Good satire is hard to find. The absurdity of modern life accelerates and mutates so rapidly that satire often tells a joke just as we’ve tired of laughing at it. Then there is the tendency to satirize reality not as one finds it but as one finds it easiest to criticize. Novel trends and dangers are ignored in favor of old bogeymen or else pinned on scapegoats. The latter is nowhere truer than in satire of technological progress.
It is a relief, then, that Mary South’s new collection of short stories, You Will Never Be Forgotten, never flinches from an uncomfortable truth: We often invite and abet the conditions we claim to despise. Her stories unfold in a grotesquely comic projection of our technological society, peopled by online trolls, content moderators, deranged fanboys, clones, and a ghost in a machine (a cellphone, of course). But it’s very much about us and how our motivations create feedback loops with our technologies.
In South’s telling, these feedback loops are mostly negative. “You Will Never Be Forgotten,” the title story, first published to wide acclaim in the New Yorker, is a hunter-becomes-hunted scenario in which an online content moderator—someone whose job it is to remove violent, disturbing material from social platforms and search engines—surveils and stalks her rapist, both online and, thrillingly, in real life. In “Not Setsuko,” a mother who has replaced her murdered daughter with a clone attempts to replicate Version 1.0’s memories by, for instance, running over Version 2.0’s kitten.
“Architecture for Monsters,” which contains surpassingly fine and vivid writing about futuristic built environments, is a profile of an eccentric celebrity architect. The buildings are bodies, in a sense, and vice versa: South uses architecture to explore motherhood, creativity, vulnerability, and impermanence. Along with “Keith Prime,” about a woman who works at a clone farm (for transplant organs, as in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go) but could not afford a “Keith” to save her sick husband, this story is her soberest and most emotionally destabilizing.
In others, South occasionally indulges an impulse to let her sense of the absurd go berserk, and our connection to her characters suffers. She owes a patent debt to George Saunders and Karen Russell, for whom the call of the weird can be more seductive than exploring human personalities. “The Promised Hostel” and “Camp Jabberwocky for Recovering Internet Trolls,” both about highly unusual therapeutic modalities (the former is, among other things, an extended joke about adult men being breastfed), belong to this playbook.
Yet even these arguably shakier stories convey much of modern life’s chaos, the feeling that our solutions, our overreliance on what Jacques Ellul termed “technique," often make things worse. All of South’s stories are about coping with loss, trauma, and grief; whether they succeed or fail for a particular reader depends on how readily the reader can identify real people in her surrealistic, Black Mirror-ish microcosms. But in any case, her settings and conceits always succeed in amplifying what feels unsettling or uncanny about life in 2020.
In “You Will Never Be Forgotten,” the “ninjas” who “kill content without being heard or seen” are a rather sorry bunch, with inane handles such as “BabyJesusUpchuck” (others are unprintable). Our disgust at them yields to an unpleasant recognition of how much control, influence, and moral decision-making is entrusted to unimpressive and untrustworthy figures. The preservation of public morality is reduced to a Sisyphean game of whack-a-mole, not the instructive moral guidance to which we ought to be receptive and by which we ought to grow and flourish.
And thus, the heroine of this story is unmoored, like so many of us: She needs to “figure out her life” without help from a credible authority. She becomes the thing, or at least a thing, that she hates, just as we all permit technology—for we do have lots of choice in the matter—to nudge us toward behaviors that, on paper, we find reprehensible.
South understands that technology has helped us to normalize almost every behavior once collectively regarded as deadly sin. Instagram teaches us that gluttony is curation and that giving scandal to others, by stoking envy, can be disguised as an expression of #gratitude. Dating apps commodify and sometimes imperil us. We call exhibitionism empowerment and rage against trolls not because they are nasty violators of the social compact but because they represent the ineradicable danger of exposing oneself to the world.
“Not Setsuko” challenges us to reject simulacra and embrace reality, even if it means we must endure grief and loss, as we always have. That the simulacrum here is of a person (a temptation that still, one hopes, lies far in the future) does not mean the lesson cannot be applied more broadly. “I speculate,” the narrator writes, “about whether or not dreaming different dreams would be enough to change a child’s personality.” Of course: enough and then some. Simulacra are crude toys, like the worlds contained in video games. Life, humanity, and consciousness, as we used to experience them, are infinitely finer-grained.
This collection has its faults. Its humor sometimes overreaches, delighted by its own inventiveness. “Frequently Asked Questions About Your Craniotomy” has a bit too much in common with the conceit-driven squibs of early McSweeney’s or the New Yorker’s “Daily Shouts.” Not every clever idea can carry gravitas without getting crushed beneath the weight.
All the same, You Will Never Be Forgotten heralds the arrival of a real talent, a writer who uses the armature of science and technology to anatomize human beings and not the other way around. South engages in some superb and imaginative world building, but the world under her gaze is, at her best, recognizably our own. As our shared life gets weirder and woollier, revealing new dangers and confronting us with the old ones that never died, we will need more writers like her—risk-takers and honest judges who help us resist the seductions of novelty and stay human, no matter how painful that may be.