Patricia Lockwood: The Accidental Prophet of Global Doomscroll Culture

PARIS—Somewhere between the Vatican’s Wi-Fi dead-zones and the algorithmic cathedrals of Twitter, Patricia Lockwood has become the patron saint of Extremely Online Existentialism, a title that comes with neither a mitre nor a blue checkmark but does guarantee you’ll be quoted by melancholic graduate students from Kyoto to Kansas. If you’ve managed to miss her, congratulations: you are either blissfully off-grid or recently thawed from a cryogenic sarcophagus sponsored by a billionaire who thinks literature peaked at Ayn Rand. For the rest of us—scrolling at 3 a.m. in Lagos, loitering in Berlin U-Bahn carriages, or doom-watching in a Buenos Aires hostel—Lockwood is the poet-laureate of the fever dream we collectively agreed to call the 21st century.

Born in a Fort Wayne trailer-cum-rectory (because only America could mint such oxymoronic real estate), Lockwood first detonated across the Anglophone world with the 2013 prose-poem “Rape Joke,” a social-media Molotov that simultaneously went viral, went academic, and went to therapy. Overnight, every MFA program between Galway and Glasgow added a seminar titled “The Meme as Confessional,” as if the internet were merely a confessional booth that smelled faintly of Doritos. Meanwhile, non-English literary scenes scrambled to translate the piece’s tonal quicksilver—Korean editors debated whether to render Twitter as “twit-uh” or surrender to Konglish; Italian critics argued if “lol” should be footnoted or left as an untranslatable sigh.

The international ripple effect was immediate and absurd. In Mexico City, feminist collectives printed the poem on pink tissue paper and floated it down the polluted Río de la Pachuca like holy trash. A Dutch start-up tried to train an AI on her syntax to sell insurance against emotional injury, but the bot achieved sentience just long enough to unionize and demand trauma leave. Even the Kremlin’s troll farms reportedly circulated pirated PDFs, presumably to weaponize irony fatigue—a gambit foiled when the bots became too depressed to post.

Lockwood’s 2021 novel, “No One Is Talking About This,” cemented her status as the oracle of the timeline apocalypse. Narrated by a terminally online protagonist whose mother texts her ultrasound photos of the neighbor’s fetus, the book reads like a group chat transcribed by Sartre on molly. Critics from Mumbai to Montevideo hailed it as the first Great American Zoomer Novel, ignoring the fact that the phrase “Great American” now sounds like a punchline in most accents. In Seoul, subway ads hawked the Korean edition with the tagline “Your doomscroll, now with footnotes,” which is either dystopian marketing or the most honest blurb in publishing history.

Yet the true global coup has been Lockwood’s infiltration of languages that have no native word for “reply guy.” Brazilian Portuguese borrowed “lockwoodian” to describe the vertigo of experiencing national politics entirely through memes. Japanese teens coined “rokkuuddo-byō” (“Lockwood syndrome”) to diagnose friends who can’t finish a sentence without appending a TikTok reference. Even the French, who traditionally treat borrowed English like raw sewage, allowed “lockwoodesque” into Le Petit Robert, defining it as “aesthetic of the divine shitpost.” Voltaire weeps, but mostly because the entry is behind a paywall.

Beneath the sarcasm, Lockwood’s work performs a grim public service: she chronicles how the internet has become the first truly transnational folklore, a campfire story told by seven billion people simultaneously roasting their own attention spans. From Nairobi cyber-cafés to Norwegian oil rigs, we all speak dialects of the same hyperlinked heartbreak. Her sentences—equal parts liturgy and subtweet—translate the ambient dread of living in a world where the news cycle outruns grief itself. It’s no accident that Ukrainian soldiers quote her in trench Telegram channels; irony is the last flak jacket when reality keeps leveling up.

So when future archaeologists (probably funded by whatever Muskified pharaoh rules the Mars colony) sift through the digital rubble, they’ll likely unearth a Lockwood aphorism before they find the Magna Carta. And they will sigh, in whatever language survives, recognizing the universal truth she smuggles inside every joke: we were all briefly alive, extremely online, and terminally mortal. The miracle is that someone managed to make that funny, even if the laugh sticks in the throat like communion gluten.

Sleep well, planet. The timeline is still loading.