Sierra Armor was bored. It was December 2020, the middle of a Vermont winter, and she was marooned in her dorm room at Bennington College in a white shingled house overlooking a sloping meadow. She wanted to learn how to write stylistically innovative novels like Tao Lin and Marguerite Duras. But many classmates had stayed home that semester, and much of her academic life — including her creative-writing classes — had vanished into Zoom squares.
That month, her boyfriend sent her a link to a strange Substack with a tiny following, written by an online presence called Angelicism01, or simply “01.” 01 published manic, labyrinthine, thousands-of-words-long ruminations on nearly every concern of the high-COVID era. They drew parallels between cancel culture and the automated, self-replicating logic of AI models, riffed on the possibility that the DNC hacked the 2020 election, and mused on how podcasters’ vocal fries evoked “the sound of a universe closing out.” Animating all of this was the idea that humankind is nearing an extinction event, an end of the world accelerated not just by climate change but by AI and the internet. Though often inscrutable, the writing was sometimes shot through with insight about the self-destructive pleasure of digital life during crisis, from “the pure cerebral slice and drop” of Netflix autoplay to the “jouissance of relapse and robodenihilism on the addictogenic screen.” Armor was drawn less to their ideas than to the stylish, erudite, and elusive way they expressed them.
