Close Reading ‘Rejection’
And a discussion of shock story subreddits.
Note: this post talks about some distasteful subreddits. To skip to the literary-technical stuff, ctrl + F: “Close Reading” Also, it is probable that Get Literate will not publish next Thursday, Aug. 7, because of work commitments. I may rerun an old piece.
Tony Tulathimutte’s 2024 short story collection Rejection got a lot of press over the last year. The book was written up in the NYT, WaPo, Vulture and so on. A lot of the reception focused on the perceived incel nature of the characters—Vulture crowned Rejection the first great incel novel—because the narrator of the first story “The Feminist,” attributes his inability to get laid to his narrow shoulders. While the narration, and future stories, cut against the incel framing, I can see why an editor or a reviewer looking for clicks would call the collection an incel novel. Unfortunately for the headline writer basically none of the characters are actually ‘involuntarily celibate’—the titular Feminist fucks at least once—and any true connoisseur of the dumbest forums known to man knows that real incels reject those of their number who do manage to get laid.
Instead, the load bearing* theme tying Rejection’s seven stories together is, obviously, rejection. Sometimes that’s romantic rejection, but it is often a social rejection—sometimes precipitated by romantic rejection—and on rare occasions, Tulathimutte’s characters deliberately reject social convention.
These rejections are typically experienced as both digital and physical phenomena: characters are expelled from parties, kicked out of group chats, find gyms too hostile and accidentally mass-email pornographic fantasies to friends and family. Tulathimutte is especially interested in metatextual, online moments of rejection, and includes several long forum posts in the book. Metatextuality is the book’s secondary theme.
The middle story “Our Dope Future” is the hinge point of the book, where Tulathimutte shifts from writing stories that primarily study specific moments of rejection to writing stories about internet metatext and the problems with reading and not-reading online.
Several stories in this book make use of forum posts, typically implied to be on Reddit. While forum culture is on the decline—killed by consolidation, LLMs, actual censorship—Reddit (unfortunately, incompletely) remains one of the last holdouts. The site is organized into a series of specialized forums, called subreddits, each of which has a specific topic for discussion/posts: sophistry, support for Operation Barbarossa, and engineering disasters.
“Our Dope Future” is modeled on the posts common to r/AmITheAsshole and similar subreddits, where the sadistic id masquerades as the disciplinary superego. We’re going to do a close reading of part of “Our Dope Future,” but to understand Tulathimutte’s whole oeuvre, we have to talk about forum cultures, internet shock stuff, metatextuality and online epistemology.
Every specialized forum eventually develops its own house-style, tropes and discursive expectations. Typically, some of these are codified in a list of forum rules, a common one on subreddits dedicated to commiseration (or short-fiction) is the assumption that all posts are true by default.
Such rules represent an effort to preserve a particular kind of aesthetic engagement, and to ensure the conversations in a forum never undermine the central ideological or epistemological tenets of a given space.
This is as much a defensive psychological reflex as it is a political tactic. Extreme forums, say places for the frank discussion of experiences with violence or harassment, both need a mechanism by which to integrate new members and a discursive filter that repels users who might compromise the integrity of discussion. One key element of this filter is the tendency by users to treat all aesthetic objects as both fictional and literally true. This allows for the memetic dissemination of extreme, shocking and distasteful stories and images, which are then digested as real images and represented as abstracted/fictional concepts. That detachment makes it possible for chronic users to flit from forum to forum, from clearly fictional horror stories to real videos of combat, without a guilty conscience.
To see how this works we have to start with some pretty gross shock video forums.
To my family (and faint-hearted readers): Skip to the section titled: Close Reading
Before the Russo-Ukrainian war produced a new theater of cruelty and Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people was livestreamed for everyone to see, you sort of had to go looking for extreme violence online.
Back in the old days, especially before the 2016 Election and the panic about online mis/disinformation (so quaint now that all social media is just genAI slop), there were actual subreddits dedicated to graphic violence and death, r/watchpeopledie being the largest and most important. Most of the videos there had been posted elsewhere, LiveLeak, WorldStarHipHop occasionally, 4Chan and its derivative boards, the web 2.0 sites hosting infamous classics (just take it on faith these are bad if you don’t know what they are) like Mr.Hands, One Man One Jar and various cartel hits, but WPD aggregated all of this content and combined it with the videos coming out of Syria, Yemen, Libya and Iraq, and a whole world’s worth of industrial accidents, traffic fatalities and suicides.
There were hierarchies within these posts: war videos were middle of the road, a little above replacement, Cartel content was particularly vicious and sought after, industrial accidents and traffic crashes all had the same general rhythm and were thus a little boring. Suicides could go any which way, but mostly were just sad, except for Budd Dwyer who became both a joke and a verb.
Reading Rejection (especially “Ahegao” and “Main Character”), it’s clear to me that Tulathimutte was either on those forums or well-acquainted with them enough to understand their odd logics and the complex mythologies.
I don’t want to say something generational or claim that this whole thing was exceptionally traumatizing for Millennials (who do not exist)—chronic lead poisoning and the Vietnam War seem to have done a number on X and the Boomers—but it was very strange.
See, these forums were populated by a strange mishmash of suicidal depressives, silent lurkers, horrified puritans and genuine sadists. The depressive element typically comprised the majority, arbitrary violence and casual brutality having a sort of soothing effect on the wounded mind comparable to 3-4 shots of cheap vodka. I was on WPD for such purposes: nothing makes death unattractive quite like the suspicion that a 15 year old will comment: “he fell funny” on security cam footage of your end.
But there was also a crew of online junkies who were on WPD for the love of the game. To them One Man One Jar wasn’t something shocking, it was a funny, replicated image, valuable for its shock value, its ability to propagate itself and its fucking bizarre aesthetics: the allure of privacy, the neck heat of shame, the cold disgust and so on.
Many of these posters were frequent commenters on WPD and on associated shock subreddits for the hatred of various despised groups: Neckbeards and so on. From the comment sections of WPD you could find yourself checking someone’s profile and then slipping easily into a subreddit full of extremely stylized, unbelievably hostile short fiction. As I came out of the worst of my depression in the winter of 2015-16, I often found myself reading those subreddits, rather than watching WPD because I had regained enough physical energy to find the whole televised death thing morally repugnant.
Text posts, unlike (pre-GenAI) video posts, lacked a certain verisimilitude, you had to take it on faith that these stories happened, and the best authors tried to toe right up to the line of truth/untruth. The really good stories, regarded as classics by connoisseurs and as truth by the rubes, inspired stylistic imitators: characters, phrases, physical attributes morphed and metastasized through the whole forum. One post might influence hundreds of derivative stories, some of which were undoubtedly, mostly true. A lot of people were clearly trying to work through real life experiences of harassment, assault and familial alienation by assimilating the tropes and works of other anonymous writers and then applying these literary formulae to their lives.
These shock story forums generated metatexts that changed the way at least some posters related to the world, a key part of that was the formal suspension of disbelief: everything, no matter how formalist, no matter how closely it hewed to the established standards of the forum’s generic conventions, was true, according to the rules.
Later in 2016, when I met my own personal “neckbeard” (another story; he has a substack) I felt like I was living out one of those forum posts. That experience set me writing a novel that would contribute settings and several characters to the Noir muder mystery I’m currently querying, which is how I think about online stuff sometimes: A mostly bad, mostly stupid morass that exists primarily to numb you enough so you don’t kill yourself, but that occasionally produces something interesting enough that, when you encounter its flesh-and-blood analogue, makes go: “Oh, weird.”
“Our Dope Future,” plays with those forum expectations of truth and with the novel prose styles—tech twitter and LinkedIn speech in particular—produced by internet media. So let’s read it.
Close Reading:
“Lastly, she said a few hurtful things. She said I was criticizing her for not pursuing her goals, but “What are *your* goals? To start a bunch of stupid companies that reinvent [crap] nobody needs, just to make a [crap]load of money you won’t even spend on anything fun?” This was totally specious, of course, but I accept that it was my fault for not articulating the full scope of my goals earlier on. I’d been planning on saving it for our first anniversary, but I wanted to let her know what she’d be leaving if she walked out that door, so I dropped the mother of all truth bombs onto her.
These are my goals, I said: the instant I hit retirement at age 40, I want to start having kids, just like you do—as many at a time as IVF will safely allow, until we hit a dozen. (Four per gestation cycle would strike the ideal balance between fast and feasible.) I want us all to live under the same roof, in a big “mothership” that takes care of our every need. Alison would be the household COO, running admin and housework, which she obviously enjoys, and I’d be CEO, overseeing our kids’ education from birth. We’ll wake up at 5 a.m., chug our shakes, engage in physical and mental enrichment, and get our yeeks in bed at the stroke of eight. As soon as the kids acquire language, we’ll start them on an *actually useful* curriculum focused on bizdev and Stoic thought that will give them a massive edge on public-schoolers—picture everyone happily sweating away at their custom desks/treadmills as they absorb meticulously curated high-quality podcasts at 2.5x speed.” (158-9)
“Our Dope Future,” is written as a forum post of the r/AmITheAsshole or r/TrueOffMyChest variety. In this passage, the poster, we’ll refer to him as OP (Original Poster in forum parlance), details the turning point of his relationship with Alison, a down-on-her luck magazine writer, who was the protagonist of Pics, the second story in the collection, and slept with the narrator of The Feminist, the first story in the collection. After suffering a series of personal disasters, Alison meets OP on a dating app and OP first lovebombs her and then isolates her from her remaining friends and family. OP, a tech exec (serial entrepreneur in his own terms), frames this abuse as a way to help Alison and himself meet their goals. This central imbalance in their relationship eventually produces the above rupture, which is the turning point of the story and the crux of Tulathimutte’s ideological critique of the tech industry—he has a narrower point about internet metatext that isn’t addressed in this passage.
A common trope of such forum posts is a turn of phrase that betrays the poster’s real purpose in seeking the opinion of thousands of completely unqualified strangers. Typically, that purpose is to find an excuse for doing something they know to be immoral or confirmation that someone close to them has been cruel. Tulathimutte, a pessimist about digital mediation, opts for the former.
The aversion to brevity in this post is characteristic of Reddit/LinkedIn prose, but it does additional service in this passage. The shortest sentence in which the narrator is not either quoting Alison or describing her speech is the parenthetical, at thirteen words. Other sentences are typically longer and the passage concludes with a fifty word monster. This, and the visuals of the parentheses, set that parenthetical apart as the ideological and libidinal center of these two grafs and the whole story. This aside shows that the narrator believes human life should be oriented around the maximally efficient reproduction of the self and that this efficiency requires a technologically mediated body-fascism. “We’ll wake up at 5 a.m., chug our shakes, engage in physical and mental enrichment,” is the daily routine of someone obsessed with treating the human body as a biological process to be manipulated and disciplined, rather than a fully-realized being. Obviously, OP’s body fascism is a patriarchal concern: he sees Alison’s physical self as a tool to produce his idealized aristocratic off-spring. She is little more than a unit of capital to him, to be manipulated by words and then reduced to a machine for making children. The parenthetical sentence shows how this controlling impulse rationalizes itself as a utilitarian balance. The end of Alison’s bodily autonomy and the physical burden of bearing twelve children, is necessary for the fulfillment of OP’s goals, but, aware of this absurdity, he gives a rhetorical concession (“ideal balance between fast and feasible”) to make his plan seem reasonable and considerate. This is another manifestation of the confession-concealment dynamic of longform reddit posts: every apology is an elision, every confession is worded to suggest the victim is, in fact, the irrational party.
The body fascism and tech-logic extend to the desired children. They don’t learn to speak, they “acquire language,” and the point of childhood education isn’t to develop individuals, but to ensure a cohort of off-spring possesses “a massive edge on public-schoolers.” This is justified again by that false utilitarian impulse: stoicism and business development are useful, the socialization of the schoolroom is not. Instead, the children are pictured as atomized individual “happily sweating away at their custom desks/treadmills as they absorb meticulously curated high-quality podcasts at 2.5x speed.” Interpersonal relationships are immaterial in this idealized family unit, each worker has his purpose overseen by the family CEO, while the physical completion of the tasks is left to feminized labor directed by the COO. If previous regimes of patriarchal dominance imagined the family as resembling the state, with the father figure as head, it’s no surprise that the post-modern imagination had made it a corporation.
OP here again tries to fit Alison into this schema, he has seen her dusting a particular spot in his apartment, ergo she must be dedicated to housework, rather than a depressed wreck. Technology in this world exists to smooth these processes out and regulate the emotional responses of people subsumed into the extractive structure of capital. There can’t be a rebellion at an emotional level against this system, its rationality is all-encompassing.
The building effect of all this for the reader is both revulsion and laughter. Tulathimutte particularly enjoys figures of ridicule who are threatening enough to deserve dislike. This dual reaction is strengthened by the oscillation between colloquial speech and misused slang on the one hand: “chug our shakes” and “get our yeeks,” and clinical corporate speech: “physical and mental enrichment.” This switching back and forth happens several times earlier in the passage: “articulating goals,” means the same thing as “dropped the mother of all truth bombs.” By pairing business-speak with contrived idiomatic expression, OP is signaling relatability, while Tulathimutte is signaling artifice. He is aware, if the character is not, that there’s an emotional violence embedded in euphemism. This is most clear, again, in that parenthetical aside, which contains so much bizarre body-horror and implied pain for Alison, whose consent to sex, IVF fertilization, multiple pregnancies and enlistment in a corporate-structured training ground is assumed by the OP. By asserting this as their common goal, and asserting it through an artificially detached idiomatic form, OP is trying to make his desires an incontestable reality.
Conversation here is a struggle for interpersonal power. And since this struggle plays out in an imagined forum, OP frames the opposing viewpoint quite consciously. But what is the opposition to OP in this passage? First, OP imagines his audience as having a base level of skepticism that can be ameliorated by sporadic rhetorical digressions. But Alison’s question is what precipitated his post, and that question is reasonable: What is the point of having money and power? This question is presented to the reader through OP’s interpolation. Even OP’s censorship of Alison’s swear words is meant to signal to the reader that OP is actually the reasonable one. Alison identifies that OP doesn’t actually enjoy anything he does as a sensual experience: eating, sex, leisure are all inefficiencies to be solved. The pleasure in OP’s worldview is in acting on the world the way a machine does: Again and again, free of introspective constraint or bodily sensation. He is proposing they become capital.
When OP’s downfall does happen, it occurs off-page, told in a series of edits to the previous post. But its genesis is here, in the expression of a system of desire that renders human bodies machines for the reproduction of interchangeable units of labor power. Because, if the goal of life is to produce children as fast as possible, while still being feasible, and if this, as OP goes on to suggest, is actually the way to bring about Tech’s secular apocalypse, then no method is off-limits. And this is an apocalyptic worldview, in subsequent pages OP asserts this regime of body fascism, in which women are machines that make child-commodities, is necessary to produce a political and economic subjectivity that will overthrow democracy and bring about the digital millenium. Alison’s reassertion of the pleasure principle destabilizes this framework and makes OP realize that he cannot achieve this level of biological enclosure in the context of a mutually loving relationship. Instead, he must find women who already exist as commodities. Which is how OP ends up establishing a sea-based libertarian sex-trafficking ring and getting bagged by the Thai police after Alison leaves him.
-30-
*The death of old forum culture means the loss of many old texts, including the load bearing drywall of internet engineering criticism.