Aiden Arata gets the internet, and her expertise comes from living it. From obsessive AIM messaging to being labeled an influencer to feeling weird about wandering around influencer events, Arata has spent her time in the online culture trenches and has survived to tell her tales. The stories she crafts in her debut essay collection You Have a New Memory aren’t hatchet jobs though, at least not directed at individuals and individual behavior around technology. Her writing is pointed (especially at the systems creating the new dynamics of the internet), but also exploratory, questioning, and thoroughly dedicated to trying to understand humanity and our relationship with the machines we’ve built our lives around.
I connected with Arata over video call upon the launch of her new book. In the following conversation, we chat about how writing a full-length collection impacted Arata’s relationship with the internet, her approach to research, and the murky distinctions between content and art.
The Rumpus: Where did this book come from?
Aiden Arata: It came from the experience of being very online and accidentally falling into content creation. I don’t know how I got here, but yes, just finding myself on the internet as a consumer and a creator and generator of digital culture and art in this way, and starting to feel very uneasy about that, noticing many of the good things that I felt, which was connection, validation. It was how I paid my bills for a long time. That is a valid reason to make things, and also feeling like, “Oh, I’m complicit in this machine that makes people feel horrible about themselves and disconnected, that is just processing and selling our data to unknown evil entities at all times.”
What does it mean to be in this system and realizing in real time how messed up it is, and messed up for everyone? I think that’s a really interesting thing that the book deals with. It’s not that compelling to me to make fun of influencers for being vapid. It’s more interesting to critique the influencer economy, and also, why are we drawn to this industry? Why do we consume it? Also, why is it not actually working for people? It’s this weird false promise.
I think it felt important to be like, “The call is coming from inside the house,” and writing a book about the internet from the perspective of someone who is deeply complicit in the internet.
Just as a side note, the book grapples with how none of the language is really sufficient to talk about the economy of content and the new world that we live in. It’s like “influencer,” “content creator,” I don’t really think of myself in any of those terms, but I also acknowledge that they’re handy.
Rumpus: You start your book with an essay about AIM, which is much more about direct communication, and over the course of your collection, the internet shifts to this one directional conversation. How has that shift changed how you interact with what you create online?
Arata: In the day, Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, you had friends. Now you have followers. At some point, the language shifted, and the relationship shifted. I do think we all just shifted.
On the one hand, as a writer and an artist, I feel most comfortable making something and then giving it to someone. At some point, the street has to be a little bit one-way, because that’s what it means to make anything and put it in the world. Of course, the horrors of losing your control over it and not knowing where the baby goes, that’s just the process, and it’s been that way forever. On the other hand, I think that it can shift—the scale at which you’re connecting with people, and of course, the depth at which you can connect to people. You can’t have an authentic connection with a million people. I just don’t think that’s possible. Everyone is in this fan-artist relationship. Everything is so parasocial right now. It’s making us all really crazy, I think.
I’m friends with a lot of artists who are much more objectively famous in the sphere and have fans in just a different way. I will preface this by saying that anyone who has ever been a fan of mine pretty much has been bubbly. Everyone who follows me is very cool and chill. I’m very biased, but my corner is nice. I just know the way that fans feel like they have access or that they are entitled to access from the people that they admire is very incel-y right now.
There’s something about fandoms and about incel culture that I’m like, “What is it about the internet that does that to us? What puts in our brains that we should be angry if we are not getting reciprocated attention from an entity?” Because it is the same idea; the idea is I want reciprocity—he idea that you want something and then you’re so angry that you’re not getting the thing. The expectation of being seen back from the mirror is very interesting. I don’t know what it is about the internet that does that to us. Maybe it’s leveling the playing field, or we’re having the illusion of leveling the playing field in this way.
This season of Love Island was after the massively successful season six, and all of the success of that season, and the fan response, it felt like this season really catered to the fans. There would be very intense fan pushes for a certain couple to get together. In the next episode, production would have happened to get that couple. It’s very much “choose your own adventure” in a way that feels very sinister to me. I just think the point of art, and that includes Love Island in some ways, the point of media in some ways is that I think that it should surprise us, and it should take the reins a little bit. There’s something about the expectation of control in all of our media right now that is very sinister to me. I don’t think it’s a good path, and I don’t think it’s a fulfilling path.
Rumpus: It’s the fan-fication of romance novels as well, where you literally have on the front cover, enemies to lovers. Everything’s like fast food in a way.
Arata: I just think it’s really interesting to make a book in this context, because it’s very much the antithesis of that, the idea that you’re making something and you’re putting it in the world and you cannot edit it, you cannot change it. I don’t think it would be wise to respond to commentary on it in a serious way. I just think there’s something being like, “Here. Here’s what it is. I respect it if it’s not for you,” but it feels very different to put this media out in this world right now, where there is a large number of people who expect things to be very catered to their taste. I fall into that, too. Again, the whole point is I’m not immune from this. I have to examine that in myself.
Rumpus: Along those lines, what’s the difference for you between writing prose and crafting a meme?
Arata: I think that memes are really interesting in the ways that they play with language and image. You just can’t get a level of nuance in the internet. It’s just consumed too quickly and it’s consumed too ephemerally to really talk about ideas and see every side of something and to give an idea a lot of grace in the ways that it grapples with a concept or a challenging situation. I just think that the way that we consume language on the internet has to be super utilitarian because our attention spans are being ripped to shreds at any given time.
For me, prose and writing a book that I think is pretty poetic—there’s something very dreamlike about it. It plays with language and all of these ways that luxuriate in language—I think that’s a response to that, to be like, “I don’t get to do this on the internet in this way. Here’s an opportunity to just sit with this because this is what language can be. It can be ornamental, and it can be, maybe not frivolous, but it can take the scenic route.”
Rumpus: Did you feel like you had to expand your writing practice for this type of writing, or were you just ready to go?
Arata: I’ve always written. I’ve always wanted to be a writer and written at some capacity, but oh, my god, yes, having to actually write with any level of discipline, yes, that changed me profoundly. I think something ironic is that I had to really get offline to write the book. Actually making something very long-term requires just deep concentration. You can’t deep concentrate on the internet. It makes it very hard to research because the temptation of just scrolling forever is there.
Yes, I think it really changed the way that I see work and the way that I value work.
To be totally candid, it’s been hard to return to the internet after that. I just feel like, “Oh. The whole point was to get it so I could write a book. Now I wrote my book, and I want to write another book.” Yes, I love living in long space or long time or whatever sort of that depth of getting into something. It’s been hard to balance being online again in any real way.
Rumpus: You mentioned research. These are obviously personal essays, but you’re also writing about science, about history, about place. How did you approach your research?
Arata: I love JSTOR. Huge JSTOR girlie, and just reading as much as I could. Just being like, “Okay, what is there about 12th-century nuns and holy visions? Really, what is the debate on whether Los Angeles is a desert or not?” I do think research is a fantastic procrastination tool as well, but I do think it’s this thing when you’re working on something that, if it’s an idea that’s very compelling to you and very exciting, then it becomes the project that you’re working on is like a vessel and the whole world is just water filling it.
Everything conforms to the shape of your vessel. Everything that you’re coming across could be a good idea or could be part of this. Then, of course, you have to weed it out because at some point, that gets a little bit like paranoia, almost where you’re like, everything is about this, and you’re like, “No, not everything is about this. There are not connections everywhere.” I think that I really enjoyed that process. It’s like gathering and then winnowing, gathering every possible angle.
Rumpus: Speaking of coming up with ideas, where did your title come from?
Arata: The iPhone used to send you that notification. It would auto-generate these stitched-together photos for you and videos, and it would just tell you that you had a new memory. I just thought that was so sinister and strange. I talked a little bit about cognitive offloading in the book and the ways that we naturally have to—again, this is not a judgment or humans being lazy—it’s just the world that we live in, the phone has taken on a lot of prosthetic responsibility for us, like it’s prosthetic memory. It’s prosthetic headspace. It’s prosthetic decision-making, prosthetic social circle, whatever.
It’s all of these things for us, and the idea that without asking, it suddenly became your memory, and then also would stitch together very disparate things, strange things that weren’t your memory, and then say, “This is your experience now.” It is the question of how can you live that way and have it be authentic? Is it an authentic life if your memories are being reconstructed and handed back to you? All memory is fallible and reconstructed, and handed back to you. It’s actually a little bit murkier than just “tech bad” or something.
Again, the funny thing about writing a book and working in the slow process of literature is that it doesn’t even send you that notification anymore, which actually feels like a huge win to me, that I’m like, “Oh, now my book is the thing that this is about. The notification—I outlived it.” The world has moved so fast, that it’s not even a relevant reference anymore.
Rumpus: Do you feel like there will be people who have different expectations of your different personas, from social media to your written work? Have you already seen responses along that vein?
Arata: I do think it’s probably more of a literary book than a lot of people maybe were expecting. I think it would be easy to not know what it’s about and pigeonhole it like, “Confessions of an influencer.” I have a previous agent before my agent now, who I love. The previous agent was trying to get the book sold from that angle. I was like, “I would rather die.” Yes, if you read that, then I think you would be pretty surprised because it’s kind of a weird book.
It’s hard to know. I think I try really hard to not think too much about performativity in a way that maybe shoots me in the foot sometimes. Obviously, you’re always clicking and we’re always thinking about it and we’re always thinking about it more than we were always thinking about it ten years ago. There’s just like a different gaze, like the camera’’s gaze or this surveillance gaze that I think influences the vast, vast majority of people on an unconscious level at this point in the Anthropocene.
Rumpus: Are there other bits of the internet or internet culture, or tech culture that you weren’t able to fit in this book that you really wanted to write about?
Arata: Ooh. This isn’t exactly an answer to your question, but I’m really grateful that I wrote this book before AI took off, because I think I would have to talk about it otherwise, and I really don’t want to in that way. I just think it’s moving too rapidly and too strangely. It’s also not that interesting to me yet. I haven’t really figured it out. I don’t like it. I think it’s evil. I just think that we could be applying it to so many better uses than we are.
I do actually think it’s really interesting that so much AI is trying to make art. It just feels like it raises all these questions about how we value art. It’s this thing where we don’t really pay artists a lot. It’s a very common joke that your parents are disappointed because you are a writer. At the same time, all of these tech people are investing billions of dollars to allow themselves to have the illusion that they can create art. They’re being like, “I could write a screenplay now.” I’m like, “Holy shit, your damage is so visible. Clearly, you really value this, and it has bothered you your whole life that you’re not a creative person. You are destroying the planet so that you can go think of yourself as a creative person.”
What if we just valued art more? I don’t know.
Rumpus: I guess that leads me to my last question. Is there a difference between content and art?
Arata: Yes. Oh, my god. Yes, and it is a blurry line, because there is some content that is art. There are some things that you see, and you’re like, “This is amazing,” or, “This is an idea that’s stuck with me forever.” The thing that is cool about memes is that they’re like kind of outsider art. They are the subversion of pop culture tropes, and into these weird, surreal, anti-capitalist ideas, because they’re democratically shared and they are sourceless. Now they’re monetizable in their own ways, but originally, it was this radical way of taking Nickelodeon’s IP and making it into something that is strange and different and reveals something about the subconscious hive mind.
I think that’s really compelling. That’s very Henry Darger to me; that’s an artistic mindset. However, a lot of content is not art. A lot of it is phoning it in, a lot of it is just capital. Whether that’s money capital or social capital, it’s all in the machine of gains, gains, gains. What can this do for me? Ultimately, I do think that something about content that’s not art is that it’s generated only for the profit of the creator. There’s no intention of benefit to the person—it’s advertising, I guess.
I think it would be disingenuous to be like, “Oh, I’m making work as some great selfless act. None of it’s for me.” Of course, I want to live a nice life. I want to be able to keep writing books. That is the dream. I want to be able to have a family and not be destitute and make art. There has to be some benefit in there for me, and also, it feels good to make things.
