In the early 1960s, J.G. Ballard found himself surrounded by pornographic violence. Immersed in a cultural wash that included the Vietnam war, the assassination of John F. Kennedy on live TV, mass-media manipulation, celebrity car crashes, and a pervasive air of perverse cruelty, he wrote his experimental novel The Atrocity Exhibition as an exercise in trying to arrange these Kaleidoscopic events into some sort of order. Underlying all that was a more profound personal catastrophe: the loss of his first wife, Mary. She died suddenly of viral pneumonia at the age of 34, leaving Ballard to raise their three young children alone. He later explained that The Atrocity Exhibition was also partly motivated by a desire to reconcile her death. “I felt that a crime had been committed by nature against this young woman—and her children—and I was searching desperately for an explanation,” he told Hari Kunzru in 2007. “To some extent The Atrocity Exhibition is an attempt to explain all the terrible violence that I saw around me in the early 60s. It wasn’t just the Kennedy assassination […] I think I was trying to look for a kind of new logic that would explain all these events.”In his first book Atrocity Exhibitions: Grieving in the TikTok Underworld, Owen Williams applies a similar approach to the social-media landscape. Dragging Ballard’s interrogation of death, spectacle, and eroticism into the digital age, the Welsh writer and musician (most known for being the lead singer of The Tubs and a founding member of Joanna Gruesome) surveys the most extreme corners of the internet like a critic wandering an art gallery. His findings are rendered like a 5G-borne Bosch painting—“a blend of end-of-the-pier campness, extreme sport, melancholy, paedophilia and neo-Sadean paganism,” where trauma grifters run amok and Bonnie Blue appears as “the female Marquis de Sade.” Amongst it all, though, there is a strange beauty to be found. In 2014, Williams lost his mother, the folk musician Charlotte Greig, to suicide following her cancer diagnosis. In the years since, he has attempted to process it through songwriting (a black and white press shot of her breastfeeding him in a graveyard serves as the cover art for The Tubs’ 2025 album, Cotton Crown), a novel that never got picked up (one dimension of Atrocity Exhibitions is about trying and failing to “hawk your big tragedy”), and now, a bejeweled book about TikTok—perhaps the most extreme example of how profound forces like grief now appear side-by-side with the inane (he learned about the nature of his mother’s death in a WalesOnline article, below a report of The One Show’s Alex Jones being spotted in a Llanelli pie shop).Here, we speak to Owen about grief, shame, AI slop, finding joy in the doomscroll, whether the internet is “artificially creating” a generation of pedophiles, and more.VICE: The book is split into five chapters, or “Rooms”: loneliness, art, sex, wellness, and grief. There’s a lot of themes you could have focused on. Why choose those? Owen Williams: Well, I was organizing [the book] around essays that I had in mind already. I had some autobiographical writing that seemed to fall into those five themes, so I kind of worked backwards from there. And I kept finding myself writing about TikTok and my mother. At first I was writing about them separately and I didn’t really have any notion of combining them, but for some weird reason they started bleeding into one another. The TikTok stuff was a bit scattershot—any mad shit that would pop up, I’d write something about. Then the themes were dictated by the more substantive writing about my mum. So it was a case of training the algorithm to send me the more extreme stuff [on TikTok] that fell into each theme.What was it about TikTok that drew you in?Because I had no real desire to be on TikTok, and I knew it was something for people younger than me, it felt like a bit of a fish-out-of-water thing. I was very influenced by John Waters and “low culture”—the idea of being attracted to the seedy and deranged. And I didn’t want to write something where it felt like I had any authority on it. I wanted it to be very much like, I’m a millennial who’s just kind of wandering in and seeing what’s what, and maybe using some of the more highbrow stuff that I like to create a bit of a lens to look at it through. Then the stuff about my mother came in, which felt like such a ridiculous jarring contrast. Writing about something like my mum killing herself is very “highbrow,” in a way, but I wanted to find a way of making it less like a profound memoir, and TikTok being one of the least profound things ever, it was a way of experimenting a bit.I suppose they’re all connected by a sense of shame, in a way.You often see people on TikTok being in this place of shame about being on TikTok. There’s a lot of styles of TikTok that are very anti-TikTok. In the music section, there are all these bands that keep going on about how they can’t get a deal because they haven’t got enough followers on TikTok, but they’re creating TikToks about that. So in a slightly contrarian way I was also trying to defend it as quite an interesting place to spend time, because it’s very maligned by everyone, including the people on it. Then the theme of shame dovetails quite naturally with the stuff about my mum, because that was very shame-based. The way she reacted to getting cancer was entirely to do with shame, like a weird kind of metaphysical shame, and I’ve always been interested in that because I don’t have much shame at all as a person. So I wanted to see how those things collided, I suppose.Obviously, at any point in history, if you make art and you want it to go somewhere you have to promote it somehow. But there’s something about promoting yourself online that feels so much worse. Why do you think that is? I think it’s partly because showing someone something you’ve made is quite an intimate thing, and if it’s on the internet you don’t really know who’s looking at it. That’s what I find weirdly shameful about posting a bit of writing on the internet. I don’t get it with music so much, but something about having to hawk your wares is really humiliating. I’d really love to be like Thomas Pynchon or whatever and be in a publishing or media world where you can just produce your work and hide away, but it happens everywhere, whatever age you are. TikTok is just the most ludicrous version of it, and therefore more interesting. But I wish I didn’t even have to think about it at all. “I was trying to defend [TikTok] as an interesting place to spend time, because it’s very maligned by everyone, including the people on it”This is tangential but what did you think of the Lily Allen album? [Laughs] I haven’t really engaged with it very much. Although, on New Year’s Eve, we went to my ex’s house for a party and for some reason that “Pussy Palace” song was stuck on repeat and no one knew how to get it off. So that felt like it meant something. So it’s her airing her dirty laundry with the Stranger Things guy?Yeah, it’s sort of a fictionalized account of the dissolution of their marriage. A lot of it is about their sex lives. Accusations of cheating, carrier bags of butt plugs in their family home, and so on.I touch on it in the book but there’s a slightly protestant element to me where I’m like ‘Are we singing about this now? In a popular album?’ And it’s not a moral thing, sometimes it just feels sort of base—in a funny way. Any kind of eroticism just goes out the window at a certain point.Did you have any reservations about the level of detail you were getting into?I had to be careful because some of my mum’s family are still alive, and I had an earlier draft that was probably a lot harsher. But to me it’s not so much a fear that I’ll upset someone. It’s more that it feels a bit awkward to be talking to [my family] about stuff with that level of intimacy, especially around such a charged thing as my mum dying the way she did. I’m still very sensitive to it, but also I have the urge, which I imagine Lily Allen did, to just put it out there anyway despite the consequences. I think people hate writers and musicians for that, which is fair enough.When you put something out publicly, whether it’s a book or a graphic Letterboxd review, the audience, now, is basically “everybody” whether you intended it or not. And it feels almost easier to express yourself honestly to everybody, I think, than it does to a family member directly.I did find that when it happened, with my mum, everyone sanitized it a bit, which is natural. I think for a lot of people it’s a taboo subject, but I found that quite suffocating. So I suppose writing about it wasn’t so much a form of rebellion, but not being able to deal with the silence around it. Then again, if you write and something like that happens to you, you’re always going to write about it, aren’t you? But I think I’m past the cycle where I feel the need to make stuff about it now. I think I thought I could figure it out somehow, but I can’t. So I wrote about TikTok instead.In the Sex chapter, you look at Bonnie Blue through a Freudian lens: “A lot of men want to see that inaccessibility accessed ad nauseam. But when, in Blue’s case, this doesn’t lead to the usual presumption of shame or vulnerability, an outraged disappointment takes over. She has remained inaccessible despite being accessed repeatedly.” That’s one of the most astute things I’ve ever read about her. Could you talk a bit more about that idea?I think when men see a woman who’s very sexually confident there’s—probably a slightly natural—response of hatred or anger. The idea is that if you have sex with her, and you’ve conquered that outer shell, the whole pretense is over. She stops pretending to be impenetrable and he can relax. So it’s interesting that men and women hate Bonnie Blue so much, partly because she’s sort of indestructible. I’ve heard her described as a “cheerful psychopath,” although she doesn’t seem like she has bad intentions, beyond selfish intentions. It’s hard, because she’s in-character in all of her interviews, but then you think, well, maybe there isn’t a character… Everyone makes the connection with Lily Phillips, who’s supposedly a bit more sort of human, but I don’t know if that’s true either. I think Bonnie Blue is just like an alien or something. I don’t think you need to find what’s beneath there. Or maybe you do, I don’t know.I find it interesting that as culture and content becomes more extreme, they also become more infantilized. It’s almost as if those things are happening in tandem.You could definitely make the case that the internet and TikTok is artificially creating pedophiles. I just read something about how there’s been an uptick in men who are not what we would think of as “natural” pedophiles… Most true pedophiles start having those urges when they’re in their adolescence, but these guys are in their forties or something, but porn addiction is pushing the envelope for them. It’s probably true that a lot of men do kind of fancy 17- or 18-year-olds, and that youth is a part of that. So that’s the porn they watch, and the algorithm keeps feeding it, and [the girls] keep getting younger. So they’re sort of becoming pedophiles through conditioning. Not to defend too much, because there probably is a point where you’re going off PornHub and onto some crazy Discord, but when you see that alongside the general infantilization of just being on TikTok, like adults dancing and stuff… Even the art that people are consuming is becoming more infantile. Culture generally is becoming less grown up. I think some people would maybe look at me and be like, well, you’re in a band….You say that like it’s a slur.Well you see these memes of millennial guys who are in bands. There probably is a level of freedom in that, I think, especially in music. People don’t get aged out the same way as they used to. So I don’t think infantilization is always a bad thing, but there’s such a dark side to it. And TikTok is obviously the most infantilizing app imaginable. It used to be that you’d just see what your friends were doing, but they took that out, so you’re no longer seeing your peers or people your own age, or any age-appropriate content. You’re just seeing whatever, and it’s just so stupid. The adults on there just seem like little babies, so who knows. I suppose it probably makes some sort of psychological sense that’s where you’d find pedophiles.You talk about the problem with limitless transgression in the book, but any efforts to control internet use feel hilariously misguided. What do you think about limits, generally? Do you think they’re necessary for people?It’s hard to say, actually. I can only really think about myself, and when I was a teenager I would have had access to whatever was on the internet. Porn, shock sites, a lot of that stuff, and I suppose I’m a little skeptical about the idea of how traumatizing that actually is. Maybe it is for some people, if it chimes with a certain experience they’ve had. But obviously the focus here is extreme content, and my thinking is more that it’s the atmosphere that’s an issue. I don’t see how you legislate against that, really, beyond giving [young people] more critical faculties to interpret what they’re seeing, or trying to create a level of detachment or irony to some of the content that might undermine someone’s body image. There are probably more sophisticated ways of building up people’s defenses, rather than just trying to flat-out ban certain things.A part of me understands why you’d be like “no one have a phone,” but I wonder what the end result is. To me, it seems like it just makes people more scared of sex. They seem to frame it as if people will become degenerates, but it’s sort of the opposite. I remember that from early shock sites—it wasn’t a case of feeling traumatized, it was just like, that looks intense. It probably did scare me a little, but hopefully this book will just solve that crisis. “You could definitely make the case that the internet and TikTok is artificially creating pedophiles”The book focuses on how the Atrocity Exhibitions are fucking up our brains and impulses, but it does invite you, at the end, to see the beauty in it as well. What are some examples of things that you, personally, have found beautiful?I suppose it was the grief stuff. In the last essay I talk about how [people on that side of TikTok] post these really strange, very cliche, kind of cosy-core scenes of themselves grieving. I’m not sure if it’s good for them, but I find it touching how it brings to light some of the most clumsy or vague ways people express profound emotions, which they are feeling but kind of failing to get across in a convincing way. To me, there was so much of that on there—sadness, and watching people try to perform to a camera as if they’re onstage. There’s no other place where you see so many people’s thwarted desires and their weird little attempts to be someone. That stuff to me is quite moving, I suppose. It’s all from a slightly analytical perspective, as a viewer, but that’s why the Ballard stuff is in there. His whole thing was what he called “perverse optimism,” which was about developing a way of seeing some of the bleakest stuff ever—which I guess for him was like, roundabouts and stuff—and finding some weird humor and joy in it. What I like about him is similar to David Lynch, where they’re quite wholesome, optimistic people who love life but are obsessed with extreme degradation and darkness. In some modest way, I wanted to take that outlook and put it onto TikTok. But it is also me in my Ivory Tower, going, “Oh! Look at you!”“There’s no other place where you see so many people’s thwarted desires and their weird little attempts to be someone”The book is very self-aware, to the point where you highlight that you contributed terms like “palpable sense of risk” to the press release for The Tubs’ album, knowing exactly why you’ve done that. But you say towards the end of the book that there’s a “naivete” to the Rooms that makes them quite touching. Do you think that naivete is a good thing? And do you feel at all envious of those who have it?Yeah, a bit. The thing about self-awareness is, partly, it’s people of our age who have been in “woke culture,” where there is a sense of having to continuously demonstrate that you’re aware of certain rules. And they’re not always bad rules, but I feel like there’s a self-awareness in writing now, especially if you’re writing stuff that’s a bit difficult or transgressive, where you kind of have to say, like, “I know what the rules are and I’m breaking them a bit.” Like, “I know about feminism, so I can write about this.” Whereas if you go back and read Phillip Roth or something, there was almost a direct link there to his feelings even if they were misogynistic. There’s a sense that he doesn’t have this self-reflexivity, he’s just saying whatever. Now I feel like that’s just a part of how everyone writes. Like an in-built defense mechanism?Yeah. But on the other hand, that’s kind of what writers are like anyway. They’re always way too analytical, and I think if you were as naive as some of the people on TikTok you probably wouldn’t be a very good writer. Musicians are slightly different because they don’t really have to have thoughts. The lyrics can be terrible and people still like it. It’s just more of a natural, less stifling thing. So it’s interesting being in both situations. There is something a lot more maddening about writing. Sometimes you just think you’re just trying to articulate things that most people know but don’t feel the need to say.The book doesn’t really get into AI, but the beauty you do find in the Atrocity Exhibitions are the places with strange flashes of humanity in them—the stuff that’s touching and repellent and embarrassing. If everything gets swamped with slop, what happens then?There’s two things going on when you look at TikTok humor. On one level it’s funny because it’s so absurd and dark. And the second element is this slightly more human aspect. So with AI, it’s like the first element gets even bigger. Because it is quite funny seeing how stupid those things are. And there are interesting things about it, like the tone. I was just watching this one of a monkey pushing a boulder in front of a bus, and everyone gets off the bus, and they’re like, oh no, there’s a boulder in front of the bus, and the monkey is dancing and then it’s gone. And it’s like… someone generated that. Someone thought to put that prompt in. I think that there’s something so bleak and funny about that. But when you take the human aspect out and it’s just those stupid videos, that’s another thing.I was watching some slop last night of a guy imagining married life with a third-generation Pokémon, and she gets pregnant and gives birth to his humanoid Pokémon babies and he is so happy.I do quite like watching slop sometimes. In a way there’s something fascinating about the lowest common denominator, bottom-of-the-barrel shit. It almost makes you realize how dumb the whole process of scrolling and the feed is. It really lays bare the pointlessness of what you’re doing. And there’s an optimism to that, because maybe it will destroy the internet. That’s my hope, that these stupid videos destroy the internet.Atrocity Exhibitions: Grieving in the TikTok Underworld is out now via Rough Trade Books. Pick it up here, or in your favorite book shop.Follow Emma on Instagram @emmaggarlandThe post Sex, Death, and Pathetic Ambition: Owen Williams on the TikTok Underworld appeared first on VICE.