There’s a sobering moment in former Facebook executive Sarah Wynn-Williams’s 2025 tell-all, Careless People, when the author is on a flight to South America with Mark Zuckerberg and his chief lieutenants. They’re traveling in the wake of the 2016 election, and one of the men is explaining to Zuck how the Trump campaign gamed the tools of the platform to influence the result. Until now, the founder and CEO has publicly and privately denied any responsibility for the outcome, but as the lieutenant goes on, Wynn-Williams watches the dawning realization on her boss’s face: not shame, not remorse, but dollar signs.
Her assessment has since become a widely accepted fact: whatever else social media once was, or might have become, it has transformed into a lucrative tool for social and political control. All those babies and beaches, those selfies and networks and likes, are no longer banal representations of a life. They are weaponizable metadata produced by manipulable targets, and if we knew what was good for us, we surely would exit these platforms en masse, rejecting what Cory Doctorow has dubbed the enshittification of the internet (i.e., “the way an online service gets worse, how that worsening unfolds, and the contagion that’s causing everything to get worse, all at once”), which increasingly means the enshittification of our lives.
The trouble, as Kate Colby writes in her dazzling new book, Paradoxx, is that we no longer know “how to be without the internet.” It’s not only the substrate of our experience, it’s also the primary mechanism through which many of us examine that experience. Colby, for her part, feels more and more like the world exists for her to post about it, “the purpose of which is to signal the kind of thing I notice.” And while, recounting the lesson on Malthus from her 7th grade Social Studies class, she observes that “it’s starting to look like we’ve been domesticated by our food sources,” in the context of the book—in the context of a lot of recent books, actually (cf. Wynn-Williams, Doctorow, Karen Hao, Shoshana Zuboff, and many more)—it looks more like we’ve been domesticated by our tech companies. That our minds have become so much meat is something like the crux of Paradoxx.
Organized into 100 numbered sections, the book initially appears to have been drafted diaristically, during the COVID lockdown, but Colby unsettles this assumption from the start. The text is bookended by a prologue and epilogue, distinct from the numbered sections, respectively titled “How It Ends” and “How It Begins” The text does not progress like clockwork, but rather reflects and even reframes the disorientation of the pandemic: “With my days now abruptly scrubbed of activity, my life looks less like a line than a hopper.” I won’t spoil the reveal. Suffice it to say, the book runs in both directions. This is less mindfuck than a statement about how we experience time and memory and the endless mundanity of our daily lives, all of which is far messier, and less linear, than social media grids (or timelines) suggest.
In this sense, Paradoxx partakes in a growing tradition of anti-memoir, and among the forerunners Colby names directly are Bernadette Mayer’s Memory (1975), Hannah Weiner’s Clairvoyant Journal (1978), and Lyn Hejinian’s My Life (1980)—all published, it must be said, by small presses. The wider canon might be thought to include, more recently, works like Edouard Levé’s Autoportrait (2005), Heidi Julavits’s The Folded Clock (2016), and Sheila Heti’s Autobiographical Diaries (2024). What unites this (sub)genre is, first, its refusal of memoir’s sacrosanct commitment to a life’s chronology, its rejection of our love affair with Freytag’s pyramid; the second is its attempt to render lived experience in novel and eye-opening ways. The latter is premised on the former: if chronology-as-progression is a lie we tell ourselves (i.e., As I got older, I got better), then what framing for lived experience makes sense?
In her childhood diaries, Colby wrote “to hoard the details,” which she believed would give shape to her life: “Thank God I threw them all away–I wouldn’t want to doxx myself like that.” It bears lingering on her wordplay here, both in that sentence and in the title. To dox(x) someone is, of course, to publish private or identifying information about a person online, thus violating another’s anonymity and inviting harm. To reveal such secrets as often appear in a diary or memoir—to confess, as it were—might then constitute, per Colby’s renouncement, a self-violation. And yet the title suggests she is doxxing herself, just not “like that.”
Though the book is helpfully grounded in the details of her daily life (a Miller Lite, an onion bagel, a trip to the Yucatan, an annoying song her son sings), the identifying information she otherwise includes is decidedly cerebral. In an early entry (3), for example, Colby admits an aversion to “borrowed drama,” recounting her irritation at the “group check-in” her boss facilitated at their San Francisco workplace on September 12, 2001. “I do cry,” she says after enumerating her worries about her children’s future, “but the tears don’t feel like mine. They fall in the space between my knowledge and experience of the reason for them.” In a much later entry (97), these themes return. Colby writes about a recent loss but quickly pivots to a consideration of her feelings, and her feelings about her feelings:
Another of my early mentors has died. I don’t like to take part in what feels to me like ambulance chasing on social media, so I said nothing when I heard the news. Now I feel guilty about not contributing to a collective memorial and public ritual of real-time mourning that does a pretty decent job of outlining the impact of one person’s life. My suspicion of others’ motives infects my assessment of my own, and I find I’m starting to accuse myself of borrowing drama when I feel much of anything at all.
From there, the four paragraphs of the entry move associatively through a number of threads established in other entries: technology, a poem by Etheridge Knight, and the death of the activist Mark Baumer. This might appear a random assortment of subjects, but one of the pleasures of Paradoxx is watching its various motifs ripen, revealing new dimensions to, and contradictions between, “my lives in the world and on paper.” For a life as it appears on paper both is and is not that life as lived.
As a neologism, paradoxx appears to be a portmanteau, in which case the kind of doxxing taking place may be self-contradictory or absurd—you know, paradoxical. But the title also brings to mind, in addition to XX chromosomes, parallax and paranoia. About the latter, Colby says, early in the text, that she is “acutely and chronically encumbered” by “acute and chronic doubt,” and so the title bears the echo of a universe out to get you, but also its wish that the book’s form of disclosure (new shapes, as opposed to new details) might instead “buoy you up.” In what could also be a description of Paradoxx, Colby observes of Hejinian’s My Life that the book tracks “the parallax of objects and events viewed at close range by a woman of many minds.” Parallax: that effect in which an object appears differently when viewed from different angles. There is not one shape to a life, or to a mind, which is a common lie perpetuated (intentionally and not) by diarists and memoirists and biographers. A life is that which can only be seen from a series of successive positions. The process isn’t any more stable than the product, which is ongoing (even after, in a biological sense, it’s not).
Accordingly, Colby’s “overwhelming question” has to do with “[w]hat’s changed more since I was born, the world or my perception of it?” While she takes some comfort in the continuities over time—her sense that, in some fundamental ways, humans maybe haven’t changed that much—she is also unsettled by the difficulty in parsing what is her data and what is her person. “I do sometimes think,” Colby writes, “that I might be a bit of a robot,” and thus a significant portion of the book consists of her effort to discover, or to prove the ways in which she is still human. Like “the proverbial Kool-Aid Man,” Colby wants to “burst through the stock scenery” of her Instagram feed to “give the reader a glimpse of the world behind it.”
One of the ways she achieves this, practically speaking, is through a recurring riff on those CAPTCHA screens that ask you to identify telephone poles or bicycles. Except Colby has designed her prompts to do more than just thwart the bots and spammers:
Select all squares with
Pure content untainted by history & bourgeois values
If there are none, click skip
It’s a joke, sure, but it’s also an inducement, presented in earnest, and a very human one at that. As Colby tries to burst through familiar frames (biographic, algorithmic), she’s also asking us, as readers, not to think like robots. She wants to reclaim her own mind, and for everything else that it is, Paradoxx is also an attempt to help us reclaim our own. By tracking (and stimulating) the movements of the mind on the page, she is trying to bridge that gap between our “lives in the world and on paper,” so as to become “integrated and complete, like I could have my life and see it, too.”
The book documents her efforts along these lines, but it’s equally concerned with enumerating the flaws in the process. For one thing, you can’t write your diary—which, again, Paradoxx is avowedly not—and, in an objective sense, read it too. We are “snow-blind snowmen,” Colby writes, “made of what’s holding us back.” That is to say, we’re built out of language, and while words both empower and restrict us, they are the primary tool we have to make sense of the self, and to see ourselves in new ways. In the current moment, our resources seem to be dwindling, our languages impoverished by corporate control of media (social and otherwise) and its culturally hegemonic ethos. Colby isn’t having it. She bats at the meaningless clichés that litter our language, and thus our thought, prying words apart with aplomb, as with the pointless tautology It is what it is. In its place, she suggests It is what is it, which has the advantage, she observes, of being a true palindrome. Its meaning, moreover, is delightfully slippery, which means generative, which means living, which means not prefabricated or robotic, but containing within it the possibility of wonder and confusion and surprise.
Paradoxx is not a simple or easy or straightforward book (which only partly explains the lack of attention it has received—I’m looking at you, corporate book publishing and reviewing), but it is an enlivening and enriching one, and the questions it raises are as deliberate as they are pressing. Among them: Within a rapidly homogenizing global culture, consisting largely of its own representation, where are the redoubts of the local and the actual? Where, in such a self-reflexive world, does authenticity still obtain? Perhaps more to the point, once we’ve entered the hall of mirrors, do these distinctions between the representation and the real continue to make any sense? Or are the kinds of judgment and rigor and individuality many of us were raised to believe in little more than sentimental anachronisms?
A critic, Greg Jackson writes, is “any steward of public discourse” committed “to nuanced distinctions and honest reflection; to raising unarticulated feelings and unquestioned desires to the light; to the possibility of upholding other values than self-interest.” We live, alas, not in an age of the critic, Jackson argues, but in the age of the pundit: those “critics for hire” who “sell you their thinking to relieve your confusion.” In place of “everything that is hard, long, boring, and not strictly pleasurable,” everything that is nuanced and perhaps even everything that is truly excellent, the pundit encourages us to choose distractions, trivialities, “effortless pleasures,” and to privilege most of all “success in a world of representation.”
Though Colby is first and foremost a poet (someone who “always means in all ways, even if he doesn’t know it”), she also proves herself to be a steward par excellence of public discourse and, more pointedly, public representation. Against the commodification of our lives, and against the standardization of our stories, Paradoxx prods us to reconsider all of our babies and beaches, not as targets or mere stencils, but as portals. Our lives are not just accumulations of reportable facts; they’re full of emergent opportunities to disrupt “the lie of [our] continuity” and “the treacheries of [our] language-dependent brain[s].” If the paradox at the heart of Paradoxx is how to “accurately render” a life while also living it (or else: how to write to see what one means), Colby’s solution runs counter to the dominant ethos: more nuance, not less. There may not be anything like certainty, much less clout, on the other side of such disruption, but there are those partners and places and pets as they are in real and remembered and discontinuous time, not as they’ve been flattened to feed an insatiable grid.
Or do I mean greed?
Erik Anderson
Erik Anderson is the author of four books: The Poetics of Trespass, Estranger, Flutter Point: Essays, and Bird. His essay about America, “Straight to the Heart,” appears in CRB 2.2.