Most people still clinging to the notion of being a writer (or at least a “pure of heart” one) are likely classifiable, at this juncture, in the “old soul” category. As such, they tend to romanticize the era when everything wasn’t dominated by technology. More specifically, smartphones and the internet. And among the many hard truths/pearls of wisdom that Sigrid Nunez offers in The Friend about being a writer in the modern world—the cruel, uncaring-about-literature modern world—is that even younger writers are “weird” about overly (or even slightly) incorporating technology into their writing.

As Nunez, through the voice of her narrator, describes it, “It is one of the great bafflements of student fiction. I have read that college students can spend up to ten hours a day on social media. But for the people they write about—also mostly college students—the internet barely exists. Cell phones do not belong in fiction, an editor once scolded in the margin of one of my manuscripts, and ever since—more than two decades now—I have wondered at the disconnect between tech-filled life and techless story.” The disconnect isn’t just that many writers (especially those of a more curmudgeonly “back in my day” variety) find something “base” and “banal” about technology, but that for the nostalgia-plagued “old soul” of a writer, the idea of incorporating technology into literature can often feel like sacrilege. Though, in truth, trying to avoid it entirely can instead come across as pretentious. A contrived bid to announce to the reader, “This is High Literature.”

To heighten the notion that literature generally considers itself too “hallowed” and too “precious” to include déclassé technology within its so-called consecrated pages, it’s no wonder that the go-to genre for writing of late appears to be historical fiction (look at such recent releases as The Boy From the Sea, A Map to Paradise and Isola). In contrast, other artistic mediums—particularly film and TV—take no issue with “keeping it modern.” Save for the handful of pseudointellectual directors that prefer to sidestep the use of technology altogether by constantly setting their films in a pre-internet decade. This includes the likes of Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson (who even makes the present feel like the past), Quentin Tarantino (once a very contemporary bloke when he started out in the nineties) and, er, Woody Allen—who adores the word “pseudointellectual” (not seeming to grasp that he is one). Granted, it’s fair to say that filmmakers have a much rougher go of “creating problems” for their characters as a result of technological advancements.

Take, for instance, a movie like 1987’s Adventures in Babysitting. The series of increasing issues faced by Chris (Elisabeth Shue) throughout her hellish night of babysitting would have been resolved within minutes if she had access to a smartphone. So yes, for movies, an aversion to setting the narrative in the present is more understandable than it is for literature, where the internalized world of the character allows for much more flexibility in terms of continuing to furnish the protagonist with a robust array of issues. In fact, technology in literature perhaps allows for the creation of even more issues (at least the emotional/anxiety-driven kind).

And yet, the writer with a romanticized vision of how literature “should be” (with notions of what “tasteful” and “elevated” mean inferring that tech is too lowbrow to wield within a narrative) simply cannot compute (tech pun intended) this possibility. In truth, this is a core reason for why so many “millennial writers” (a broad term frequently used to diminish and demean even those who don’t fall into said generational category) were—and continue to be—dismissed as “whiny” and “unserious.” Because they “dared” and “deigned” to let technology feature prominently within their work (apparently not “romantic” enough to excise it).

There are even examples of when the use of tech a.k.a. social media/the internet was the entire conceit for a “millennial” book (e.g., Marie Calloway’s what purpose did i serve in your life and Tao Lin’s Richard Yates). Different from “New Sincerity” writers like David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen, the “millennial writer” possesses a voice and style that is almost entirely informed by their technology and internet-entrenched existence (one might say this for Gen Z as well, were it not for the fact that no truly prominent Gen Z writers have emerged [this in part because, as will be referenced below, there are few Gen Z readers], in a telling symbol of how literature/the printed word is likely to die out entirely in the future). This includes authors such as Sally Rooney, Halle Butler and Lauren Oyler.

To the point of the “millennial shift” felt in writing during the 2010s, in Adam Kelly’s New Sincerity: American Fiction in the Neoliberal Age, he brings up something that cuts right to the core of why writing took a noticeable turn yet again in the post-New Sincerity age (demarcated by Kelly as being after the 2008 financial crisis). That something is the fact that we presently live in an era when there are more writers than readers. Quoting from Deborah Brandt’s The Rise of Writing in the passage that follows, Kelly states, “…with the coming of the knowledge economy from the 1970s and the digital age from the 1990s, ‘For perhaps the first time in the history of mass literacy, writing seems to be eclipsing reading as the literate experience of consequence.’ And writing possesses a contrasting cultural heritage to reading, being ‘connected not to citizenship but to work,’ belonging to ‘the transactional sphere,’ with its value ‘captured largely for private enterprise, trade and artisanship.’”

That technology itself became a primary catalyst for why so many people from the millennial generation onward assumed they could (and should) write is yet another meta aspect to their more tech-friendly literature. Ever since the dawning of even the “crudest” forms of blogs and webpages (e.g., GeoCities and Angelfire), the “democratizing” power of technology allowed anyone to become a writer because anyone (with a computer and internet connection) could disseminate their message. The gatekeeping days of major publishing houses were over, thanks to increasing modes of self-publishing-geared options (whether digital or print). And that, to many, was actually a good thing. Not a sign of some “there goes the neighborhood” catastrophe, but a chance, at last to be heard where once it was impossible to finagle a platform (like WordPress, Tumblr [RIP, to the good version of it anyway], et al.).

Somewhere along the way, however, the approach to writing as a form of “expression” (online or otherwise) gave way to the curse of “late capitalism.” To quote Kelly citing Brandt, “As Brandt notes, this utilitarian, capitalist conception of writing—so different to the historically dominant understanding of reading as a pathway to citizenship, worship and personal autonomy—is underscored by the law of the land: ‘According to the Supreme Court, people do not really write at work as citizens or free beings but rather as willingly enlisted corporate voices… They are not individually responsible for what they are paid to say. Consequently, they don’t really mean what they say. In fact, according to the Court, people who write for pay can’t really mean what they say. Their speech rights are corrupted and, hence, inoperable. From this perspective, writing starts to look a lot less romantic, and a lot more feudal.”

To this end, writing for no pay online might actually be the purest form of writing currently going. And as for being the mouthpiece of a corporation trying its best to appeal to “trending market tastes,” this, too, could be why technology and the internet is still so frequently excluded from literature. Perhaps the remaining suits controlling the purse strings that control the remaining paid writers believe that no one wants to be bombarded by the presence of technology in literature. That they want to, instead, escape from it—especially if this is the medium they’re retreating into. But to remove the presence of tech and the internet entirely from a book intended to be set in the present is an unabashed “whitewashing” of the culture. As Nunez phrases it in The Friend, “Think of Kurt Vonnegut’s complaint that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.”

So sure, maybe there is nothing “glamorous” or “exciting” about writing phones, computers and the internet into one’s work. But to deny its existence altogether belies the writer’s purported duty to reflect the times in which they live. For some writers, though, that’s likely the entire point. They don’t want to assign themselves to any one period that will seem “dated” later on. Would prefer, instead, to remain “evergreen” by never mentioning any specific tech item whatsoever (this, too, being why “period pieces” are becoming increasingly common). But in so doing, these writers are making their work stand out for all the wrong reasons. As such, maybe it’s time to dispense with this unique form of being a Luddite. Even if AI, particularly for writers who are having their non-tech-filled work funneled into it, makes that challenge all the more cumbersome.