In “The Feminist,” the opening missive in Tony Tulathimutte’s profane and profanely hysterical book Rejection, a narrow-shouldered tryhard brands himself a feminist ally to have sex with women. It doesn’t exactly work out for him, but that’s also the point Tulathimutte is trying to make—the man’s attempt at sexual conquest is blinded by his irredeemable narcissism. He refuses to believe he’s the problem. Among Tulathimutte’s moralizing flock of neurotic loners who animate the frictions and trapdoors of online life, he is simply one of many, many more.
Rejection is Tulathimutte’s second book, and it’s quite the leveling up. His first, 2016’s Private Citizens, followed an ensemble of Stanford graduates in San Francisco during the mid-aughts (Tulathimutte also attended Stanford, where he studied symbolic systems). His latest, a collection of interlocked stories, is so exactingly acidic, so entertaining in its pathos and humor, you’ll wonder how someone can so immaculately peer into the soul of millennial disorder in the way that he does.
Without spoiling too much, I’ll say this: I have never laughed as hard reading a work of fiction, maybe ever, while also being challenged by the clarity of its tragic dream. Under the microscope, Tulathimutte observes and scrutinizes the anatomy of our delusions, supercharged as they are by the internet. The book sizzles in its distillations, is coolly askew in its dark spirals. Rejection is brain-meltingly good.
In the story “Ahegao, or, The Ballad of Sexual Repression,” a man named Kant reluctantly joins a gay hookup app—“a miniscule butcher shop”—and is turned off by its “infinite display case of rumps, loins, and wursts.” Later, he pays an adult-content creator to cosplay what I can only describe as one of the most demented, and hilariously specific, sexual fantasies I have ever read. What is there to learn from Tulathimutte’s love-mangled virgins who are embittered by their romantic failures? Quite a lot, it turns out.
Jason Parham: What’s your earliest memory of being online?
Tony Tulathimutte: Until Twitter came around, the internet was always a distinctively single player experience for me. Our first console was an Atari 2600. I was a really big gamer. When dial up started to hit, I signed up immediately. Then the file-sharing era took off and I was downloading incredibly bad infosec files to my family computer. I’ve always been a lurker.
Same.
There is a really interesting chicken-and-egg question about whether or not being online primarily shapes the content of our desires or whether or not it reflects what’s already inside of us. For me, being online from such an early age—I would say 11 or 12—it’s hard to distinguish which direction it came from, or what the interplay is there.
What was it about Twitter that changed that single-user experience?
The entire point of Twitter is to be broadcast to some number of people that’s likely higher than you will ever meet in person in your entire life. There’s a throwaway line in the book about how these faux pas that happen on social media are the consequence of the difference between what a human and what a computer considers a large number. In the same way, during the mid-century, that unidirectional mass media had unintended consequences for its effect on culture, our current bidirectional mass media—where you are the media, as well as the audience—is exponentially more chaotic for that reason.
It’s rotting our brains.
[Laughs] Well, I don’t know. Since the invention of radio, people have said that about every new medium. The content during the birth of those mediums is usually commercial trash, or there’s not been a real process of optimization where people figure out what that platform is for.
Everyone’s just testing shit out.
I always think about an early tweet, in 2007, that the New York Times Twitter account posted—“‘Word Up!’ It is I, the Gray Lady.” When its content is like that, and people are still figuring out what the medium is for, or what it’s good at, it is garbage. It is garbage. It’s not going to compare to a form like the novel, that’s been around for hundreds of years. But it doesn’t actually take all that long for a medium to get up on its feet. The stigma around a medium being a trash medium that rots your brain does linger for some time, even when it starts to provide stuff that is really worth thinking about.
Completely.
That said, I don’t want to be too contrarian. There is still plenty of garbage.
Has your relationship to the platform changed since Elon Musk took over?
My relationship to Twitter has always been to post the stupidest thing I can think about. It’s the genuine shitposting thing. In that unidirectional sense, when it’s sitting down to write and post, it hasn’t really affected that at all. But certainly the quality of the content that you see coming the other way is horrendously awful. The thumb has been placed on the scales to promote the agenda of the person who owns this website under the intensely hypocritical guise of free speech.
It’s really no wonder that there has been this scattering to the winds of people on social media now, as if they didn’t need another reason to migrate to other platforms. I remember that moment when there was Threads, Bluesky, Twitter, Mastodon, and some other ones—and I’m like, this is the fucking War of the Roses.
I dunk on Twitter constantly—I am never calling it X—but can’t seem to quit. It’s still important and useful for many reasons.
From my vantage point, the utility to the writer is it provides a buffet of freak behavior that you would never have access to otherwise.
All the trolls.
Well, you get examples of pathologies that you wouldn’t come across in your ordinary life, but on the other hand, it also has stretched everybody’s imagination of what kind of people are out there. This becomes even more interesting and complicated when you contemplate that people are not really being themselves online either. A reader picking up a book now is going to be, I think, less skeptical about extremes of behavior in a character that’s on the internet, which gives you a lot more latitude to be absurdist in a way that doesn’t skirt realism.
Why was the, quote-unquote, loser or reject such an enticing figure to pursue in this project?
The obvious answer—it’s what’s on my mind. Being somebody who has gone through a lot of rejection, and not really finding a ton of books, to my mind, that engaged centrally about that subject, or books that went beyond treating it as a brief plot point, was the drive for it.
What themes felt important to unpack?
As far as how I connected it to the internet, one, it’s where people go for answers very often, especially answers to questions that are too shameful to ask in real life. They seek out people who’ve been through the same things. This used to be the primary task of literature.
The other thing is, when you’re lonely, especially when you’re lonely in a kind of wounded way, it is extremely enticing to be on a medium that can’t reject you. The internet is never off. Unless you are somewhere without access, there is never a point where you are denied from using it. It creates a zero-calorie form of socialization that will soothe lonely people, at least temporarily. When writing about contemporary life, it’s hard to avoid.
Is loneliness one of the defining symptoms of this current era?
No, loneliness has always existed. In a strange way, our access to witness loneliness has radically increased. There is something to the fact that the availability of a substitute for socialization, rather than in-person meeting, has contributed to that a little bit. Social media being solely responsible for having generated it, is a little bit of a moral panic.
One of the stories in the collection, “Pics,” illustrates the complexity of group chat dynamics. I came across a recent post about how decayed and absurd the internet has gotten, because of AI, influencers, and other weird evolutions. The post made me wonder if group chats are the last safe space we have.
I don’t know. You see how it turns out in that story—not well, without spoiling it. It’s this interesting example of the internet of few people, where you are connected to other people but only like six or seven of them. You create a sort of ersatz community that way. But it can just as easily fall apart because of one argument that people have. It’s not that that can’t happen in real life, but it’s akin to, you know, there being an argument in some sort of community center or bar and then the bar crumbling around everybody’s head as a result of it. It usually doesn’t happen that way.
As someone who’s been acutely plugged in from the beginning, how do you see social media evolving in this next stage?
There’s a definite pivot to video. I learned not that long ago about this phenomenon of the millennial pause. Have you heard of this?
No, I haven’t.
Apparently there’s this thing that humiliatingly identifies millennials when they post video content, which is that when they start they pause for a second or two, before they begin talking. Whereas if you watch something made by a younger person, they’ll be in the middle of their sentence by the time it starts. It’s stuff like that.
Damn, I definitely do that.
If you’re asking for a prediction, my guess is there’s going to be a larger shift away from unique identity, in the sense that an individual account is presumed to represent one real person in the world. Given the combined weight of things—the co-presence of AI slop and bots, but also the reluctance to be tied or accountable to a single all-purpose identity across platforms—there’s going to be less of a feeling that any particular account is canonically ‘you’ online. That is, you might use one to promote your work, and one for socializing, and one for lurking and trolling, a kind of willful fragmenting of oneself in a way that can be totally opaque to others. People already do it now, but it will be more of the baseline norm in the future.
