But there’s another component to the theory—and this is where the conspiracy part comes into play. The Dead Internet theory states that this move from human-created content to artificially generated content was purposeful, spearheaded by governments and corporations in order to exploit control over the public’s perception.
Now, as a novelist, I love this theory. What a great setup for a tense techno-thriller! But as a journalist, I always thought it seemed pretty bonkers. That is, until recently. Lately, the Dead Internet theory is starting to look less conspiracy and more prophetic—well, at least in part.
Without understanding exactly how I’d gotten there, I straddled the side of a steep hill in downtown Singapore, stretching my arm into the branches of a belimbing buluh tree for plump yellow-green fruits. Tiled shophouses surrounded the hill, and beyond, the austere skyline loomed like a glittering tidal wave. I focused on a little cluster of fruit dancing just beyond my fingertips and went for the pluck.
From the base of the tree, MJ Teoh, head chef at Native, told me belimbing is a member of the starfruit family that produces small, powerfully sour fruit. From the restaurant’s air-conditioned dining room, she had tasked me with helping gather ingredients for the dinner menu. We also needed bunga kantan, known as torch ginger — a flower that grows like a pink flame and a key component for a local sweet-savory classic called rojak — and pepper leaves, flashy green leaves used as ground cover throughout Singapore that yield a sharp flavor, which the chef uses in a take on miang kham, a street food popular in Thailand.
In the end, Loss, a Love Story is perhaps best understood as an experiment, bearing unexpected and even incomplete—although always compelling—results. Ratcliffe suggests but never resolves the connections between her losses and reading. Instead, she highlights the perhaps obvious yet no less significant preservational and meaning-making power of literature—how, to paraphrase “Amazing Grace,” what once was lost now can still, at the very least through words and the worlds they create, be found.
The story explores identity politics, that complicated intersection of race, gender and sexual orientation that, depending on your point of view, promotes equity or sanctifies discrimination. It’s the kind of treacherous novel that Philip Roth might have written — and almost did with “The Human Stain.”
But I already regret that comparison. Although Sahota is just as clear-eyed as Roth about the crosscurrents of tribalism that contort our lives, his tone is always plaintive. No matter how deeply he sympathizes with characters’ grievances, he never sweats with the kind of rage that fueled Roth.
More deeply, though, this outlook is not new at all. There may in fact be a basic psychological explanation for why humans have always been fascinated by the end of days. Everyone knows that they are going to die. But we also all like to think that our particular span on Earth is somehow special. Perhaps speculating about the end of the world is a way of connecting those two things, of creating a grand narrative that aligns what are otherwise two random, unconnected plots. After all, by placing ourselves at the end of the biggest story of all, we simultaneously place ourselves at its centre: Après moi, le déluge.