“Leave Society”: An Interview With Tao Lin
Art by Owen Cyclops
People often read Countere and the first question they ask me is: “Who is the director behind the site?” The answer is more enigmatic than people expect. After proposing a feature on Tao Lin, I received an email back from the general contact inbox telling me to expect the Editor-in-Chief of the magazine himself to be in touch. I wasn’t quite sure who they were—there were rumors I’m not comfortable sharing publicly here—but I was told to wait by the mailbox on the third Tuesday of September for a USPS truck carrying a postcard from San Francisco. That it would be from them.
On that day I sat in my driveway. Sure enough, a Grumman Long Life van swerved down my street and dropped a letter by my feet.
There was only one sentence on the crinkled white printer paper: ‘Ask him about [REDACTED].’ Below, a signature in red unfamiliar to me. Two letters. RC. When I asked [REDACTED], my contact at Countere, who this was, he shrugged. “I’d listen to him though,” he said, “RC is never wrong.” A week later, an interview with Tao Lin was set up.
As far as I’m aware, this is one of the few phone interviews Tao’s done—one can’t discount his appearances on the LA Review of Books & The Paris Review—and I was glad to find that he was transparent and engaging. I wasn’t really aware of him prior to 2020, so I had the luxury of not being nervous about speaking with him, otherwise I may have overthought what I wanted to say.
In reality, Tao has been staggeringly influential as an author. Over the course of eight books—two poetry collections, one book of short stories, one novella, three novels, and one book of nonfiction—he’s defined the voice of the internet generation. His deadpan, detached, minimalist style should be recognizable to people who’ve never read a word of his. Brett Easton Ellis called him “the most interesting prose stylist of his generation.” Elon Musk is a fan.
Tao’s next novel, Leave Society, drops Summer 2021. To promote it, he’s been blogging on a blogspot called Leave Society. Tao and I talked about 9/11, anti-gravity technology, grounding, breathing, his parents, and the mysterious origins of the universe. Below is our conversation, lightly edited for clarity.
Hey Tao, how’s it going? You’re in Hawaii right now?
I’m doing good. I'm on the island of Oahu. I've been here since January. I was going to go to Taiwan to see my parents, but then Taiwan banned foreign visitors because of the virus. I’ve stayed here since then.
It sounds like you've been doing a good amount of traveling—staying in different places over the past couple of years.
Yeah. This year, I’ve been in 6 Airbnbs in Oahu. Since July, I’ve been in a rental.
Would you say that traveling has helped you stay creative from a literary perspective? Or do you find the constant traveling is kind of jarring and can interrupt a connection with a certain area?
Hm. I feel kind of overwhelmed by having too much to write about, and I think living in different places contributes to that. But it also helps, because it's a good structure for writing autobiographical stuff to have these different places that I stayed at.
Was your upcoming novel, Leave Society, predominantly written in any one particular place? Or has the writing been spread out across your travels?
It's been spread out a lot, partly because of how long I've been writing it. I started writing it in 2014. And each year since then, I've gone to Taiwan for a fourth of the year. Besides Taiwan, I’ve lived in Manhattan and then three or four places outside the city. So it's been a variety of places.
Has there been one geographical area, though, that you associate with Leave Society?
Yeah, I think there is. That would be Taipei, where I’ve been visiting my parents. I write a lot about my parents in this book. I've never really written about them that much. But staying with them has helped. A lot of what's in the book happened while I was living with them.
How has your relationship with your parents changed over time? What was the creative impetus for them to become the main subjects in your new book?
I was close to my mom growing up, until I was a teenager. Then I didn't pay much attention to either of my parents for like, 15 years, especially when I was using a lot of pharmaceutical drugs and being open about it online. My mom was really worried and would try to tell me not to take drugs, and it would upset me a lot.
And then we wouldn't talk even more because of that. But then after my previous novel, Taipei, I felt like I'd reached a kind of bottom with all the drugs. I also connected the drugs with a certain world—a bleak one, bleak and pessimistic. And as I started thinking of myself as having reached the bottom and wanting to recover, I stopped talking to a lot of people I used to talk to. And then started talking to my parents a lot more.
Do you think other millennials have had a similar trajectory with their parents as they get older? I’m wondering if your relationship with your parents is part of a larger shared experience.
Hm. I'm not sure. I haven't connected it with getting older. I've connected it with wanting to disassociate myself with a certain world…that doesn't care that much about older people. I’m talking partly about the world of newspapers and magazines, which I was in. Like writing stuff for Vice and whatever.
That kind of world puts a lot of emphasis on youth and being interested in young new things. But I feel like as people get older, they do seem to become more interested in their parents. Maybe partly it's just wanting to find something new to focus on. Because I don't feel like I can just keep writing the same thing. Partly because my editor will notice that I'm writing the same thing and push me to do something new. So my parents just seemed new—something I hadn’t explored before.
There's a ton of different things right now that you're interested in. First, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on 9/11, which you’ve made comments about on Twitter.
I was in New York City on 9/11. I had just arrived for college, and I was in this dorm by Washington Square Park when it happened. But I haven’t been that interested in it until 2017 when I encountered a person named Judy Wood who wrote a book titled Where Did the Towers Go? She argued that the towers were turned into dust by a classified technology that interferes electromagnetic energy, kind of like in a microwave.
I listened to her lecture on YouTube. It’s two-and-a-half hours. And then I read her book, which is 500 pages and seemed fascinating and compelling to me. Before reading her book, I had thought, based on videos I've seen online, that the government had, at the least, foreknown the attacks.
But after Judy Wood, it seems just even more...it seems worse than that. Because it seems like some group with this classified technology seems to have just turned the towers to dust.
I think it’s plausible. Do you think whoever had this technology that brought down the towers—are you inferring it wouldn't be the government, but some rogue agency? Or an underground militia movement? Who would this other group be?
Hm. [thinks long and hard] I think it could be a secret project of the CIA that kept growing and got out of hand, getting more and more compartmentalized and dysfunctional. And I think it could be that, because I keep encountering information that leads to 9/11 and this technology that can turn things to dust...for example, I’ve been learning more about extraterrestrials. This guy, Steven Greer, who has put out a few documentaries and books, argues that since the 1950s, a secret group has had anti-gravity technologies, allowing them to build UFOs. Greer thinks these secret projects, which he calls ‘unacknowledged special access projects,’ have gotten really out of control and that they’re fragmented and volatile and changing all the time. And that the same group or groups with anti-gravity also have ‘directed energy’ technology that can turn things to dust.
Man, some light bulbs are going off in my brain right now. When you say the organizations are getting out of hand, do you mean from a funding level? Or they now overshadow the government who set them up?
It’s hard for me to talk about this topic because I don’t talk about it often and haven’t written about it yet except for the 9/11 part that I wrote about on Patreon. I’ve mostly just been reading about it since around 2017. But I know about other government-related secrets projects. I’ve studied a lot about MKULTRA. Which is this thing the CIA had in the 1950s and probably still exists in various forms. Where they experiment with drugs and mind control.
You've done a lot of research on these secret projects and these topics, which are definitely controversial. You had a tweet recently where you said Leave Society was a threat to yourself and everybody else. Do you think the government views you as a threat?
Probably not, since I haven’t talked that much about these topics or published that much about it compared to other people. Look at all the people who spend all their time writing about the shadow government or 9/11—I think those people are more of a threat.
I don’t want to become a threat to these organizations. I want to focus on writing that is more personal and emotional. Partly because it seems hellish…people who’ve become a threat to the group with anti-gravity and other technologies, like free energy, seem to get attacked with electromagnetic energy and subjected to psychotronics and end up seeming to kill themselves or just dying. It doesn’t seem like something I want to go into currently.
When you said that Leave Society is a threat to everyone, including yourself, what did you mean by that? Is that just a metaphor?
I wanted it to be a threat then, because I was considering moving back to around New York City, but now I don't think of it as a threat anymore, after working on the novel more. Now I view it more as a gentle suggestion.
Is that suggestion an endorsement of pastoral life?
I think it's more of a suggestion to go in a certain direction. In my novel, I talk about how 6,500 years ago, the mainstream of humanity seems to have changed and become what Riane Eisler calls a ‘dominator society.’ It became male-dominated and obsessed with war and detached from nature. So when I say ‘society,’ I’m referring to what I argue has only been in effect for 6,500 years. I mean just to go away from that, to any degree.
The main character in the novel, Li, talks about how since he lives in midtown Manhattan, and has grown up being immersed in this society, he feels that anything he does will be qualified as leaving society to some degree.
I think you may be referencing the fact that the world isn't necessarily even 10 billion years old or however long people say it is, but actually much, much, much older. And this ‘dominator society’ thinks it was the oldest, but we have a human history that we need to tap into. To resurrect our true human selves.
I think you summarized it well.
When it comes to the Big Bang and how people conceive of the world’s beginning, we both know that's a factually wrong place to start because our essence has been along before the Big Bang ever occurred. What are your thoughts on how the Big Bang is marketed in modern society?
I read this book earlier this year called The Big Bang Never Happened. The author, Eric Lerner, gives a lot of evidence for why the Big Bang doesn't seem accurate. He talks about why he thinks the Big Bang got so popular. He points out that the Big Bang was first proposed by Edgar Allan Poe in like 1868. And he thinks it got really popular throughout the 20th century because of how bleak things have been with the two World Wars.
The Big Bang postulates that either everything's going to keep expanding until it’s extremely cold and things are far apart and there’s no life, or that everything's going to crunch back down and be destroyed. Eric Lerner thinks those options are comforting to people of the 21st century, who are existential and think things are meaningless.
It’s similar to what I was talking about with the dominator society 6,500 years ago. Because one of the main alternative theories to the Big Bang—called ‘plasma cosmology’—says that the universe is at least a few trillion years old, and possibly infinite in space and time. So the lesser-known theory in our society offers the much bigger, more complex world than the dominant theories of the Big Bang or that civilization didn’t start until 6,500 years ago. So these less known theories make things more complex, and at the same time, it seems to me, more accurate. And, to me, they also make the world seem more magical and hopeful—that it’s possibly way, way older, and that humans seem to have been, from like 300,000 to 6,500 years ago, a ‘partnership’ species, with people worshipping nature and living without war. So that's one way those two theories are connected in my book.
How did you envision Leave Society when you started, and how has the final result aligned with your expectations?
Hm. I haven't thought about that. I had the title since the very beginning. And I had a kind of feeling. But the thing with this book is that I wrote it while living it over at least four years.
You’ve got a lot of different styles. They can be terse sentences versus the long poetic sentences—you've got flexibility with what tool you're trying to pull out as far as being a writer. How have your styles changed over time?
I feel like they keep changing from book to book. Right now, if I just started typing something, I don’t feel like it will be a certain style. It feels like information, which I edit into a certain style. I’ve tried different styles, like the ones you mentioned and…I would be interested in using those styles again. So, I don't feel like I'm evolving somewhere with my style, but more like I'm open to using whatever style.
Would you say there is a deliberate style choice to Leave Society?
Yeah, there is. I liked the style throughout each of my books to be the same. And that happens when I keep editing it. With this book, I kept going from beginning to end, reading and editing. The style was informed by me wanting it to be really readable—to be clear and to use simple language. But also have variety and to be dense and complex sometimes.
I've got a couple more things here, words that I must ask while I have you. I’ve seen you mention grounding. I thought it was pretty interesting—the ground being able to catch free radicals, and how our lack of connection to the ground with our feet has impacted our rates of cancer. When did you first hear about grounding?
I don’t remember where I first heard it, but I’ve heard it probably like a hundred times since college from people interested in natural health and and people interested in optimizing their body. It seems to be just that you can absorb electrons through your feet from the Earth. When people say that they're inflamed, that means they’re lacking electrons.
So when I walk bare feet on a beach or somewhere, I’m aware of that sometimes, and it helps me enjoy it.
It gets back to what you were saying with the purpose of the book Leave Society. There might be inherent physical effects to living in society that can be alleviated by just reconnecting with the world, the land.
Yes.
I wanted to pick your brain on breathing. I’ve seen you say that people over-breath.
Yeah. I’ve been into breathing more for most of my life, because my lungs collapsed when I was in high school. They told me to breathe more. And I've heard various other people talking about breathing more being good.
Then I encountered this book, Breathe to Heal, and it talks about how almost everyone today breathes too much. It was convincing. The author talks about how aboriginal people breathe slowly and calmly through the nose, and so do other experts in breathing like yogis and samurais. And he talks about how breathing through the nose is healthier. It filters the air, it warms the air and lets the air pass through all of your sinuses, which go all the way up to your eyes. It seems that humans have evolved with this breathing through the nose slowly. So I’ve been doing that, I've been breathing through the nose, and I think it's helped me with my mood and sleep and level of calmness.
I know Leave Society is your newest book, but you've also hinted at another forthcoming book.
Apocalypse Training. Yes.
I think it's an appropriate title. Is the title alluding to the events of 2020?
I had the title before this year. I feel like I've been hearing a lot about potential apocalypses. One of them is a comet or asteroid impact. Which seems like it could happen. And I've heard of something called a ‘pole shift’…that the magnetic poles of Earth could shift in a certain way, making it so that Antarctica or the North Pole or something would be where the equator is now.
Apocalypse Training seems like a good thing to focus on, a really broad topic. I feel like it involves wanting to be in control of your emotions and being able to stay positive and being able to get along with people, stuff like that.
Sources of knowledge mentioned in this interview:
Where Did the Towers Go? Evidence of Directed Free-energy by Judy Wood
The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future by Riane Eisler
The Big Bang Never Happened: A Startling Refutation of the Dominant Theory of the Origin of the Universe by Eric Lerner
Breathe to Heal: Break Free From Asthma (Breathing Normalization) by Sasha Yakovleva
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