Words by Venetia Rigoni
As someone who spends too much time on their phone, I made the decision to read more books in 2023. So, naturally, I started the year with a book about being online.
Reward System is Jem Calder’s first published collection of fiction. It speaks to the malaise of our increasingly blended offline/online lived experiences through its portraits of millennials stumbling through relationships, work, dating, and, more generally, efforts for connection and meaning making. Calder’s stories capture our present tech-mediated lives in a manner unlike most new fiction. The title of the third story, “Distraction from Sadness Is Not the Same Thing as Happiness,” is a fitting adage for the collection as a whole.
Calder’s writing is described as ‘ultra-contemporary’ and has received a glowing recommendation from writer Sally Rooney, author of Normal People, who found herself ‘thinking newly and differently about contemporary life’ after reading Calder’s stories. While both authors paint a sharp portrait of millennials, Calder’s writing strikes the reader as particularly attuned to our communication patterns and the way long-term use of social media has conditioned our thinking. These unconscious patterns of anticipation and gratification are the ‘reward systems’ Calder refers to in his collection’s title. As unfolds in the final story “The Foreseeable”, these reward systems create a familiar dilemma expressed in the aftermath of a zoom meeting between exes during a pandemic:
I rolled over onto my side; my smartphone sliding off my chest and landing face-down on the bed beside me. Despite having just finished using it, I felt an urge to turn over and consult the device – an urge I’d always previously yielded to within moments of its having arisen. Consciously devoting my attention to the act, I breathed in and out; breathed in and out.
Calder excels in capturing the minutiae of these reward systems, drawing out the moments when the seamlessness of touch to tech breaks for just a moment and we see our habits laid bare. His stories are filled with the familiar yet uncanny, like that strange reverse déjà vu when you hover your finger over an app, stopping just short of tapping, trying to remember why you scrolled to it in the first place.
There is also an insularity and intimacy to these stories. Despite each of the six stories being set in a large, unnamed anglophone city with characters crossing each other’s paths, we become minutely aware of the smaller worlds they move within, both physically and online. Calder shows the spaces that we create, or that are constructed for us, online – a private message chat, a dating app, a zoom exchange – and we see how the particularities of these spaces strain us, but also the lengths we go to carve out some form of connection – a connection often undermined by the very ways these online spaces are structured. Calder does well to show the poignancy of social misreadings and the particular shame and disappointment of realising the person on the other side is further away than initially thought. In “The Foreseeable” we ache for a character who realises that what he thought was a relationship rekindling with his ex over a series of zoom calls was more like an epilogue to their relationship – a final call goodbye.
Calder asks if we then start to see people more as surfaces and interchangeable subscriptions we opt in and out of, seeing we spend so much time interacting on screens and online. In “Distraction from Sadness Is Not the Same Thing as Happiness”, we follow the arc of two dating app users from the moments of their initial algorithmically determined pairing till their inevitable slow drift out of each other’s sphere.
She re-iterated several times to herself her overall strategy for the date, which was to present to the male user an exaggeratedly carefree, pretty, lite-version of her real self; a person-shaped suite of attractive gestures and responses whose outline she could gradually, somewhere along the line, restock with elements of the personality she actually had.
In 2023 to live and be connected is to be online. Tech incentivises us to think and behave in certain ways, to pursue certain types of relationships, and to adopt particular ways of seeing the world. My experience of reading Reward System was one of slow horror and occasional recoil. All-too-familiar descriptions would take me back to similar events in my life, but their predictability often limited the nuance of the stories and characters. After the fourth of the six stories, this style became tedious and alienating.
Calder’s stories highlight his character’s ever pressing loneliness and desperate attempts to connect. While we may be briefly gratified by the comforting reward loops of smartphone notifications or the gamified interfaces of dating apps, there are deeper and more meaningful ways of connecting. While tech can be a barrier to this, it does present possibilities for connection or closure which do not arise in our physical world, for better or worse. If anything, Reward System is about how hard it is to be yourself in a present that is increasingly optimised, algorithmically decided and incentivises snap recognition and surface readings. We are perhaps most human in those moments between the algorithms. Genuine connection happens in the margins we make outside the clean cropped borders of our online selves.
On Dit 