A story of first love across cities spanning the decade that transformed the internet

In the halls of an elite East Coast high school, Arjun and Payal fall in love as the world begins to tilt toward the digital. Over the next eight years, their trajectories diverge as sharply as the fractured internet itself. Payal ascends to the dizzying, dopamine-fueled heights of New York’s influencer economy, finding fame on Boost, a looping video app that is as rewarding as it is demanding. Meanwhile, in a cavernous office in Chicago, Arjun, a musician whose dreams have quieted, now cleans up the same platform’s debris, moderating the internet’s darkest videos. When a brutal act of political violence against a beloved musician goes viral, this rip in reality forces the pair to confront the motivations of the platforms they inhabit. A sharp exploration of creative ambition and the multifarious nature of identity, this is a story of love in the time of infinite scroll and a look at what we sacrifice to be seen.

Ankur Thakkar is a multimedia artist and the author of the novel Blow Yourself Up. He was a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference in 2025 and his writing has appeared in Guernica, PANK, and TriQuarterly. Medium selected his piece, “Swipe,” as one of the best personal essays about the internet. His artwork has been shown at the Palais de Tokyo and La Friche la Belle de Mai. He chose MFA, then NYC, and lives in Brooklyn.

Kevin Nguyen is the author of the novels New Waves (2020) and Mỹ Documents (2025), a best book of 2025 according to The New Yorker, Esquire, and Time magazine. He is a features editor at The Verge.