s many ludicrous scenes), but is actually very hard to imitate. Most writers can only fake it. The truth is that almost all of us writers are still holding on to fear; almost all of us are afraid to shout BANZAI!!! and just go full-retard, to borrow an extinct term from the millennial era.

When I say “deranged,” I mean something slightly different than the typical definition, of course, and not in a pejorative way. What I’m really talking about here, truly, is the absence of fear, but calling it “courageous” would invite the same slop-connotations we see in every blurb that claims the same—a novel that’s been traditionally published and is described as “courageous,” is, of course, almost invariably recapitulating the current-era mores of the tote-bag class.

Being deranged in this setting distills into a couple of components:

• Telling extremely difficult, painful social or psychological truths about people in our current era; and with it, a kind of general fearlessness from repercussions that maps as crazy

• Doing it with an explosive or balletic style—with a shit-eating grin on your face

• A certain magical jouissance, the writer captures “it,” where “it” is some combination of voice and mainlining an undertapped current in the zeitgeist.

In my own life, I’ve struggled at times to write as honestly as possible. Sometimes it’s because it’s too painful, but usually it’s because of fear—fear that isn’t really even rational, when, in my case, the stakes are approaching zero.

Fear for an artist is such an insidious thing. You have to almost deliberately cultivate a counterphobic response if you want to go anywhere in dealing with it.

Valorizing artistic ‘craziness,’ of course, can come with pathological manifestations. Artists romanticize drug abuse, mental illness, blow up personal relationships for narrative material—I don’t believe any of that is truly necessary to produce great art, only an uninhibited stream of honne (‘true feeling,’ “as the Japanese say”).

A book is a reflection of the author.

An author is a reflection of themselves, staring into the manuscript as if it were a mirror.

When I look at the great Japanese novelists of the 20th century—Mishima, Dazai, even Dazai’s daughter, Yūko Tsushima—all of them had a certain deranged fearlessness, not of the mortal kind, per se (two of them died by their own hand), but in the artistic sense. There was something special about them that you can only grasp from the feeling you get when you read their novels.

What was it?

What was that special, beautiful, thing that seemed to disappear after they left?

I recently had a very interesting conversation with the Bitcoin OG about censorship resistance, and felt compelled to draw up a new framework that I hope will be useful for other outsider novelists like me.

See, the funnest part of being a literary theorist is the world-building aspect. Of course, I’m using the term world-building in a tongue-in-cheek sense, since I am ultimately trying to correctly model the world on this blog—not merely trying to create some towering complex of verbal and conceptual abstractions.1

If an idea is sufficiently entertaining, it tends to be generative—i.e., people will debate “what the thing actually means.”

Let’s unpack, then, how the idea of decentralized fiction might be variously construed:

• First definition: The Press as the centralizer/decentralizer

  • Fiction that is produced outside of large, centralized, corporate conglomerates (“the big five”)2, and is instead produced by small indie-publishers or self-published works.

  • Typically, we’ve called this “indie-lit” or “alt-lit.” Smaller publishers like Expat Press or Serpent Club Press.

• Second definition: Cultural aesthetics as the centralizer/decentralizer

  • This model shifts the definition of centralization away from institutional centralization to ideological centralization.

  • Under this model, decentralized fiction is any work that escapes the functionally-centralized trend toward cultural homogeneity that is present in the space of literary fiction as a whole—regardless of whether the novel is published by Simon and Shuster vs. your typical indie press.

  • This implies a “Cathedral”-like critique of cultural production in the West: if the vast majority of indie presses are maximally leading-edge progressive in their cultural aesthetics, then they do not represent a meaningful deviation from work that would be operating under similar constraints under traditional publishing.

  • Note that this does not necessarily require an indie-press to be right-wing, but right-wing presses would definitionally be included in this category merely because they’re countercultural in the literary space (even if they’re now presently aligned with the reins of political power in the Trumpian sense). Here I’d be thinking of something like Passage Press as a notable example.3 Another key example would be , which, despite being labelled as “anti-woke” by the Rolling Stone editor who titled the recent magazine article about them, does not appear to be meaningfully engaged in politics at all.

• Third definition: Authorial identity as the centralizer/decentralizer

  • In a PvP-world, a name is no longer a mere signifier, it’s a central attack surface. It has always been the case that writing can get you into trouble, and I want to paraphrase a great tweet recently about how writing has asymmetric downside—roughly, “it’s easy to get in some degree of trouble from your writing, but it’s very hard to become the next JK Rowling.”4 A name is a database-centralizer that makes you more legible to a variety of people, including unstable, angry ones—and most concerningly, the state itself.

  • We are increasingly in a world where Western states, regardless of their leftist or rightist orientation, will severely punish speech. This is the unambiguous trendline and we’ve seen it from Democratic administrations, the Trump administration, European technocrats, European rightists, etc.

  • There are varying levels of OPSEC you can deploy here—I originally wildly overcorrected for this (no one will ever care that I exist, and I mean that in a good way), but would be an example of someone who is writing outsider fiction at the highest-level and remains highly disciplined with his pseudonymity (e.g. not even publishing on AMAZORG, which actually can be done 100% pseudonymously—it just takes a lot of effort).

  • Pseudonymity/facelessness is a form of emancipation: it simply allows you to speak more freely.

• Fourth definition: Discovery & Distribution as the centralizer/decentralizer

  • This model focused on how books are marketed and sold. Fiction that is discovered and distributed in a censorship-resistant fashion is, in my view, the most important axis of decentralization, simply because censorship-resistance is what most effectively promotes freedom of speech.

  • An extremely important caveat: centralized platforms may have relatively minimal moderation, which functionally enables an indirect form of decentralization (weird, right?). To give but one example, the pseudonymous outsider writer made his career publishing Carver-esque short stories about nihilistic modern sex on the #1 Megacorporate-Werewolf-Fuck-Fantasy reading-platform in the world (AMAZORG).

I’d note further that, undergirding all of this is effectively the First Amendment and the decentralized internet itself, without which we would all be horribly lost (and both of which are currently under active, multi-domain assault by a variety of domestic actors).5

The thing that I want to impart here is a very simple framing: every novelist must choose what constitutes an acceptable tradeoff between censorship-resistance and distribution.

Let’s look at some interesting examples of how fiction is discovered and distributed in a censorship-resistant or non-censorship resistant fashion.

Discovering fiction writers: Censorship-resistance vs. Distribution

The reality is that almost no indie fiction is discovered at any meaningful degree of scale via purely decentralized, censorship resistant platforms.

In 2023, I tried to promote my novel on Urbit after hearing Justin Murphy promote it on his podcast for years. I came to discover that Urbit was a horribly broken, shitty Discord replacement with a small number of interesting people on it (it also used to have very a beautiful landing page, but that too is now gone). The result was that I was able to give away a handful of digital copies of my novel and make contact with a couple of people who I was able to reach on other platforms anyway.

I admire the ethos behind a project like Urbit, but executing a project like this is enormously difficult. mentioned a platform like Nostr, which I’d only ever passingly heard of, but it’s a great example of the challenge here:

• Distributed, censorship resistant social networks could in theory be used for discovery of new works of literary fiction.

• Because they typically require more technical sophistication from users, they are high-friction and fail to capture network effects.

• This means that no one goes on these sites, and you can’t promote your novels there.

Well, what about a self-hosted blog? The old classic!

A self-hosted blog is, in general, good, but the discovery of blogs typically regresses to people linking to your blog on various social media platforms, which are themselves centralized platforms. This is because the independent blogosphere, which consisted of extensive cross-linking, is basically dead now (and may it Rest in Peace— has written eloquently about this).

Even Nick Land is mostly just active on Twitter and the occasional podcast, the latter of which is distributed on giant centralized platforms like Spotify anyhow!

What about the bird site?

Well, Twitter, as we all know, has been murdered for new writers courtesy of enshittification, account-throttling and link-punishment courtesy of Slop-King Elon.6

The most interesting platforms here are really Substack itself and a loose affiliation of literary podcasts, and only because the moderation on these platforms is currently very minimal. The essential advantage of Substack is the network effects from the built-in discovery function of Substack notes, recommendations, tagging other writers, etc.

Indirectly, almost all my success is attributable to this website. is right to point out its increasing significance in literary fiction.

Regardless, I remain fearful of what will happen when content moderation becomes algorithmically smarter and you can easily scale ideological policing of text with near-perfect accuracy. “We can’t practically do this” is a great excuse for platforms to have when they’re put under pressure and remains a high-friction barrier to implementing state-driven or NGO-driven speech repression.

Selling and shipping literary fiction: Censorship-resistance vs. Distribution

The elephant in the room is AMAZORG.

For all its faults, AMAZORG, due to its best-in-class logistics/Rube-Goldberg-human-suffering-delivery-fulfilment-pain-distribution system, has arguably enabled a renaissance in indie literature.

Because it’s not cost-effective to aggressively content-police the enormous volume of self-published books sold on their platform above and beyond the absolutely bare minimum level, content moderation on the platform is quite restrained.

Coupled with self-publishing as an option, this functionally enables outsider literature to flourish, particularly when someone applies artisanal effort (and non-trivial budget) to the book design & packaging (here, someone like myself or come to mind).

The problem, of course, is we simply don’t know how long this will last.

Consider alternatives like Expat Press, which do not appear to sell on AMAZORG:

I admire and respect the work of people like Manuel who, as I understand it, print and ship all their own novels with no MNC-intermediary. There’s a real artisanal craftsmanship aspect to this that I sincerely hope continues. It also allows them to print and craft the books to their own specifications and retain greater control over shipping & distribution relative to handing that power over to AMAZORG.

The problem, of course, is the friction in buying.

If someone buys a book on Amazon, even if it’s POD, it arrives very quickly and they can often buy it with a single-click or two. More importantly, readers get into the habit of buying books and everything else off of Amazon online, which even further decreases the cognitive friction of buying.

With many other online retailers, entering in your checkout information adds just enough friction that the efficiency of distribution and ease of purchasing the book dramatically reduces sales. Many book purchases occur at the psychological margin, moments after someone discovers a new writer, and impulsiveness and ease-of-buying are net-good features for the experience of the shopper.

It’s a huge problem that’s more or less inherent to human psychology.

An indie press like has gone the conventional route: distributing on AMAZORG:

Now, there’s nothing wrong with this strategy, but I worry about the hammer coming down on all of us one day. It’s hard to predict, politically, when that might happen, as it would appear to be a function of how much closer the United States ratchets toward a more authoritarian instance of red or blue control.

Lastly, there is a third-way between these two poles, a compromise approach: printing your own books and shipping them, but releasing digital-only books on AMAZORG (I’ve seen Passage Press do this for some books). It remains to be seen if this is a viable strategy or not.

Even more confusingly, censorship can happen at the level of both printers, shippers, and payment processors, which further complicates the process of distribution.

For most of you

For most outsider artists, I’d recommend the following distribution stack:

• Substack, even though it’s centralized, due to lax moderation, for discovery. In parallel, considering mirroring your blog to your own authorial website. Regularly export your e-mail list of subscribers for when the platform (eventually) becomes enshittified in xyz years.

• AMAZORG, for all its faults, for publishing. Consider also Ingram Spark, Apple Books, etc., if you’re so inclined, but only if you don’t mind the extra effort for much more marginal return. Keep the publication files forever and don’t lose them.

Lastly, regarding pseudonymity:

• This is largely a function of personal preference, risk-tolerance, and general DGAF-points. Facedoxx if you want to enjoy the NYC literary scene and can’t functionally be fired or don’t care if you lose your job. Pseudonymity if you’re a normie and just don’t want to deal with even the minor headaches of being a public-facing person with even a small amount of successful traction. In many cases pseudonymity won’t be necessary and is complete overkill (e.g. mine). Remember that it’s a spectrum, and know that here’s a tradeoff between facedoxxing & establishing yourself online vs. being “harder-to-remember” and pseudonymous—I can’t do video podcasts, for example, which would be really fun.

• If you meaningfully touch on anything political and live/work in the US (I’m not in this category), you should work in some margin of error to account for the fact that the US is trending toward increasing levels of civil conflict and internal political repression. Unless you’re specifically an immigrant writing about Palestine and the lobby is putting your name on a targeting list that is going directly to the op of the Trump administration, risk here remains low because notoriety is required for the eye of Sauron to turn on you. That said, it does feel like the general climate is turning for the worse, and it remains possible that relatively anodyne writers will one day be ruthlessly targeted by whoever is in power anyway (whether red or blue, you can’t hide from Palantir, etc.).7

My novel, INCEL, was recently featured by over at on Substack. Now, I might be slightly biased (having been featured there for a Tony Tulathimutte piece), but I have to say I’m consistently impressed by both the output and the quality over at TMR, which was founded by , and David Roberts.

There’s just an enormous amount of energy over at the mag and it’s unusual to see this quantity of writing maintain such a high level of quality given the pace at which they’re releasing these articles (for example, the reviews are consistently excellent across the board). Their pace of commissioning and production is really quite unusual for a literary publication in this category—they typically have very widely spaced out release schedules. It’s also hugely impactful for them to elevate outsider artists who are doing interesting things but are situated on the institutional margin or niche alt-lit circles, etc. New blood injected from outside traditional prestige publishing institutions is sorely needed in the literary fiction space, and TMR has a great mix of established and outsider writers in that respect.

I felt that Daniel’s review was extremely dialed in to the philosophy of the book, and I’d encourage you to check it out—I really enjoy it when a reviewer incorporates a strong sense of their own voice and style into a piece like this.1

I also recently had a great conversation with the writer , a fellow Substacker and novelist who similarly puts a great deal of effort into engaging with contemporary fiction and other writers on this platform, which you can find here.

I don’t typically do written interviews since podcasts are typically the preferred interview medium in the world of decentralized fiction, but I felt that Adam’s questions were really very thoughtful and generative when I reflected back on the process of writing the novel.

I think the most interesting question he posed was about faith and theism, which is a topic I want to explore more in future fiction that I work on. Recently I’ve been thinking about Shusaku Endo’s Silence as a model for what good theistic fiction looks like (at least in the Christian sense), and I’ve felt quite inspired by it.

This year, I’m hoping to start (and finish) a first draft of a short novella—something like the punchy, accessible length of ’s Scenebux—a sweet spot for a time-restricted wagecuck like myself living the 4-hour-life (it’s more like 2-hours, actually, but who’s counting?), but Lord knows if I’ll actually find the time for it.

You get a little bit older and there’s a guy on Instagram who’s telling you that free testosterone drops by 2-3% per year after the age of 30 and then you blink and you’ve lost 1-2 plates off your deadlift (depending on how many discs you’ve herniated) and you find yourself becoming more sentimental at a seemingly physiological level. What we might call the sentimentality of aging is really just a form of acceleration: fundamentally, it’s a function of the movement of time. Senescence is a progressive phenomenon whereby the particles of experience start streaking past you in increasingly blurry bright lines that smooth out into the rim of your peripheral vision, embracing you like a warm halo from the void.

That is to say, you realize you are slowly dying.

Not quite dying in the terminal sense, per se, but in that living-is-a-kind-of-dying sense, an incremental pruning of the various possible branches of the future that remain traversable by the increasingly broken vessel of your body.

This, in turn, breeds a kind of gratitude that is hard to grasp from the halcyon goggles of youth, meaning you appreciate everything a little bit more than you did previously.

One of my favorite memories of New York was getting day drunk on July 4th at a rooftop party in Brooklyn, passing out from trying to keep up with my childhood Russian-Jewish friend’s exceptional pace-of-drinking, and waking up a couple hours later on a bean-bag (or was it a large pillow?), rehydrating from a table of overpriced water bottles, and dancing to the sunset while Lee Burridge played some kind of trancelike house music in the background.

A decade later, I spent another beautiful night on a rooftop in Brooklyn, this time having returned to the city as a writer.

I’ve been away from the blog for a couple of months dealing with life stuff—nothing terminal, thankfully—just a compressed sequence of epiphanies unloading themselves into my brain like shockwaves crumpling various foundational moorings (“yeah im good bro haha”, etc.).

Anyway, all that is to say, I’ve been meaning to write a thank you note that’s somehow lagged behind me.

In July I participated in a 3 x 3 reading with and . Since I like to keep a low profile as a (highly marginal) pseudanon we did a no-camera thing (Matt’s clever idea!) at the Brooklyn Center for Theater Research.1 This was my first reading as a novelist and the first time I’ve attended any kind of public event under my authorial identity, and it was an absolute pleasure to do so. I’m extremely appreciative to both of these guys for letting me share the stage with them given my status as a relative outsider.

I understand now—with much greater, experiential clarity—the benefit of connection, community, and physicality in the world of literary fiction. It’s become such a small, marginal past-time—one that will plausibly die off with with this final cohort of millennial wordcels—that the energetic boost of physical communion feels necessary to keep the flame alive.

Relative to the digital distance of writing and speaking over the internet, I felt a sense of connection with the other attendees that both surprised and moved me. Probably this is because I’m not conditioned to being around other writers (or even readers) in my daily life. Where I live, I sometimes feel like I’m the only person I know who still reads novels, and having a group of like-minded people cohere into a single evening felt very special.

Meeting people who’d deeply connected with my novel—G, for example—is something I’ll deeply treasure for a very long time. Sincerity, I think, is very important to me, particularly in my writing, and it’s these moments of gratitude that sometimes keep me going when I feel like giving up outright and throwing in the towel on writing altogether.

For someone coming from the outside—I never studied creative writing in college, I never did an MFA, I never had friends who were writers (until relatively recently), I never even knew anyone who had written anything professionally—sufficed to say, it was an important personal milestone, and one I’m extremely grateful for.

It was nice, also, to connect with other people from Substack and various friends from New York. It’s always a pleasure to chat with about our experiences as Asian-American writers trying to distinguish ourselves from our peers (as an aside, I’d suggest that everyone keep an eye out for him, as I truly believe he’ll break out in a massive way within the next year or so). also made an appearance at the reading—who, in addition to writing extremely thoughtful and thoroughly researched book reviews, is an absolute unit of a human being who looks like he deadlifts about 500 pounds (possibly more). was kind enough to review my novel on Goodreads and I found his MFA journey to be very interesting (like me, he also has an interest in the convergence of philosophy and fiction). I briefly ran into , who I hope to see more of, particularly as continues its rapid ascent and blistering pace of quality (check out his novel Glass Century, which I wrote about recently). I also enjoyed chatting with , whose novel was recently reviewed in TMR. To cap it off, I learned about some exciting new projects that have recently gotten off the ground—’s , and , a new magazine from and Matt Gasda.

The bottom line is that even for literary anons, network effects matter and geography matters. The density of talent in NYC when it comes to novel-writing really is important, and even for other faceless avatars like me, I’d strongly encourage you to attend some events in the city just to absorb the energy from your peers.

Thank you to everyone who came to the event, and thank you to Matt for giving me a platform to share my novel with the good people of New York.

It was an immense privilege, and I look forward to coming back again.

Whenever I return home to visit the US, I make it a point to drop in as many bookstores as I can. I enjoy the process of following the literary discourse online, but the digital avant-garde takes time to bleed into the physical world.

Like a weather vane pointing in a particular direction, a physical bookstore is a lagging indicator, snapping to alignment with the zeitgeist by way of its literary presentation.

Both in large chain bookstores and small independents, these shelves of recommendations represent a safe consensus, with the placement and emphasis of their various novels-for-sale signaling some combination of cultural and commercial incentives—status rewards and monetary rewards, respectively.

I haven’t yet detected any discernible change in the orientation of these physical signals, but I think something significant is happening in the world of letters.

Rather than call this a “vibe shift,” let’s try to be more precise with our descriptors: we are currently—thanks largely to Substack—in the middle of a shift in the Aesthetic Overton Window in the world of letters.

The beatings will continue until Vuong improves

Ocean Vuong is getting a lot of criticism these days, but it’s not in the context of anything like a literary cancellation.

Rather, Vuong is being criticized for aesthetic reasons.

(For a great piece on this, I suggest Sam Kahn’s latest).

Rather than frame these critiques as critiques of wokeness qua wokeness, I think something more fundamental is happening.

I think, in part, we are living through a crisis of Liberalism that is being triggered by the unraveling of the central moral legitimating narratives of the global American empire.

My view is that these two things are inextricably connected and essentially continuous with one another.

As one comes apart, so too does the other.

This unraveling is a manifold, complex event driven by several interlocking trends in finance, trade, geopolitics, and most importantly in political meta-narratives. This collapse in narrative management is driven by all kinds of factors, but the US-backed genocide of Gaza and the extraordinarily systematic depth of the Epstein scandal stand out as two central forces.

I’m starting to feel that the cognitive dissonance these two events trigger for American exceptionalism among leftist and rightist camps threatens the foundational structure of Liberalism itself.

If the Purpose of a System is What It Does, then elite American institutions are demonstrably optimized for the feeding of two serpentine entities: Blood for the Blood God, and Cum for the Cum God.

If human rights are the North Star of the Liberal project, then why are we moving heaven and earth to help our Most-Favored-Ethnostate liquidate tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of children?

What does democracy mean if you can’t even functionally vote to stop a genocide? What do laws mean when the government doesn’t even bother to wipe the metadata from the security camera footage outside of Epstein’s cell?

Do you understand that they’re laughing at you?

What kind of moral authority could possibly reside behind a podium with the seal of a state that does all of these things and yet still claims moral leadership over the entire planet?

Is it just me, or do you feel like you’re going insane?

I think it’s in light of this crisis that all kinds of narrative threads are snapping, suddenly and violently.

I think, on some level, people are getting this now.

The problem with Vuong, in my view, was not really his overwrought aestheticism.

It was always that he didn’t go far enough.

If you want to understand the Vietnam War, I don’t think you’ll find it in Vuong’s poetry. You’ll find it in Nick Turse’s Kill Everything That Moves and you’ll understand the level of the atrocity, and then you’ll wonder how Liberalism ever survived the act of torching millions of people alive.1

Maybe it’s because they couldn’t record their bodies burning on smartphones.

Don’t try to persuade me of the truth—show me that you know it to be true

Back to the bookstores, where we are reaching a saturation threshold for repetitive visual fatigue. The sameness even extends into the bland, repetitive designs of the covers themselves: bleached with the same bright pastels and self-important minimalist typography.

I’m going to propose a hypothesis that combines my prior critiques to those of David Herod at : the problem with moral didacticism in literature is not the moral epistemology itself, but the lack of conviction in it, which requires the writer to contaminate his story with a form of persuasion.

(who is being persuaded? why—the writer themselves, of course!)

While there is certainly a craft and aesthetic beauty to many of these works, the career of the modal elite fiction writer in this generation might be better modeled as the behavior of a 'moral entrepreneur' rather than an artist outright.

Is the purpose of a novel to tell a story or is the purpose of a novel to convey a moral lesson?

More importantly—are we, as citizens of the global American imperium—in any sort of position to impart moral lessons?

To ask the question is to answer it with our own deep-seated intuitions: any story that tries to hard to persuade its reader has compromised itself. More often than not, novels that lean too hard into alignment with leading edge secular progressive morality fall into this trap: the trap of contaminating the aesthetic object of the narrative with that of literary persuasion.

The consequences of this regime of aesthetic homogeneity have been severe.

The form of literary fiction has the problem of dual-decline. As the masses slip into the dopamine slavery of hyper-optimized consumer smartphone apps, the world of letters increasingly falls under the domain of our cultural elites—elites who are generally more sensitive to the homogenizing forces of this aforementioned culture of purity.

The effect is to compound the decline of an already declining art form, subverting any possibility of rejuvenation and regeneration.

As easy as it would be to levy a conservative critique and pin the blame on "woke-ism," the current dominant paradigm of secular progressive morality is only one instance of a general and even more fundamental facet of human psychology.

There are multiple reasons for this, but let us discuss only one.

World-models and the implicit world-building of the literary novel

The core problem with turning a novel into a parable about woke-ism or any other ideological system is that the "moral lesson" embedded in the text grows beyond the natural boundaries of an organic literary theme. In so doing, it hypertrophies beyond the dimensions of its natural shape and placement within a narrative, exerting a "reality distortion field" that warps any sense of narrative verisimilitude.

Let me explain.

Insofar as a novel must present a coherent setting, it must also present a literary world model.

A “world model” is simply that which its name implies—a model of the world. When a narrative is pulled into the gravity of an overbearing ideological framework, the world models gets distorted: inconvenient facts, characters, and human flaws get flattened and shorn off, flattening the complexity of the world model and widening the gap between the complexity of real life and the *representation* of 'real life' in the novel.

In a sense, this is the job of the sensitivity reader: the identify and amputate any narrative violations that exist in a pre-publication novel. If features of the literary world model conflict with the ideologically-charged world model of leading-edge secular progressive morality, they are cut out entirely.

I think things are slowly getting better now.

It used to be that racial minorities could only be depicted in the strictest possible terms, with their narrative presentation serially gate-kept by a sequence of editorial chokepoints that sifted out any deviation from the proper presentation of that layer of the intersectional stack. A book like ’s Victim couldn’t get published at the peak of this trend.

Reality, then, is a more complicated thing than tribalism seeks to admit.

Art inherently resists instrumentalization. There is a tradeoff between the degree to which a narrative acts as an instrumental tool for persuasion and the degree to which it exists for its own sake, as an end unto itself (e.g. propaganda has less artistic merit). 

Where do we go from here?

Literary fiction, like other art forms, progress through waves of trends. By definition, any current trend is temporally limited. If we consider the zeitgeist as a form of collective consciousness, we can broadly intuit its shape and directionality. Like any sort of natural rhythm that ultimately finds it tether in biology (i.e., in the human animal), literature progresses through alternating cycles of rising and falling (we might call this ‘Kali-Yuga-Wordcel-Theory').

The salient question—now that we have fallen—is how we might rise.

Many artists are counterculturally-inclined, so one potential result would be for "anti-woke" literary fiction to become the new trend.

The problem is that this is not a solution: my experience has been that explicitly coded "anti-woke" narratives—whatever their form—tend to be terrible.

(By the way, I think writers like Adem Luz Rienspects or being pinned as “anti-woke” in a recent editorial headline is largely inaccurate, although I understand why Rolling Stone needed a headline like that drive clicks)

The problem with the culture war vis-a-vis art is not that these topics aren't salient or that they don't relate to important questions of morality and human values, but that instrumentalizing literary fiction to the role of a military unit in the culture war mistakes the purpose of the novel altogether.

In philosophy, this is referred to as a “category mistake”— erroneously placing one thing (persuasion) into the category of another (narrative). Regardless of the ideological content, this is a form of contamination. Ayn Rand's books may be best-sellers, but it's not because they are good stories—rather, they are compelling forms of propaganda.

What we need is to reintroduce chaos, jouissance, and moral complexity to literary fiction—to reduce the 'ideological quotient' of the art form as opposed to merely changing its valence.

A truly generative paradigm shift is not merely a reaction to the existing paradigm, but an orthogonal move away from the paradigm altogether. 

The cynical counterargument is that such a move constitutes a form of moral evasion and a refusal to articulate any notion of human values in a literary work.

Herein lies another error: I'm not in favor of completely abdicating any attempts at moral discourse in the novel, but I am for permitting a greater degree of general openness: an openness to infusing moral complexity, ambiguity, and ideological contradiction back into the top-tiers of literary fiction.

And most importantly, if you believe something to be true, you should know it to be true, and that knowingness should organically emerge in the world model of reality you’re building there.2

We can imagine this as a kind of freedom: a freedom to weave these threads of contradiction and mirror the stubborn messiness of the world as it presents itself to us.

Chaos is the thing that is missing from our over-credentialized, overly-academic literary elites.

I’m a coward—true—but I’m not wrong in my diagnosis.

We need more Mishimas, I think. We need artists who are ready to burn their lives down.

Whether we find it in a flock of birds or the rippling surface of the ocean, it is chaos that connects us to “white hot center” of our emotional selves as writers. Herein comes a narrative spooling out of your chest without the hyper-analytical sequence of purity tests acting as an immediate censor of what is being born, cutting the cord to the energy connecting you to your own work.

I do not and have not ever believed in notions of permanent literary decline. A new wave of fiction is emerging: writers who are not directly concerned with constructing a didactic “woke/anti-woke” normative moral framing, choosing instead to bypass it altogether.

By virtue of this disregard, their works fail to land cleanly on one category or the other, organically accumulating contradictions as these manuscripts grow and mature over time.

This is the syncretic beauty of nature: of its manifold layers of fractal contradictions.

It is only right that we do it justice with words.

I’m doing a reading on Saturday, July 26th at the Brooklyn Center for Theater Research with and .

Please note: no photography is permitted at this event.

You can buy tickets here.

There’s a quote I can’t find (or even really remember) from dating back several years.

I remember it because it once appeared on her Twitter feed and it stuck with me in a painful, barbed manner, reminding me of the youth of my generation: of all the people who’d loved us so sincerely and who we’d nonetheless chosen to abandon in pursuit of the next one.

I’m (extremely heavily) paraphrasing here, but as far as I can remember, it went something like this:

I think people don’t quite appreciate the tragedy of two people breaking apart from one another. Every relationship has its own vocabulary, siloed from the world, that builds something that no one on the outside can see. And when it comes to an end, this private, precious thing gets broken apart irrevocably, adding to what is lost, and adding to the underlying sense of tragedy.

When I was a younger man, I couldn’t get enough narrative grittiness in my life.

Millennials, of course, popularized the idea of the grim antihero, but the appeal of this narrative trope reflected a broader attraction to varying forms of nihilism and a general affinity for wallowing in wretchedness on both a literal and spiritual level.

Of course, this was reflected in our aesthetic tastes as well. This was true not only for more notable mediums like film but also for various forms of literary storytelling—gritty auto-fiction in particular.

I’m not entirely sure why I’ve lost interest in this.

Maybe your soul runs out of steam after a certain level of psychic drawdown and you hit some kind of internal psychological limit.

Or maybe it just gets harder as you get older.

I look back and shudder on how easily we discarded one another, how much contempt we had for sincerity and longing and the codification of avoidant-attachment patterns in dating “rules” that crushed perhaps half the souls of an entire generation.

In my view, the defining cultural characteristic of millennials is that, as a group, we innovated on a number of civilizational dead-ends: in creating new forms of non-reproductive pleasure-seeking, in elevating hedonic utility curves to the peak of meaning, in the essential prioritization of cumming as much as possible.

This too was present in our narrative works, which emptied most vessels of meaning, leaving only various conflicts on the axis of the culture war.

Of course, you might well say that I too am guilty of this.

INCEL is a dark, satirical novel that explores some very difficult existential questions about the essential problem of human meaning.

It is only at the very end of the novel, that—spoiler alert—the protagonist understands the universality of suffering, and in so doing, opens of shaft of meaning.

(“There’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets through,” as they say).

is a writer whose work I randomly encountered scrolling through Amazon’s algorithmic recommendations.

On a whim, I bought it based on an interesting description that reminded me of Terence Malick’s Tree of Life:

Our Last Year is a book about change, transformation and metamorphosis; through the internal narration of its two characters, the novel follows the disintegration and renewal of a marriage, in synthesis with a much wider natural reality. It tells a story of damage and destruction, both painful and restorative, and necessary. The trajectory of the novel – of becoming part of the planetary process, awake to it, enlivened by it, compassionate towards it – is dramatised through two minds, with an honesty and openness that urges us to contemplate our relationships with others and with our environment.

I’m glad I did, because I loved this novel.1

A neo-Buddhist presentation of meaning

Rossi is an interesting figure in that he’s arguably very well credentialed but has a relatively minimal footprint online (which I assume is a deliberate choice on his end).2

Rather than double-click on his life, though I want to focus on his book.

Our Last Year does two things as a novel that I found very compelling:

1. Stylistically, it uses long, run-on sentences that reach a potent lyrical register that exceeds the apparent simplicity of its component words. While it takes some getting used to as a reader, after the first couple of pages, it’s smooth and rewarding.

2. Philosophically, it interweaves descriptions of natural processes—biological, climate-related, and planetary—in a way that captures the rhythmic oscillations of nature and life. This structure points toward a more rigorous thematic depth than you would typically find in more politically-inflected contemporary fiction.

Many contemporary writers, I feel, hide behind minimalist realism in order to mask more general deficits in their skills.

And even fewer have any interest in engaging with deep existential questions for which modern secular culture struggles to formulate a satisfactory answer for.

Our Last Year stands out, and I felt captured by this book almost immediately.

The book starts with an account of a relationship that is in the midst of failing:

The novel’s narrator swings between the subjectivity of the husband and the wife, sometimes lingering on a more expansive, naturalistic observation of the world.

I was reminded of the biological and planetary scenes in Terence Malick’s Tree of Life in the way that these observations were seamed into the flow of the story.

This oscillation between the mundane and the planetary doesn’t quite feel Biblical in character, but rather, feels like the continuity of all things.

It’s not an Abrahamic work in the way that Tree of Life is, but instead, it dips into the thematic reservoir of Buddhist spirituality and perhaps even gestures to certain adjoining, related ideas such as Panpsychism or even Cosmo-psychism.

Flowing between the scale of time, biological, and climate, Rossi depicts relationship fatigue in a way that understands the treadmill of modernity: why keep working on your relationship when there exists the possibility of exiting it altogether and fucking someone else?

This exhaustion is, in this marriage, symmetrical:

Indeed, it is interesting to contrast Our Last Year’s millennial optimism with ’s Sleepers—to me, these books sort of read as a kind of interesting near-contemporaneous pairing.

Here Rossi presents the allure of the extramarital, scoped as an easy slipstream back onto the treadmill of dopamine:

The trauma plot rears itself again

I go back and forth on the literary debate about the trauma plot.

On the one hand, defining a character’s developmental arc by way of childhood experience feels very intuitively correct and, to be fair, largely aligns with the scientific literature on topics like abuse and its semi-deterministic downstream psychological consequences. Here, I have to reiterate all the standard statements around mental illness being “real” in the fundamental sense, correlated to brain states, and driven by various neuroscientific forces and so on.

(Yes, all of that is real).

And yet, I also agree that the centrality of trauma as a narrative device in contemporary narrative feels overused, and, at times, sickly pornographic, reductive, and, at worst, repetitive.3

To an extent, Our Last Year ascribes the wife’s desire to escape her marriage to various forms of childhood neglect and and sexual abuse. In this framing, the ongoing relational neglect from her current, (non-abusive) husband activates her latent childhood trauma, contributing to the fracture of the marriage.

But what separates it from other novels of this generation is that this revelation is a waypoint in this character’s journey, and doesn’t expand to fill the entire space of her life’s meaning or trajctory. And what I mean by that is not that the novel believes that this traumatic abuse didn’t affect her, but that it situates that abuse within a much broader and deeper presentation of the character’s own agency and ability to effect positive change in her own life.

That is to say: it explains without lingering, and moves on.

Underlying this, I feel, is a Buddhist inflection to the presentation of the character’s backstory.

Life is suffering, after all.

Therapist-as-priestess, therapist as God

My memory is once again failing me and I can’t find the viral Substack post about millennials seeking moral instruction from their therapists and a concomitant validation of their life choices. Therapists, in this theoretical framework, are implicitly expected to answer fundamentally normative questions about how to live rather than maintain the professional neutrality that is nominally expected of them.

Once again, I’m personally of mixed minds here.

I think therapy can often be highly beneficial but it’s simultaneously true that, like any other treatment, it has various failure modes including a validation-seeking and pathological affirming of bad life choices.

As a society, we’ve dispensed with God and any overarching spiritual architecture of normative morality.

Is it any wonder that we want our therapists to provide the moral instruction we still crave?

Our Last Year presents a couples counselor as a sort of wise priestess with near-perfect knowledge of both characters and their attendant path of healing:

It’s perhaps the only thing about this novel that felt like it caused some friction for me: not because I didn’t find this particular character’s advice practically effective in restoring the relationship, but because I felt that the character was almost too faultless in the depth of her wisdom.

But then I realized—is this really so implausible?

Is it so thoroughly implausible to posit the existence of a very good therapist?

The therapist/couples counsellor posits some interesting comparisons: is male pornography use really that different from casually flirting with other men?

Aren’t each of these instances of lust in your heart?

Interestingly, the story centers questions of trauma, behavior, and moral responsibility in the context of childhood abuse:

Ultimately, I don’t feel that Our Last Year is rigorously attached to a normative account of therapy as a form of perfect wisdom or healing. You have the sense, when reading it, that the story isn’t trying to convince you of anything. It just flows forward, energized by a matter-of-fact description of events defined by their own unyielding sincerity:

But what if you’d tried?

has a very good article called “Millenials Will Age Terribly” that I often find myself going back to.

In the coming years, the defining characteristic of the aging, solitary millennial might well become regret.

“But what if I’d tried?”

“What if I’d tried to make that relationship work?”

What I love about Our Last Year is its commitment to trying—to not giving up, or, better yet, to abandoning the rubric of self-actualization and the notion of freedom as an unmitigated good.

It’s very much the antithesis of social script that we developed and distributed, at great cost, to our entire generation.

Thinking through /newwave/romanticism/ and its taxonomic discontents

I firmly believe that one of the secrets of life is that you can just meme things into existence.

The power of hyperstition is that it isn’t a strict problem of logic: particularly for literary or artistic movements, categorization isn’t a hard boundary. It’s a fluid, organic membrane that inserts itself around various works of similar composition.

Some definitions of the New Romanticism or /newwave/romanticism/ will, for the sake of authority, look toward the past as a kind of formal anchor for the definition. Maybe they’ll quote Byron or certain ways of living as necessary logical ingredients of the modern instantiation of the movement.

But I think we can take a liberatory view of hyperstition here, and simply reformulate the meaning of what these boundaries might look like without very much attachment to the past.

We are free to splinter in our direction.

I think, very simply, that /newwave/romanticism/ needs only a simple, straightforward core to persist as a new, self-replicating category: all it has to do is care about beauty, sincerity, and meaning, and present a positive vision of these things that the human soul can wrap itself around.

In this respect, Our Last Year stands as a central column.

Coda: Tao Lin interviews Alan Rossi

I’ve resisted watching this interview with and because I wanted to review the book in a vacuum, but I’m posting it here for context.

I want this book—and by extension, Alan—to get the attention it rightfully deserves, and some of you may find this dialogue interesting.

After posting this, I’ll watch it myself as well.

I think for a certain type of literary purist, shilling your work feels incredibly crass. When you grow up reading stories about how Cormac McCarthy was so poor that he kept a light-bulb with him to read deep into the night inside a string of cheap motels, this kind of aesthetic asceticism contains a certain kind of sense to it. It’s the thing you see portrayed in various mythology-building Hollywood literary biopics: the shining path of the single-minded artist unwilling to do anything other than the art itself.

I have great respect for people who have the capacity to struggle like this.

This focus on purity is not altogether without context—in an era of unlimited vanity, even a little bit of self-promotion can start to feel like a form of self-excess because of the gravitational pull of audience capture and algorithmic reward, factors which weren’t present in earlier eras of micro-celebrity. More generally, I’m certain that traditional forms of literary careerism are soul-crushing for most of the participants in the traditional ecosystem.

I have never thought this way, because for me, book marketing is a game.

I am spiritually and culturally American. I have been playing games my entire. I love games!

Further to that, I’m a nobody—a pseudanon on the internet—with no agent, no literary press, and no institutional backing.1

The underlying problem for the purist is that literary writing and book marketing are essentially orthogonal skillsets. It’s hard to do things that are decorrelated skillsets. But! If you look at history, I think it’s surprisingly easy to accidentally retcon the peak wordcel-era (the back half of the 20th century notable novelists) as an era of greater literary purism.

With the benefit of hindsight, I think many of us have an unconscious bias where we conceptualize famous novelists as people who were just organically “living their lives” rather than, on some level, deliberately cultivating literary personas in a less technologically sophisticated era of mass media distribution.

For example, here’s a photo of Yukio Mishima just hanging out and doing nothing in particular:

Time has rendered this picture of Mishima into something more serious than it really is, I think. What we have here, frankly, is an influencer photoshoot. Mishima loved doing this. He absolutely loved doing fabulous literary influencer cosplay photoshoots. If anything, I am jealous of his aura. The man was prodigious, producing a voluminous amount of work, and still found the time to cultivate a form of self-serious literary celebrity.

Granted, Mishima didn’t need to do this kind of persona-building in order to drive his novel-sales.

But it didn’t hurt, did it?

It’s 2025, WW3 is about to start, and we’re still here talking about him, aren’t we?

Making it in America (for wordcels)

One of my favorite narrative structures is the “making it in America”-type story. I loved How To Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid, and I also very much enjoyed Flesh by David Szalay, which recently came out this year.

Perhaps this is because I am an immigrant, and perhaps this is because is because I love the idea of climbing, but these types of striver stories have always appealed to me.

What’s fun about striving to becoming a successful, renowned novelist in America is that it’s like striving to become a successful and renowned cellist or Magic: The Gathering card player—absolutely no one gives a shit.

There’s a beautiful freedom in the bar being so low.

Some thoughts on the First Things thinkpiece about INCEL

First things first, I’m grateful to Scott Litts for putting in the work to write a compelling analysis of my novel, INCEL. It’s a significant personal milestone for me as a writer and will help to draw out the long tail for the novel as it approaches 1,000 copies sold (I’m ~75% of the way there!).

For me, I have to situate Scott’s review behind my own motivation for writing the novel, which I always viewed as largely a philosophical type of story.

Let me explain.

One of the things that has repeatedly frustrated me about (some) modern literary fiction is how thin the thematic layer feels. That’s not to say a novel necessarily has to explore some critical load-bearing philosophical concept, only that the lack of interest in engaging with these topics sometimes feels like it’s secondary to a more general sparsity of the author’s world-model and general lack of depth.

The general critique of contemporary novelists working right now is that they are often overly focused on hyper-contemporary political issues to the exclusion of other equally but less interesting topics. This creates a kind of “time-decay” effect where the books get historically pinned to, say, specific conditions under the Obama era, in a way that rapidly depreciates how interesting the story is in retrospect.

To give but one recent example, I enjoyed Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom, a book about an African doctoral researcher working set in the context of her religious Christian upbringing.

A concept like this is an incredibly rich vein of philosophical exploration: you could, for example, closely track the protagonist’s fall from faith and how this psychological journey is intertwined with actually impactful metaphysics around, say, the problem of suffering, or the epistemological problems with faith as an argument for theism in general.

Instead, you don’t really get much of that, and the narrative lens zooms in very close to a much less interesting story about her brother’s opiate addiction problems. It felt to me that it never substantively expanded into a wider aperture around faith, religion, and meaning.

I think I understand why. Modern realist style is averse to anything other than capturing moment-to-moment verisimilitude, but its definition of verisimilitude evades psychological accounts of religious, metaphysical, or philosophical viewpoint changes.

It’s hard to dramatize an internal intellectual conflict without it being boring!

In hindsight this makes perfect sense: the reason it’s hard to write a philosophical novel because the novel is, by default, not the optimum vehicle for philosophy (that would be the essay!).2 The default failure mode of the philosophical novel is a descent into long back-and-forth dialetical arguments between characters acting as mouthpieces for paragraph blocks that belong in an essay or an academic paper.3

With INCEL, I wanted to focus my critique on scientism through the lens of ideological capture on the internet and what this feels like on the inside rather than as a set of propositional arguments.

It’s no secret that gender discourse has driven everyone completely insane in the past 15-odd years, and modern inceldom is merely a subset of this more general problem.

But fascinatingly, these problems are upstream of scientific and philosophical developments—Darwinism, materialism, scientism, and reductionism—that arguably began hundreds of years ago.

What feels hyperlocal to the internet age actually has a long lineage.

Enter Litts

Scott Litts is a writer, filmmaker, and critic with a varied body of work that you can find here on his website (you can check out some his experimental films here).

The worldview explored in Incel is a crystallization of what Jean Baudrillard terms “obscenity” in his 1979 work Seduction.4 The obscene, for Baudrillard, is less about explicitness than an excess of rational clarity, a stripping away of mystery and ambiguity until all that remains is the brute, predictable fact of material reality. In an obscene culture, “Everything is to be produced, everything is to be legible, everything is to become real, visible, accountable; everything is to be transcribed in relations of force, systems of concepts or measurable energy.” Obscenity is a fixation on quantifiable certainty and total disclosure.

Obscenity stands in opposition to Baudrillard’s twin concept of seduction. Seduction derives its charm from uncertainty and secrecy. It is the levity and frivolity of fun, as opposed to the stern purpose of work. Seduction is largely defined by what is omitted, unknown, unknowable. It resists, above all else, explicit definition.

Here Litts frames the intense scientific reductionism of anon in the novel as a form of Baudrillardian obscenity: romantic relationships are something to metricised, and this quantification reduces the organic to the obscene.

There’s (understandably) a lot of hand-wringing about “modernity” in various social and cultural thinkpieces, but the reason I think the modern incel is so significant is because he (or she) is a harbinger of what is to come.

What is to come, you say?

I think, essentially, a terminal unraveling of human meaning driven by immersive AI-powered products and services. Markets—in the form of technocapital acceleration and dopamine capitalism—are a sort of path-finding algorithm. They exist to connect the shortest possible distance between desire and reward, and in collapsing that distance, they erase the struggle of striving toward goals in general that we are evolved to endure.

This manifests as a form of radical and escalating disempowerment and short-circuiting of goal-seeking behavior whereby people experience a collapse in personal agency and drop out of whatever agentic games they would otherwise find meaning in (work, romantic relationships, and so on).

The Japanese Hikkikomori was, we now know, merely the East Asian precursor analog to the American incel. Japan, being at the forefront of modernity and dopamine capitalism, simply hit the perimeter of social breakdown first.

I think people don’t understand how rapidly this trend is going to accelerate and how economically redundant most of us are about to become because quantification isn’t going away anytime soon (it’s getting worse). Scott’s review taps into this mega-trend.

How to shill your way into a credible literary magazine

Occasionally, I have people who notice my (very modest) level of niche traction and ask me for a couple of pointers.

While I’m certainly grateful to be featured in First Things, the truth is I don’t have any special insight into book marketing. There are many self-published writers who are far superior when it comes to achieving book sales. To cite but one of many examples, I could cite dozens of writers who write Werewolf-fuck-fantasies who are orders of magnitude better at book marketing than I am.

But of course, writing genre fiction is a different game, so I’m being somewhat facetious here. We all know that literary fiction is its own tiny sphere of niche competition. That is to say that marketing literary erotica is different than marketing (the much more niche) literary fiction category.

My strategy consists of three components:

1. Consistently blogging and micro-blogging (via Notes) on Substack, which is now the most important social network for writers.

2. Cultivating friendly relationships with other writers online via DM’s on Substack and X, including appearing on their podcasts (this is how I met Scott).

   1. If I could, I’d consistently go to literary parties in NYC to amplify this effect, but I can’t because I don’t live there and am almost never in town.

3. Putting effort into online authorial visual design (e.g. my PfP), branding (consistent visual design elements across social media profiles), and especially the book cover (book covers are hugely important and you should invest a lot into making them good). I think a lot of people neglect this aspect. I like the design aspect and have a lot of fun with it.

That’s it.

Being “taken seriously” in the literary-criticism sense is a function of (1) the type of work you’re outputting and (2), your reach/eyeball-exposure, the latter of which is merely a funnel for the actual work itself.

Beyond that, critical exposure has a natural kind of compounding effect: each review begets additional reviews, and more prominent reviews tend to beget more prominent reviews and so on. Starting this virtuous compounding cycle is difficult but doable if you just keep churning new stuff out.

As a writer, you have no control over this other than writing the best stuff you can.

The reason that this strategy outlined above is not 1-to-1 reproducible is because its success is contingent on the specific execution of all of the above multiplied by some large factor of randomness. I happen to have more readers on this blog than I ever anticipated gathering largely because the Substack algorithm favored some random piece I wrote about the lack of interesting Asian-American cultural production.

I don’t perfectly remember how I first met Scott online, but it was over Twitter (we have some overlapping e-friends and travel in partially overlapping circles online). We shared a common interest in ’s excellent Nutcrankr and I offered him a free copy of my book. Some months later he read it and told me he was working on an article because he liked the philosophical content in the novel. Later, he finished it, and recently, it got published.

Note that this sequence of events was almost entirely out of my control: it’s almost wholly a function of Scott’s established pedigree and general stature in the NYC literary community (previously, he’s also helped publish an Expat novel.

While I think Twitter is largely useless for promotion, I think it’s still useful for meeting other writers. Just being active and putting out stuff will eventually gain you attention, and people who like your stuff will eventually find you.

That’s it.

That’s the whole playbook!

Aura-farming your way to success

As a closing thought, I think that one of the underrated factors that explains book marketing success is the charisma of the novelist themselves. This amplifies the effect of everything else as a kind of success multiplier. A lot of people complain about literary nepo-babies (sometimes deservedly) but my personal theory is that charisma is more often the core success differentiator, even among people who are well connected.

Now, for myself—pseudonymous, anime-avatar, voice-changer—it’s not really possible to convey any sort of corporeal charisma. The most I can do is put effort into the visual design and branding of my online avatar.

Maybe it’s because I recently took a trip to Japan, but lately, I’ve been impressed by a lot of Japanese artistry and cultural production—and in particular, the presence that some of their artists are able to convey.

This clip below recently went viral, and illustrates my point:5

Where does this charisma come from?

I think, in its purest form, it stems from a lack of self-consciousness. Last month I spent some time in Tokyo and Osaka, and (as always) it was interesting to contrast the native population’s body language to that of my generation of Asian-Americans. The difference in self-consciousness between these two groups couldn’t be more extreme. I felt like I was in another universe.

If we scope in on the literary implementation of charisma, I think it’s ultimately less about consciously cultivating a certain persona (which feels fake, like DFW) than it is about unconsciously capturing a certain form of energy that I think matters most.

Think back to the Mishima photoshoot from earlier in this post. There’s an incredible intensity to him that runs deeper than the obvious performative layer. That’s what I mean by energy in this case.

It’s a form of artistic energy, a stream of life that you channel moreso than generate de novo. It’s the thing-that-is-not-reducible that is perhaps the most important thing, because literary capabilities aside, it’s the thrust that makes a writer’s work interesting, and interesting work always has an easier time gaining distribution. These things then manifest in the literary work itself and in the author’s IRL-presence.

When I survey the landscape of Asian-American novelists, my feeling is less that something is technically missing—for example, in terms of their prose-level skillset—and more that something is energetically missing. Mishima had it. (Maybe) Murakami had it (for a period of time, before he started repeating himself).

The Japanese had the sauce and there is no denying it.

Who’s going to get it next?

Regardless of the corporeal limiter, a pseudonymous writer should still do what they can in this category. Maybe digital avatars will progress enough that persona cultivation becomes more possible. Lately, I’ve been playing around with updating my authorial avatar to add another boost to my profile on Substack. I recently combined some generative art with a new character design and some simple Japanese-style J-Pop album art with Chinese lettering.

I’m out here having fun with it!

Coda: Buy my novel (and rate it also!)

If you enjoyed this post, I’d ask you check out my debut novel, INCEL, which was originally published in 2023, but remains as topical as ever.

(Also, for those of you who have read the book, adding a rating or review on Amazon or Goodreads helps me a lot).

Thanks!

First, some quick updates:

enjoyed my novel, INCEL, and posted a review on his eponymous blog:

But as you may have intuited even before I quoted that sequence, ARX-Han’s dedication to realism with the crassness of the language chosen and scenes described, combined with the hyper-intellectual ‘thinks he’s not an autist’ internal-monologue of Anon, means my suggestion that the broader public should read this is nonsense, really. It is for a certain type of person, I am not going to lie. But that’s why its great. ARX-Han did not compromise.

Honestly, I do not think I am exaggerating, it goes: American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis, Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk, and Incel, ARX-Han.

I’ll be appearing on his podcast sometime this summer as we finalize a recording date.

also reviewed the book on The Word Dump, but found it challenging for other reasons:

On the whole, I feel a bit mixed about INCEL after finishing it. On the one hand, the style and prose are a masterwork that are beautifully written and articulated. It’s definitively different and unique from other fiction on the market, unabashedly itself in a sea of pandering fiction that toes the line as though it’s afraid to offend anyone. On the other hand, the majority of this book confronts uncomfortable topics from the POV of a deeply troubled individual.

The podcasts will continue until morale improves

I have a ton of fun meeting other writers online, having conversations, and sharing these conversations with others. For whatever (hilarious) reason—probably my vocal modulator—the views on my audio interviews are always much lower than my standard written pieces.

It’s a good thing I don’t need to make any money on this website, then!

In any event, and I had an interesting and wide-ranging discussion on a number of interrelated literary and cultural topics, including the decline of Twitter, Substack as a platform for indie writers, why I got into writing, the limits of promiscuous-autofiction-as-a-genre, inceldom, fandom-vs-race-based identity formation (particularly among millennials who came of age prior to wokeness), geopolitical multipolarity as a force for artistic generation, the current state of literature, the value of agency as an indie-novelist (shoutout to ’s favorite term ^_^), and the joys of being a wordcel in the year 2025.

Contra

Terminally Online

The neo-futurist concept artist Syd Mead (Blade Runner, Aliens, or Tron) called science fiction “reality ahead of schedule.” In the digital age, that train travels faster than ever, and its terminally online passengers are speeding along the frontiers of an experience that folds together the virtual and the real. Physical space is reduced to a grid wher…

Listen now

a year ago · 12 likes · Pedro L. Gonzalez

Pedro has an interesting background in that he came up in the political sphere and has since left that space and has chosen to become more literary. Although we didn’t intend to, we had an interim discussion about Trump and the absurdity of the tariff policies (which have since been rolled back).1

Podcasts are a great simulacrum of the literary salon and I’m glad that Substack has great integration with the audio component for writers.

While no platform is perfect, I think it’s about as good as it could be.

Desiderata

I recently completed some notable commentary or reviews on a number of titles that just came out:

• ’s excellent Glass Century recently came out to widespread acclaim: rather than add another typical review, I got into some theorycel musings around NYC and literary notions of human agency.

• ’s similarly strong The Sleepers was a brutal takedown of millennial self-actualization converging on utilitarianism.

• I’ve got 2 other books in my review queue: The Agonies and Stop All the Clocks.

• Lastly, I’m working on a review of ’s excellent Our Last Year, which was a truly underappreciated gem of a novel.

People seem to really be connecting with the book reviews, so they will be making up a good chunk of the blog’s focus moving forward. I’m now firmly convinced that shining a light on great but unappreciated works is the most positive-sum thing I can contribute to decentralized fiction, so that is what I will continue to do!

’s Glass Century debuts today.

It’s an ambitious multigenerational novel that’s interesting not merely because of its depth but also because of its timing: it’s the kind of book that you just don’t see attempted very much anymore.

Glass Century primarily follows the life of Mona Glass, a young, headstrong woman living in New York City in the early 70’s.

The books spans several epochs in the city’s timeline and while there are quite a few opportunities here for traditional literary analysis, for me, the most important distillation comes down to a single needlepoint of an idea—and it’s not the obvious thing you would draw on (which is the book’s engagement with the confluence of human and urban time).

Imagine a pyramid of literary analysis that sequences something like this: descriptive prose → dialogue → characterization → plot → themes → meta-themes. Now, at the highest possible level of abstraction—at the summit of the pyramid—the biggest theme of Glass Century is arguably its conception of human agency and its connection to the effect of living in New York itself.

Some background first.

For me, the appeal of literary fiction doesn’t merely draw from the aestheticism of it, but also of its ability to create a kind of holographic simulation in the mind of the reader. The simulation isn’t a 1:1 drawing of reality, but a narrative superstimulus: an accelerated presentation of the stream of consciousness where pivotal events are timeline-compressed and actions are therefore magnified in their consequences.

As a general rule, the most compelling simulations trend toward active protagonists whose sense of individual agency often exceeds ours. Note that this need not expand into the area of fantasy or outright escapism. It’s not so much about the “hero’s journey” as it is about the magnification of regular life and its pivotal choices: characters act in their world, their choices have (highly variable) consequences, and these consequences beget another round of pivotal choices.

In modern conditions, the speed of this cycle often feels slow, drawn out, and the opposite of agentic: days and weeks and years of living through automatisms and longitudinal life-scripts where we glide by on-rails.

What makes Mona Glass an interesting character is not any fantastical account of her being a notable figure in the cinematic sense but merely the feeling of her choices. The novel’s juxtaposition between its protagonist and the city seems to present an implicit commentary beyond the traditional tropes of New York as a place where “anyone can make it,” but rather, of the city as a kind of ambient leverage on your freely-willed choices, a sort of environmental multiplier that magnifies human agency beyond its normal parameters.

The thing that’s special about New York isn’t a function of its network effects in publishing or finance or anything else, but in the actual feeling of these effects: almost by magic, there’s an ambient, expanded freedom of action that you get from the place, one that gets activated beyond a certain threshold of energetic urbanism.

This, for me, is the very subtle and hard-to-articulate beauty that leaks through the metastructure of the novel. If I were to connect it to a cinematic analogue, it calls to mind the ending sequence of Gangs of New York and it’s time-lapsed montage of urban evolution that, like Glass Century, seems to pose the exact same question—what is a city other than amalgamation of stories?

How many great stories have bloomed (and died) in this vast grid of streets and skyscrapers?

Glass Century even seems to gesture toward an account of New York as a kind of super-agent: a kind of sprawling narrative superstructure that directs the flow of the entire country, like some enormous magnetic compass pointing in a certain direction.

This was what I liked most about the novel, and in particular, in the way this came through its ending.

Let me digress: I spent a fair while debating how to approach Barkan’s novel in my Substack. First, there are already a surfeit of reviews that have emerged, which include recommendations from Pulitzer prize winners (Joshua Cohen) and a glowing review in The Wall Street Journal. I didn’t want to approach things too directly when differentiation is always my prime directive for this blog.

Second, I had the privilege of reading a late-stage version of the manuscript when it was already very close to publication. My notes were really quite simple: it’s a serious, elegantly written novel that’s interesting in part because it seems to entirely lack a true contemporary—I’d have to go back about 15 years to think of another novel in this category. (I’m talking about Franzen, Foer and so on).

So, to put it in somewhat crude terms: how many guys under the age of 40 are currently putting out novels like this?

I suppose we are all by now somewhat tired of the discourse around the decline of fiction by (and for) men. Of course, this discussion was at some point important to have: sometimes the dog that didn’t bark is the most interesting thing to talk about!

Now, a new consensus has appropriately emerged: it’s time to lean away from discourse and lean toward production.

And production, for a guy like Barkan, is really no problem at all.

Perhaps what’s most interesting about him as a writer is how agentically he has approached his own career as a novelist and writer. In this manner it’s hard for me not to place him and in roughly the same category: to me, these guys seem self-made in the agentic sense.1

What do I mean by this?

I mean that guys like Barkan are as much engines as they are writers: they press forward and create their own networks and opportunities. Nepo-babies they are not.

For those of you who hadn’t read him yet, Ross regularly contributes top-shelf literary criticism on Substack, and his breadth is one of the things that makes him a compelling writer: any objective evaluation of his placement would situate him somewhere on the vertical slope of the power laws in the attention economy: for one, he’s an unusually successful journalist with tens of thousands of subscribers.

If you have any level of engagement with writing, you would know how difficult it is to enter that tier of attention.

That he also writes very eloquently about the honesty of literary ambition or about the underrated benefits of pro-social co-operation between literary writers indicates a level of versatility that’s very hard not to be impressed by.

Lastly, Barkan goes out of his way to elevate other small, niche writers, including yours truly—for which I am deeply grateful for. As much as I can, I try to pay this forward by recommending books by other writers who I feel deserve a higher profile: , , , , , , , and many others come to mind.

The body is a form of literary interiority

A coda, then, to Mona Glass’ representation of human agency is the way in which she inhabits her own body. Agency, in its most fundamental sense, is a physical thing, after all: when a unicellular organisms exhibits agency, it is always through movement, not computation.

Even speaking is a form of movement!

Thus, my favorite sequence in the book (apart from the very ending) is actually a tennis battle that appears about one quarter of the way into the novel.

The easy analogy here would be compare it David Foster Wallace’s famous profile on Roger Federer, but a (much funnier and perhaps more subsconsciously accurate) comparison would be to psychoanalyze Ross and speculate that he unconsciously drew upon some of the genre-defining battle sequences in Dragonball Z, which he grew up enjoying as a child.

The following description, for me, carries the tiniest perceptible inflection of a deeply hateable Japanese anime antagonist:

I read the tennis battle end-to-end standing in a queue for something which I barely remember because I wanted this character to lose so incredibly badly.

The integration of Mona’s strategizing during this scene reads like a war—which is one of the reasons I liked it so much.

The joy of reading fiction as a literary writer is that you can appreciate the craft of composition with another layer of appreciation: you have a more intuitive sense of how difficult it is to do something.

In the age of high-fidelity cinema, animation, and CGI, it’s often said that the novel is an obsolete technology for depicting visual action.

I agree with this judgment—but I differ on a single detail.

While the novel may no longer be as salient for depicting visual action, it’s irreplaceable for inhabiting physical action, because living in your body is moreso a feeling than it is a observation.

Notice the way Barkan seamelessly moves between proprioception (internal awareness of the body), antagonistic strategizing (guessing what Alec is thinking), and the actual events of the tennis battle.

This, to me, is a beautiful exercise in craft that demonstrates the magic and beauty of prose fiction: of its ability to seamlessly migrate from interior to exterior and back again, like a stream that is continuously changing course.

Rebooting literary culture with high-agency, “live-players”

I recently came across an interesting tweet by Matthew Zeitlin (no idea who this guy is) about the decline of literary culture and thought it was interesting.

What’s salient about this take isn’t the prediction itself, but the sentiment behind it: the decline of jazz is a function of its irrelevance, and its irrelevance is a function of its lack of energy.

And lack of energy is downstream from lack of agency.

The passivity of traditional publishing is infuriating.

Essentially, it comes down to waiting for permission?

Dear agent, can you please read my book?

Dear editor, can you please choose my book?

Dear sensitivity reader, can you please approve my sentences?

Dear Twitter, can you please tell me I’m good?

And so on.

Look—I don’t know what the future holds for the medium of the novel, but increasingly, my gut says that it won’t quite go the way of jazz or classical music. Even with the progression of high-fidelity AR and VR narrative immersion, my intuition is that narrative text is just too strong of a cognitive anchor to get obsoleted in the way that a specific musical genre can get turned over and obsoleted. The proper analogy, then, would be closer to music itself going the way of Jazz (not just one specific genre within it).

If the novel is to have a future—and I believe that it will—it will be because people like Ross and striving and building from a well of energy that compounds into a sincere regeneration of the form itself.

And I’m all for it.

Preamble: We might as well dispense with blurbs in general

Depending on how fast you read, a good novel will subtract anywhere from five to fifteen hours from your life.

This is not so much a utilitarian calculation as it is a aesthetic and spiritual one—the question you have ask yourself before you commit to reading a novel is whether or not it will give more than it takes.

Will it add a certain richness to your stream of consciousness?

Or will it merely consume units of time?

Because I’m an obsessive, I find it difficult to start (but not finish) a novel.

To me, the act of giving up on a book feels incorrect and abortive; like pausing a simulation that’s meant to progress to its natural and deserved conclusion.

Time is a generally a good filter for choice of literature: it’s easier to select books that have persisted in their readership over the years. Good works tend to accumulate (rather than lose) their reputation over time; it’s almost as if literary merit exerts a kind of anti-entropic force as the years roll by, progressively burnishing their stature in the pantheon.1

With contemporary or recently-published works, selection is a much harder enterprise.

As with any form of art made by human beings, a lot of literary fiction is basically dog shit.

The problem comes down to your heuristics for choosing what to read. If you were to assume that blurbs are a genuine indicator of quality, you’d have no idea that this is the case.

The basic problem is that a lot of shitty books have excellent blurbs.

The reason for this is simple.2 Currently, literary fiction is a small, shrinking market.3 In a previous era, where literary novels had much wider reach and much deeper cultural impact, the market was large enough to support “PvP” rivalries— “player-vs-player” or writer-vs-writer conflicts with savage takedowns of various novelists by prominent critics.4

Back in the day, a larger market could support a larger critical commentariat and you could advance a career in literary criticism with a bit of headhunting.

Now, because the overall size of the literary fiction market has become smaller, economic imperatives toward back-scratching reciprocity are greater. The game has shifted from PvP into “PvE” (player-vs-environment), where the real competitors consist of a multitude of dopamine troughs like TikTok, video games, social media, and so on.

This has the effect of turning the game into a more co-operation-oriented strategy. The problem with excessive co-operation in the publishing market is that it can also drive a form of literary cronyism which rapidly devolves into a circlejerk of incestuous back-scratching.

Here’s how it works: like fine art or other form of high culture, literary fiction is partly a status game.

Status is conferred when someone more established than you says something good about your novel—this can be a blurb, a review, or a social media media post. This person might be a critic at a magazine who also has their own novel or essay collection that has either already been published or is soon forthcoming.

This creates a strong incentive structure to say good things about novels written by your friends because there are so few notable people to begin with.

This isn’t an altogether conspiratorial element, but a matter of simple survival—a sort of banding together and a form of positive-sum competition.

Because I started out as a completely marginal figure, it’s been surprising how friendly and receptive other writers in the alt-lit space are. There’s a sense of genuine camaraderie and community—even in a purely online dimension. And I don’t want to diminish the beauty (and value) of this.

But we have to acknowledge its downsides.

Literary podcasts like or do an admirable job of maintaining objectivity and not being overly laudatory of indie works. I think and also work hard at this too.

See?

I’m doing it right now!

All of these teams have either published me or said positive things about me.

And here I am saying good things about them.

Of course, that’s my sincere belief—but you can’t say that I’m not (in some way) biased on the matter.

Disclosures: I’ve never met Matthew Gasda and he is not my best friend

As you can guess from scouting my profile, I don’t live in New York City.

I’ve never met and I’ve never been to a trendy literary party in Brooklyn. Of course, I’ve followed the brouhaha over Dimes Square but I’ve never been a scenester or made an appearance in washed-out polaroids with e-girls doing a post-ironic pseudo-duckface.5

I really have no commentary about the (now defunct?) Dimes Square scene that was (presumably?) anchored on various bon-vivant personalities and micro-celebrities. Whether by choice or by journalistic fiat, Gasda is inextricably tied up with the “brand” of Dimes Square, but I don’t think any of that is particularly relevant to his novel.

The book should be evaluated on its own terms.

Granted, it’s not as if I can erase all context on the subject. I’ve lightly followed Gasda’s career—from a distance, having never seen one of his plays in-person—and I’ve always been impressed by the way that he bootstrapped his play-writing career out of performances in an apartment.

From my perspective, that’s the kind of high-agency scrappiness you just have to respect as a writer.

Thus far, we’ve exchanged a few friendly DM’s on his body of work, which is how I got access to an ARC copy. As a matter of process, I have not shown him the review prior to publishing it. It’s possible a colleague of his will help me put out a short piece later this year, but I haven’t written it yet and probably won’t have time to because my shitty drop-shipping business that (marginally) keeps me out of absolute poverty has just been nuked by the Trump administration.6

That does not mean that I am entirely without sin.

Like my periodic correspondence with other established writers, I’ll freely admit that even DM’ing someone at this level gives me a frisson of “I’m in the scene now” and so on.

Recall that I started as a complete outsider. Even the most minimal acknowledgement creates low-level glow in my validation-circuitry.

Even though I love the Gasda-affiliated , my next novel is probably going to be a lot more spicy than my first one, and I don’t see any traditional publisher realistically backing its release.

Even so, as I write this, a little voice in my head—a little Wormtongue—is asking what might happen if I ingratiate myself with Arcade-affiliated writers.

Might that help me out down the road?

I think it’s reasonable to be honest about our biases as critics and to openly acknowledge them.

The stakes aren’t exactly high, but it’s good spiritual hygiene nonetheless.

So now you know where my biases lie on the matter.

Let’s get to it, then

I’ll start with the verdict, and then we can talk about specifics.

I liked The Sleepers a lot and I think it’ll stand the test of time as one of the more important and lasting literary novels of this millennial era.

My view at a high level is simple.

As millennials continue to age terribly, The Sleepers will increasingly read like a coda to the dead-end of our cumulative cultural mores: an incredibly damning indictment of our hedonism and the hollowed-out playground of modern liberalism in the meaning shredder of New York City.

If Tony Tulathimutte’s excellent Private Citizens augured in the millennial literary generation, The Sleepers puts it to bed—or, perhaps more accurately, it puts a bullet in its head.

There’s so much to say about this book that I have to start out by mentioning the style in which it was written.

For those of you who’ve read my own novel, you’ll know that I’m a fan of maximalism and all of its stylistic conceits. Think American Psycho with its detailed, overly descriptive prose and lengthy, run-on sentences delivered in a very intense, forceful voice.

In contrast, Gasda’s lyrical restraint and minimalism isn’t an unusual style for his generation of novelists, but there’s something unique about his particular form of minimalism.

What’s particularly interesting about the style of The Sleepers is that it’s written like a novel but often feels like a play. It’s an incredibly unique structure that is hard to describe even with an excerpt—you have to zoom out and view the manuscript from a satellite-view to see it.

Essentially, the individual dialogue scenes between characters run for much longer than what you’d typically see in most novels—for the most part, rather than this being a detriment to the narrative, it’s a strength of the book.

To the extent that some of these scenes periodically drag on for too long, it’s a minor flaw in a very tightly-written book that abjures trendy prose-level flourishes but is impactful and devastating all the same.

Cum for the cum good: wire-heading as the dead-end of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness

Here’s a segment from the first page of the novel that describes Akari, a hapa millennial:

In a sentence, we already see the portrait of the millennial as the ur-gooner: a human-optimization function aimed at the pyramidal structure of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Already, Gasda seems to present a hypothesis around this psychological structure: is the capstone of the pyramid truly this thing we call “self-actualization”?

Or is it really something more based?

Is it really about cumming as much as possible?

Be honest, now.

Like many of us, Akari is trapped in the ouroboros of experiential pleasure: the screen presents the viewer with various possibilities of hedonic experience.

Thus, all the striving that exists within us is there only to collapse the distance between the these sexual and non-sexual flavors of televised pornography and the optical feed that is your actual lived experience:

Then, we zoom out, and Gasda presents the playground of the city: the “IQ-shredder” of TFR-zero and it’s orphaned, non-reproductive ejaculates:

The problem with this model of living, of course, is its intrinsic vulnerability to entropy.

There are many readings of this book that are valid, and it’s not an aggressively (or even overtly) natalist novel.

But insofar as it presents a broad critique of liberalism, it’s hard not to make the subsequent inference as a reader. Whereas reproductive systems are life-giving, hedonistic systems are, on net, life-subtracting—simply because they degrade over time.

We’re deep within Chesterton’s-Fence-territory here—whether we like it or not.

Here we begin to add characters: Akari’s hapa sister, Mariko (a failed actress), and Mariko’s leftist-academic boyfriend, Dan—and we begin confront the brutality of the millennial operating system and it’s two failure modes of (a) getting what you want, and (b) not getting what you want.

Friends!

What happens if you reach the peak of the pyramid—and there is nothing there?

Or worse—you never make it to the top of the pyramid at all?

The problem with self actualization as a life strategy exceeds the comparatively simple implementation of hedonic wire-heading: not everyone can be equally high-agency. Because human agency exists relative to other agents, it is zero-sum. It’s not just about the limited number of Dunbar slots for prominent people—it’s an even more essential feature of agentic competition in any sphere, whether artistic or not.

This ruthless tournament of competition is most acutely true for actors:

The most important question to ask about a novel is whether or not you enjoyed reading it—whether or not the experience resonates on an aesthetic level.

With literary fiction in particular, there are complementary ways to achieve this end.

Broadly speaking, you can anchor on the sentence-level and craft beautiful prose with complex or inventive metaphors, or you can anchor on the meta-structure and lean into voice as the emergent property of the text.

Gasda’s clean, straightforward style has almost no flourishes in the former category, but his command of human interiority is precise, incisive, and resonant with the bare-metal facets of human psychology.

Interestingly, the book evades any sort of conflict-axis when it comes to examining the social and cultural problems of millennials. It’s tone is neither progressive nor reactionary, but passively descriptive.

The feeling is something of a dispassionate syncreticism that views our pathologies from an ideologically perpendicular angle - this is another reason I think it’ll last in the years to come.

It’s examination of race, for example, is light-handed and rooted in the individualized perspectives of the characters, leaving room for ambiguity and contradiction. In one clip, Mariko speculates about the psychological motivations of her boyfriend and the men-in-his-category more broadly:

It’s interesting to note that Mariko is the product of a German father and a Japanese mother.

The implication, of course, is that she is reproducing the pattern of her own origin.

Now we can ask of the novel—are these sentiments true?

It’s not particularly worried about a conclusive answer.

The response within the text seems to be—who knows?

It’s not as if leftist men are uniquely attracted to Asian woman above-and-beyond their far right counterparts. At most, even if this hypothesis were to be true, it would simply be a complementary psychological explanation that sits alongside a mirror of its right-wing counterpart.7

The book doesn’t really care if this character’s theory is true or not: like reality, most psychological hypotheses in the domain of human motivation are not falsifiable with current technologies.

In effect, the novel poses these kinds of interesting questions, but swiftly moves on.

A novel that reads like a play (can be a good thing)

Like any story, The Sleepers is not without certain artistic liberties. The conceits of the book are marginal and, insofar as they sometimes seem to depart from a 1-to-1 realistic depiction of difficult human conversations, they’re stylistically acceptable externalizations of interior sentiments that you’d find in a compelling stage play.

Dan, having an uncomfortable late-night conversation with Mariko, summons the combative interaction you’re more likely to find in a dialogue-driven performance:

The narrative arc of the novel hinges on Dan’s indiscretions and the multiplying consequences thereof—on the surface, it’s a classic sort-of “Me-too” style fall from grace, but the book spends little time moralizing about the ethics of power relations.

That is to say, it contains little in the way of arguments and more in the way of themes.

This—if I might be so presumptive, if I might engage in a bit of stolen-valor as part of a personal brand-building exercise—reads very /newwave/ to me.

Rather than advancing a sense of correctness, The Sleeprs presents a dispassionate mapping of the psychological drives that lead to the implosion of Dan’s life and the contributory actions from all of the parties involved.

In a sense, it feels like a novel written by a writer from an earlier era pulled forward into a semi-contemporary, ~2016-era setting.

Is Gasda an American Houellebecq?

Not quite, but the void of theism echoes throughout the book in musings like this:

Disenchantment isn’t merely downstream from digitization: it’s downstream from the death of God himself.

What is it that so resonated with this novel for me?

Quite simply, my feeling is that Gasda understands human beings very well.

Because he understands human beings very well, he writes very well.

A story doesn’t have to give you an answer

One of the things that works with the novel is the way that it engages with ambiguity.

That is not to say that it contains nothing in the way of moral epistemology—a sleazy, somewhat predatory film director (Xavier) is presented in a particularly negative light —but it presents this morality in gradations rather than binary classifications, i.e., with varying degrees of moral compromise.

The Sleepers presents notions of consent as complex and multifaceted psychological summations. The human being is an agent, yes, but one composed of various sub-agents with conflicting motivational drives. It’s not a nihilistic interpretation of sexual morality, merely a complicated one.

Further to that angle, what’s particularly interesting is that the “white men” in the book are essentially universally depicted uniformly negatively in their romantic with women of color. At the same time, Gasda has very little meta-commentary around that.

I have the feeling of a novelist looking to describe a certain-type-of-guy-and-how-he-might-be-perceived, a certain-type-of-horniness—a naturalistic account of a particular slice of a particular world.

A noticer, if you will.

New York City, the soul-crusher

Liberalism was supposed to be liberatory: to expand choice and, in doing so, to facilitate self-actualization.

But what if the subtraction of a narrow, social-prescribed choice-architecture merely regresses the problem of freedom to another level?

If a decision amounts to a biological computation, does that mean that freedom exists in the cranial determinism of the brain’s own internal reward circuitry?

Is that not merely a reformulation of the same problem?

What is agency, exactly, if human beings lack contra-causal free will?

But what did it all mean?

The Sleepers is a very sad book.

To the extent that it is sad, its sadness is a function of its presentation of the truth: a descriptive account of the genuine tragedy of an entire generation of failed millennial relationships.

Where are the answers, then?

We have not found them within us.

We don’t know where they are.

We don’t know.

Information Processing - Steve Hsu

Incels, Evo Psych, and Modern Literature with ARX-Han - Manifold Episode 83

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a year ago · 3 likes · 2 comments · Steve Hsu

Hsu is a brilliant guy and it was a real pleasure to chat with him.

(Also: here’s a version in YouTube form, for those of you who prefer video)

Steve typically interviews people who are a hell of a lot smarter than I am, so I was humbled to have been invited on his show and talk about my novel, INCEL, which bridges the worlds of literary fiction and scientific reductionism.

I suspect this is why the book caught his attention, and it was really interesting to get his view on the protagonist’s Neo-Landian philosophical journey (in a funny sort of coincidence, I learned that Hsu used to talk to Nick Land online from years back in the day).

More broadly, as a member of the commentariat, Hsu made a number of very contrarian predictions in the geopolitical/technological spheres, including making the argument that export controls and technology sanctions on the PRC won’t work because they have too much human capital.

His predictive model—which is increasingly being proven correct—is that STEM talent is the decisive upstream input for technocapital-acceleration and essentially cannot be sanctioned with legal tools like chip embargoes.

This prediction, if indeed correct, will prove enormously consequential for the entire arc of human (and post-human) history.

For those of you who are curious, to get a broad introduction toHsu’s views on this topic, I’d suggest his excellent interview with , which you can find here:

The Garden of Earthly Delights

Steve Hsu: AI Arms Race - China & US

The story about AI in the West is escalating —breakthrough after breakthrough, each more hyped than the last. But across the globe, China works in parallel, under different politics, with different intentions. Today, I'm speaking with Steve Hsu about this mysterious counterpart in the AI race. How real is America's technological edge? Is China's authori…

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a year ago · 12 likes · 3 comments · Alex Kaschuta and Steve Hsu

There’s a niche-famous clip of Tao Lin doing a reading sometime in 2008 in some grimy underground gallery that I sometimes encounter in the process of looking through various threads of extremely-online alt-lit marginalia from eras past.1

Years ago, when I first encountered the clip, I had assumed that Lin’s stilted, monotone performance was some kind of deliberate affectation—that he was ‘doing a bit’ and leaning into a sort of literary-coded version of the dirtbag-hipster (the evolutionarily-optimal persona-cultivation-strategy for skinny NYC males).

I was impressed by his marketing acumen: gaining attention in any cultural sphere is extraordinarily difficult, and creating a literary persona may be scoffed at but is tremendously difficult thing to actually execute (“if it’s so easy to be Honor Levy, anon, then why aren’t you her?”).

In any event, I later found out that it wasn’t a bit and this is how he actually normally talks.

The internet is real but atoms are realer

Previously, I’ve written about the idea of a meme-ing a purely digital literary scene into existence.

While I think it’s certainly true that you can build a meaningful literary presence with purely digital distribution, the fact remains that the physical world remains an important compounder of digital channels.

Rather than viewing these as separate systems of literary distribution, the reality is that they compound on one another where each multiplies the power of the other.

Just think about it from first principles: even if you yourself aren’t doing a reading, meeting other writers IRL strengthens your connections to other artists in the niche high-culture world of literary fiction.

Podcasts are enormously useful, but as with anything digital, they’re still disembodied forms of connection.

Much has been written about the decline of Literary Fiction(TM), and a lot of this sense of sadness comes down to the relative decline in the cultural stature of novelists (even if I wasn’t pseudonymous, crafted a Mishima-level persona would verge on impossible, and only Lin has really approached that zone of stature from the periphery).

I think hits the nail on the head here with his view that we’re in a “post-prestige” era in the space.

On the one hand, this is naturally going to be a sad thing for novelists and fiction writers when we compare ourselves to Bret Easton Ellis or other more titanic figures from the 20th centure.

On the other hand, the loss of status can also be emancipatory.

The joys of a small subculture

I’ve recently been watching a truly excellent Japanese television series, Frieren, a fantasy story about an Elven mage.

I’m about one-third of the way through this gem of a narrative, and one of the funniest things is this recurring bit whereby Frieren—who has lived thousands of years—largely occupies her time by hunting down seemingly obscure and worthless spells that have little if any practical utility.

The running joke is essentially that she’s got this sort of semi-autistic hobby when it comes to spell-collecting that her normie-companions simply can’t understand.

This, my dear friends, is how I feel about neglected novels and literary works.

I recently discovered Alan Rossi’s Our Last Year, a really wonderful novel about the disintegration and reconstitution of a failing marriage.

The novel is beautifully written in a minimalist (but not austere) style with long run-on, lyrical sentences. It’s a real gem of a book that manages to texture the seemingly mundane events of marital discord into something that’s really quite resonant and full of true feeling. Dream-like, it reads almost like a translation of a Japanese writer.

In spite of Rossi’s credentialed success as a writer, this book appears to have had minimal reception or press, and has only accumulated a couple dozen Goodreads reviews.

All that is to say: I feel privileged to have accidentally discovered it (and I don’t even remember how!).

Rather than mourn the heydey of the Hemingways and Mishimas, writers and readers should focus on keeping the form alive.

And the thing that will keep literature alive will be the simple act of discovering, buying, and reading beautiful books.

We are not, in a sense, disimilar from medieval monks who autistically collected literary works and preserved a lineage of text through eras of conflict and brutal wardom.

Community is a word that has been debased by marketers and capitalists, but that does not make the concept any less real.

And one thing we can be certain of was that these literary monks had a firm sense of it.

Why can’t we be friends?

It’s possible to be friends with someone on the internet, but it’s difficult to do so deeply.

The reason to host a literary party isn’t just to build up a literary persona or to build a brand or to amplify a distribution mechanism.

It’s to cultivate friendships between writers, readers, and a community of niche-hobbyists who love fiction for it’s own sake—even without the panels, the awards, or the magazine profiles.

This feeds into the intrinsically social energy of the arts, which are meant to be created and appreciated. This is a reciprocal, fundamental social act: a literal sharing of consciousness between human beings.

Don’t worry about the money or the panels. God—or the universe, or the singularity—will see (and appreciate) your sincere and moving works.

What could be more meaningful than that?

Hosting a literary party isn’t marketing activation event. You’re not building up a platform so much as cultivating and preserving a lineage of the wordcel-class. has done some great work in this sphere with , and has recently broken through as well.

But I am now convinced that the thing that everyone should continue to lean into is the idea of the party.

The party is at once aimless and simple in its intention.

Adem Luz Rienspects recently posted a series of photos from an LA event with New Ritual Press.

It looks like everyone had a great time and I’m happy for them.

All I can say is—cheers to that!

I recently finished Matthew Gasda’s The Sleepers—a very good book that I’m still processing—a sweeping indictment of millennial pleasure-seeking culture.

It’s a book that’s arrived at what feels like the right time. When it comes to culture, time and distance are the ultimate clarifying agents, and the moment of judgment for millennials has come.

Let us consider the macro-trend of historical consciousness and its ongoing evolution in the era of mass culture: generational social and psychological pathologies are distilled into thinkpieces and narrative critiques and the ones that resonate with truth rise up and get preferentially replicated. This in turn feeds into the genesis of the replacement culture and the young replace the old and generate a novel set of problems and the wheel turns yet again.

When I look back on millennial literary culture, the thing that most bothers me is the cynicism about beauty. I don’t mean beauty in the physical sense of the face or body, but beauty as a transcendent aesthetic good for the human soul more broadly.

How much energy was wasted on snark?

Whenever I find myself enjoying a good novel, this enjoyment comes downstream of beauty in the expansive sense. The art of a sentence, the lyricality of prose, the way the paragraphs appear on the page as sculptural objects, and most importantly, the feeling that I get from reading something worthwhile uplift me and nourish me. It’s not quite a spiritual exercise but it’s something adjacent to it; meditative, edifying.

Millennials are perhaps only now shedding ourselves of these many sedimentary layers of cynicism and snark that buried too many good works and potentials under an irony-poisoned blanket that made any kind of sincerity impossible; that made a generation of authors lean too hard into the many varieties of black-pilled wretchedness lacking in the light of anything good and true.

A lot has been written about this general sense of aesthetic degradation, now made worse by various forms of AI-slop, but my intuition about our current moment is that it’s still possible to make beautiful books and for people to read and appreciate them.

I say this as a guy who put an AI-image on my (revised) novel cover and liked it.

Consider the state of literary fiction: yes, it’s in decline, yes, zoomers are apparently (as a class) decreasingly literate (with some notable exceptions), yes, it’s becoming a conservatory art-form for a small subset of aging, declining people. This is now effectively a niche hobby that will never reach the heights of 20th century literary stardom is a tragedy but also an opportunity. Whenever an aesthetic circle shrinks, this closes the door to zeitgeist-level distribution but it also opens the door to artistic purists.

Consider further the state of niche online self-published or indie literary fiction.

The benefit of being a loser is that you are completely emancipated by your own lack of notoriety. Success breeds professional relationships which breeds a networked web of interlocking social constraints and Lines-That-Should-Not-Be-Crossed.

If you are self-publishing a novel for Bezos-buxx on AMAZORG, you can basically do whatever you want.

Freedom for the artist is not unconstrained, however, because it breeds its own form of obligation.

The indie novelist is not merely an artist, but an artisan. All of this is to say perhaps only one thing: indie novelists should treat novels not merely as objects of beautiful text but as beautiful physical objects as well.

What I mean by this is that even if you are poor and broke and working some shit job to fund your fiction-writing project, you should try somehow to make sure that your physical book is beautiful.

The wrapper of the “the thing” is not insignificant. The psychology of packaging text is not a problem to be solved, but an aesthetic opportunity to be embraced.

Now, in fairness, not everyone will have the resources to commission custom art for their cover, to which I’ll simply say: if you want it badly enough, you will figure it out.

Let’s talk about some people who have done this well

The first thing I look for when I encounter a new indie press is the design execution.

To survive, artisanal media (literary fiction) must lean into embodiment and lean into the physical world.

In execution terms, a well designed novel with a beautiful and compelling cover elevates the experience of reading the physical work.

Mixtape Hyperborea by Adem Luz Rienspects (self-published):

Gothic Violence by Mike Ma (self-published):

Calanitia Dreaming by (self-published):

Xenosystems by Nick Land (published by Passage Press):

The Agonies by Ben Faulkner (published by )

Glass Century by (publisher: Tough Poets Press, forthcoming)

after sunstone by Dustin Cole (publisher: Farthest Heaven)

Make it look good

If you’re a writer and you’re reading this, you know what to do.

Go out and increase the aggregate beauty of the world. No amount of ugliness can subtract from the sublime.

But first: some review-related updates over from DECENTRALIZED FICTION:

1. put up a nice review of my novel, INCEL, on his blog (thank you David!):

   

2. I recently finished Matthew Gasda’s The Sleepers, which I very much enjoyed. A full review will come in due course, but I can’t help but think it’s the apex -type-of-novel: a truly savage indictment of the spiritual dead-end of urban pleasure-seeking-as-a-lifestyle. I saw parts of myself and many members of my own generation in this. If I were to describe the book in word one—damning.

3. I’ve acquired review copies of The Agonies by Ben Faulkner and Stop All the Clocks by Noah Kumin. Full reviews in due course.

4. I plan to review the novel Fedbook later this year, but we’ll see when I get to it.

Now—on to the podcast.

Lastly, I put out a request for further posts. A lot of people asked for more posts about indie publishing and book reviews, so these themes are going to get hit more in the near future.

A summary of my conversation with

Some things we talked about, excerpted from his post about our dialogue:

the counterbalance to techno-feudalism, the shifting Overton window, on deep (racial? / psychosexual?) anxieties of Western elites over China’s technological rise, transhumanist cults, the internet as a pathologization engine, the problem of male agency in a world trending toward simulation, the accelerating breakdown of ideological coherence, the future of literary fiction in an era of digital feudalism, the aesthetics of niche subcultures, on panpsychism for story building models, the seduction of AI worship, Grand Theft Auto as contemporary American reality. On paranoia, the next phase of cult formation, social engineering, why the next big cultural divide won’t be left vs. right but human vs. post-human, and why it’s enough to just be read by a small group of considered minds in a literary salon scattered across the digital ether… + more.

Part of the undercurrent of our conversation came down to the question of it means to be an Asian-American novelist in an era of extreme technocapital acceleration from both Western and Eastern poles.

This is one of the reasons I’ve become so intensely fixated on geopolitical and technological competition.

At the risk of being reductive, I have a two-level view of this genuinely-titanic struggle:

1. On one level, the competition between the United States and China is a contest between a hegemonic Western technofeudalist oligarchy (the US), and a Sinic communist techno-authoritarian party powered by the engine of state-capitalism (China).1

2. On a deeper level, it’s simultaneously a racial conflict between Western Europeans and the Han race.

At level 1, the competition takes on all kinds of interesting dimensions. Technofeudalism (closed-source AI, centralized in US frontier labs), vs. Communism (open-source AI, distributed and decentralized from PRC frontier labs).

The latter contrast is hilarious kind of narrative violation about who truly has the “right to compute” in these opposing political systems, but maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that a communist state believes in open-source software. It does seem like there’s a certain ideological alignment there, doesn’t it?

Now: let’s talk about the racial angle.

World War 3 is a race war and we can stop pretending it’s not going to be

One of the simplest ways to model sentiment around racial or geopolitical conflict is to see what kinds of ideas gain traction on social media. When something achieves meme status, it means that a non-trivial percentage of the population has anchored on the emotional traction of a particular war-related power fantasy (these trend toward various forms of genocide).

One of the perpetual tropes you’ll encounter on the Twittersphere is the idea of air-striking the three gorges dam in the event of a US-China war over Taiwan.

I’ve seen it often enough and people can hardly contain their raging enthusiasm for the idea.

Here’s what Grok says about the expected casualties from such an attack, both direct and indirect:

It’s hard for me to gauge his deep this kind of racial animus is.

My intuition is that anti-Asian racism in the West is not currently very deep, but that it could become very intense in the event of a hot war with China.

Simply put, the American psyche is not remotely ready to sustain severe aeronaval losses of prestige platforms like aircraft carriers, F-35’s, and so on.2 At both the level of mass politics and the level of the White House, it is not psychologically prepared to lose.

This is what makes the political situation so profoundly dangerous: it means the reaction function will be very extreme in both domestic and foreign theaters. It could easily go nuclear.

A simple question for Asian-Americans:

Do you know what time it is?

Neo-China arrives from the future and diaspora navel-gazers are not ready

"When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse."

• Osama Bin Laden

When I came to the West as a young boy, neither my parents nor myself had any regard for our home country of birth.

Whereas Japan, Taiwan and Singapore had notably already achieved a great deal of economic and technological progress, China was a sort of shameful laggard we rarely ever talked about.

One of the ideas I mentioned during this podcast was the idea of technological power as a surrogate marker for racial power.

As a boy, I remember picking up issues of Popular Mechanics and marveling at images of the US Carrier Strike Groups sailing the ocean. I was entranced by the image of it.

The thing about power is that it forms its own argument. This argument tends to be irrefutable.

Flashback to the unipolar era: history, at the time, was utterly over. The Liberal imperium would last indefinitely; the Chinese back home would toil in 16-hour factory shifts and make us shoes until the heat death of the universe. Those of us who had left were the lucky ones: we’d escaped into the material comforts of the continental United States and the universal appeal of capital accumulation.

When I was 13 years old, I spent six months learning (and failing) how to skateboard. There was a 12 to 24 month period of adolescence where I think I rotated through every possible permutation of millennial boyhood that was available at the time (in the end, I landed on none of them).3

In the past couple of years, things have changed somewhat dramatically.

It started with EV’s but it’s progressed to humanoid robots, two sixth-generation fighters, and now Deepseek.4

Here’s a take that I think will be proven correct in the next couple of years:

Here my hypothesis is simple: Nick Land was right about the Chinese, and we are all catching up to it.

The reasons for this are multifactorial and have been variously attributed to a combination of a effective industrial policy, high-levels of communist state capacity, and most importantly, a very deep bench of human capital in the STEM department.

has written numerous times about the most important upstream inputs for Chinese technocapital acceleration: they have more engineers than we do. This means that sanctioning them won’t work because they’ll continue climbing the tech tree with indigenous talent alone. This follows from simple first principles; upstream of innovation is human cognition and the political and economic systems to co-ordinate them.

Hsu argues that stopping them is too late: the Middle Kingdom has reached escape velocity.

Information Processing - Steve Hsu

US-PRC Tech War: DeepSeek AI and 6th Generation Fighters — Manifold #78

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a year ago · 4 likes · 8 comments · Steve Hsu

Now, if you follow any Asian-American literary writers, none of them are talking about this. Absolutely none of them appear to be talking about the most significant geopolitical shift underlying the entire relationship of the United States to Asians, and by extension, Asian-Americans.

As a class, these people are completely out of ideas: aesthetically, culturally, ideologically. The Fukuyama train has derailed and they have yet to crawl out of the wreckage of it.

They’re laggards of a different kind.

Consider the following short story: Dorchester, by Vietnamese-American Steven Duong:5

What is Dorchester about, exactly?

Nominally, it starts with an account of anti-Asian hate crimes (written in the most generic, reality-avoiding manner possible), but as you press forward into the story, a central theme is the Asian-American male protagonist being leashed by his girlfriend.

Look—how many times are we going to do this to ourselves?

What’s the point of this kind of story?

I actually enjoyed Dorchester—I think it’s written very well—but we need some new ideas here.

I don’t know anything about Duong’s background: whether he’s Chinese, Vietnamese, Chinese-Vietnamese, etc., but I feel he’s emblematic of an entire artistic cohort in the diaspora.

If I could describe them in a single sentence, they are people who are not paying attention.

There’s a certain type of Asian-American who is so implicitly married to the matrix of American exceptionalism and cultural liberalism (and their comfy place within it) that something breaks in their brains when they see the sovereign East growing in technological and geopolitical power.

It’s a narrative violation that activates a cognitive dissonance so disorienting that very little makes sense anymore.

It’s one thing to be a minority from a poor country. This type of low-agency identitarianism fits into the glove of progressive politics and our near-total lack of domestic political power.

But—it’s another thing to be a minority from a peer competitor to the United States of America.

These situations are precarious, but in opposite ways.

The essential characteristic of the contemporary Asian-American is that he or she is conquered. This explains (in part) why the West loves Korean and Japanese cultural exports—these countries are occupied and subordinate to Anglo-American power.

I want to be clear about what I’m saying here: the answer to Asian-American anomie is not a form of reactive Sino-Triumphalism, or worse, a mirror-image of domineering ethnonationalism or ethnosupremacy. It’s merely a conscious decision to relinquish deeply held notions of your own inferiority.

And that is a starting point, not a destination, for something generative.

Literary fiction is a niche hobby that will never regain its peak cultural significance and that’s okay and we should stop whining about it

Why care so much about books?

Why care so much about literary fiction, an admittedly niche hobby that might well mostly die out with the last literate generation (millennials)?6

For me, the answer is simple.

The novel is a beautiful form of art, and one with unique strengths over and above other narrative forms.

Wordcels of every race have a duty to preserve it.

So long as small circles of people continue to cultivate and participate in this organic ecosystem—so long as it is not gone entirely—it remains a worthwhile enterprise and a genuine source of meaning.