When Michael Cohen pleaded guilty last week to telling lies about a deal he was working, Twitter lit up with little slices of information, cross-checking dates from court documents with other dates and plotlines that have been reported, extrapolating what all this meant or could mean for the larger Russia investigation.

It was like how we’d livetweet an actual 2018 TV show.

We, the readers and viewers of 2018, are consuming the Russia investigation news like we’re part of the biggest internet fandom there’s ever been. We’re in the throes of fan theories, fictions, wars, and everything else, alert to and at the mercy of the next development, whatever produces that feeling where your eyes feel like they’re both jumping out of your head and melting.

There’s a missing professor, a Moscow deal, a porn star, a Russian spy, a Russian billionaire, his son, his son’s music promoter, highly lucrative overseas political consulting, secret memos, secret recordings of calls, secret payoffs, surveillance warrants, the existence of Carter Page, the vagueness of that Trump Tower meeting, the dossier, the overheard lunches, the texts between the FBI agents, the love affair between George and Simona, the emergence of Michael Avenatti, the latter-day resurrection of Rudy Giuliani and Lanny Davis, and on and on and on and on — an ever-expanding formation of surreal plots and mundane process details.