The Uncanny Canyon

Yes, I know it's supposed to be valley

Midjourney images for “uncanny”

I just finished Patricia Lockwood’s No One is Talking About This, which was in the mix for and won all kinds of prizey things. Reading Lockwood’s novel was a different experience, and that makes it hard to talk about in a conventional way. This is a good thing. Better than good. I don’t want to be “spoiler person,” but I think one of Lockwood’s achievements is adding a new layer to the term “the uncanny valley” which I will dumbly call “the uncanny canyon.” (Keep it clean, people.)

The uncanny canyon is the internet version of the uncanny valley—instead of experiencing discomfort in seeing something (like a robot) that too closely resembles human form (not sure if M3GAN would count), Lockwood applies the uncanniness to the self: she writes about the discomfort of your non-online-self getting a full look at your online self (which is, in a sense, a simulation). The results prove unflattering and, in the ever-shifting contexts of No One is Talking About This, they can be devastating.

I give Lockwood an Everest of credit for orchestrating something that feels like it should be easy but is not—she writes about online life and identity in a nuanced (and often hilarious) way. She is not someone to just point her cursor and say, “this is stupid, you’re stupid, and I can’t believe how stupid all this stupid is and does.” Lockwood’s an artist who isn’t afraid to challenge herself—I find her to genuinely be asking, “What is this online world doing to me, Patricia Lockwood, in terms of my emotions and relationships outside of that context, if such an ‘outside’ even exists anymore.” I find several of Lockwood’s realizations disturbing. To be clear, it is not Lockwood that is disturbing; it’s that she invites me as a reader to participate in that same analysis, and in doing so I walk into my own uncanny canyon (I said keep it clean Substack!). Or to use a long-running simile that actually makes sense—I felt like I was looking in a mirror. And Lockwood is, again, too smart to have you as a reader be able to look in that mirror and decisively reflect, “I like/didn’t like what I saw.”

Instead, I think she’s pointing to a fundamental truth of the contemporary western (online) world—to be an “online often” personality is to be more a part of society than not. It is to be included, to be liked and thumbs-upped for everything you offer in that world, and the sillier the better. To not be an “online often” personality is to be away from that disembodied and phrenetic hive, to be sheltered from the fatigue of moving from outrage to outrage before instantly forgetting what your anger was about, but the truth is that the price of non-admission is often loneliness. You’re not in the place where you will now find many of your friends, especially from the past. You don’t see all their pictures or hear what their cat destroyed this time. To not be “online often” is to, in many cases, lose touch with people and friends that you love, because “online” and “in touch” are close to being synonymous.

No One is Talking About This is divided into two parts: the first details the “online often” character and the second the “offline often” character (who are the same person, but different!). But it’s important to know that the online world—which Lockwood calls “the portal”—is always present in the novel; it’s just a question of modulation and balance. It’s certainly present in the book’s form, where Lockwood made a truly great decision in writing in short bursts and sections of text, like a series of super tweets strung together that, in the end, become all the lights on a Christmas tree. Like I said, I won’t spoil the plot, so instead… let me talk about myself!

I’m not “extremely online.” Substack and LinkedIn are the only two places you can really find me in the uncanny canyon (I can hear you all saying “Lame.” Stop it). No Facebook, no TikTok, no TwiXter, no “Insta,” and obviously none of the other things that I can’t name because I’m not cool. There are two reasons for this. First, a few years back, I was essentially pushed off social media by an employer—this was not done through official sanction, but via the very real strategy we call “the chilling effect” (I had done nothing wrong; I was literally engaging with one of my elected representatives. My employer was just coincidentally in the same district.) Second, in terms of Facebook, I left when I became a Dean at my university—it felt like the right thing to do, as so many of the people who suddenly reported to me were my “FB friends” and I didn’t want to interfere with Facebook’s main function for many people: venting. Venting is important, and I knew the workplace would be a part of it, as would I (likely for good reason).

Why am I saying all this? I’ve only been “limited online” for about 5 or 6 years and I can say that this distance has allowed me to experience the “uncanny canyon” that Lockwood has mapped. I hesitate to say this, but I can “tell” which people are “online often” from those who aren’t—living in largely different worlds leads to significant differences, or changes, in personality. In many ways, I feel better being offline—I read, write, work out, spend time with my family, play guitar, etc. And I can concentrate, which I really needed to do as Dean. There was a time when I was of the “often online” tribe when I could literally feel my brain changing, rewiring itself: it became harder to read books, harder to concentrate, and harder to invite quiet and the importance that is boredom into my life. I fought like heck to get all that back, and thus even that employer’s interference became interpreted as serendipitous. I was not among “them” anymore.

And that’s where Lockwood’s work really taught me something. There’s a tradeoff. Whether you are online or not, that fact is that much of the western world is, and that world is where things happen, are said, and can be fun and connective—you can become isolated from that, or at least feel isolated from that, and the issue Lockwood often tests is whether that isolation is not only good or bad, but whether or not it’s real. If anything, my experience was that being an “online often” person didn’t so much isolate me from others as it isolated me from myself. It was still a form of loneliness and that’s what hurt. (There’s also this post, which is the thing I’ve written here that people have read the most.)

But what am I now? A pretty useless writer of poetry, but to know the poetry world and to submit and publish work is to, of course, be online. I don’t read physical newspapers; I refer to about 5 to 8 different news sites daily, all online—it’s just that most of my online experience isn’t social. Maybe I’ll invent another stupid term: I am “online often” but in an “online asocial” manner (also, comments sections give Dante nightmares).

The world is different. I remember first truly falling into the emerging web around 1995 or so, when me and some friends would drink cheap wine coolers and try to design webpages in basic html, for fun! Imagine, that at the start, creating the internet was often an in-person social activity! But as I’ve written previously, so much of what I care about isn’t “here.” (Substack has been a true exception to almost all my other “platform” experience.) I didn’t listen to No One is Talking About This on audiobook or an e-reader—I held it in my hands and turned the pages of a bound book set in a world without pages. I hit page 1000 in War and Peace today, meaning I finished chapter one. As I write this, I’m listening to MIZU’s Distant Intervals on Spotify. So as I am writing about not being online much, I am holding my laptop, writing on Substack, and listening to Spotify…yet feel like I am doing this in seclusion, as if I could be writing by hand and listening to the radio, though I will self-publish a few minutes from now with a single “click” and announce my presence without permission. No one is liking me or hearting me or thumbing me (which sounds terrible, but Patricia Lockwood would get that one, because she’s hilarious and raunchy and simultaneously sharp as a blade.)

And now Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely is running through my head. That could be an alternate title for Patricia Lockwood’s No One is Talking About This. The novel also doesn’t have guns, so it qualifies as Gun-Free Entertainment, which all three of you know I love.

In short, I think you should read No One is Talking About This—think about that world, think about yourself within that world, and then try to step outside of that and look at yourself looking. Uncanny. I want to know what you see.