Michael Kohlhaas is Extremely Online
Most internet-y novels1 have weirdly offline plots. Nothing that happens online seems to matter, or at least it doesn’t really matter that it happened online—boy meets girl on twitter, but the story goes exactly as it would go if they’d met at a bookstore. It’s difficult to be precise here, I don’t want to say “I want extremely online novels to have plots that could only happen online,” because I don’t think there’s any online dynamic that doesn’t have pre-internet parallels; still I want it to matter that the characters are online!
Very often, “nothing that happens online matters to the novel” because nothing that happens at all matters to the novel. Maybe the goal is to show contemporary rootlessness, atomization, lack of life-plan, etc, etc, etc, but even though those things are very real in dail life, and possibly caused by the internet, that’s not what the internet itself feels like. Online life stories play out with drama and reversals worthy of Dumas. People lie for years on end. People fall in love through a picture and uproot their lives to chase that love, like a fairy tale. Someone you argued with online in your teens will show up in the news ten years later as a prize-winning author or a murderer.
Michael Kohlhaas is an 1810 novella based on events that happened in the 1530s. Maybe it goes without saying that the internet wasn’t around yet. But if you updated only the settings, the outfits, the other incidentals, and kept the story beats exactly as they are, you would have the kind of “State Vs Poster” thoughtful thriller that the blurbs for Fake Accounts and Annihilation promise you that you’re buying.
I went into the novella knowing that Kohlhaas is a bourgeois turned outlaw after being extorted by a nobleman. I didn’t know that Kohlhaas was a poster-bandit a la Ziz, an archetype I’ve seen in the recent news much more often than in recent novels. He gathers insurgents by posting his grievances on church doors; Martin Luther tries to stop him by widely posting a denunciation (and of course Kohlhaas, individualistic and anti-institutional, is a Lutheran). It’s not always true that a private individual can communicate with the mob faster than he can communicate with institutions, and it’s definitely not always true that a private person can communicate with the mob faster than institutions can communicate with the mob, but it was true then, and it’s true now. Public writing and the mob’s quickly-shifting response to public writing, is a major driver of the plot.
So, like, it can be done. After reading a bunch of other novels that promised and failed to be about poster vs State vs mob, I thought maybe it couldn’t be done, or hadn’t been done yet. But it has! No excuses!
That I’ve read. So far.
The only thing I know about "Michael Kohlhaas" is that E.L Doctorow named the character of Coalhouse Walker in "Ragtime" as a tribute to him, so now I'm curious whether you'd find that "Ragtime" also functions as an Extremely Online story before its time (written in the 1970s and set around 1900).
I'll have to give Michael Kohlhaas a read! Some internetcentric books I've enjoyed recently are Mood Swings by Frankie Barnet, I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom by Jason Pargin, and Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor which was a less satirical, more meta fiction look at the relationship between internet fame and the creation of art than Mood Swings.. None of those seem to be specifically what you're talking about or looking for, but I still found them interesting and think do a good job of grappling with how we relate to one another and the concept of being very online. I
Anotor like very early, before-my-time in computer history one was Picks and Shovels by Cory Doctorow which does a good job of kind of elucidating proto internet history.
Sorry, for just randomly mentioning a handful of semi related sci-fi books on your post when I haven't even read the book you were actually writing about. I should probably have waited until after reading the one you mentioned to make sure they were actually addressing some of the same themes, but I think they might be at least somewhat adjacent.