The emptiness of the millennial world

Article by Gavin Haynes, published in UnHerd

The Millennial Literary Voice was always going to have trouble establishing itself. It is, after all, defined by a subject that literature always struggles with, because it lacks a proper verb: being online. Consider the number of Poirot mysteries that would easily be solved with Google, and a life inside tech seems to be without the dimensions required for narrative. Yet the alternative — an anachronistic world in which characters pretend they don’t spend Sunday nights in deflated doom-scrolling — is even worse. As is descending into William Gibson cyber-surfer neural-network blather: in the age of always-on, somehow sci fi has never felt more distant. The thing in the middle will define the Voice — how we use tech and how tech uses us.

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