Do you ever log out?

Talking about The Sluts by Dennis Cooper

Hey everyone!! Sorry for the absence, it’s been a weird few weeks. I’ve written about it but it feels too personal to share here so here’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while now! I always hope to be consistent with my substack but tbh I don’t think that will ever happen!

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The Sluts, a book by Dennis Cooper came out in 2004 and the story (if you can call it that) takes place in 2002. The internet in The Sluts is a very different place from the one we experience today. The online world wasn’t yet an extension of yourself; it was a separate space where you could experiment, perform, or simply disappear. It was possible to be anyone at all without worrying that someone would find you or judge you, unless you wanted to. The people who write the reviews in the book, obsessively and desperately, could still hide and deceive to a level that most of us can’t nowadays.

I don’t think the anonymity in The Sluts is nostalgic, I think it’s corrosive. It’s freedom and destruction. Inside the website featured in the novel people invent personas, rewrite events, and manipulate each other for pleasure and for cruelty. The result is a collective hallucination, a collapsing reality. The endgame is getting people to believe you but reading it feels like watching truth disintegrate in real time.

This is also what fascinated me and made me keep thinking about the book. Cooper captures a moment when the internet’s anonymity allowed absolute experimentation: you could say anything, be anyone, and then disappear. That freedom is terrifying to us nowadays but it’s freedom all the same. The internet of the past was built on the separation between who you were offline and who you could be online, something that no longer exists for the great majority of us.

We live in the opposite condition. Our names, faces, and locations are tethered to every account sometimes on purpose but sometimes because we don’t know better. Our data follows us from app to app. Even the spaces that claim to offer anonymity are porous as a username is never truly separate from the body behind it. Of course, you can be anonymous today, but it takes both skill and discipline that most people don’t have. Back then, in the long gone year of 2002 anonymity was effortless, I doubt most people considered a world where we would be permanently connected.

I think about that difference constantly. When I first started going online, it required intention: you sat at a desktop computer, turned it on and then stepped into the internet. Usually to play MyScene games or go on Stardoll. Being online was an event. My dad even installed 3-hour timers on both mine and my younger sister’s profile in the family computer and it was fine. Three hours a day to go on MSN and play games was enough as the real world was happening outside of the computer. Now it’s ambient. I carry it in my pocket. I find myself reaching for it constantly. I’m never really offline, because the internet is also the infrastructure of everything: work, bureaucracy, banking, social life. Now, wanting to disconnect is a privilege.

Sometimes I fantasize about getting a dumbphone, or a brick. I imagine living in a world where everything is physical and tangible. I even bought a second-hand DVD player from Vinted, a spur of the moment decision facilitated by my local library’s insane DVD collection. This feeds this offline fantasy but that’s exactly what it is, just a fantasy. I need social media for work and I need government and bank apps to survive abroad. This fantasy of disconnection always collapses when logistics enter the room.

This is where The Sluts and the modern world diverge most sharply. In Cooper’s novel, anonymity annihilates truth: the forum becomes a hall of mirrors where no statement and no user can be verified. In our world, truth is enforced to the point of exhaustion. Every action online is traceable. Whilst The Sluts is showing us the horror of total freedom, we’re living in the anxiety of total visibility.

It’s easy to romanticize the early internet, especially its anonymity, but Cooper refuses that. His version of the online world is brutal and exploitative as there are no rules. The anonymity of these characters allowed for invention, yes. Various contradicting personas and various contradicting statements that kept out-performing each other without consequence. Today, that possibility has vanished. Online life is continuous, cumulative and archived. Your online footprint is forever, as long as someone has a screenshot or a link. Either extreme is terrible.

Reading this book made me spiral because you can’t tell what’s real. Maybe it’s one person fabricating the entire review thread, but no one will ever know now. In real life, or at least my real life, the spiralling happens because everything has to be real. The other side of these unverified reviews is permanently being seen and existing online. We’re permanently visible online as we are offline. Most of us at least.

Of course I am not advocating for any of the things represented in this book. Of course it can be quite dangerous to deceive online given how everything is online nowadays. But the internet before was a playground because the stakes weren’t as high. You could come and go and it wouldn’t have as severe of an impact in your real life. There was a freedom that people will never experience now when accessing it. There’s no spontaneity, there’s a permanent weight of surveillance whether it is commercial or social. Even these minor acts of rebellion such as being unfiltered and vulnerable online are immediately absorbed by the algorithm and fed back to us as a new fad.

There’s no separation between the offline and online anymore. We all know this, it’s not groundbreaking, but I don’t think we’re conscious of how far we’re connected. Our online and offline selves share the same nervous system. I open Instagram without noticing I’m doing it. And when I’m bored of Instagram I move on to Reddit, or TikTok or anything that doesn’t let me have space and time with myself. We curate our best selves online to the expense of our real ones. There’s no logging out anymore.

I understand the fatigue we are experiencing with online living. I don’t believe in fully going offline, or at least I don’t believe in it for myself for all the reasons mentioned above. However, I am clinging to small analogue gestures: selecting a record from my growing but small collection, writing in notebooks, watching a DVD. These small rituals remind me that life exists outside the screen. But I do still feel the pull to take a photo, to prove that I’m doing these things, even just to show them off on Instagram. Disconnection can also be performative, especially since it’s not available for everyone.

What Cooper captured in 2002 was the internet before our internet. Before we selected a single consistent identity. Before the constant performance of it all. His characters inhabit an obscene freedom that now feels almost impossible. I don’t envy its world of cruelty and confusion. I don’t think those are the aspects of the novel that really did it for me. I do envy the separation of the offline self from the online self. Visiting the internet but living outside of it. Yes, we fled anonymity because of its danger, but the danger is still there. Now we’re too visible, we’re easy to find, easy to trance, easy to impersonate. The danger is now systemic as algorithms manipulate emotion, surveil us, and make it impossible to disappear.