The American writer exposing our bizarre online double-lives
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
“For some time,” Natasha Stagg writes, she has warned anyone who’ll listen that “Facebook was not just another thing on the internet, like Wikipedia or virtual aquariums. I’d get annoyed with people when they feigned disinterest in the idea, saying they hardly participated in the new tools of self-promotion. ‘I’m on it but I never post’ sounds guilty, and at the same time naïve. Is a dependency on voyeurism healthier than one on exhibitionism?”
Stagg is one of our sharpest writers on life in the digital age. In Artless, her second prose collection, made up of short “musings, or reviews, or diaries” mixed indiscriminately with fiction, her subjects are occasional and legion – cancelled men, social media, advertising, fashion, parties, sex – but they all swim in the blurry divide between online and offline life. She makes no pretence of finality. In her introduction, she quotes Marguerite Duras: “At most, the book represents what I think sometimes, some days, about some things.”
Stagg’s first book was a novel, Surveys (2016). It tells the story of a listless young woman who gains unfulfilling online fame; though presented as a work of fiction, its commentarial heart was on its sleeve. Next came Sleeveless (2019), a collection that explores, like Artless, how “digital natives” can no longer view personal identity in the way that their elders could. They’re forced to understand themselves as images, as things seen by other people. When everything gets chronicled, and self-presentation can never stop, work and leisure have effectively merged: this, Stagg writes in Artless, is “the eradication of compartmenting what one does and what one does”.
Her insights aren’t applicable to Gen Y and Z alone, but to anyone who maintains an active presence on the web. Some people still don’t have one, and bliss it must be in that dawn, but they’re a minority of internet users, and one shrinking with every month. As Stagg explained in Sleeveless, everyone else – from the most avid Instagrammer to anyone who comments “below the line” – has effectively created a “double self-image”, a “contrast between a life and the image of that life as projected online”. You pose for “spontaneous” photos, then work to filter and curate them; you lash out in the comments section, then go downstairs to your family. Online, you’re always self-fashioning, whether in images or words. You become, in effect, your own brand.
Though born in Tuscon, Arizona, and once a Los Angeles resident, Stagg’s centre of gravity is New York City. She’s an aficionado of its local mythology, and how that’s a locus of branding too, from the renovated Hotel Chelsea to the annual theatre of Fashion Week.“Nostalgia is a poison,” she writes of the Chelsea, now trading on its Beatnik legend, “but forgetting is just as toxic.”
Along the way, there are melancholic stories about intimacies revived from the past, or never quite reciprocated in the present, as well as offhand party reports, plus some stranger fact-finding pieces that were commissioned by magazines. The highlight is a trip to the home of the “visionary” architect Eduardo “Roth” Neira, “which looks like a climbing/skate park, or a lived-in lunar-surface movie set, in a jungle”. Her critical eye is constant, though, in truth, these read like diversions from the central affair.
Stagg knows another fact about digital life: that our hearts aren’t entirely sold. According to a 2019 report, 50 per cent of millennials trust influencers when they advertise brands, yet 88 per cent want those influencers to be “authentic” too. Since we don’t think of branding as authenticity – or would, at least, claim to see through it – there’s some contradiction here. Stagg is captivated by the modern luminaries who put us in that bind, and writes well about celebrities, about “the behavioural changes that come from being constantly scrutinised”. She has encountered a number of stars – Sarah Jessica Parker, Vincent Gallo and Abel Ferrara stroll through Artless – so when she adds that “writing about meeting celebrities is stigmatised because it is also name-dropping”, you hear frustration in her tone. (One early title for Artless was Name Dropping, but the autofictional novelist Chris Kraus, Stagg’s editor, had other and better ideas.)
Throughout Artless, Stagg is an instructive stylist. Though her subjects are trendy and her tone informal, her sentences are dispassionate. What makes her resistant to quotation, and impenetrable in interviews, is also what makes her analysis good: she discards no view in totality. She’s at her most deadpan, but also her most serious, about the American opioid crisis: “I keep hearing about fentanyl in cocaine like it’s salmonella in spinach at the grocery store. Don’t buy right now. Wait out the infection. But also, there are drugs everywhere, in restaurants and parks and cars. The relentless optimism of everyone feels threatening.”
You sense that she wants to be pithy more often, but refuses to trust the instinct. In an age where shrill essayists swarm the internet, planting opinions like flags and writing as monotonously as they can, Stagg prefers to inhabit grey areas. Her discussion of cultural appropriation takes a couple of pages to unfurl, and covers the bases better than any defence or attack I’ve read. In a recent interview, she described moralising as “just so obnoxious to read… I can’t consider myself the authority on anything. Not fashion, not art, not writing.” The intellectual characteristic of the age, she thinks, is to have “conflicting opinions coming from one mind, and that mind earnestly believing each”.
To return to that early line: “‘I’m on it but I never post’ sounds guilty, and at the same time naïve.” Nonetheless, it’s the sort of thing people declare – or they declare that they don’t use that social-media rubbish, as if that even mattered, as if the world around them weren’t insidiously shaped by social-media patterns of thought. As Stagg explains, everything you see on a screen, from text to pictures, is now branded in some way. But to that realism, she adds a thought that has, characteristically, no time for despair. “Advertising is not nothing,” she writes. “It’s one of the most substantive acts we have.”
Artless is published by Semiotext(e) at £15.99
