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A review by birdk1ng
Escape: How a Generation Shaped, Destroyed and Survived the Internet by Marie Le Conte
2.0
I found this book incredibly frustrating. A subtitle like “How a generation shaped, destroyed and survived the internet”
led me to believe that this would have been some kind of analysis or social theory. Instead what you get is a collection of, often repetitive, memoir-style essays about what it was like for the author to grow up on the internet ‘back when it was good’. I felt let down because I really did relate to a lot of her anecdotes and found her voice at times to be genuinely charming but it just… really lacked substance. There were points in the book where Le Conte tiptoes around actual theory before refusing to actually reference say Deleuze and Guattari or any studies on the rise of internet fascism, mental health statistics or surveillance… usually she justifies this with something along the lines of ‘I’d rather not bore you, the reader, or myself, the author’. The citations in this book then end up being the occasional news article and email correspondence with her friends who also had blogs ‘back when the internet was good’. I wish this book had either had the integrity to actually study internet culture or admit that it was a memoir and lean into the narrative of the author’s actual lived experience.
led me to believe that this would have been some kind of analysis or social theory. Instead what you get is a collection of, often repetitive, memoir-style essays about what it was like for the author to grow up on the internet ‘back when it was good’. I felt let down because I really did relate to a lot of her anecdotes and found her voice at times to be genuinely charming but it just… really lacked substance. There were points in the book where Le Conte tiptoes around actual theory before refusing to actually reference say Deleuze and Guattari or any studies on the rise of internet fascism, mental health statistics or surveillance… usually she justifies this with something along the lines of ‘I’d rather not bore you, the reader, or myself, the author’. The citations in this book then end up being the occasional news article and email correspondence with her friends who also had blogs ‘back when the internet was good’. I wish this book had either had the integrity to actually study internet culture or admit that it was a memoir and lean into the narrative of the author’s actual lived experience.