My Mortal Enemy

Sunday, Sep. 17, 2006 By LEV GROSSMAN
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I don't want to oversell this. I'm pretty sure I spend way more time thinking about Ed Champion than he spends thinking about me. But Ed isn't my only weird, ectoplasmic Internet relationship. My life is increasingly being invaded by these people. There's a woman (or a man, or possibly a robot) named MoFlo4Sho who e-mails me a couple of dozen times a day with her various insane thoughts about religion and celebrities. It's one of the singular features of our little social-technological moment that people all over the world whom we otherwise would never even be aware of can effortlessly impinge upon our minds and lives and desktops. We probably see fewer people in person these days, but our lives are populated by an entire chorus of disembodied presences, amplified and directed by the Internet, as if we had all begun to suffer from a mild form of schizophrenia. Everybody talks a little louder now. There's a little less mental elbow room.

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I suppose it's only fair. I mean, here I am impinging on all of you on the back page of Time magazine. Why shouldn't Ed Champion get to talk back? In a way writers do have a superpower, the power to transmit our thoughts to other people around the world with a few keystrokes. Why should we be the only ones? Why should we get to be in the X-Men, while everybody else is merely human?

No reason at all. But listen, Edward Champion, if that is your real name (and if you're the Champion, what does that make me?): Now that we're all superheroes, all I ask is that you use your powers for good. Let's take each other seriously and respond in good faith. Let's not bandy words around thoughtlessly or maliciously--there's enough of that going on already, what with Uwe Boll and MoFlo4Sho out there. After all, at the end of the day, we're not so different, you and I.

Except that I'm getting paid for this.