Fight Club, written by Chuck Palahniuk, follows an unnamed protagonist who, disillusioned and suffering from insomnia, attends multiple support groups for people with various afflictions. On a business trip he meets Tyler Durden, and together they form Fight Club, which expands and evolves into Project Mayhem, a terrorist organisation based on anarchy and anti-consumerism.
It was published in the mid-1990s, at a time when capitalism was reaching its zenith. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Empire made Western consumer culture ascendant; the USA was undisputed world leader, before the rise of China in the 21st Century threatened its supremacy. Amidst this was a growing dissatisfaction with the emptiness of modern life, portrayed in the novel via the protagonist’s Ikea catalogue existence.
Today, despite the backlash against globalisation and the waning of American power, consumerism still abounds, especially in the digital world. This in China as well as the West — Amazon and Alibaba are two of the largest retail companies in the world, both imperial in their scope and reach. And it is not hard to see echoes of the protagonist’s experience here — our online shopping experiences have removed us from the high street, where we otherwise might have met friends and gone out for coffee; targeted advertising and surveillance capitalism has eroded our privacy and allowed faceless corporations into our homes; and the supremacy of huge corporations has reduced our consumer choices, giving us the illusion of choice (how many times do you go on Amazon looking for a product, and see numerous listings of essentially identical products?).
Big Tech would position itself as the disrupter, upending our previous way of life to liberate us, connect us, and give us greater freedom. Social media was supposed to help oppressed peoples defeat autocracy. But what if Big Tech is now the face of faceless consumer culture? What if that is what we should be liberating ourselves from? In Fight Club, the goal of Project Mayhem was to erase human history so that we could start afresh; the new society would be primal, free of societal controls. What would that mean today? Destroying and erasing the Internet?
And yet it is in the digital world that people find their communities. Fight Club is a novel about the search for identity, finding escape and meaning when we’re alienated in the real world. In the digital space, people can find others like themselves and form bonds. For the most part this is innocuous, enriching, liberating; it can also mean that, like in the novel, people retreat into echo chambers and fall down a pathway to extremism. Like in Fight Club, it can lead people to do things they never thought they were capable of.
Towards the end of the novel, we find out that Tyler Durden was a projection of the protagonist’s self-conscious. In his desperation and disillusionment, the protagonist creates this idealised version of what, on some level, he wants to be. Might we, in creating online personas for the digital space, be experiencing something similar?
Peter R. S. Thomas 
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