Fake Accounts

The narrator discovers her boyfriend is secretly running a wildly popular Instagram conspiracy account — and then he dies, leaving her with no one to confront and no way to process what she found. She moves to Berlin, starts creating fake accounts herself on dating apps, performing different versions of herself for strangers, and gradually loses track of where the performance ends and the person begins. Oyler writes with the seductive confidence of someone who knows exactly how complicit she is in the thing she's satirizing — the internet ecosystem that makes everyone a curator of a self, that turns authenticity into another performance, that makes the line between the conspiracy theorist and the person horrified by him thinner than either would like to admit. The fictional companion to Combating Cult Mind Control in the coercive control bundle: Hassan names the mechanism by which groups capture people's reality, Oyler renders the texture of what it feels like when reality has already been captured and you can't locate the exit. The comedy is the horror. The horror is the comedy. That's the internet.