About

In the fall of 2004 during my first semester as a grad student studying English literature I created an account on a new website called "Facebook."

The term 'social media' has apparently been around since the days of AOL. What 'social media' means now isn't at all what early Facebook felt like. It felt like a public utility for peer-to-peer, one-to-many communication, the most user-friendly bulletin board system to date. Back then Facebook's user engagement algorithm was probably no more complicated than "most recent first." YouTube was not yet a thing, nor Twitter. It was an era when most my professors could still blithely ignore the university's newly-licensed learning management system WebCT and when many still expected printouts of term papers. I, on the other hand, was an internet-tech early adopter and digital evangelist: I had ditched Internet Explorer in favor of Firefox before most people knew there were web browser alternatives, I maintained a personal website, submitted one of my archival research projects in HTML format, and even built a rudimentary learning management system for my First Year Writing students using a new "content management framework" called Drupal.

Click ahead to 2009: I was still pretty optimistic about what we were starting to call Web 2.0. I had presented a conference paper on using Facebook in the classroom. The internet was now a participatory sphere where content creation was democratized! decentralized! decommodified! The fundamental axioms of teaching writing -- understand audience, understand purpose -- had never been more accessible: students could web-log! The gatekeepers of the moving image were being overrun by the YouTube hordes, authors could self-publish using print-on-demand services like Lulu.com, you could Couchsurf and Craigslist, and the triumph of crowd-sourced Wikipedia over corporate Microsoft Encarta -- well, that seemed to say it all. Twitter was the hot new thing (though as a community college writing instructor I had my doubts about that one, since a platform that capped entries at 140 characters felt like a sorry reinforcement of soundbyte-driven culture and reductive critical thinking; the only intellectually viable proposition for such a medium was haiku, as I decided to demonstrate through a collection of Twitter poetry).

Around this time I learned of the Facebook Developer Platform, where software developers could create applications that incorporated Facebook user data. And I thought: Huh. I was no software developer but the Reader-Response theorist in me was intrigued. Hypertext theory had come and gone but here was something the internet could do with the written word that simply hadn't been possible prior. For the first time a text could be automatically tailored to each individual reader. The main character could be the reader, the supporting characters real people the reader knew.

In this way the concept was conceived, not from the seed of plot or human condition or universalizing theme but from the formalistic possibilities of the medium itself. Marshall McLuhan had been right after all. Function would follow form: if I was going to write a narrative that incorporated details from the reader's real life, the plot should deal with the line between fiction and reality. And if that must be the plot, what better characters to carry it forward that a bunch of gamers? And if my narrator was going to be a hive-minded group, how could I do otherwise than write the thing in plural first person?

Not being a gamer myself, I also felt this would be good exercise for my fiction writing hobby. Using the argot of gamer culture, I could practice crafting a distinctive narrative voice to humanize a misunderstood subculture -- and one that simultaneously seemed to :::say::: something about the contemporary moment.

I got to work. I made ablutions to the progenitors: Baudrillard, Gibson, Cronenberg. I frequented a cybercafe, scribbled furtive notes regarding its denizens. I did freewriting exercises in demotic leetspeak. I birthed down-the-rabbit-hole faux realia: a fake Wikipedia page, fake scholarship, a portal into computer data, an entire (and now entirely defunct) videogame company website, a trailer for the fictional video game the novel's characters are playing. Never had writing felt so deterministic. I was just transcribing, with a bit of authorial license in the minutiae. From the start I was conflicted by Chapter One. I tested alternatives. Eventually I resigned myself, digital pencil-pusher that I was, that the first chapter simply had to go the way it was going to go.

In 2010 I released 1337: A Game Novel on Facebook, publishing new chapters weekly. Through Facebook data I could see just how many people were reading the thing, and while the number was more than I could count on my fingers and toes, it was not very much more. That was fine. Because this was a concept album. Because I was doing it driven by the most valid motivation for anyone doing creative work: the effort was utterly absorbing.

Click to 2017. My optimism for the social internet succumbs to the many manifestations of what Cory Doctorow would succinctly christen some years hence as enshittification. I cancel my Facebook account. And though I will earn my daily bread doing software development for a decade to come, that optimism will continue to go the way, in the words of Papa Hemingway, of insolvency: gradually, then suddenly. I wonder whether you, dear reader, can similarly point to a singular crisis of faith in your digital pysche that goes by the title The Night the Web Fell.

That brings me to now. I've all but unplugged from the social web. Ditched the smartphone. Stepped back from software development. I limit content subscriptions to what feels like the level of media input a brain in the 19th century might consume. Maybe this is my post-modem moment, which is to say, as with postmodernism, you sort of keep doing the thing but with begrudging arm's-length cynicism. You ate of the Tree and yeah, okay, it was schway you guess, but now all you've got is a lousy stomach ache. I increasingly seek the antacid of internally-directed effort, which for me manifests as journaling over blogging, navel-gazing over being a "productive" maker, and learning from my past over architecting my future. For me it's altogether incredibly scary, incredibly painful and incredibly valuable to study past writing. The Most. Fertile. Ground. for self-realization, a gut punch to the ego whose sting subsides with the realization of just how far you've come. Revisiting 1337: A Game Novel after fifteen years was no exception: I found plenty of juvenalia cringe you'd expect anyone to confront while down Memory Lane. But also sections that hold up, particularly Chapter 4 and Chapter 11. And then -- here's the self-realization stuff -- there are parts that downright unsettle, where the subject matter then-me chose is stuff now-me feels I had and still have no authority to write about. I'd violated Writerly Dictum One (Write what you know). I'd apparently rationalized that riffing the thought and speech of the gamer was justified on aesthetic grounds, that in channeling my protagonists I was humanizing them. But there's no way round the fact that their rhetorical patterns bear the traits of internet trolling -- narcissistic, immature, dehumanizing, just plain mean. For now, I've redacted some parts from the remastered version of 1337: A Game Novel you'll find here. The painfully wonderful part? The fact it's unsettling to now-me means something's changed. Something for the better. No, writing never has to go the way it's going to go. I've got my coulds and my shoulds sorted.

I could say more but these days so much of what's worth saying is best left to an audience of one.

--Mark Fullmer, April 2026