Yohann Koshy, 26, is a journalist and critic whose writing has been published in Vice, the Baffler, Financial Times and elsewhere. He lives in Oxford where he is co-editor of New Internationalist magazine
On 15 September 2008, the same day that Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy, an anonymous account on Twitter published its first tweet: a monosyllabic “No.” A childish negation – of what? of whom? – this “No” set the tone for what would become a defining satirical voice over the course of a decade. Wint, who goes by the handle @dril, now has 1.23 million followers and an unrivalled reputation.
To commemorate 10 years, dril has self-published an anthology of his own tweets: Dril Official “Mr. Ten Years” Anniversary Collection. It is 400 pages organised in thematic chapters, crudely reproducing images of tweets as they would have originally appeared in a social media newsfeed, only without the glow of a screen. It reads like a compendium of modern nonsense verse; each tweet a stanza in a senseless saga.
From the chapter “POLITICS”:
wint @dril: thinking of wrapping my entire body in barbed wire and becoming Sovereign
From the chapter “NOSTALGIA”:
wint @dril: the good things i like about 90s is there were no hipsters, no rap, and your odds of getting an infection at a hospital were slightly higher
Explaining the significance of these pronouncements is difficult. This isn’t because of their formal features. The tools of literary criticism work fine for unpacking those. The syntax is splayed: extra spaces abound inside and between words, which, in turn, crumble under intentional misspelling, as if the writer were too lazy to type with precision. Semicolons appear unexpectedly and capital letters are rare. The rhythm is off-kilter: some tweets appear to miss dependent clauses or start in medias res without resolution. For the historian Greg Afinogenov, future generations will be as baffled by dril as we are by US poet Ogden Nash, whose oblique, cunning couplets amused the postwar generation – “Who wants my jellyfish / I’m not sellyfish!” – but which are no longer funny.
The difficulty is that dril is deeply embedded in, and an expression of, a particular historical moment as experienced by a certain type of person. From the outside, he appears unintelligible. John Berger observes, in The Moment of Cubism, that meaning of cubism was “only possible given the fact that the seer inherit[ed] a precise historical, economic and social situation”. The historical situation that dril’s followers inherited was the long decade that stretches out from the 2008 financial crisis, characterised by stagnation and crisis in the global north. The type of person with whom his writing chimes is the precarious and alienated millennial, whose instincts were forged by that crisis, and who has cruised through the decade in precarious work with no sense of the future.
The book satirises the morbid symptoms that plague the millennial’s life: the immorality of the endless war on terror (“i put years of hard work into getting my torture degree at torture college & now everyones like ‘oh tortures bad’, ‘its ineffective’ fuck off”); the penetration of advertising and branding into society (“i will nbe referring to a certain soda brand as ‘p*psi’ until i receive the 16$ they owe me”); the perpetual present of almost always being online (“who the fuck is scraeming ‘LOG OFF’ at my house. show yourself, coward. i will never log off”). Dril stretches the coordinates of our age until it is not quite recognisable, but feels more nakedly true. He performs a sort of literary cubism.
In the form of a printed book, the tweets acquire a solidity that they lack online, building up into a compelling argument for the sheer strangeness of things. But they lack the digital medium’s participatory quality. It has become common for Twitter users to juxtapose dril tweets with those of Serious, Important people, with the effect of creating a parodic montage. Whenever a public official defends the indefensible, you will see it compared to dril’s satirically equivocating words: “drunk driving may kill a lot of people, but it also helps a lot of people get to work on time, so, it;s impossible to say if its bad or not”. His writing is used as well as read; the yardstick for stupidity in a deeply stupid age.
So what will future generations make of this curious book? In its preface, dril describes his foray into self-publishing as a “Svalbard Global Seed Vault” of internet posts – a time capsule of values and observations from which a future civilisation can be planted after the apocalypse. We could do worse. If only by handing the responsibility over to another unique prose stylist who lives his life on Twitter: President Trump. Now there’s someone who will “never log off”.
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