The German writer reflects on how the internet evolved from a space of experimentation into a system of depletion, while arguing that literature can still create new ways of thinking.
When writer Joshua Groß looks at the digital world today, he sees a profound transformation. The internet that once represented openness, experimentation and an alternative space beyond established structures has, in his view, become a place of exhaustion and limitation. In an interview with DIE ZEIT, Groß describes a growing sense of confinement in modern society and explores how literature might challenge the narratives that shape political and personal life.
Born in 1989, Groß has built a reputation through experimental novels including “Prana Extrem” and “Plasmatropfen,” works that blur the boundaries between reality and imagination, digital worlds and physical experience. He is currently delivering the renowned Frankfurt Poetics Lectures at Goethe University Frankfurt, where he examines questions of identity, technology and storytelling in his lecture series “Walking Beside Oneself: Thinking in Avatars.”
For Groß, literature’s role in a turbulent era is not to simply become a tool for political debate or reproduce daily controversies through fictional characters. Instead, he believes literature can challenge the deeper narratives that influence how societies understand themselves. The writer describes this process as “psychedelic,” meaning literature that dissolves rigid structures of thought and allows complexity, uncertainty and alternative perspectives to emerge.
According to Groß, the power of literature lies in its ability to make people question the stories they have inherited about society, progress and crisis. By disrupting familiar patterns of thinking, literature can create space for new conversations about how people want to organize their shared lives.
However, he argues that contemporary culture faces a major problem: many terms once associated with critical thinking have become politically contested. Concepts such as distrust, questioning authority and breaking down established structures have been adopted or transformed by different movements, leaving society with a shortage of language to describe current challenges. For Groß, developing new ways of speaking is part of literature’s essential task.
His relationship with the internet is shaped by personal experience. Growing up during the rise of digital culture, Groß encountered the online world as a young person and initially experienced it as a space of freedom. Unlike the established world around him, the early internet seemed unpredictable, experimental and open to new forms of expression. Its technical limitations created unique aesthetics, and online communities developed new forms of language that influenced his writing.
In particular, Groß remembers the creative energy surrounding platforms such as Twitter during the 2010s. The platform became a place where users experimented with language, spelling, humor and poetic forms. Together with other writers, he documented these digital experiments in the 2019 anthology “Mindstate Malibu,” which captured a moment when online creativity appeared to be constantly expanding.
By the time the anthology was published, however, Groß already sensed that this digital culture was disappearing. The experimental language and unusual forms that once flourished online had increasingly become absorbed into commercial systems. The structures created by major technology companies became more established, while the internet produced fewer moments of genuine surprise.
Today, Groß no longer sees the internet as the alternative world he once imagined. Instead, he believes it has increasingly reproduced the problems of the offline world. The platforms that promised freedom have become spaces dominated by repetition, commercial incentives and constant demands for attention.
His criticism goes beyond concerns about data collection. Groß argues that something less visible is being extracted from users: their energy and imagination. “It is as if our imagination is being taken away,” he says, describing a feeling that digital systems leave behind exhaustion and a dependence on existing realities rather than encouraging creativity.
To explain this condition, Groß uses the metaphor of a new form of digital labor. He describes the modern internet as a kind of “digital serfdom,” where users continuously contribute attention and activity to platforms in order to remain visible. Participation becomes almost unavoidable, even when people recognize the systems that shape their behavior.
Another important image in his thinking comes from Polish writer Bruno Schulz’s short story “The Crocodile Street.” In Schulz’s work, traditional businesses are replaced by large commercial structures that operate according to completely different rules. Groß sees a parallel with the digital age: people may criticize the transformation taking place around them, but they continue participating in the very systems they question.
Despite his concerns, Groß does not view the future as determined by decline. He sees literature as a way to interrupt patterns of resignation and create new possibilities. Drawing on the ideas of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, he discusses the concept of “counter-actualization,” a process of stepping outside immediate experiences and viewing life from another perspective.
This approach has also influenced how Groß thinks about personal experiences of pain and difficulty. He explains that he once focused mainly on distancing himself from painful events, transforming them quickly into artistic material. Over time, he came to believe that genuine transformation requires acknowledging experiences before attempting to move beyond them.
In this context, Groß refers to the work of philosopher and psychoanalyst Cynthia Fleury, who argues that people should not remain defined solely by what has harmed them. Instead, difficult experiences can become a source of personal development and expanded freedom.
For Groß, repair is ultimately an act of imagination. He believes that rebuilding damaged things, whether personal experiences, social structures or cultural ideas, can create possibilities that did not previously exist. Even in a digital world marked by exhaustion and uncertainty, he argues that creativity remains a way to imagine something different.
