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Dox
tragickal presents DOX
When Bela Ogórek starts using SeekingArrangement to help pay down her family debt, she meets a wealthy young man involved in right-wing Internet politics. Her sister violently disapproves.
This is a novel of cultural decline. There will not be a recovery.
When Bela Ogórek starts using SeekingArrangement to help pay down her family debt, she meets a wealthy young man involved in right-wing Internet politics. Her sister violently disapproves.
This is a novel of cultural decline. There will not be a recovery.
235 pages, Paperback
Published February 22, 2021
35 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
October 16, 2021
Alex Beaumais’ debut novel Dox takes place in “the thousand mirrored snowflake debt-binge of Western Civilization”: aka Toronto. Characters form concave ideograms of their Internet avatars, eviscerating the novel’s five-pointed musculature. Individuals shell themselves of thought via Nootropics prescribed by Reddit sidebars. More than a gimmick, the erasure of text, cat toying censorship, strips ideologues of identity, inflating the novel’s formal fulcrums into Sugar Baby love dolls – rousing us far beyond redaction.
December 16, 2021
ALL-ENCOMPASSING POLITICS ETCHED IN GLISTENING PROSE
On November 22nd, 2022, the day I finished reading Alex Beaumais’ debut novel Dox (Tragickal Books), reports came in about photos being published of trans activists in front of JK Rowling’s house. It was decried as “doxxing,” or publishing the home address of someone as retaliation for their politically objectionable opinions.
In Rowling’s case these opinions were famously about her objections to trans rights and the definition of what constitutes a woman. Rowling has for several years fulfilled, in the minds of many people, the role of a transphobic, out-of-touch celebrity. Quickly people on Twitter chimed in that the photos could hardly be called doxxing as Rowling’s address in Edinburgh is well-known to anybody consulting a tourism website; people take photos there all the time.
There is, at least apparently, no such ambiguity to the doxxing experienced by Rick Speer in Beaumais’ novel: in his portrayal it is a frightening, career-ending, reputation-destroying act of disruption that may as well spell the end of one’s life. Speer, a libertarian blogger who has amassed a small fortune in Bitcoin and who has more than flirted with far-right politics online, is being exposed and blackmailed by volatile antifa types who come to his house, throw rocks through his window, and film themselves having an altercation with him in the parking lot of his Toronto condo. In a frenzy Speer shuffles through his options, which include fleeing to other countries, paying off the doxxers, and suicide. The novel is about other things, as well, but this experience lies at the center of the narrative and propels the plot forward.
In the author’s very capable hands, Toronto, Canada is portrayed as a choke point of globally-conscious, highly-educated urban youth seeking meaning in 21st century culture wars. Politics is ever present and ever-important; the online universe, for this class of tapped-in young city-dwellers, is a whetstone of political philosophy against which to grind many ideological axe blades. The novel’s landscape is of a tense, fearful place, and the social media environment inhabited by the characters is one saturated with opinions and, in the constantly watching eyes of the Internet, a thirst for accountability. We know this from watching the news, or more specifically by hearing of the crushing spectacles of denunciation performed by online mobs seeking vengeance in a hyper-mediated biosphere of unforgiving political correctness. Beaumais dramatizes this phenomenon, highlighting the fears of very public revelations felt by people trapped by their own actions and utterances as recorded by the eternal posterity of the Internet.
The most remarkable aspect of the novel as I read it was its intelligent and bewildering prose style, studded with au courant political and cultural jargon, a whirlwind encyclopedia of refined political positions as examined under a fearless 2021 microscope. Rick Speer reflects to himself upon the arrival at his Weltanschauung vis-a-vis the trolls of the right wing:
“At some point between indulging these people and wishing he could delete them like his Internet history, Rick had to admit that, though he hated anarcho-capitalists, PUAs, 1488ers, trad-Christians, accelerationists, NEETs, and Nazbols—he hated them half a degree less than the general population. It was just too easy for normies to believe falsehoods and become human shields for consumerism…You could see the cognitive dissonance in genetic-testing kits, which revealed your separateness down to whether you carried a Neanderthal allele for sneezing after dark chocolate but whose commercials showed everyone as octo-racial, with freckles, an epicanthic fold, a flat nose, a copper afro.”
The portrait of Rick Speer as a man seduced by alt-right ideas and yet a sympathetic victim of mass bullying is a risky one, but Beaumais wins our indulgence by putting Rick through an ordeal that in some ways has little to do with culture wars. The doxxing central to the novel is bookended by a beginning and ending having to do with a Polish man and his three daughters, the Ogóreks, and Rick’s encounters with them. Bela, one of the daughters, is dating Rick while her very uptight sister Ariel looks on with extreme displeasure, because as right-wing (he would say libertarian) as Rick is, Ariel is ultra-left and driven by left-wing grievances and struggles with her own white privilege. The sections where Ariel and Rick debate politics around the dinner table are, unfortunately, weak spots in the novel, where the veneer over the “novel of ideas”—and this is what Dox seems to struggle to extricate itself from being—is at its thinnest. Beaumais excels at narrating the inner workings of his characters’ minds and is less assured at this outward dialogue of bickering, educated strivers. The portrayal of Ariel as an unpleasantly PC, essay-writing shrew is perhaps meant to strike a satirical tone; maybe people in Toronto talk like this in reality and I have just never crossed paths with them.
Dox is a great book for readers wanting to visit the world of the present day and engage with intricate ideas and politics of the moment. It is not an escape from a politics-drenched media environment but a diving-into.
Highlights of the book include the middle section dealing with the doxxing and a section nearer the beginning where Bela and Rick inadvertently drink a water bottle laced with MDMA and go to a nightclub. The elucidation of the two uncertain lovers’ intoxicated thoughts and actions while in a crowded place full of sensory stimuli was wonderful. Beaumais has also written a short piece of spectacular fiction called “Brickshooter’s Infowar” the prose of which glistens with mentation as it mimics with eerie specificity the leaps and contortions of a consciousness shaped by online “second life,” to a degree approaching what James Joyce would sound like if he were inhabiting a sci-fi video game millennia in the future. If this, and Dox, are signals of what Beaumais is capable of, there are tremendous works coming in the future.
On November 22nd, 2022, the day I finished reading Alex Beaumais’ debut novel Dox (Tragickal Books), reports came in about photos being published of trans activists in front of JK Rowling’s house. It was decried as “doxxing,” or publishing the home address of someone as retaliation for their politically objectionable opinions.
In Rowling’s case these opinions were famously about her objections to trans rights and the definition of what constitutes a woman. Rowling has for several years fulfilled, in the minds of many people, the role of a transphobic, out-of-touch celebrity. Quickly people on Twitter chimed in that the photos could hardly be called doxxing as Rowling’s address in Edinburgh is well-known to anybody consulting a tourism website; people take photos there all the time.
There is, at least apparently, no such ambiguity to the doxxing experienced by Rick Speer in Beaumais’ novel: in his portrayal it is a frightening, career-ending, reputation-destroying act of disruption that may as well spell the end of one’s life. Speer, a libertarian blogger who has amassed a small fortune in Bitcoin and who has more than flirted with far-right politics online, is being exposed and blackmailed by volatile antifa types who come to his house, throw rocks through his window, and film themselves having an altercation with him in the parking lot of his Toronto condo. In a frenzy Speer shuffles through his options, which include fleeing to other countries, paying off the doxxers, and suicide. The novel is about other things, as well, but this experience lies at the center of the narrative and propels the plot forward.
In the author’s very capable hands, Toronto, Canada is portrayed as a choke point of globally-conscious, highly-educated urban youth seeking meaning in 21st century culture wars. Politics is ever present and ever-important; the online universe, for this class of tapped-in young city-dwellers, is a whetstone of political philosophy against which to grind many ideological axe blades. The novel’s landscape is of a tense, fearful place, and the social media environment inhabited by the characters is one saturated with opinions and, in the constantly watching eyes of the Internet, a thirst for accountability. We know this from watching the news, or more specifically by hearing of the crushing spectacles of denunciation performed by online mobs seeking vengeance in a hyper-mediated biosphere of unforgiving political correctness. Beaumais dramatizes this phenomenon, highlighting the fears of very public revelations felt by people trapped by their own actions and utterances as recorded by the eternal posterity of the Internet.
The most remarkable aspect of the novel as I read it was its intelligent and bewildering prose style, studded with au courant political and cultural jargon, a whirlwind encyclopedia of refined political positions as examined under a fearless 2021 microscope. Rick Speer reflects to himself upon the arrival at his Weltanschauung vis-a-vis the trolls of the right wing:
“At some point between indulging these people and wishing he could delete them like his Internet history, Rick had to admit that, though he hated anarcho-capitalists, PUAs, 1488ers, trad-Christians, accelerationists, NEETs, and Nazbols—he hated them half a degree less than the general population. It was just too easy for normies to believe falsehoods and become human shields for consumerism…You could see the cognitive dissonance in genetic-testing kits, which revealed your separateness down to whether you carried a Neanderthal allele for sneezing after dark chocolate but whose commercials showed everyone as octo-racial, with freckles, an epicanthic fold, a flat nose, a copper afro.”
The portrait of Rick Speer as a man seduced by alt-right ideas and yet a sympathetic victim of mass bullying is a risky one, but Beaumais wins our indulgence by putting Rick through an ordeal that in some ways has little to do with culture wars. The doxxing central to the novel is bookended by a beginning and ending having to do with a Polish man and his three daughters, the Ogóreks, and Rick’s encounters with them. Bela, one of the daughters, is dating Rick while her very uptight sister Ariel looks on with extreme displeasure, because as right-wing (he would say libertarian) as Rick is, Ariel is ultra-left and driven by left-wing grievances and struggles with her own white privilege. The sections where Ariel and Rick debate politics around the dinner table are, unfortunately, weak spots in the novel, where the veneer over the “novel of ideas”—and this is what Dox seems to struggle to extricate itself from being—is at its thinnest. Beaumais excels at narrating the inner workings of his characters’ minds and is less assured at this outward dialogue of bickering, educated strivers. The portrayal of Ariel as an unpleasantly PC, essay-writing shrew is perhaps meant to strike a satirical tone; maybe people in Toronto talk like this in reality and I have just never crossed paths with them.
Dox is a great book for readers wanting to visit the world of the present day and engage with intricate ideas and politics of the moment. It is not an escape from a politics-drenched media environment but a diving-into.
Highlights of the book include the middle section dealing with the doxxing and a section nearer the beginning where Bela and Rick inadvertently drink a water bottle laced with MDMA and go to a nightclub. The elucidation of the two uncertain lovers’ intoxicated thoughts and actions while in a crowded place full of sensory stimuli was wonderful. Beaumais has also written a short piece of spectacular fiction called “Brickshooter’s Infowar” the prose of which glistens with mentation as it mimics with eerie specificity the leaps and contortions of a consciousness shaped by online “second life,” to a degree approaching what James Joyce would sound like if he were inhabiting a sci-fi video game millennia in the future. If this, and Dox, are signals of what Beaumais is capable of, there are tremendous works coming in the future.
February 11, 2023
Thirty years from now the people who read Dox will struggle with the question: Is this satire?
Few books capture the societal madness that started in North America around 2016. Two of the main characters are so 'online' that it's hard to believe that they are made of flesh and not merely avatars attached to opaque accounts.
There is one character who stands out against this. The normie. The one that will exist long after the madness has passed. The normie is what binds past, present and future. Without the normie, there are no abnormals. No blips. No intellectual fads. The normal is the constant that future readers will see themselves in.
Beyond its deep dive into online culture, and how it warps peoples perceptions of the real world, Dox is a pleasure to read. Highly recommend to anyone who loves a good read.
Few books capture the societal madness that started in North America around 2016. Two of the main characters are so 'online' that it's hard to believe that they are made of flesh and not merely avatars attached to opaque accounts.
There is one character who stands out against this. The normie. The one that will exist long after the madness has passed. The normie is what binds past, present and future. Without the normie, there are no abnormals. No blips. No intellectual fads. The normal is the constant that future readers will see themselves in.
Beyond its deep dive into online culture, and how it warps peoples perceptions of the real world, Dox is a pleasure to read. Highly recommend to anyone who loves a good read.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews