“There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.”

—Ursula K. LeGuin

It’s 2006. I am an unpaid blogger without a day job living at home with my parents. Freelance work has been slow. After smoking a bowl in my green Hyundai Accent with a dent in the front left bumper, I shuffle to the computer room and go through my bookmarked blogs. One of them (I don’t remember which one, probably BoingBoing) links me to a Henry Jenkins essay on the challenge of making video game narratives; how it is difficult to find the balance between good gameplay and good narrative. I have what blogger Lindsay Robertson of the now-defunct blog Lindsayism calls a “highdea.” What if the Internet were to evolve into a narrative medium? Jenkins compares video games to cinema. For decades, films were primarily meant to be an attraction: an electric vaudeville, or circus. There was no fourth wall, actors looked at the camera and performed their stunts, pratfalls, etc. My hope is that by the 2010s, the Internet will prove to be as legitimate a medium for storytelling as cinema proved to be and as television is proving to be at that time.

Almost 20 years later, I am two years sober and the internet has no coherence whatsoever, let alone any serious claim for narrative legitimacy. We are about to become a post-literate society. AI is triggering delusions. What’s more, people don’t seem to have lives to live, let alone write about. Heather Parry writes in Persuasion:

But we have grown up in the internet age, so all our characters speak in a very detached, ironic style where you can’t actually figure out what anyone feels about anything. Because there are no obvious emotions, you can’t really figure out an emotional change. Because there’s no action, and instead we have characters just saying what they think (but not what they feel), there’s little progression or tension, and you don’t see characters forced to make decisions. There’s no propulsion from one scene to the next, and you might get to the end of a story—or sometimes an entire novel—without anything having actually occurred. You’ve had lots of discussions in different bars (to show your character is tortured, right?) but no plot is to be