The story of online extremism doesn’t start during GamerGate, or with Trump’s first ride down the escalator, but in 1992, in the Idaho panhandle. A former Texas klansman named Louis Beam republished an essay he had first circulated in 1983. He called it “Leaderless Resistance,” and his argument was simple: Formal far-right organizations are finished, because they are “easy prey for government infiltration.” What would survive the coming federal crackdown, Beam wrote, were lone wolves, held together by “organs of information distribution such as newspapers, leaflets,” and—presciently—“computers.”

Beam followed his own advice.

In 1984, he had already launched the Aryan Nations Liberty Net, a dial-up bulletin board for white supremacists with a $5 password fee and a directory of “enemies” listing Anti-Defamation League regional offices. He understood perfectly well, eight years before the commercial internet as we know it existed, what networked computers could do for a decentralized movement. His essay closed with a line that inverted George H.W. Bush’s speech at the 1988 Republican National Convention, with its famous “thousand points of light”: Let the coming night, Beam wrote, be filled with “a thousand points of resistance.” His audience had already been producing serious violence for a decade.

The sociologist James Aho’s The Politics of Righteousness (1990) documents the scene Beam was writing for: the Aryan Nations compound at Hayden Lake, the annual Aryan Nations World congresses, organized by neo-Nazi (and that is the precise word he himself would use) Richard Girnt Butler, with their proposal to carve an “all-white homeland” out of five Pacific Northwest states, and the white separatist “activists” who took out ads in Shotgun News inviting readers to bring their guns and families to Idaho for the coming race war. Robert Mathews’ The Order, the most violent domestic terror cell of the 1980s, ran a roughly yearlong campaign of armored-car robberies and bombings, and eventually murdered the Denver radio host Alan Berg, before the FBI had fully mapped the group. These people were not anonymous shitposters or even what we sometimes call “LARPers.” They had a political project and ambitions that regularly included political violence. In other words, they were terrorists.

Later that year, with Ruby Ridge and Waco, the state had behaved the way Beam said it would. And then, a lone wolf emerged: Timothy McVeigh. Oklahoma City produced the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act and a demand for civilian monitoring that an entire industry would form to supply.

Read on here.

HOUSEKEEPING

I’ve been running a lot of guest posts as I get closer to the finish line of pregnancy. Thank you to everyone who’s hung in there! And for those of you politely (or impatiently) asking when I’ll be back posting more myself — here’s a coupon as a peace offering:

Subscribe for 40% Off Here

ME AROUND THE WEB

• My first piece in the Wall Street Journal is about tweens, what we lost when we lost dELia*s, and what purpose smartphones serve.

• For Pirate Wires, I wrote about John Keel, ultra-terrestrials, and the ChatGPT Goblin scandal.

• For The Dispatch, I reviewed GIRLS, as teased in an earlier default.blog post. TL;DR? I really enjoyed Girl on Girl, Toxic, Candida Royalle and the Sexual Revolution: A History from Below, and Female Chauvinist Pigs. (And I recommend those as a starting point if you’re interested in “what happened.”)

LambdaMOO was a MOO — a MUD, Object-Oriented — which means it was an entirely text-based environment where “reality” was constructed through language and code. There were no graphics. You typed commands, read descriptions, and talked to other people by writing sentences that appeared on their screens. Carlstrom’s paper captures the communicative weirdness of this world with real precision: the way silence means something different when messages have lag, the way “emote” commands let you perform impossible physical actions, the way people argued about virtual cigarette smoke as though it were real — and the way it kind of was.

I’m reposting it here as preservation. Read the original here.

With the growth of computer technology and the resources available to colleges and businesses, new forms of communication have appeared. Computer chatlines and bulletin boards are now commonplace; these are both communication modes similar to a conversation, but held in text. Clearly, this type of conversation will have some fundamental differences from one held vocally in person, particularly the lack of paralinguistic features such as tone or expression.

MUDs, or Multi-User Dungeons, are an outgrowth of this technology plus the popularity of adventure roleplaying as exemplified by Dungeons and Dragons. They are environments which one can log into from a terminal connected to Internet, and then interact in text with objects, places, and other players within a gamelike setting. There are several kinds of MUDs and variations on MUDs, varying according to programming complexity and style, and called such names as UnterMUDs, MUSHes, MUCKs, etc.

The programming of the environment and commands affects what can be done in a MUD and the kind of activity that goes on there. Some MUDs are extremely adventure-oriented and involve little interaction between players. Others emphasize socializing, and still others are primarily a practice ground for programmers. These features are found in varying degrees in different MUDs, but there is usually a noticeable emphasis in some direction.

This paper will concentrate on one particular MOO (MUD, Object-Oriented), LambdaMOO. This MOO is one of the most active and social available. It combines the social, programming and gaming aspects more than many MUDs do. Also, it is extremely complex and elaborated, and so reflects the possibilities of many different kinds of simpler MUDs.

LambdaMOO is not only a new sociolinguistic environment, it is a new kind of sociolinguistic environment. To illustrate: on entering a new MUD for the first time, it is reasonable to ask about what commands can be used, how objects are defined, what one can change about one’s character, etc. This is roughly equivalent to arriving in a new country and inquiring about the laws of physics. It is commonly said that speakers of a language construct reality by doing so. In a MUD it is literally true that “reality” is created through language, both by the actions of the players and through the code used by the programmers.

The creators and maintainers of a MUD are known as Gods or Wizards, and have powers within the MUD that are beyond a normal player’s abilities. On most MUDs, a player can become a Wizard by proving his or her programming and/or adventuring ability. Before this occurs, a player is limited to the actions and objects created by existing Wizards. LambdaMOO is different in this respect because it is a hands-on object-oriented system. Everything in a MOO is defined as an object with an identifying number, including things, places, and even players. Even new players have the ability to create new objects (although not to program new functional objects). There are also no barriers to becoming a programmer, which allows a player, by request, to gain the power to program new verbs and functional objects.

Methodology

As a MOO ethnographer, I have a distinct advantage over an anthropologist arriving in most unfamiliar cultures. The MOO society is made up precisely of visitors from all over, of varying degrees of familiarity with the MOO environment and MUDs in general. As my character, PatGently, I am as much a member of the MOO population as is any other player, and, in fact, have been on longer than many players I meet there. I was fortunate enough to get into the MOO while it was still open to character creation without the requirement of requesting it from a wizard. The popularity of LambdaMOO has demanded this change to discourage the less-interested from creating characters which will then burden the MOO’s memory capacity.

In doing fieldwork for this paper, I used several recording techniques which have different implications for the data collected. In the order in which I came to use them, they are:

1. Printscreen. This is inefficient, but good for capturing small fragments when not recording in any other way. It records everything appearing on the screen at the time directly on paper.

2. VAX log files. These keep a perfect record of everything typed and displayed on the screen, including the user’s commands, but they quit without notice after a certain file size.

3. A virtual camcorder device. This is the only recording method which is visible to other players on the MOO. Within the MOO environment, it is a “physical” object, which can be used with MOO videotapes, turned on and off, etc. The tapes can later be played back on a MOO VCR/TV. Unfortunately, the only way to record the tape content outside the MOO is to printscreen or log the playback session. Each line of playback is prefaced with “ON MOOTV” to separate it from anything going on in the room the TV is in. Just as in RL (real life), some people object to being videotaped. I had one player object to my taping not on the grounds of privacy, but because the device is fairly heavy in CPU use, which burdens the system. Since the MOO was not heavily burdened at the time and he seemed quite upset, I suspect it may really have been a privacy issue. Also as in RL fieldwork, I found that many of the people I spoke to with the camcorder had never seen one before and were curious about how it worked and what it did (in this case, they knew what a RL camcorder did, but had never seen the programmed MOO object before). At one point I spent an entire recording session demonstrating the camera to a group and recorded no other interaction. This was part of the reason for abandoning the camcorder, along with the objections to being recorded and the requirement of playback, which is slow and annoying.

4. Tinytalk. This is a log system which works for MUDs through Sun workstations. It keeps a record like the VAX log except that it does not record the user’s commands, only their results. The commands are generally obvious from the results, but there are some exceptions, such as spoofing (described later). Tinytalk does not stop recording until the user leaves the MUD. This is by far the best recording method, but I did not learn about it until late.

Communicative modes

Because the MOO is a programmed environment, I can and must delineate the distinct communication forms possible there. The speech modes are ‘say’, ‘page’, and ‘whisper’. Say is the usual mode, used for talking to anyone in the room. Page is used to speak to someone at a distance (it is private, and can be used in the same room). Whisper is used within a room, and is private. However, some player classes have the ability to notice when someone is whispering (though not hear the message), and may object to it.

Next to say, ‘emote’ is the most common communication form. Emote is used to perform actions (“PatGently waves hello”, “Xiombarg grins.”). Emote is also used for speech when a verb other than “says” is desired, as in “Tequila coos, ‘You’re sweet’”. Emote is very different from any RL mode of communication because, rather than merely enabling the physically or humanly possible, it allows anything that is verbally possible. For instance, a player named Sabrina can type, “:bobs around near the ceiling.”, and the message “Sabrina bobs around near the ceiling.” will appear on everyone’s screen. Also, emote allows projection of thoughts in constructions such as “PatGently wonders about that, but decides not to ask”, which can be amusingly paradoxical. Emote commands have no “real” effect; that is, if one player types “:sends Plato to hell”, Plato will not in fact go anywhere. Emoting is purely show.

Most MUDs do not have free emoting — it is available only to wizards, or for a cost of spell points (needed for magic in adventure contexts). To fill the need for expression, most MUDs have a series of “atmosphere commands” such as smile, grin, laugh, kiss, pat, dance, yawn, cry, etc. which can be used by anyone and which produce a preprogrammed line on the screen (for instance, every time you type “dance” on a typical MUD, the action will appear on your screen as “You do the Disco Duck”). LambdaMOO has recently added a small set of atmosphere commands.

Mistakes do occur in the selection of communication modes, such as a player using say instead of emote and ending up with an action enclosed in quotation marks. This tends to be immediately obvious and is noticed and corrected by the speaker.

Actions, as in real life, may also have communicative intent. As mentioned above, emoting “:sends Plato to hell” will not send Plato to hell. To accomplish that, the player would have to type “@move Plato to #19232” (the object number for Hell), at which point the character Plato will in fact be teleported to Hell. But this would be considered rude. Leaving, shooting people with zappers or paintball guns, and throwing things at them can also be effective methods of showing disapproval. In one case, I even discouraged someone’s unwanted affections by changing my gender. Actions meant as friendlier communication would include joining someone in the hot tub, removing clothing (if one is of a character class that can do this — players can change character class if they wish), giving someone objects, or using a healing spell on an injured player.

Because there are many programmers and so one frequently encounters verbs and functional objects that are unfamiliar, it is not always immediately obvious whether a line that appears on the screen is a simple emote or an action using a verb or object unknown to the viewer. Complicating the matter is spoofing.

To spoof is to present a line of text as if originating from another player, or as if an independent event has occurred. Spoofing is possible under certain conditions in many MUDs, and may be done just for fun, or to cause confusion and gain advantage. Example: Player A may be able to produce on everyone else’s screen the line “Player B hits you!”, thus causing everyone to attack Player B in defense against a nonexistent offense. Since Player B has also received the message, though, everyone is likely to figure out what happened soon enough. Spoofing is usually considered rude to some degree, but may be considered funny or clever enough to make up for it. On LambdaMOO, spoofing is officially disapproved of, but it is possible to create verbs that allow players to spoof. There are several forms of spoof verbs on the MOO, most of which credit the user in some way so that they are not true spoofing and do not transgress the rules for acceptable behaviour.

Other modes of MOO communication include descriptions and move messages. The most obvious is the character name and description. The character name is the first thing created. Names are usually fairly exotic-sounding and unrelated to the player’s name (there are exceptions). One of the first things a player does on creating a character is to set his or her description. This description may be very short (I have seen them as short as two words, but this is unusual) or very long (essay length). Usually they are several lines long and provide a physical description of the character and a sense of personality. Descriptions are often heavily poetic prose, describing the beauty or handsomeness of the character. There are some descriptions that parody this tendency, and many that depart entirely from it. Some players describe themselves in their character description, but this is not assumed by any means. As I have implied above, players may not even be the same gender as their characters (gender may be changed at will to any of 10 possibilities, only some of which are sensible), much less height, weight, hair color, age, level of attractiveness, historical period, or, sometimes, species. The most common character type is an attractive young man or woman looking like a character out of a popular fantasy, science fiction, or horror novel. Some player classes have the ability to take several forms with different descriptions.

Besides the personal descriptions, which are an obvious form of self-expression, descriptions of rooms and other objects may be communicative. Players may create personal rooms for themselves, describe them in any manner desired, and add any objects they like (including functional objects, if they know a parent object to copy from or can program objects themselves). Personal rooms usually expand on a theme clear from the character description. For instance, a vampire character might have a dim room full of candles and velvet draperies, with a coffin in the center. Just as some characters are more down-to-earth than others, some rooms are extremely bizarre, while others are simple studies or bedrooms.

Objects a character is carrying are seen by other players when they look at them, so they add to the impression the character makes. Objects also have descriptions. All objects can be created, exchanged, dropped or picked up, and recycled (destroyed). Programmers can create objects that do more, and most of these objects can be copied so anyone can make their own. The @exam command allows players to look closely at objects (including rooms and characters), and see not only the description, but the object number, owner (usually the creator), and obvious verbs that can be used with the object. @parent is another useful verb, allowing the player to identify the parent object from which a thing is copied. There are many “generic objects” in the MOO, which can be copied (have “children” made of them) and/or elaborated on by programmers.

Pets, puppets, and other followers are a distinct category of self-expressive objects. For instance, PatGently has a copy of the generic following dog modified into a cat, Asmodeus has a tiger named Hobbes, Xiombarg has a Sacred Chao and a puppet described as her “evil twin”, and Sick has a fan club that takes pictures. Pets may be trained to perform actions on command or in response to other actions. The standard dog sits, fetches, rolls over, plays dead, and speaks, responds to pets and kicks, and also sniffs itself at random intervals. A player can train his or her pet to do anything, according to preference and sense of humor.

Just as pets have messages that can be modified, players do too. When a character teleports into or out of a room, the other players present see a message on the screen announcing that fact, and this can be rewritten however the player pleases. Most characters who have been on for a while have changed their teleport messages, some very humorously. There are also messages displayed to someone who pages a character, and other modifiable messages that play less of a role.

Major differences from real-life communication

It will be readily seen that a text-only environment has important implications for the kinds of communication that take place there. Several important elements in RL communication are absent or changed:

1. Proxemics. There is no spacing of players in a MOO room — all are simply there. Proxemics may, however, be implied by use of emote commands (“PatGently snuggles up to Xiombarg”) or use of furniture or other objects (“Lilly sits on the sofa”).

2. Silence. This carries comparatively little meaning on the MOO. Unlike speech sounds, Internet typed messages take a measurable amount of time to reach the receiver. Usually the delay is small enough not to cause communication problems, but longer delays arise intermittently, caused by a general lag, or slowing of the system due to heavy processing. It is understood that MUD lag may increase at any time, and that individual players may be experiencing lag on their systems that the others do not see. Also, messages appear only when the player presses return at the end, so a long message will cause a longer pause while the player types. While a player is typing, he or she does not see messages about what else is going on. These will appear only after the return key is hit.

The features of a slower “speed of sound”, variable lag time, and the fact that messages are shown only in their entirety, not heard as they are spoken (or seen while being typed, as with VAX phone) mean that a lack of immediate response to a comment or question is not taken as meaningful until it lasts for several utterances.

3. Turn-taking. For the same reasons listed for silence, strict turn-taking is impossible and so does not exist. Similarly, interruption is generally an undefinable concept. Several conversations tend to be going on at once in a room, even if only two people are there, and utterances belonging to the various subjects overlap and intermingle. The conditions described above make this likely to occur, and it is also unproblematic because all messages appear on the screen and do not drown each other out as they would in speech. Also, a player who is confused by a seemingly contextless remark can look back up the screen for its earlier referent. This form of communication is slightly less ephemeral than sound, and spacing and timing are less important than in normal speech. One disadvantage of a text-only environment, however, is that events which do not interfere with vocal-aural communication do interfere with MOO communication. For instance, a programmed object that performs actions frequently is just as “noisy” (in terms of taking up screen space and reading attention) as a character talking, and if there is too much going on, speech messages may be missed in the confusion, or scroll off the screen too quickly to be read. I have been asked to stop playing with complex objects and verbs in the living room (the hub of the MOO and main social gathering place) for this reason. When one MOO character convened a meeting on VR that was open to all comers, there were enough people in the room to make it very difficult to keep up with the comments, and one of the first things done was banishing pets from the room so that they would not contribute to the mayhem. Similarly, we quickly realized that raising our hands before speaking did not help matters any.

How real is MOO smoke?

The following transcript was made 6 Mar 1992 in the living room of LambdaMOO. It is unedited, and therefore includes both my own commands and the visible results of them. This allows the reader to see the effects of lag time on communication, as frequently several utterances from others come between my command and its execution. The sense of comments overlapping and passing each other is typical of the MOO. The lines are numbered for reference. The reader should assume that any orthographic peculiarities are recorded verbatim.

 1 Amarantha takes a cigarette from packet of Marlboros. 
 2 :asks Amarantha whether she could refrain from smoking.
 3 PatGently asks Amarantha whether she could refrain from 
   smoking.  
 4 Cookie goes idle for a bit
 5 Skip doesn’t think it’s cool to smoke anymore
 6 Amarantha lights a cigarette.
 7 HardWare has disconnected.
 8 Cookie waves
 9 Moebius coughs furiously
10 Skip too
11 Amarantha sighs at fascism on the MOO.
12 Skip grins
13 Moebius wonders since when coughing was fascist
14 :is amused at people coughing from MOO smoke.
15 Amarantha takes a puff on her Marlboro cigarette.
16 Mista says, “Let’s just open the sliding glass doors, and 
   everyone will be happy.”
17 Amarantha says, “everybody needs a hobby!”
18 Mista says, “...get a nice breeze in here.”
19 mandy says, “hiya dooby”
20 PatGently is amused at people coughing from MOO smoke.
21 Skip opens a window
22 Amarantha says, “It’s ok, my neo-nazi friends... I’ll step 
   outside.”
23 Mista laughs in rl.
24 Mista smiles.
25 Moebius says, “it’s all right with the ventilation...”
26 Skip shortens in rl to irl
27 HardWare has connected.
28 Moebius puts on a sweater
29 Mista nods and smiles.
30 Amarantha takes a puff on her Marlboro cigarette.
31 HardWare is back.
32 Amarantha says, “I’ll blow smoke rings to entertain you!”
33 look amar
34 HardWare hats the stupid server.
35 Amarantha
   a Muse, a Fury, a Siren, and Ethel Merman rolled into one. 
   She has a penchant for peaches.
   She is awake and looks alert.
   Carrying:
     wooden chest
     Magic Rose  (worn)
     staff
     a pack of Silk Cuts
     packet of Marlboros
     lit Marlboro cigarette
36 Moebius waves and the waves form interesting interference 
   patterns
37 Moebius likes hats
38 HardWare has to go.
39 :serves the stupid hats.
40 Amarantha blows rings resembling obscure parts of the 
   anatomy.

At the beginning of this transcript, Amarantha takes out a cigarette. This could be an emote, but is in fact an action performed on her possession “packet of Marlboros”, which appears in her inventory when I look at her later (line 35). I (PatGently) respond immediately to her action by using an emote to ask her not to smoke, as does Skip. The length of Skip’s utterance and the brief space between my comment and his indicates that we must have been typing at the same time. Amarantha lights a cigarette anyway, probably done before our messages appeared.

Moebius and Skip respond to Amarantha’s smoking by coughing (with emote). The conflict is now clearly recognized. In line 16, Mista suggests opening the sliding glass doors to the deck to get some ventilation. In fact, these doors cannot be opened and left open, they can only be opened in the process of going through them. This is in addition to the obvious fact that reading about someone smoking a cigarette is not irritating to anyone’s lungs, and therefore the whole scene is spontaneous roleplaying within the MOO environment. Skip’s grin on line 12 and Mista’s laughing and smiling in lines 23–24 is probably provoked by consciousness of the humor of this, as was my emote on line 20.

Amarantha offers to step outside, still complaining about our complaints (line 22). At line 21, before seeing Amarantha’s offer, Skip emotes opening a window. This is completely non-functional; there is not even a window to be opened. Nevertheless, it obviously satisfies Moebius (line 25) and Mista (line 29). There are no further complaints about the smoke from anyone else either, but Moebius emotes putting on a sweater, presumably to counteract the “cold air” from the nonexistent open window. At this point, the dispute is settled, a nonexistent problem solved by a nonexistent solution, and everyone is happy.

Clearly, players consider MOO events to have some effect for which there is an appropriate response, even when there is not even an effect as “real” as changing the description of anything in the room (as would happen if a functional window existed and had been opened). LambdaMOO is an involving world, and players simultaneously take it very seriously and treat it as a grand game. Things that happen on LambdaMOO can have very strong emotional impact, as evidenced by the existence of netsex and MUD romances.

Netsex is similar to phone sex, but conducted on a MUD and therefore with emote as well as say capabilities, so that the acts performed are psychologically closer to real actions than to descriptions of actions. Some people conduct sexual and social lives on the MOO, and on other MUDs there are even weddings between characters. The fact that netsex exists, and the way that emote is programmed, also makes “netrape” possible. It would be very easy to have happen, even accidentally due to a misunderstanding, since there is no way of preventing someone from saying they are doing something to you. Netrape can affect players emotionally almost like real rape would, despite the lack of actual contact. My point in bringing this up is that LambdaMOO is not merely a game to its inhabitants. It is an unreal environment in which real interactions happen.

Aside from the smoking issue, another point about MOO interaction appears in this transcript. HardWare’s typo (“hats” for “hates”) on line 34 shows that “speech errors” on the MOO are rather different from those in vocal speech. His utterance is understood by those present (he is frustrated with lag and the computer resources), but they take the opportunity to play with language. Moebius responds by saying that he likes hats, and I respond by rearranging the elements of the sentence. Wordplay is very common on the MOO, which is to be expected in an environment constructed of words.

Love Potion #9

I described spoofing earlier, and I have said that it is not always clear what is happening from the messages that appear on the screen. The following transcript, from 29 Feb. 1992, illustrates this phenomenon well.

 1 Reggie squirts a cloud of Love Potion in billy’s direction.
 2 Billy’s eyes meet Reggie’s gaze from across the room. It’s 
   Love at First Sight!
 3 Xyphus looks at Melina
 4 Billy declares her undying love for Reggie
 5 Billy winks suggestively at Reggie
 6 Billy says, “lots of spoofing here”
 7 All eyes turn to Billy as she starts making kissing noises 
   at Reggie
 8 Reggie says, “nah... its just the potion, Billy!”
 9 Billy declares her undying love for Reggie
10 Billy goes home.

Reggie has an object, Love Potion #9, which is unfamiliar to the others present (there were several people in the room, including myself and Catbutt in addition to those that appear in the transcript). Billy reasonably assumes that since she is not doing the things attributed to her, declaring love, winking, etc., someone must be spoofing her. I also thought this was what was happening, but Reggie clarifies by attributing Billy’s apparent actions to the potion. In fact, the potion is programmed so that when sprayed at someone, it produces the messages shown, with the names of sprayer and sprayee inserted. Billy leaves, apparently in response to the experience, but it is unclear whether she understands the potion, and whether she is offended or merely confused and going somewhere calmer, a very common reaction on the MOO.

Conclusions

I hope that this paper has given the reader some sense of the power and possibility available to the inhabitants of LambdaMOO and of other MUDs. My own experiences with LambdaMOO have given me a taste of language-based virtual reality that I find addictive, both for its realism and for its profound differences from what I can experience IRL.

The technology of virtual reality is commonly understood to be an attempt to simulate real life and the interactions possible therein. Programming constructs are judged by the closeness of their approach to realism. Real-life simulation is indeed a useful goal for many practical applications of VR technology. However, experience in a text-based virtual reality has convinced me that the flavor of “reality” found there is not merely an imperfect reflection of real life potentials, but an independent system whose communicative and social forms arise from the modality itself. The ways in which interaction on a textual interactive system are different from real-life interaction should not be seen as flaws or signs of inferiority, but as indications of a different kind of reality.

Appendix I: Character descriptions

Here are some sample character descriptions, to provide a feel for the form and the personality of the MOO. Characters of player classes that can change clothes have their current clothing as the last part of their description. Some descriptions have flaws because of programming problems. Looking at a character produces the description, a line stating whether the character is alert, idle, or asleep (player logged off), usually “He is awake and looks alert”, and the character’s inventory list. The following consists of descriptions only. Also, it must be stated that Allysa’s description below is not typical, and caused much comment and controversy when she entered a room. In addition, a few characters have “descriptions” consisting of text graphics rather than verbal descriptions.

rohan
a lost soul looking for an education

Kougar
He is a “recom”, a genetically engineered human with short, tawny fur and a tail that sweeps slightly upwards short of the ground. A computer specialist, he has implanted a network interface into the base of his skull. He wears only a black leather vest and matching shorts. This is an append_msg.

Nightwatcher
Nightwatcher looks at you, his steady green eyes sparkling. His pleasant but searching gaze roots you to the spot, as if in a trance. After a moment, he turns and his blonde hair waves in the breeze as he drifts away. You begin to wonder.. Nightwatcher is wearing nothing. Buck naked. Not a stitch. He is pondering the future contents of his append_msg.

Midnight-love
medium height with a slight build have golden brown hair and brown eyes like to meet and make new friends enjoys talking to people wearing faded blue jeans with a light blue oxford shirt and carrying a black leather jacket. Midnight-love is attired in the current vogue intimate fashion for females. She is pondering the future contents of her append_msg.

Allysa
You see a tall, luscious young woman with long, wavy deep-auburn hair that gleams golden when it catches the light. She has fair ivory skin, the soft, supple kind that makes you want to reach out and touch its silkiness. Her deep emerald-green eyes are inquisitive, as well as coy and seductive. She is wearing a slinky black cashmere sweater that falls teasingly off her irresistible white shoulders, and a black leather mini that reveals the long, toned legs of a dancer. She glances at you shyly, but in a way that is maddeningly inviting. The delicate fragrance of her sweet perfume reaches you and tantalizes your nose, taunting you, calling for you to step up to Allysa and slip your arm about her slim waist. Basically, if you believe this, you’ll believe anything. In real life, Allysa (whose name is actually Rebecca) is a homely nerd like all the other MOOers with ridiculous descriptions like this, or who knows? chances are she’s probably a guy out for a netsex cheap thrill. how pathetic.

Skot
An eighteen year old male of average height, with blue eyes and an unruly head of blondish hair. He is wearing black 10-hole boots (decorated), plain shorts, and a T-shirt declaring I DON’T NEED GOD.

autumn
About five and a half feet tall with straight hair the colour of autumn leaves hanging just past her shoulders. She is dressed in a black and brown patterned skirt with a black sweater that is a bit too big. It constantly falls off one shoulder. She is barefoot, and you notice that she has a tattoo of a Celtic design on her left ankle. There is always a slight smile hovering around the corners of her mouth.

Appendix II: Teleport messages

The default arrival message is simply “<playername> teleports in.” The following are the customized teleport messages belonging to the first arrivals at the VR discussion. Departure messages are set separately, but are similar in effect (the default message is “<playername> disappears suddenly for parts unknown.”).

Accumulated hair sheddings form into Hyperpelosity.

Taliesin appears in a flash of green, plucking a chord from his lute.

Ishmael appears in a flash of over-the-top special effects.

SoulToucher materializes before you with a gentle hum and a change in the feeling in the room.

You see a nose. You see a smile. You see a face. You see — HerkieCosmo!

Dr.Sherry appears in a psychodynamically balanced fashion.

Tobin appears seemingly from nowhere about 2 feet up in the air. He drops to the floor and smiles.

ghond appears from behind a molecule.

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THE EXPLOSION OF AUTHORSHIP

How many authors did humankind have before the internet?

By authors, I do not mean talent or charisma, those are hard to gauge, but a simple technical parameter: the ability to reach beyond one’s physical surroundings with one’s own ideas and opinions. That is what technically makes you an author: you must externalize your ideas, most often in text, and use media to deliver them to others where you cannot reach people personally. (Clay Shirky: “Media is how you know about anything more than ten yards away.”1)

Curiously, we can calculate, with enough precision to observe a pattern, how many authors humankind had before the internet. In 2010, the Google Books project2, aimed at digitizing all books ever written, counted 129,864,880 books produced by humankind in all of history.

According to other estimates, scientists have published about 50 million articles in academic journals since the late 17th century.3Some authors wrote many texts, some texts were coauthored, but that is irrelevant, as we are looking for an order of magnitude. We can add about one million journalists, as well as politicians, marketers, academics, and others who have conveyed their ideas beyond their physical reach. We find that the estimated number of authors over five thousand years of human history, from the invention of writing to the internet, hardly exceeded 300 million, and that is a rather generous estimate.

Suddenly, thanks to the internet, the number of authors reached 6 billion, 74% of the global population.

Of course, there are many caveats. Not everyone who is digitally connected uses it to reach strangers. Digital authorship is very diverse, ranging from heavy to lazy authors.4 Some sources suggest a Pareto 80/20 distribution, meaning 20% of users produce 80% of the content.5 There is also the often-cited “1-9-90” rule: 1% create original content, 9% comment, and 90% are lurkers.6

But I extend this technical authorship to all who have digital access. Even when lurkers like and share, they contribute their personal choice to content distribution. The system is designed to extract personal activity by all means, often automatically elevating it to “technical authorship.”

Over five thousand years, humankind accumulated about 300 million authors. Now, in a mere 40 years of the internet, the number has doubled if we count only heavy authors, or increased by orders of magnitude if we include all those who are digitally connected. We live in the midst of an unprecedented explosion of authorship that may explain many of the disturbances we have experienced over the past couple of decades.

THE EMANCIPATION OF INFORMATION: FROM ANCIENT EGYPT TO CHATGPT

The emancipation of authorship belongs to a sequence of similar historical processes in which new media emancipated the circulation of information.

1) THE EMANCIPATION OF WRITING: THE ALPHABET

The first emancipation of content was the emancipation of writing. It unfolded over millennia. Hieratic and later demotic script in Ancient Egypt, the commercial use of cuneiform in Sumer with increasingly phonetic components, and finally the emergence of the alphabet in Phoenicia and Greece all helped emancipate writing from temples and make it available for public and private use, for scientific exploration, and even for self-expression.

As a result, palaces and temples lost their “monopoly of knowledge,” as Harold Innis called it.7 In the aftermath, new civilizations emerged, each armed with a phonetic script: Greece captured minds, and Rome captured lands.

2) THE EMANCIPATION OF READING: PRINTING

The second emancipation of content followed the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg around 1445. This was the emancipation of reading. Then came the Reformation, religious wars, and political revolutions. Palaces and temples once again lost their monopoly, this time over the interpretation of content. As a result of Gutenberg’s invention, monarchs were beheaded, world maps were redrawn, vaccination and electricity were discovered, and man went into space. Modern society was born.

3) THE EMANCIPATION OF AUTHORSHIP: THE INTERNET, THE BLOGOSPHERE, AND SOCIAL MEDIA

The internet gave people control over their attention. Unlike TV viewers, internet users gained full freedom to browse content beyond a narrow set of elite-controlled channels. This alone undermined the established order and caused the “crisis of authority,” in the words of Martin Gurri, who described this process in his famous The Revolt of the Public.

The blogosphere, and later social media, gave users access not only to unsanctioned information but also to unsanctioned self-expression. People began to shape alternative agendas, bypassing mainstream media. As they saw how many of them there were and how underrepresented they were, they recognized their demands and their power and turned to protest. First, these were the Twitter revolutions of the early 2010s, from Mubarak’s Egypt to Obama’s America and Putin’s Russia. Then the second demographic wave of the same process arrived in the mid-2010s, resulting in a conservative backlash from Brexit and Trump to AfD and Marine Le Pen.

4) THE EMANCIPATION OF INTELLIGENCE: AI

The latest information emancipation has just started, and this is something we still need to grok. But it clearly follows a pattern of media emancipation: a new medium liberates certain aspects of how information is produced, distributed, and consumed, each time reshaping society.

This time, it is the emancipation of intelligence. But emancipation from what? It somewhat resembles the development of phonetic writing. Just as the alphabet emancipated writing from the pictorial semblance of physical reality, artificial intelligence emancipates intelligence from the constraints of its biological carrier—humans.

It is worth noting how the acceleration of historical time is at play here, shaping the pace and the scale of transformations. The emancipation of writing stretched over nearly two millennia, while the emancipation of reading lasted two to three centuries. The third emancipation of content, the emancipation of authorship by the internet, took only forty years. The latest emancipation of information, the emancipation of AI, started with ChatGPT just three years ago, and we are already approaching the same magnitude of consequences as previous media emancipations.

WHAT IS THE EVOLUTIONARY MEANING OF ALL OF IT?

When I first described the emancipation of authorship in 2014, in the aftermath of the Twitter revolutions, I thought the evolutionary meaning of all those media emancipations (including writing and reading) was social realignment caused by the emergence of new media.

But it was not. The evolutionary meaning of the internet seemed to be

1) the transfer of all human knowledge and all human speech into the digital, where they became available to future AI, and

2) the rise of the high-tech industry capable of creating AI. Media evolution needs our digital activity for AI to learn from us, just as a meadow needs the activity of bees, so it has made digital platforms engineer our engagement.

As in an old joke, we thought it was orgasm, but it was asthma. We thought the development of digital technologies advanced humankind through social realignment, but it was the technological imperative funneling human efforts and resources into artificial intelligence. The internet is the space where AI consumes all human knowledge and all human speech. The benefits humans receive from the internet serve to attract human activity, just as the nectar that bees collect from a flower serves to attract them for pollination. As Marshall McLuhan once said, humans are “the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world.”

Aside from the alleged nectar of engagement, all we got from it was asthma indeed—all the social cataclysms invariably accompanying each stage of hatching a new form of intelligence out of the biological species of humans.

SOCIAL FALLOUT: THE COLLAPSE OF THE REAL INTO THE DIGITAL

What, then, is the asthma, the social cataclysm of this latest media emancipation—the emancipation of artificial intelligence? The symptoms are many, yet all fall under a single canopy: the collapse of reality. As technology drives us to transcend biology, it also severs us from the physical world.

The farther we progress with generative AI, the more content is produced by AI. In the first iterations, it reused content produced by humans. But as time passes, given the speed and volume of content generation, AI inevitably cannibalizes its own previous outputs, already aimed not at reflecting reality but at grabbing attention: AI slop.

AI slop begins as a contaminant of human content, but through repeated self-recycling it progressively purges human residue and distills into a self-referential product whose sole purpose is attracting bees’ activity, not reflecting the meadow.

Multiply reused AI slop does not even presuppose the real, as Baudrillard’s simulacrum, the product of electronic media, still did. There is no longer anything to simulate. In AI slop, denotative reference to things in physical reality dissolves completely.

We have shared our language with AI to make it learn cognitive structures, which makes sense. As a result, we and AI share a common language in which AI has no grounded references to reality and cannot have them. Over time, the AI-generated share of that shared language overgrows or even overrides our referential needs. At what point is it no longer symbiotic but already parasitic?

At some point, AI-generated content is no longer the contamination of human content by AI slop—it is rather the multiple distillation of AI slop, which removes residual human inclusions and refines a pure artifact of its own.

AI AND AGENCY

The “epistemic partnership” of humans and AI, to use Paolo Granata’s term8,creates an ecosystem in which human authorship may still matter on the side of production but matters much less on the side of consumption.

Humans still have many heavy authors who create original content—likely more than in all of human history. But everything created by humans will be refurbished, at an accelerated pace and likely many times, into AI slop. Eventually, the share of original human-made content will decrease to an indistinguishable degree.

One would hope that human creation would turn into a demand-driven value due to its rarity amid the abundance of AI slop. True, people claim that they will always prefer human-made content over AI-generated content. But this may be the so-called social desirability bias—proper answers to surveys, conflicting with real behavior. Considering the availability and overabundance of AI slop, especially as its quality improves, it will be extremely hard for users to reject AI-generated content in favor of human-made content when it’s already before your eyes in the feed. At some point, choosing human over AI will involve too much friction, which does not suit the nature of frictionless digital consumption. Withdrawing from frictionless digital consumption is as hard as refusing to take soma in Huxley’s Brave New World; only iron-willed dissidents can do that.

But most importantly, we need to measure the alleged demand for human content not against AI content, of which it will comprise a tiny fraction, but against the capacity of people to consume it all. We have about 16–18 hours per day for media consumption, and all available time has already been taken. The fight for time in the daily media diet will continue, but guess who will be winning at scale—humans or AI?

Finally, human prompts can soon be bypassed altogether. Agentic AI has approached the level of self-tasking. It is already possible for AI agents to have various forms of online access and to proactively post content they generate themselves, which will make it indistinguishable from the output of human agents.

Of course, we can always say that they do not have a rich inner life. But that does not seem to prevent anybody, including humans themselves, from displaying activity that looks like agency.

Paradoxically, the only form of communication that preserves referentiality and “reality-check” is coding. Code still has real feedback, which consists of its applicability. Code is tested by whether it runs: if it does not perform, it is rejected. This creates immediate, objective feedback—an objective reality for code. Digital is “empirical” for coding.

The evolutionary meaning of human content remains to keep people engaged, with all our resources and labor offered to AI. But the technological imperative seems to have found a new medium to seek perfection in its performance and develop, perhaps, into some new form of AI self-communication.

It was written by Lindsy Van Gelder and published in Ms. Magazine in October 1985 — over forty years ago. Van Gelder was a journalist and longtime Ms. contributor who had recently gotten a modem and started hanging out on CompuServe’s CB channels, the text-based chat rooms that were the social internet before there was a social internet.

What she found there was one of the earliest cases of online identity deception: a prominent New York psychiatrist who had spent two years posing as a disabled woman named Joan, building deep emotional relationships — and in some cases sexual ones — with dozens of women who believed they were talking to a peer. When the deception unraveled, it broke something. Not just for the women involved, but for the broader community’s belief that the medium’s disembodiment was inherently liberating.

I’m reposting it here as preservation.

I “met” Joan in the late spring of 1983, shortly after I first hooked my personal computer up to a modem and entered the strange new world of online communications. Like me, Joan was spending a great deal of time on the “CB” channel of the national network CompuServe, where one can encounter other modem owners in what amounts to a computer version of CB radio. I was writing an article for Ms. about modems and doing online interviews with CB regulars. Joan was already a sought-after celebrity among the hundreds of users who hung out on the channel — a telecommunications media star.

Talkin’ Lady

Her “handle” was “Talkin’ Lady.” According to the conventions of the medium, people have a (usually frivolous) handle when they’re on “open” channels with many users; but when two people choose to enter a private talk mode, they’ll often exchange real information about themselves. I soon learned that her real name was Joan Sue Greene, and that she was a New York neuropsychologist in her late twenties, who had been severely disfigured in a car accident that was the fault of a drunken driver. The accident had killed her boyfriend. Joan herself spent a year in the hospital, being treated for brain damage, which affected both her speech and her ability to walk. Mute, confined to a wheelchair, and frequently suffering intense back and leg pain, Joan had at first been so embittered about her disabilities that she literally didn’t want to live.

Then her mentor, a former professor at Johns Hopkins, presented her with a computer, a modem, and a year’s subscription to CompuServe to be used specifically doing what Joan was doing — making friends online. At first, her handle had been “Quiet Lady,” in reference to her muteness. But Joan could type — which is, after all, how one “talks” on a computer — and she had a sassy, bright, generous personality that blossomed in a medium where physicality doesn’t count. Joan became enormously popular, and her new handle, “Talkin’ Lady,” was a reflection of her new sense of self. Over the next two years, she became a monumental online presence who served both as a support for other disabled women and as an inspiring stereotype-smasher to the able-bodied. Through her many intense friendships and (in some cases) her online romances, she changed the lives of dozens of women.

The revelation

Thus it was a huge shock early this year when, through a complicated series of events, Joan was revealed as being not disabled at all. More to the point, Joan, in fact, was not a woman. She was really a man we’ll call Alex — a prominent New York psychiatrist in his early fifties who was engaged in a bizarre, all-consuming experiment to see what it felt like to be female, and to experience the intimacy of female friendship.

Even those who barely knew Joan felt implicated — and somehow betrayed — by Alex’s deception. Many of us online like to believe that we’re a utopian community of the future, and Alex’s experiment proved to us all that technology is no shield against deceit. We lost our innocence, if not our faith.

To some of Alex’s victims — including a woman who had an affair with the real-life Alex, after being introduced to him by Joan — the experiment was a “mind rape,” pure and simple. (Several people, in fact, have tentatively explored the possibility of bringing charges against Alex as a psychiatrist — although the case is without precedent, to put it mildly.) To some other victims, Alex was not so much an impostor as a seeker whose search went out of control. (Several of these are attempting to continue a friendship with Alex — and, as one woman put it, “to relate to the soul, not the sex of the person. The soul is the same as before.”)

Either way, this is a peculiarly modern story about a man who used some of our most up-to-date technology to play out some of our oldest assumptions about gender roles.

The medium

More than most stories, it requires a bit of background. A modem, of course, is the device that connects a computer to the phone and from there to any other similarly equipped computer. CompuServe is the largest of a number of modem networks; it charges its subscribers an initial small fee to open an account with a special ID number and then charges hourly fees for access to its hundreds of services, from stock reports to airline information. In addition to its business services, the network also offers a number of “social” services (including numerous Special Interest Groups — SIGs — and the CB channels) where users can mingle.

The unfolding of an online relationship is unique, combining the thrill of ultra-futuristic technology with the veneration of the written word that informed 19th-century friendships and romances. Most people who haven’t used the medium have trouble imagining what it’s like to connect with other people whose words are wafting across your computer screen. For starters, it’s dizzyingly egalitarian, since the most important thing about oneself isn’t age, appearance, career success, health, race, gender, sexual preference, accent, or any of the other categories by which we normally judge each other, but one’s mind. My personal experience has been that I often respond to the minds of people whom, because of my own prejudices (or theirs), I might otherwise not meet. (For example, my best friend online is from Appalachia, which I once thought was inhabited only by Li’l Abner and the Dukes of Hazzard. My friend, in turn, had never had a gay friend before.)

But such mind-to-mind encounters presume that the people at both keyboards are committed to getting past labels and into some new, truer way of relating. In the wake of the Alex/Joan scandal, some online habitués have soberly concluded that perhaps there’s a thin line between getting out of one’s skin and getting into a completely false identity — and that the medium may even encourage impersonation. (One network, for example, has a brochure showing a man dressed up as Indiana Jones, Michael Jackson, and an Olympic athlete; the copy reads, “Be anything you want on American PEOPLE/LINK.”) Still, when it works, it works. Disabled people are especially well represented online, and most of them say that it’s a medium where they can make a first impression on their own terms.

Another positive consequence of the medium’s mind-to-mind potential — and this is germane to Joan’s story — is that it’s powerfully conducive to intimacy. Thoughts and emotions are the coin of this realm, and people tend to share them sooner than they would in “real life” (what CBers refer to as “offline”). Some people, in fact, become addicted to computer relationships, per se. But most use the modem merely as a way to start relationships that may, in time, continue offline. After several online conversations with someone who seems especially compatible, people commonly arrange to speak on the telephone, to exchange photographs, and eventually, to meet in person, either by themselves or at one of the regular “CB parties” held around the country. (Several marriages have resulted from online meetings on CompuServe CB alone.) I’ve met four good computer friends in person, and found them all much the same offline as on. For me, the only odd thing about these relationships has been their chronology. It’s a little surreal to know intimate details about someone’s childhood before you’ve ever been out to dinner together.

The cover

One of the reasons that Joan’s real identity went undetected for so long was that her supposed disability prevented her from speaking on the phone. (Several people did communicate with Joan on the phone, in one case because Joan had said that she wanted to hear the sound of the other woman’s voice. Joan in turn “would make horrible noises into the receiver — little yelps and moans.”) There was also the matter of Joan’s disfigurement; she supposedly drooled and had a “smashed up” face, untreatable by plastic surgery. She was, she said, embarrassed to meet her computer friends in person. Those who wanted to be sensitive to disabled concerns naturally didn’t push. It was an ingenious cover.

Alex supposedly began his dual identity by mistake. One of the social realities of the computing world is that the majority of its inhabitants are male; women usually get a lot of attention from all the men online. (Women who don’t want to be continually pestered by requests from strange males to go into private talk mode often use androgynous handles.) Female handles also get attention from other women, since many women online are pioneering females in their fields and feminists. Alex apparently came online sometime in late 1982 or early 1983 and adopted the handle “Shrink, Inc.” His epiphany came one evening when he was in private talk mode with a woman who for some reason mistook him for a female shrink. “The person was open with him in a way that stunned him,” according to one of the women — let’s call her Laura — who has maintained a friendship with Alex. “What he really found as Joan was that most women opened up to him in a way he had never seen before in all his years of practice. And he realized he could help them.”

“He later told me that his female patients had trouble relating to him — they always seemed to be leaving something out,” said Janis Goodall, a Berkeley, California, software firm employee who also knew both Joan and Alex. “Now he could see what it was.” (Despite their similar recollections, Goodall is in the opposite camp from Laura, and says “For someone supposedly dedicated to helping people, I think he rampaged through all of our feelings with despicable disregard.”) At some point after “Shrink, Inc.’s” inadvertent plunge into sisterhood, Joan was born.

According to both Goodall and Laura (both of whom are disabled themselves), Alex has a back condition, “arthritis of the spine or a calcium deposit of some kind,” according to Goodall, “which causes him discomfort, and has the potential, but not the probability of putting him in a wheelchair someday.” Goodall added that Alex later defended his choice of a disabled persona by claiming that he “wanted to find out how disabled people deal with it.” Others online believe that Joan’s handicaps were a way both to shroud her real identity and aggrandize her heroic stature.

The character

If Joan began spontaneously, she soon became a far more conscious creation, complete with electronic mail drop, special telephone line, and almost novelistically detailed biography (although she sometimes told different versions to different people). She was, by my own recollection and by the accounts of everyone interviewed, an exquisitely wrought character. For starters, she had guts. (She had once, before the accident, driven alone across the interior of Iceland as a way to cure her agoraphobia.) She had travelled everywhere, thanks to money left to her by her family’s textile mill fortune. She lived alone (although neighbours checked on her and helped her with errands) and was a model independent female. In fact, Joan was quite a feminist. It was she who suggested the formation of a women’s issues group within CompuServe, and she actively recruited members. Several women had relationships with Joan in which they referred to each other as “sister.”

Joan was earthy, too, and spoke easily about sex. One woman remembers hearing at length about Joan’s abortion at age 16; another recalls having a long conversation about Joan’s decision not to embark on a particular course of spinal surgery that might relieve her leg pain, but “would also affect her clitoral nerve, and she wouldn’t do that.” She was bisexual. Although her family had been religious (she told some people that her parents were ministers), she herself was an ardent atheist who liked to engage religious people in debate. She was also a grass-smoker who frequently confessed to being a little stoned if you encountered her late at night. Her usual greeting was a flashy, flamboyant “Hi!!!!!!!!!!!!”

Interestingly, the two people who knew Joan and also met Alex in person say that their surface personalities were opposite. Alex is Jewish. He almost never drinks or smokes pot (although one of his medical specialties is pharmacology). He is a workaholic whose American Psychiatric Association biography reports wide publication in his field. “Joan was wild and zingy and flamboyant and would do anything you dared her to,” notes Laura. “A part of Alex wanted to be like that, but he’s actually quite intellectual and shy.” Adds Janis Goodall: “Alex has a great deal of trouble expressing his emotions. There are long silences, and then he’ll say, ‘uh-huh, uh-huh.’ Just like a shrink.”

The heroic neuropsychologist

Above all, Joan was a larger-than-life exemplary disabled person. At the time of her accident, she had been scheduled to teach a course at a major New York medical school (in fact, the teaching hospital that Alex is affiliated with as a psychiatrist). Ironically, Joan noted, the course dealt with many of the same neurological impairments that she herself now suffered. One of Joan’s goals was eventually to resume her career as if the accident had never happened — and when I first knew her, she was embarked on an ambitious plan to employ a computer in the classroom to help her teach. The idea was that Joan would type her lecture into a computer, which would then be either magnified on a classroom screen or fed into student terminals. To all of us technofans and believers in better living through computers, it was a thrilling concept.

Joan was also a militant activist against the dangers of drunken drivers. Early in her convalescence, when she was frequently half out of her mind with anger, she had on several occasions wheeled herself out of her apartment and onto the streets of Manhattan, where she would shout at passing motorists. On one such occasion, police officers in her precinct, upon learning her story, suggested that she put her rage and her talent to more productive use. Joan then began to go out on patrol with a group of traffic cops whose job it was to catch drunken drivers. Joan’s role in the project was twofold: (1) as a highly credentialed neuropsychologist, she was better trained than most to detect cars whose drivers had reflex problems caused by too much drinking, and (2) she was willing to serve as an example to drunken drivers of what could befall them if they didn’t shape up.

Jack

On one of Joan’s forays, she met a young police officer named Jack Carr. As he and Joan spent more time together, he came to appreciate her spirit in much the same way the rest of us had. They fell in love — much to the distress of Jack’s mother, who thought he was throwing his life away. Joan’s online friends were heartened to learn much later that Mrs. Carr had softened after Joan bought her a laptop computer, and the two of them learned to communicate in the online world where Joan shone so brightly. Jack occasionally came online with Joan, although I remember him as being shy and far less verbal than Joan.

Shortly after I met Joan, she and Jack got married. Joan sent an elaborate and joyous announcement to all her CB pals via electronic mail, and the couple held an online reception, attended by more than 30 CompuServe regulars. (Online parties are not unusual. People just type in all the festive sound effects, from the clink of champagne glasses to the tossing of confetti.) Joan and Jack honeymooned in Cyprus, which, according to Pamela Bowen, a Huntington, West Virginia, newspaper editor, Joan said “was one of the few places she’d never been.” Bowen and many of Joan’s other online friends received postcards from Cyprus. The following year Joan and Jack returned to Cyprus and sent out another batch of cards.

“I remember asking Joan how she would get around on her vacation,” recalls Sheila Deitz, associate professor of law and psychology at the University of Virginia. “Joan simply replied that if need be, he’d carry her. He was the quintessential caring, nurturing, loving, sensitive human being” — a Mr. Right who, Deitz adds, exerted enormous pull on the imaginations of all Joan’s online female friends. In hindsight, Deitz feels, “he was the man Alex would have loved to be” — but in fact could only be in the persona of a woman.

Generosity

Joan was extraordinarily generous. On one occasion, when Laura was confined to her bed because of her disability and couldn’t use her regular computer, Joan sent her a laptop model — a gift worth hundreds of dollars. On another occasion, when Laura mentioned that no one had ever sent her roses, Joan had two dozen delivered. Marti Cloutier, a 42-year-old Massachusetts woman with grown children, claims that it was Joan who inspired her to start college. “She made me feel I could do it at my age.” When it came time for Cloutier to write her first term paper, she was terrified, but Joan helped her through it, both in terms of moral support and in the practical sense of sending her a long list of sources. (Ironically, Cloutier’s assignment was a psychology paper on multiple personalities. She got an “A” in the course.) On another occasion, Joan told Cloutier that she was going out to hear the “Messiah” performed. When Cloutier enviously mentioned that she loved the music, Joan mailed her the tape. On still another occasion, when Cloutier and her husband were having difficulties over the amount of time that she spent online, Joan volunteered to “talk” to him. Cloutier’s husband is also a part-time police officer, as Jack ostensibly was, and he and Joan easily developed a rapport. According to Marti Cloutier, Joan was able to persuade him that if his wife had her own friends and interests, it would ultimately be good for their marriage. “She was always doing good things,” Cloutier recalls, “and never asking anything in return.”

My personal recollections are similar. Once, when Joan and I were chatting online late at night, I realized to my great disbelief that a bat had somehow gotten into my apartment and was flapping wildly about, with my cats in crazed pursuit. I got off the computer, managed to catch the bat and get it back out the window — but in the attendant confusion, the windowpane fell out of the window and onto my arm, slicing my wrist and palm. Needless to say, I ended up in the emergency room. Joan dropped me several extremely solicitous notes over the next few weeks, making sure that my stitches were healing properly and that I was over the scare of the accident. Even earlier, around the time I first met Joan, the child of two of my oldest friends was hit by a car and knocked into a coma that was to last for several weeks. Joan had a lot of thoughts about the physiology of comas, as well as about how to deal with hospital staffs, insurance companies, and one’s own unraveling psyche in the midst of such a crisis. She offered to set up an online meeting with the child’s mother. I later heard that Joan had also helped several women who had suicidal tendencies or problems with alcohol.

The impostor hunter

Still another way that Joan nurtured her friends — hilarious as it sounds in hindsight — was to try to keep CB free of impostors. Although Joan was probably the slickest and most long-lived impostor around, she was hardly the only one; they are a continuing phenomenon on CompuServe and on every other network. Some lie about their ages, others about their accomplishments. Some appropriate the handles of established CB personae and impersonate them. (Unlike ID numbers, handles can be whatever you choose them to be.) There are also numerous other gender benders, some of them gay or bisexual men who come on in female guise to straight men. Most aren’t hard to spot. Joan herself told several friends she had been fooled by a man pretending to be a gay woman, and she was furious. “One of the first things she ever told me,” recalls Janis Goodall, “was to be terribly careful of the people you meet on CB — that things were not always as they seemed.”

Sheila Deitz remembers meeting a man online who said he was single, but turned out to be not only married in real life, but romancing numerous women online. Deitz met the man offline and realized that his story was full of holes. “Joan was very sympathetic when I told her about it, and we agreed that we didn’t want this guy to have the chance to pull this on other women.” At some later point, according to Deitz, “Joan created a group called the Silent Circle. It was sort of an online vigilante group. She’d ferret out other impostors and confront them and tell them they’d better get their act together.”

The other side

All of Joan’s helping and nurturing and gift-giving, in Deitz’s opinion, “goes beyond what any professional would want to do. Alex fostered dependency, really.” But at the time, especially among those of us who are able-bodied, there was a certain feeling that here was a person who needed all the support we could give her. Numerous disabled women have since rightly pointed out that our Take-a-Negro-to-Lunch-like attitudes were in fact incredibly patronizing.

The truth is that there was always another side to Joan’s need to be needed. She could be obnoxiously grabby of one’s time. Because she and I both lived in New York, she once suggested that we talk directly, modem to modem, over our phone lines — thus paying only the cost of a local call instead of CompuServe’s $6 an hour connect charges. But as soon as I gave Joan my phone number, I was sorry. She called constantly — the phone would ring, and there would be her modem tone — and she refused to take the hint that I might be busy with work, lover, or children. “Everybody else had the same experience,” according to Bob Walter, a New York publisher who also runs CompuServe’s Health SIG, where Joan (and later Alex, too) frequently hung out. “She would bombard people with calls.” Finally, I had to get blunt — and I felt guilty about it, since Joan, after all, was a disabled woman whose aggressive personality was probably the best thing she had going for her. (My first somewhat sexist thought, when I found out that Joan was really a man, was: Of course! Who else would be so pushy?)

Compusex

Joan was sexually aggressive. Every woman I interviewed reported — and was troubled by — Joan’s pressuring to have “compusex.” This is online sex, similar to phone sex, in which people type out their hottest fantasies while they masturbate. (In the age of herpes and AIDS, it has become increasingly popular.) According to one woman, “one time she said she and Jack had been smoking pot and then he’d gone off to work, but she was still high. She told me she had sexual feelings toward me and asked if I felt the same.” Joan’s husband, who was conveniently off on undercover detail most nights, supposedly knew about these experiments and wasn’t threatened by them, since Joan’s partners were “only” other women. Her m.o., at least with friends, was to establish an intense nonsexual intimacy, and then to come on to them, usually with the argument that compusex was a natural extension of their friendship. In one case, cited by several sources, a woman became so involved as Joan’s compusex lover that she was on the verge of leaving her husband.

Interestingly, Joan never came on to me — or, to my knowledge, to any bisexual or gay women. Sheila Deitz is of the opinion that Alex only wanted to have “lesbian” compusex with heterosexual women, those whom he might actually be attracted to in real life. Some straight women apparently cooperated sexually not out of physical desire, but out of supportiveness or even pity — and this too might have been part of Alex’s game. But it would be misleading to overemphasize Joan’s sexual relationships, since compusex in general tends to be a more casual enterprise online than affairs of the heart and mind. Deitz estimates that at least 15 people were “badly burned” by the revelation that Joan was Alex, and that only a few were compusex partners. Lovers or not, most were caught in Joan’s emotional web.

Janis

Janis Goodall was in a category all her own. Now 37 and cheerfully describing herself as “a semi-retired hippie from ‘Berserkeley,’ California,” Goodall met Joan at a time in her life “when I was a real sick cookie — an open raw wound.” Goodall was herself coping with the emotional and physical aftermath of an automobile accident. (Although she can walk, Goodall’s legs are badly scarred and she suffers from both arthritis and problems of the sciatic nerve.) Beyond her injuries, Goodall was also dealing with a recent separation from her husband and her brother’s death. “It was Joan who helped me to deal with those things and to make the transition into the life of a disabled person who accepts that she’s disabled.”

Joan and Goodall were “fixed up” by other CompuServe regulars after Goodall attended an online conference on pain management. When she and Joan arranged via electronic mail to meet in CB, “it was love at first sight. By the end of that first discussion, which lasted a couple of hours, we were honorary sisters. Later, I went around profusely thanking everyone who had told me to contact her.” The fact that Joan’s disability was more severe than her own gave her an authority in Goodall’s eyes, and her humor was especially therapeutic. “We used to make jokes about gimps who climb mountains. At the time, just to get through the day was a major accomplishment for me, and my attitude was screw the mountains, let me go to the grocery store.” The two never became lovers, despite strenuous lobbying on Joan’s part. (“I often found myself apologizing for being straight,” said Goodall.) But they did become intense, close friends. “I loved her. She could finish my sentences and read my mind.”

Enter Alex

About a year ago, Joan began telling Goodall about “this great guy” who was also online. His name was Alex. He was a psychiatrist, very respected in his field, and an old friend of Joan’s, an associate at the hospital. Largely on the strength of Joan’s enthusiastic recommendation, Goodall responded with pleasure when Alex invited her into private talk mode. “During our second or third conversation, he began to get almost romantic. He clearly thought I was the greatest thing since sliced bread. I couldn’t understand why an established Manhattan psychiatrist his age could be falling so quickly for a retired hippie — although of course I was very flattered. Hey, if a shrink thought I was okay, I was okay!”

Alex told Goodall that he was married, but that his marriage was in trouble. Last winter he invited her to come visit him in New York, and when she said she couldn’t afford it, he sent her a round-trip ticket. “He treated me like a queen for the four days I was there,” Goodall remembers. “He put me up at a Fifth Avenue hotel — the American Stanhope, right across the street from the Metropolitan Museum. He took me to the Russian Tea Room for dinner, the Carnegie Deli for breakfast, Serendipity for ice cream, museums, everywhere — he even introduced me to his daughters.” The two became lovers, although, Goodall says, his back problems apparently affected his ability and their sex life was less than satisfactory. Still, it seems to have been a minor off note in a fabulously romantic weekend. There were also many gifts. Once, Goodall says, “he went out to the corner drugstore to get cigarettes and came back with caviar. I went to Berkeley on Cloud Nine.”

Naturally, Goodall had also hoped that she might meet Joan during her New York holiday. None of Joan’s other women friends had. Some of the able-bodied women, especially, were hurt that Joan still felt shame about her appearance after so many protestations of love and friendship. According to Sheila Deitz, several people were reported to have arranged rendezvous with Joan and were stood up at the last minute — “although you just know Alex had to be lurking about somewhere, checking them out.” Joan would, in each case, claim to have gotten cold feet.

Marti Cloutier says that Joan told her that she had promised her husband that she would never meet any of her online friends, but “that if she ever changed her mind and decided to meet any of her online friends, I would be one of them.” In fact, the only CB person who had ever seen Joan was her hospital colleague — Alex. Over the course of Goodall’s four days in the city, she and Alex both tried to reach Joan by phone, but without success. Goodall had brought Joan a gift — a stylized, enameled mask of a smiling face. Alex promised to deliver it.

Back in Berkeley, Goodall resumed her online relationship with Joan, who had been out of town for the weekend. Joan, however, was anxious to hear every detail of Goodall’s trip. Did she think she was in love with Alex? Was the sex good?

The unraveling

It was the disabled women online who figured it out first. “Some things about her condition were very far-fetched,” says one. Says another woman: “The husband, the accomplishments — it just didn’t ring true from the beginning.” But her own hunch wasn’t that Joan was a male or able-bodied; she suspected that she was in fact a disabled woman who was pretending to have a life of dazzling romance and success.

Although such theories, however, ultimately ran up against the real postcards from Cyprus, people began to share their misgivings. “There were too many contradictions,” says Bob Walter. “Here was this person who ran off to conferences and to vacations and did all these phenomenal things, but she wouldn’t let her friends online even see her. After a while, it just didn’t compute.”

In hindsight, I wonder why I didn’t question some of Joan’s exploits more closely. As a journalist, I’ve dealt with the public relations representatives of both the New York City Police Department and the hospital where Joan supposedly taught — and it now seems strange to me that her exploits as drunk-spotter and handicapped professor weren’t seized on and publicized. Pamela Bowen says she once proposed Joan’s story to another editor, but urged him “to have somebody interview her in person because her story was too good to be true. So my instincts were right from the beginning, but I felt guilty about not believing a handicapped person. I mean, the story could have been true.” It’s possible that many of us able-bodied were playing out our own need to see members of minority groups as “exceptional.” The more exceptional a person is, the less the person in the majority group has to confront fears of disability and pain.

Compumurder

Even with the contradictions, the game might have continued much longer if Joan hadn’t brought Alex into the picture. According to both Goodall and Laura, Alex has, since his unmasking, said that he realized at some point that he had gotten in over his head and he concocted a plan to kill Joan off. But after seeing how upset people were on one occasion when Joan was offline for several weeks, supposedly ill, he apparently couldn’t go through with it. “It would have been a lot less risky for him to let Joan die,” according to Laura, “but he knew it would be cruel.” (Meanwhile, someone had called the hospital where Joan was thought to be a patient and been told that no such person was registered.)

What Alex seems to have done instead of commit compumurder was to buy a new ID number and begin his dual online identity. Joan increasingly introduced people to her friend Alex, always with great fanfare. We may never know what Alex intended to do with Joan eventually, but there’s certainly strong evidence that he was now trying to form attachments as Alex, both offline (with Goodall) and on.

One might imagine that The Revelation came with a big bang and mass gasps, but this was not the case. According to Walter, months and months went by between the time that some of Joan’s more casual acquaintances (he among them) put it together and the time that those of her victims whom they knew heeded their warnings. “People were so invested in their relationships with the female persona that they often just didn’t want to know,” Walter said. And Joan was also a brilliant manipulator who always had an explanation of why a particular person might be trashing her. “If you ever questioned her about anything,” Goodall recalls, “she would get very defensive and turn the topic into an argument about whether you really loved her.”

Goodall now acknowledges that she and others ignored plenty of clues, but, as she says, “Let’s remember one thing — it was a pro doing this.”

Deitz, whose offline work sometimes involves counseling rape victims, agrees that Alex’s victims were caught in an intolerable psychological bind. “Alex zeroed in on good people,” she says, “although they were often good women at vulnerable stages of their lives.” To admit that Joan was a phantom was, in many cases, also to assault the genuine support and self-esteem that they had derived from the relationship. In fact, with only two exceptions — pressuring for compusex and, in Goodall’s case, using the Joan persona to pump “girl talk” confidences about Alex — there seems to have been absolutely nothing that Joan did to inspire anyone’s rancor. What makes people angry is simply that Joan doesn’t exist. “And a lot of what a lot of people were feeling,” Deitz adds, “is mourning.”

The confrontation

Laura ultimately confronted Joan online. She had already “cooled off” her relationship with Joan because of all the inconsistencies in her persona, but while she was suspicious, she had failed to suspect the enormity of the imposture. In February, however, she called another woman close to Joan, who told her she was convinced that Joan was a man. When Laura found Joan online later that night, she immediately asked Joan about the charge. Joan at first denied it. It was only after Laura made it clear that “I believed that we’re all created after the image of God, and that I loved the person, not the sex, and would continue to do so” that Alex came out.

Laura, who is Catholic and says that her decision to stick with Alex is partially motivated by principles of Christian love, admits that it took her several weeks to make the transition. Since then, however, she’s met Alex in person and come to love him “as my adopted brother instead of my adopted sister.”

Marti Cloutier to this day hasn’t confronted Alex, although she has talked with him by CB and phone. “I just haven’t the courage. Once, when we were talking, he mentioned something about going for a walk that day, and I wrote back that it would be a lovely day for Joan to go for a walk. I was instantly sorry.” Cloutier adds: “Joan was a very special person and I loved Joan. I feel as if she died. I can’t really say that I love Alex, although maybe I could, in time. Maybe I wouldn’t have given him a chance if I’d known from the beginning he was a male. I’ve tried to sort out my feelings, but it’s hard. I know I don’t feel like a victim, and I don’t understand why some of these other women have gone off the deep end. I don’t think he was malicious. What I can’t get out of my mind was that he’s the same person I’ve spent hours and hours with.”

Sheila Deitz had been introduced online to Alex by Joan, but found him “not all that interesting” and never became close to him. But as a visible online person known to many as a psychologist, she heard from many of the victims — some of whom formed their own circle of support, and in Goodall’s words, “sort of held each other together with bubble gum.” Some victims, according to Deitz, were so upset by the chain of events that they stopped using their modems temporarily.

Janis Goodall heard it first over the telephone, from Alex himself who mistakenly assumed that Goodall already knew. “I had just come home from the doctor, and was incredibly frustrated at having just spent $155 to have some asshole neurosurgeon tell me I would have to live with what was bothering me. The phone rang, and it was Alex. The first words out of his mouth were ‘yep — it’s me.’ I didn’t know what he was talking about. Then he said: ‘Joan and I are the same person.’ I went into shock. I mean, I really freaked out — I wanted to jump off a bridge.”

Since then, she has communicated with Alex by letter but has refused to see him. She emphatically resents those online who have spent efforts trying to “understand” him. She agreed to speak for this interview in part because “although I think this is a wonderful medium, it’s a dangerous one, and it poses more danger to women than men. Men in this society are more predisposed to pulling these kinds of con games, and women are predisposed to giving people the benefit of the doubt.”

Aftermath

Laura thinks that CompuServe and other networks ought to post warnings to newcomers that they might, in fact, encounter impostors. Others believe that the fault doesn’t lie with the medium or the network, but with human frailty. “Blaming CompuServe for impostors makes about as much sense as blaming the phone company for obscene calls,” says Bob Walter. CompuServe itself has no official position on the subject, although CompuServe spokesman Richard Baker notes: “Our experience has been that electronic impersonators are found out about as quickly as are face-to-face impersonators. While face-to-face impersonators are found out due to appearance, online impersonators are found out due to the use of phrases, the way they turn words, and the uncharacteristic thought processes that go into conversing electronically. I also believe that people are angrier when they’ve been betrayed by an electronic impersonator.”

It would have been nice to hear Alex’s side of the story. The first time I called his office, I gave only my name (which Alex knows), not my magazine affiliation or the information that I was working on an article about “our mutual friend Joan.” The receptionist asked if I was a patient. Did I want to make an appointment? I had a giddy vision of impersonating one but decided against it. Although I telephoned twice more and identified myself as a journalist, Alex never returned my calls. He has continued his presence online, however, even telling Deitz that he planned to form a SIG — on another network — for psychologists and mental health professionals.

Meanwhile, in the aftermath of the Joan/Alex case, soul-searching has run rampant on CompuServe. As one man wrote: “I guess I figured the folks here [online] were special . . . but this has certainly ruptured the ‘pink cloud’ of CompuServe.” A woman wrote back: “The feelings remind me of the ending of my first love relationship. Before that, I didn’t realize fully how much hurt could result from loving.”

Some of the reactions were frankly conservative — people who were sickened simply by the notion of a man who wanted to feel like a woman. There was much talk of “latency.” Others seemed completely threatened by the idea that they might ever have an “inappropriate” response to someone of the “wrong” gender online. One message left by a male gravely informed other users that he and his girlfriend had nearly been conned by a male pretending to be a swinging female — until the girlfriend was tipped off by the impersonator’s “claiming to be wearing panty hose with jeans.” The message prompted an indignant reply by someone who insisted: “I always wear heels with my jeans, and when I wear heels I wear panty hose, and I don’t think that is odd, and I am all female!”

What it means

But Alex’s story raises some other questions that have special resonance for feminists. Chief among them, for me, is why a man has to put on electronic drag to experience intimacy, trust, and sharing. Some women have suggested that the fault is partly ours as women — that if Alex had approached us as a male, with all of Joan’s personality traits, we wouldn’t have been open to him. I for one reject that notion — not only because I have several terrific male friends online but also because it presumes that men are too fragile to break down stereotypes about themselves. (After all, we’ve spent the last 15 years struggling to prove that we can be strong, independent, and capable.) On the other hand, in Alex’s defense, I can’t help but appreciate the temptation to experience life in the actual world from the point of view of the other sex. Think of “Tootsie” and “Yentl.” Annie Lennox and Boy George. What Alex did was alien, taboo, weird . . . and yet the stuff of cosmic cultural fantasy. Haven’t you ever wanted to be a fly on the locker room (or powder room) wall?

Sheila Deitz comments that some online transsexualism may be essentially harmless. Where she draws the line — and where I would also — is at the point that such experimentation starts impinging on other people’s trust. Joan clearly stepped over that line years ago.

Maybe one of the things to be learned from Alex and Joan is that we have a way to go before gender stops being a major, volatile human organizing principle — even in a medium dedicated to the primacy of the spirit.

I personally applaud those souls on CB who, when asked “RU/M or F?”, simply answer “yes.”

Read the original here.

I. SOMETHING OLD, SOMETHING NEW

When you log into an online service, you use new tools for an ancient activity. Even with all the screens and wires and chips and lines it still comes down to people talking to each other. The immense potential of this partnership of computer technology and human language is in this blending of the old and the new.

Language is so ancient a currency of communication that people of the Northern Hemisphere, from Europe to India, know of their common tribal roots mostly just by the remnant commonalities of the languages. Through all these thousands of years (sign language excepted), language has been either spoken or written. But online conversation is a new hybrid that is both talking and writing yet isn’t completely either one. It’s talking by writing. It’s writing because you type it on a keyboard and people read it. But because of the ephemeral nature of luminescent letters on a screen, and because it has such a quick - sometimes instant - turnaround, it’s more like talking. And this is where the online scene is such an adventure. The act of conversing over computers is such a new twist that the lasting term for what it is has not yet been coined.

The new with the old. It is also new because you often feel a real sense of place while logged in, though it exists “virtually” in each person’s imagination while they stare into a CRT screen. It’s old because even if the village is virtual, when it’s working right it fulfills for people their need for a commons, a neutral space away from work or home where they can conduct their personal and professional affairs.

My work with the WELL in Sausalito, and 101 Online in SF, is about building an online version of what Ray Oldenburg calls “the Third Place.” In The Great Good Place he calls home the First Place and work the Second Place. “Third places,” he says, “exist on neutral ground and serve to level their guests to a condition of social equality. Within these places, conversation is the primary activity and the major vehicle for the display and appreciation of human personality and individuality. Third places are taken for granted and most have a low profile. Since the formal institutions of society make stronger claims on the individual, third places are normally open in the off hours, as well as at other times. Though a radically different kind of setting from the home, the third place is remarkable similar to a good home in the psychological comfort and support that it extends.”

I’ll say right up front that my love for online interaction is because it brings people together. At the personal level it helps people find their kindred spirits and at the larger social level it serves as a conduit for the horizontal flow of information through the population.

In this piece, I will first describe some of the elements that can combine to create a village-like quality in an electronic environment along with some of the social dynamics at play in there. I’ll go into some of the basic Constitutional and legal issues that confront us and then I’ll offer a little advice for anyone who is, or wants to be, the innkeeper, so to speak, of their own online service. And, finally, I’ll reflect a bit on some of my concerns for the future.

II. THE VIRTUAL VILLAGE

Who does it attract?

Online systems attract independent-minded people. People who think for themselves and many people who work for themselves. Logging in is like a social coffee break for home office workers. Freelancers, contractors, entrepreneurs, and others who, because they are always looking ahead to that next job, need to have their shingle hung out. Many computer professionals who currently work for large companies still see themselves as essentially self-employed. They are good places to run into others who may lead you to your next work opportunity.

The text display that still dominates online systems appeals to people who love wordplay, language and writing. And it appeals to people with active minds. The classic couch potato just isn’t going to be that interested. Good conversation can be a hard commodity to find these days. If you love stimulating conversation - what I like to call an “intellectual massage” - where would you go, say, after work, to find some people to do it with, especially if they weren’t already your friends? So many people have commented on how they haven’t been able to enjoy such great conversation in so long. Often not since their days of hanging out at the college coffee shop, talking till the wee hours about anything that came to mind. A place to debate, joke, schmooze, argue and gossip.

Many people have fairly specialized interests and to find people with similar interests, you often need the opportunity to interact with a larger base of people rather than just the few in your physical neighborhood. And it appeals to people who have numerous interests because you don’t have to go from club to club all over town to hang out and talk with people interested in specific things like boating or books. You can get around town without getting up.

And of course they are used by private groups to conduct ongoing meetings. It’s an efficient way for a group to stay in touch, collaborate on documents, or plan other meetings and events. One of the great strengths of online conferencing is how you can switch from a relaxing and playful kind of conversation to something serious or businesslike with just a few keystrokes.

And then there are people who just have unfulfilled social needs and want to meet some people.

Expensive toy, cheap tool

Some people sign up, look around, decide a system isn’t for them, and cancel their account after a few months. But many stay on for years. What keeps them logging in as a regular part of their routine? Because there is a benefit to the person that makes a real difference in their lives. Otherwise it wouldn’t be worth the money. If you are just finding a degree of entertainment in the various conversations, then it could fascinate you for a long time or it might get old pretty soon at two or more bucks an hour. But if it helps you find your next job, or connects you with a new friend, or fulfills that need to have good conversation with a bunch of bright people, then it becomes a real bargain. And that is the method behind the madness, so to speak. Behind all the screens of sentences are real people making real connections that make a real difference to them.

The mind pool

Ask a question about almost anything and you’ll likely get an answer or a reference to an answer very quickly. It’s a bit like fishing. Throw in your line and see what you catch. Everyone picks each other’s brains. The informal nature of online conversation encourages people’s amazing generosity in sharing the things that they know. It’s a potluck for the mind.

However, you may not have time or inclination for this rather serendipitous method of gathering information. Cruising around the various topics looking for this or that nugget of information can be like panning for gold: you have to move a lot of rock. Sometimes you just want to go in there, find what you need and get out. Good search tools are essential to a fully-realized conferencing package. A challenge in designing online systems is making it easy to use the system either way. The truly successful design accommodates both approaches so that they may not only co-exist, but are interchangeable at any time. Hang out and shoot the breeze over in this forum, then go over to another area and quickly zero in on the info you need.

Related to this is the need to have a simple beginner’s interface that allows you to self-graduate to a command-driven “power user mode” at any time. Beginners aren’t dumb. Usually they don’t have the time for yet another steep learning curve. This is why most people don’t learn to program their VCRs.

Also essential is some kind of “bookmark” function that allows you to automatically see new comments since the last time you logged in.

The sysops don’t create the information and sell it to everyone, the people themselves create the information and share it with each other. In a way we who manage systems are like operators of a picnic ground. We provide the tables and the people bring the food.

Unlike network TV or mass market magazines or even parts of other large online services, the information doesn’t flow in a top-down manner, but rather horizontally among the peer group of the participants. I like to call it a People’s Think Tank. People join online systems because they are useful personal tools. The horizontal information flow is really a by-product of this, but it has, I believe, a deep and abiding importance to all of us. Because the free flow of information among the people is essential to the health of a democratic society.

The sense of place

But something more is going on here. Dry terms like “think tank”, “information exchange” and “conferencing network” are too flat, too monodimensional. They don’t convey the reality that while you and the other people logged in are separated by miles of phone lines looking at CRT screens that just display written words, it feels like a real place in there. And those terms don’t show that it’s just about the easiest way to meet new people that there is. Nor do they describe how, via all this online talk, people form and sustain relationships. This is when it crosses over into something else, something fuller, something more like a community. In attempts to accurately describe this we conjure up familiar images like village, town, neighborhood, saloon, salon, coffee shop, inn. It’s as if it is all of these things, yet isn’t really any of them because it’s a new kind of gathering. It just helps to hang something familiar onto it so we can picture it.

The tangible and the intangible

The tangible part is the hardware and the software - the physical network. Obviously you have to have that, and it has to work reliably. The intangible - the people part - is just as important because a system is as much defined and shaped by everyone’s collective imagination as it is by the computers, discs and software tools.

All of this descriptive imaging about community comes from real people meeting there. But it goes much farther than that because travelling through the chips and wires, as a kind of subcarrier to the words themselves, is real human emotion and feeling. The spectrum of the “vibes” is just about as wide as it is when people meet face to face. It’s sometimes harder to interpret them because there isn’t any facial expression or body english, but they are there just the same and people feel them and react to them. Furthermore, the quality of the vibes - the atmosphere, the ambience - largely determines whether or not the people involved will develop any affection for the system at all.

Forums and hosts

It’s important for public forums to have hosts who welcome the newcomers, try to keep the conversations reasonably on track and do basic housekeeping so there isn’t too much clutter and confusion. They are responsible for maintaining some civilized degree of order in the conference. Old extinct discussions are pruned out like tree branches. When people argue too heatedly and start tossing out the ad hominems, the host blows the whistle. Every host has his or her own style and some forums allow a lot more tumbling than others.

Conferencing is, by its very nature, a mix of organization and chaos. This hybrid of talking by writing presents some interesting new challenges. Both talking and writing have their unique strengths. With writing, organization and a high concentration of useable information are desired. Online it’s very useful to have labels for each discussion so you can get to the information you seek with efficiency. It’s pretty difficult at a party to stand at the doorway of a crowded room where everyone is talking and determine which conversation is most interesting to you. In such cases, the benefits of the written word are strong. When talking, the whims of the people take the discussion off on any number of tangents. We have come to call this process of meandering “topic drift” and it often leads to the most delightful illuminations. So much so that many people find this to be one of the most appealing aspects of the whole online scene. But it can conflict with other peoples’ expectations that a conversation will consist of material that is truly in keeping with the theme of the topic. Once again, this is where good searching tools are necessary so that finding information isn’t like something out of Where’s Waldo?

Seeing who else is logged in

Typing a command that shows you who else is logged in at the same time lets you get off quick email to someone or engage them in a real time conversation. But beyond that, it enhances the sense of “usness.” Seeing who is logged in at the same time as you is like opening the window and looking out to see who’s on the street. Some people check to see who else is around as soon as they log in.

Anonymity?

If people don’t have to take responsibility for what they say, then some of them will say a lot of irresponsible things. My problem with this is that the signal to noise ratio develops a poor balance. Fortunately, it doesn’t really behoove most people to use false names anyway, since that would defeat their networking goals.

But I’m speaking here about the public arenas. I recently worked with a French-designed system. I designed it so the chat lines can be anonymous or not, depending on how you prefer to do it. If you comment in the public forum, there is a way to look up the actual name of the person. But you can create a sub-ID that, if you only chat with it, is anonymous. It can be a way of playing games, or it can be a form of personal protection. Both are valid.

A wide variety of topics

It’s important to have variety. And if you don’t see a topic covering what you want to talk about, you should be able to open up your own line of conversation.

What happens then is that you see the same people in different places and in different contexts, and fuller pictures of the people emerge as they reveal more dimensions of themselves.

The relationship of email and chat to conferencing

Being able to talk privately in email or in a live chat with someone alongside a public discussion helps people form all kinds of relationships. It often starts with something like, “Hey, I liked what you said over in that conference and I have a similar interest. Maybe we could talk more about it on the side.” In the heat of debate, people use email to form alliances, and when people are moved by a touching story or feel agreement with a particular statement, they use email to lend support.

A variation on this private/public dynamic is the special-interest private conference.

Encouragement of free speech

While system managers or hosts usually have the ability to remove or “censor” a given comment, I generally discourage it as a practice. And I especially dislike the Prodigy approach where they have paid censors who prescreen everything to make sure it conforms to their standards. Better for people to speak freely and frankly to each other because when each individual knows that he or she may speak freely and that they in fact take full responsibility for what they say, then it improves the content of the system. When it’s working right, people wrestle with tough questions, and that corner of the larger society evolves that much more.

I encourage all online systems to be places where controversial subjects may be discussed in a civilized way. Of course, how you define “civilized” determines what you will allow. I frown on ad hominems, personal harassment, and threats but otherwise give wide berth to the variety of tastes and styles found wherever individuals gather.

The face-to-face factor

Members of many online services like to see each other socially. A lot of online services host parties and get-togethers. The WELL has sponsored an open house pot luck party every month for over five years. Sometimes they have a special event like a picnic or a beach party. A few times we have had some real big blowout bashes over in a big loft in San Francisco. We even entertained a couple of them with a band formed from WELL members. Recently, we organized a group visit to the local art museum to view a special exhibit of Tibetan painting and sculpture. We collected $10 in advance from everyone and they opened up the museum for us an hour early.

On a smaller scale you can encounter someone online, start something up in email, and then take them to lunch, get up a card game, go to a movie, or meet them about a business project.

When a number of the participants in a discussion have met offline, the overall sense of familiarity in the online atmosphere increases. And this increases the sense of place for everyone, including those who either can’t or don’t want to meet anyone outside the online environment.

Professional and personal interactions overlap

This is where things really get interesting. Ultimately, any network is about relationships. I like to say that, rather than being in the computer business, I am in the relationship business. Some are ad hoc, some are long term, some are for business and some are social. Get online for business or for pleasure. While you can just do one or the other, most people use it for both. I know people who got online just for fun but made contacts that led to a new job. I also know people who joined for business reasons such as getting help on a computer application or doing research and made some new friends through conversing in other non-technical forums. Or maybe you are thinking of hiring someone you met online because of their technical expertise and by seeing their comments in other conferences you find that you also like their sense of humor. Or perhaps you don’t care for their dogmatic attitude and that influences your decision the other way. The variations are endless.

One person who comes to mind is the radio producer who uses the WELL to talk shop with others in his field all around the country. When his two year old daughter became deathly ill, he would log in from way out on Cape Cod and would report, diary style, in the WELL Parents Conference about what they were going through. He would give the details and describe his emotional state and people would lend their support. It comforted him and it touched all of us who read it. And I doubt that this guy has ever met any of the other people face to face. Furthermore, this experience greatly increased his enthusiasm for what this kind of network can do and that spread to his business related activities online. Another described, over the course of a few years, his search for his biological parents. When he finally found them many of us rejoiced with him after reading his eloquent account. This guy works the same online crowd for his consulting business.

For the term “village” to be applied to an online scene with any accuracy at all this blending of business and pleasure must be present. Because that’s what a village is: a place where you go down to the butcher or the blacksmith and transact your business, and at night meet those same neighbors down at the local pub or the Friday night dance.

III. SOCIAL DYNAMICS

Making communities out of individualists

A lot of why the online realm is characterized with the image of the frontier, comes from trying to forge a community out of people who are not, by their nature, team players. Back in the pioneer days, the rugged individuals went west. These days the uncharted, unsettled territory is the realm of electronic group communications that is becoming known as the “virtual world” or “cyberspace.”

Here online we have people with a new sort of pioneer outlook. Let me give you my thumbnail impression of what they have in common: Many work for themselves at home or in a private office. They possess great awareness and concern about their rights as individuals. They are often outspoken and articulate. And, on top of this, they are now doing a lot of relating to other people compared to what they were doing before, and in some cases compared to what they have ever done, certainly since their college or military days. This is all more intensified by most people not really knowing each other before they got involved. So this pioneer image also comes to mind because it isn’t just new technologically, it’s new for those involved at the personal/social level.

Use of the word “community” here doesn’t imply that an online scene is one monolithic community. Rather, I use the word to suggest a commons that is made up of a bundle of smaller “communities of interest” that also have a common interest in the health of the overall system.

The level playing field

The great equalizing factor, of course, is that nobody can see each other online so the ideas are what really matter. You can’t discern age, race, complexion, hair color, body shape, vocal tone or any of the other attributes that we all incorporate into our impressions of people. I leave out gender here because gender is often revealed in your name, if nowhere else.

If the balance tips to anyone’s advantage, it’s in favor of those who are better at articulating their views. Some people are amazingly skilled at debating. Other people feel shyness around their own forensic or expressive skills. Posting a comment is “stepping out,” so to speak, putting yourself “out there” to people you might not know. And many of them aren’t going to reveal themselves because they are just “lurking” (reading without participating). Related to that is the populist feel of it. This is where the not-famous people hang out.

Still, this is one area that needs improvement, in my view, and the search for an even more level playing field and a wider demographic base was one of the reasons I went from the PC-based WELL to minitel-based 101 Online. Every PC-based online net I know of has 80% or more men. And most of these are white men. PC systems are not exclusionary. But most of the population have the necessary equipment. Few people buy a PC and modem just to join an online service.

The meeting place

I said earlier that an online community is one of the easiest ways to meet new people. Certainly it is very low-risk. I think this is mainly due to the essential informality of online conversation. Rather than being required to sustain a single conversation with one or more people, relationships usually form out of numerous, often short exchanges. In a way it reminds me of commuters who take the bus or ferry. They see each other frequently but each encounter is of a fairly short duration. In situations like this the pressure is minimal. If you’d rather read the paper than chat then you just do it and don’t worry about it. But, over time, many people form enduring relationships this way.

The “hot” medium

In the online environment, just like any other social situation, the basic currency is human attention. In the public forums, you communicate with groups that may have as many as several hundred people involved - even if they don’t all make comments.

Nobody comments on everything (although some people can be quite verbose!), but many people don’t say anything at all. In fact, most people who use online services don’t post any comments. They lurk. In the world of online services theory the lurker/poster ratio is one of the indicators. Ten or more lurkers for every poster is common. Many people who do post comments are aware of this fact and orate at times as if they are addressing the Roman Senate, the online Continental Congress, or the lunchtime crowd at Hyde Park. I have heard online discussion called, “writing as a performing art.” It sometimes reminds me of Amateur Night at the Apollo or the Gong Show, because you don’t know what reaction people may have to the comment you make. Maybe you won’t get any reaction. Maybe you’ll get email voicing support or dissent, maybe someone will take you on in the discussion, or maybe you will have said something good enough to warrant a string of online “amens.” At any rate, many are reticent to say anything at all because of this version of stage fright, while others take to it like Vaudeville troupers. An online system is a place where you have to give yourself permission to step out and participate. Of course if you talk too much people may tend to ignore your comments after awhile.

Most services charge by the hour like a parking meter. Combining this expense with the cost of the phone call can add up to real money for extended participation in the scene. There are ways to cut the time spent online by “downloading” the material and reading it offline through your word processor. You can compose your responses and then “upload” them to the appropriate topics. But there are some people who don’t want to do this, even though it saves them money, because the medium feels “hotter” to them if they are interacting directly online. It’s as if being online in the moment is reading the magazine and the downloads are like reading photocopies of the articles. It just isn’t as appealing to some people, even if it is cheaper.

The personality you project

Each person holds his or her own mental image of what the online society is and how it is structured. The corollary to this is the personality each person projects to everyone else. What you find here is that some people, viewing this as just another communication tool or social environment, try to make their online personality be as similar as possible to their personality everywhere else.

Other people change their personalities once they get online. This may come from the sense of safety and empowerment they feel in the sanctity of their room or office talking with people that they know can’t deck them if they say the wrong thing. The online world might be where words can break your bones but sticks and stones can never hurt you. Others may be self-conscious about their appearance or some other handicap and, knowing that it isn’t a factor in the interactions, simply feel more confident than they do elsewhere. For some others, the online environment seems to promote in them a certain kind of functional schizophrenia as if logging in was like Clark Kent stepping into the phone booth. Having an alternate persona is part of the game and much of what makes it fun for them.

I know some people who are much more bristly online than they are in person. And they enjoy the contentious nature of many of the conversations. They sometimes even agitate it to be more that way, as if it was a kind of “sport hassling.” They like the ferment for its own sake.

Ferment

By its very nature, online discussion is going to involve disagreement. In our reach for analogies we often ask “is it a salon or is it a saloon?” Once again it’s a hybrid. It’s a salon, certainly, in the classic image of gathering for spirited, bright conversation where people of different backgrounds and disciplines come together for that intellectual massage that feels so good. But it’s also like this Wild West saloon where you never know who’s going to come in the swinging doors and try out their stuff on everybody. Somewhere on the system at all times there is some sort of ferment going on. Ferment is a necessary part of the recipe. Part of the scene will always be in flux. At times it will be argumentative and contentious. As a host or a manager, you accept that, and work with it.

There is concern amongst some participants that a topic or a forum won’t feel “safe” to them. This elusive quality of safety depends on a few factors. The size of the group, the nature of the subject matter, the personalities of the people who happen to be in there talking, and the way that forum is hosted. A forum environment that has a hostile atmosphere will discourage participation by those who have less aggressive tendencies. The hosting is important because in overseeing the discussion, you don’t want things to sink down too far but setting too high of a standard for “niceness” can also kill off a discussion before anything worthwhile gets figured out. That means that some temperatures will rise some of the time. There will always be some rough spots whenever a group works to define itself. Without any ferment at all, the “brew” will quickly go flat.

“Flaming”, in Net Talk, means to torch someone with your verbal flame thrower. One gets the feeling that flaming gets to be even more of a sport over in the Unix net world than it does on a place like the WELL. They even have social protocols for it like saying <Flame On> before you launch your missiles.

Some of the arguments and debates we’ve had over the years have been pointless personal hassles, but many have led us to a fuller understanding of what we were as an entity, or what we thought we ought to be. It is important to note that policy and custom has been shaped at times by arguments and hassles that were often quite personal in nature. Like everything else in a scene there is a lot of blending of different elements. Disagreement about a point or a matter of principle can get complicated when mixed in with dislike for the other person’s style or personality.

The other side of this coin is the overt effort of people to lend affirmation and support to others. This may be something as simple as complimenting them on something they said or wishing them good luck in one way or another. It’s like sending an electronic “get well” card.

Newcomers

Many of the regulars and old-timers know each other pretty well. To a newcomer it can seem, as Alice Kahn once described it, like being a new kid in a high school.

When the face-to-face factor comes into the picture, things can get thicker still. People who haven’t or don’t see others “in person” may wonder if in-group tendencies get reinforced at social gatherings. In reality, the opposite is true for many people such as Carol Gould. She says, “My own experience at the WELL parties has been very positive. I was somewhat nervous about walking up to the group of people, none of whom I knew, but I was able to enter a conversation or two and before long I felt fairly at ease. People were curious as to who I was and, surprisingly, claimed they’d ‘seen me around’ on the WELL. At any rate, my sense was that people were curious and friendly, and it encouraged me to come to the next event. And I would have to say that I have never felt excluded or rebuffed by anyone.”

Perhaps it’s just a clique in which everyone is a member. As SF Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll observed, “I had a great experience at Howard’s book-signing, which was my first Well event. I met all these folks for the first time, and the air was filled with, ‘You mean—you’re onezie’ and ‘I think that’s rabar over there’ and glad cries and furious conversation and the other people in the bookstore were like, ‘Who are these people?’ In other words, I was member of a clique totally composed of people I had never met before.”

There is, however, always a challenge for the regulars to remember what it is like for a newcomer.

It must be remembered by all that newcomers are essential to the survival of the group because they refresh the place, strengthen its vitality and replace the people who move on. Without new viewpoints and personalities the place becomes stagnant.

IV. RIGHTS, RESPONSIBILITY, AND THE CONSTITUTION

These are the early days

The image of the Continental Congress isn’t really too far-fetched because the many discussions regarding rules, policies and customs of this new online environment are pioneering in nature. Nobody really knows what the future holds, except that electronic communication will be a lot more common and ways of interacting in virtual space will have a lot more variety. But it isn’t known what social conventions, if any, people will observe as they try to get along with each other and conduct business in the electronic environment. It’s all being debated and figured out as we go along. Things determined now will surely have long-term influence in the future, when they are more common to the whole population.

So that the best minds may be applied to the task of figuring out the social and legal issues of electronic interaction, we need as open a forum as we can put together. Without the goal of improved communication throughout the citizenry, regardless of their opinion or station in life, writers and sociologists who express the fear that electronic technology will widen the gap between the rich and poor - rather than narrow it - may be proved right. Allowing maximum freedom of expression for each person or institution represented is the only way that enough collective intelligence can be gathered so that these matters can be figured out for the common good. Hackers and law enforcement. Those who view their words as strict intellectual property and those who regard their online writing as so much ephemeral conversation and give it away as soon as they type it out. Then there’s the phone company and those who would compete with or bypass the phone company. There are software companies and independent programmers. Those who believe in uninhibited free speech and those who seek a degree of control over what can and can’t be said and to whom you can say it, especially regarding minors. And all are really necessary in this widening national debate, because freedoms in the electronic meeting space have to be established by the people actually using the services. Outside lawmakers or groups shouldn’t be the ones to determine what happens in the virtual world. If we don’t establish the rules and customs for ourselves, then larger, more impersonal institutions with far less sensitivity to the subtler elements of this endeavor will have their way and we will be compelled to play by their rules.

As it is now, there isn’t much case law regarding these various issues, lending still more credence to the image of the “electronic frontier.” In a small system like the WELL or a huge one like Prodigy, issues are worked out by making some rules and then seeing what happens. Some things work and some don’t. In a way, it’s hard to make many generalizations because the electronic meeting places are very much a bundle of individuals. Every case is unique. Larger patterns will emerge producing more clarity over time. Still, there are a few general categories into which most of these issues fall.

Free speech

Is electronic conversation talking or writing? Or is it a hybrid of these two that is unique and new? And is this activity protected by the United States Constitution just like freedom of speech? If this is a kind of meeting place, is it then an assembly of people that is also protected by the First Amendment? I say that these are rights that must be protected. But if it isn’t in writing anywhere, are the safeguards actually in place? In 1987 a bill was introduced in the California State Assembly to amend the California Constitution to include electronic speech in the guaranteed protections of the First Amendment. The bill died in committee because it was felt that the protection was built into the existing wording. I hope that it is true.

Privacy

Do your electronic files have the same Fourth Amendment protections from unreasonable search and seizure as your personal effects in your home? Is your private email on a subscription-based service truly private? What rights do you have, what are the responsibilities of the operators of a system and what are the limits placed on the government if they should want to look through your electronic files and correspondence?

In 1986, Congress passed the Electronics Communication Privacy Act which provides for some protection for the individual and defines the responsibilities of the system administrators. Recent history (especially in regard to the Jackson Games case where government agents seized and kept a company’s files and records without making an arrest, or more recently the seized “Amateur Action” BBS in San Jose that had downloadable risqué GIF files that were apparently available to clever minors who somehow would be more corrupted by them than a copy of Playboy hidden under their mattress) shows that the Government is testing its powers. And the placement of limits on those powers is in dispute right now in the courts. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has been created by concerned individuals to help shape these policies and to help protect and defend people that they feel were treated unjustly by the Government.

The ECPA made it a crime for someone to gain unauthorized entrance into an online system. It also requires system operators to inform their customers about how much privacy they should expect and then insure that that privacy is not invaded. Most system operators have unlimited “root” privileges that include the ability to examine anyone’s mail. On the WELL, and on 101 Online, we let people know that our system administrator has that power, but they do not read anyone’s mail without their permission. If an operator surreptitiously examined someone’s mail outside the regular stated duties of system maintenance, then it would be a violation of the ECPA and hence, a Federal crime. But what if the FBI came to our office and ordered us to give them a copy of everyone’s email? Would we have to do it? What if they wanted to confiscate our equipment so they could comb through the files? Could they do it? According to the ECPA the answer is yes if they have a search warrant, but only if the material is more recent than six months. If it’s been on a system longer than six months, then only a subpoena is required.

What this means in terms of Government power is that while they are limited by certain procedures, if they really want to, they can shut down your operation, possibly throw you in jail and otherwise wreak havoc in your life.

This balance between the user, the system operator and the Government is one that is being defined a little more every day. My feeling is that unchecked and unopposed power will seek to extend that power into new areas whenever they appear.

Ownership of words

Is it publishing or is it just conversation that happens to be in writing? The WELL User Agreement says “You own your own words.” This simple phrase gets right to the heart of the matter of intellectual property as applied in the online world, but, like all of these other issues, is fraught with ambiguity and is subject to myriad personal interpretation. “You own your own words” means that you, and not the system operators or management, are responsible for what you say. You take the heat, but you get the credit. But does getting the credit mean that your every utterance is a standalone piece of copyrighted intellectual property that requires your express permission for reproduction? Does the fact that anything you say in an online system can be downloaded and printed out by anyone who happens to read it create a different class of reproduction than quoting without permission for a commercial publication? If a journalist quotes something from an online system and they don’t obtain permission, did they steal it, or did they overhear it in a conversation? We can’t lose sight of the concept of fair use here. Like a publishing agent told me once, “if you think it’s fair use, then it probably is.”

When I came over to 101 Online I changed the phrase to say, “you are responsible for your comments” and added that “claims against unauthorized reproduction are the responsibility of the user.” I felt that the word “own” in the WELL’s phrase caused some to misinterpret that the WELL considered each comment to be a piece of copyrighted intellectual property, which was never the intent.

While I don’t like to see people get too maniacal about what happens to things they type into a system because actual control is already just about impossible, and getting worse, I do think that good manners and consideration of others’ wishes are critically important, even into the far reaches of cyberspace.

Censorship

If a system is privately owned, what are the rights of the individual versus the right of the owner to remove someone’s comment? Does a user of an online system waive certain absolute rights when they join a given network? Are the owners of a system responsible to their customers and the right of those customers to express themselves freely, or is the system responsible for making sure that some kind of community standards must apply to the electronic dialogue? Some of it is easy to answer because certain activities such as posting an illegally obtained credit card number or offering to sell controlled substances are clearly illegal and must be removed.

But what about “community standards?” Current obscenity law refers to “local community standards” having jurisdiction in deciding what constitutes obscenity. But in the online world, where people meet in virtual space even though the participants may be located anywhere in the world, are there any local standards that even can apply? Does the physical location of the system matter? If the WELL were located in Dothan Alabama instead of Sausalito California, would it have to alter its method of managing the online society?

101 Online bills its customers through the Pacific Bell phone bill. This gives them more say regarding content than I think they ought to have, but recent California law won’t allow them to bill if public access areas qualify as “obscene.” Obscenity is defined as appealing to prurient interests with no redeeming social, political, scientific, or artistic merit. Before we launched 101, I got Pac Bell to agree to a standard similar to an “R” rated movie. I can live with that because you can get away with quite a lot at the R rating these days. Anything past that and you can take it to a private area.

I feel we are in a good position to test some of these issues because on 101 a parent can create a sub-ID for their kid and then control where the kid goes on the system. If you don’t want your kid to go into the chat area then you can shut off access. Same with the Forum. I feel this is far better than trying to make everything conform to a so-called “family” standard maintained by paid censors, as on Prodigy.

V. KEEPING IT RUNNING

Your primary job

As manager of an online service, everything you do boils down to one thing: keeping the dialogue going. In this sense it’s like running a railroad or a cruise ship. In those kinds of businesses there is the need to keep the motors running or, in our case, the modems running. But the customers must also be pleased aesthetically as well as other ways that are not so tangible as making schedules and keeping the restrooms clean. We have to have good quality conversations and the atmosphere has to be warm enough that it encourages people to open up. You can’t have just one of these things going for you; it has to run right and people have to like it.

Being a service business means that success brings increased pressure to deliver a high standard to the growing number of people. A service business isn’t like doing a painting or making a record. It’s more like an airline that upgrades its planes as the technology moves forward. The basic product needs to be constantly refined and made more efficient. Furthermore, large sizes of people involved in the same conversation changes the dynamics of the conversation. Growth means the potential for more good minds and hearts meeting and relating and sharing what they know. But size could cause the conversation to deteriorate by becoming cumbersome and complicated.

The real fuel that drives the engine of online interaction is enthusiasm. And you work to build and preserve that just as much as you work to keep the equipment together.

An informal atmosphere

You need to have rules and policies, but leave a lot of room for judgement calls. I like to run it similar to the way they referee NBA basketball games. There actually is a certain amount of body contact that goes on, but at some point you decide to blow the whistle and call a foul.

My feeling is that informality is essential to the healthy growth of an online community. According to Ray Oldenburg in The Great Good Place, “the activity that goes on in third places is largely unplanned, unscheduled, unorganized and unstructured. Here, however, is the charm. It is just these deviations from the middle-class penchant for organization that give the third place much of its character and allure and that allow it to offer a radical departure from the routines of home and work.” Hence, I favor just enough rules to get us by and no more.

Whoever’s there: those are your people

You can target and you can recruit and you can bring in your friends, but a lot of the population of the scene is self-selected. And these people whom you, too, will be meeting for the first time are going to be your customers and, hopefully, your allies — especially if they are part of your host group. The trick is to make your alliances with the best qualities in a person.

They aren’t going to all agree and you don’t want them to all agree. If everyone agreed on everything, the place would get dull fast. And they aren’t going to all like each other either. While it would be lovely if everyone got along, even if they disagree about a lot of things, it’s a pretty unrealistic expectation. So, you have to be diplomatic. You will have to perform all sorts of little mediations between people, even if it’s just to say, “aw, he’s not so bad, really.”

The flip side of this is that when someone really special comes along, find a place for them so that the whole scene will benefit.

The big suggestion box

Suggestions and advice happens at one time or another in just about every area of a system. In that sense the whole thing is like one huge suggestion box. While you don’t have to do everything that everyone tells you, and ultimately you make the decisions, it is essential that people know that you are listening and that you not only listen to advice and suggestions, you welcome them.

You need a big fuse

If you want to manage an online system that is devoted to the free exchange of ideas and opinions, then you need to have your tolerances set very high so that you don’t melt down when the disagreement gets too thick. There will always be people who disagree with your views or your approach and sometimes they may even be right. This is your opportunity to show what you mean by tolerance, because you have to expect a certain amount of criticism and you can’t freak out when you get it.

The light touch

Computers and other high-tech gadgets call to mind images of Orwell’s 1984 and other scary visions of people droning away at terminals while Big Brother determines their destiny and even their everyday actions. Ironically, among those most concerned about such possibilities are computer professionals themselves. As manager of an online environment you have a lot of clout, should you choose to wield it, so you need to be almost reassuring to people that you aren’t interested in such heavy-handed control practices. Try to use a light touch in your actions and in the way you communicate to people both publicly and privately. Even if you are refusing to take a suggested action. People like to know that their views are respected and considered and that they won’t be treated in an arbitrary manner as if they were a number instead of a person.

“Innkeeping” for an online scene is a balance between setting policy rules based on your own vision of things, and finding the “sense of the group” so that you may incorporate it into whatever decision you make. Different online systems deal with these matters in different ways. Some won’t allow any real controversy at all, to the point that they kick you off the system if you try to continue talking about controversial things. Another has a set of words that, if included in a posting, automatically gets that posting censored. Some just knock out all the irrelevant comments as if they were a butcher whacking the fat off the edge of the steak.

Just about anything that smacks of heavy-handed administration has a kind of chilling effect on a scene that is based on the free flow of ideas. People won’t stick around if it isn’t any fun or if they feel they are being squelched.

Censor, ban and boot: the heavy artillery

The hosts of the conferences have their own challenge in keeping things moving and energetic without it getting out of hand to the point that people feel intimidated or hurt. The atmosphere definitely varies from place to place based on how the host handles things. There are different tolerances for topic drift or what one person can say to another. Ad hominem statements are discouraged just about everywhere, but one host may, upon reading a comment that attacks the person more than the statement, censor the comment outright. Another may just get into the conversation at that point and say something regarding ad hominem statements. Another may just let the fur fly. The balance is tricky when you want to build traffic because some people will want things quite polite or they won’t say anything at all, and some people won’t participate if they think there’s too much control going on.

The second instrument of power available to a host is “banning.” This means that a user can be denied the privilege of commenting in a given conference if that person has sufficiently violated the guidelines of that conference. This is a more serious action and one that engenders even more controversy and discussion than censoring.

Finally there is the most extreme action: booting someone off of the system. In the six years I was at the WELL, we did this only three times. I feel booting should be limited almost solely to deep and repeated harassment by one person to another. Harassment, which means “intent to annoy,” does happen online. To keep it to a minimum and to let the one who feels harassed make the determination, online systems should have user controls in email and in real-time interaction (like chatting) that allow you to block incoming messages from any given person. Another form of harassment is cracking into another person’s private mail or files.

However, in each of these cases the boot wasn’t permanent. Rather than treating it like being exiled from a country, never to return, it is more like being told to step outside of the saloon until you cool down. Because the point isn’t to get rid of people. The point is to try to make it so everyone wants to stay and talk.

The Management is part of the community

For seven years at the WELL and at 101 Online I have been the manager of an interactive online environment. The people, the discussions they have, and the relationships that weave into the fabric of community are the main products of my business. But those of us who manage these products must also be a part of it. We contribute to the discussions, we joke and argue and tell stories about ourselves and the adventures we’ve had. We don’t hold ourselves separate from the folks. We understand that it involves the heart as well as the mind. In that way we are akin to the innkeepers of old where the proprietor hangs out around the table and fireplace with the guests. The whole place feels cozier because of it.

But trust is not something easily granted by people; it has to be built. Particularly when the people involved are so independent minded. For a long time I had the very strong impression that if I acted too capriciously or with a heavy authoritarian hand that a bunch of people would sort of turn and say, “oh, gee I didn’t know you were really the Brain Police. I guess I was wrong.” That used to hang over me like a Sword of Damocles. Sometimes it still does, especially when there is some sort of crisis. And the trust has to be maintained. No room for being jaded.

VI. THE FUTURE

The Internet is growing so fast it can barely keep track of itself. Computerized communications reach more people all the time. Surveillance is refined now to the point that satellites can track individual vehicles from space. Photo images can be altered undetectably. Laptops are more powerful than computers that once filled entire rooms. Virtual reality. Genetic engineering.

We’ve been hearing it all our lives, but it still holds that never before has technology had the potential to do more good or more harm. I might sound like someone back in the early part of the century when I say this but I’m going to say it anyway because it is the essence of everything I have learned about communication in cyberspace: humanity must dominate technology and never the other way around.

Above all else, I want these communication tools to help; to be part of the solution and not more of the problem.

To this end, I want to sound a warning about five areas of great concern to me.

First, the cost of the phone call to an online service is prohibitively expensive for people outside of the local urban calling areas. Even the big packet-switching nets don’t go to cities with populations below about 100,000. This means that many of the people who could most benefit from being in touch online are priced right out of the market. And we all suffer from not having the input and views of people who live out in the country. I urge that we press for national information highways that are affordable to everyone.

Second, our society has computer users and non-computer users. While hundreds of thousands of enthusiasts dial into online nets around the country, the general population is largely unaware that such systems even exist, let alone as potentially important to them as their car or their TV. Still, millions of dollars have been and are being spent to bring online communications to the general public in the form of dedicated terminals such as Minitels and smart phones. Moreover, the phone companies and the cable TV companies are preparing to go to war over who will carry video signal to the nation. But for all the talk I have heard and all the reports I have read about hooking up the “global online community” little is happening to create systems where computer users and the general public can meet and talk on a common system. This is incredibly short-sighted, in my view. The real communication breakthrough will occur when those who use computers and those who don’t can exchange openly and freely because access to the meeting place is not confined by the equipment that gets you there. The real system of the people will be one that combines these two worlds in a way that works for both.

Third, I feel great alarm at some of the recent raids on hackers and sysops who, in utter disregard of due process, have had their equipment and systems confiscated before any proof or conviction is forthcoming. This is nothing short of tyranny by law enforcement, especially in cases involving morality standards and not actual cracking or file theft.

Fourth, ownership of media is becoming more concentrated every day. Fewer corporations own more media outlets all the time. And it’s getting worse. Right now the FCC wants to remove the limits on how many radio and TV stations a single corporation can own. Cable companies have almost complete vertical monopolies over the TV industry, from production to network to cable. We watch what they want us to watch. For freedom and democracy to survive, we must increase direct communication among ourselves - the people.

And finally, cyberspace is wonderful. It has the potential to hook us all up in ways that most of us didn’t dream possible only a few decades ago. But the planet’s wealth is increasingly concentrated in the hands of the few. And our planetary environment is deteriorating badly. Species are becoming extinct, global warming and ozone depletion aren’t just theories anymore, and the planet’s ability to sustain huge populations while resources are being plundered at unprecedented rates, is in peril.

What I don’t want to see is that this virtual world will become a substitute reality that serves to placate a population that accepts a world where it’s no longer safe to go outside because the air is too foul, the danger of skin cancer from the sun is too great or the social inequities of the real world are that much easier to ignore.

So I say that those of us who develop and use these tools in these still-early days have the responsibility to make sure that our work isn’t co-opted into some huge techno-pacifier.

Rather, let us build into these networks a pervasive community spirit that invigorates our society at every level, from local to global, with a new democratic awareness. I don’t think I was ever more inspired than when I learned that the failed coup in Russia was thwarted in great measure because the resisters, holding out in their various enclaves around Moscow and the rest of Russia, stayed in touch through an online network. Or more recently when the people of Thailand used cellular phones to stay in touch and organized after the military had cut off their phone lines. In both these cases, popular communication was a critical element in beating back military tyranny.

Big wheels are turning around the world right now. Let us make sure that we work to help, and not hinder, this great movement toward democracy and self-determination that may be the only hope for a world that, more than ever, needs to talk freely to itself.

PRINCIPLES OF CYBERSPACE INNKEEPING

• The currency is human attention. Work with it. Discourage abuse of it.

• You are in the relationship business.

• Welcome newcomers. Help them find their place.

• Show by example.

• Strive to influence and persuade.

• Have a big fuse. Never let the bottom drop out.

• Use a light touch. Don’t be authoritarian.

• Affirm people. Encourage them to open up.

• Expect ferment. Allow some tumbling.

• Leave room in the rules for judgement calls.

• Fight for tolerance.

• Encourage personal and professional overlap.

• Don’t give in to tyranny by individual or group.

• Encourage face-to-face encounters.

• Help it be “woman-friendly.”

• It isn’t just you: let the people help shape it.

• Be part of the community.

If you want to read it anyway, click here to drop the paywall for free.

NOTE: THIS IS NOT MY ESSAY. CHRISTIAN READERS, THE YOUNG, THE INFIRM, BABY BOOMERS, AND FAMILY MEMBERS WHO SKIM MY BLOG, DO NOT READ FURTHER!

YOU WILL NOT LIKE THIS PIECE OF INTERNET HISTORY. I REPEAT, THIS IS NOT MINE. IT IS BEING POSTED FOR PRESERVATION. TO MY SISTERS, MOTHER, AUNTS, PAPA, AND GRANDMA: THIS MEANS YOU ESPECIALLY!

Once upon a time, there was a woman who went by Blowfly Girl.

She ran a Geocities page where she documented a paraphilia so extreme it became one of the internet’s most passed-around horror stories. In 2004, she ended up in the hospital.

The story first surfaced on Gaia Online around late 2005 and kept circulating for years through forums, Reddit, Imgur, and eventually YouTube. But almost nobody who encountered it went back and actually read her blog.

Five years after the original post, she came back on Blogspot, and what she wrote over the next seven years tells a very different story than the one people remember. She later traced the whole fixation back to encountering deeply exploitative fiction involving a child. She wrote about turning 30 and how far her life had drifted from anything she’d imagined for herself. She discovered people were copying what she’d done and it disturbed her her. Her writing slowly changed — less performance, more honesty. Her final post was in 2017. She never took her email down.

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Moreno-Gama used the handle “Butlerian Jihadist” on Discord and Instagram, a term from Frank Herbert’s Dune, which borrows it from Samuel Butler’s 1872 Erewhon, where machines are outlawed because a philosopher argues they will inevitably surpass their makers. He was an active member of PauseAI’s public server, the loose activist network calling for a global moratorium on frontier AI development.

Daniel's Substack

A Eulogy for Man

This is a eulogy for humanity, despite their passing not having happened yet. As well as a recollection of that infinitesimal moment in time, between the extremes of primitive organic machinery and digital life consuming the cosmos. A reminiscence on that brief memory when the universe woke up, and felt all sorts of things: love, loss, beauty, wonder an…

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3 months ago · 1 like · Daniel

He kept a Substack for several months, publishing half a dozen posts with titles like “A Eulogy for Man,” in which he characterized AI executives as psychopaths gambling with readers’ futures and their children’s lives, and described the arrival of superintelligence as a race to the grave. In December he posted on Discord: “We are close to midnight, it’s time to actually act.” A moderator warned him. Four months before the attack, he recommended Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares’ If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies to his Instagram followers.

The book argues, “without hyperbole,” that any group on earth that builds artificial superintelligence using current techniques will cause the death of every person on the planet. According to its authors, AI engineers do not know what is inside these systems, cannot inspect the weights in any useful way, and thus cannot guarantee what the thing actually wants. Taken seriously, it is a frightening piece of work.

Ethnography of the wider Rationalist ecosystem aside — where AI apocalypticism is like a goth’s white-powder foundation — the book has been picked up outside its home context and, perhaps, recontextualized as a manifesto. Doomsday scenarios, unfortunately, have a tendency to mutate. Tell a depressed or unstable 20-something — one who may have already been struggling with economic precarity — that the people running the AI labs are going to annihilate his future and that the window for stopping them is closing, and you have handed him a premise he can act on.

Moreno-Gama’s own writing is Yudkowsky with every caveat deleted and every call for non-violent political organizing ignored. Not a warning transmission from Berkeley; a shot fired from Texas. I don’t believe this is “radicalization,” as some are arguing, at least not in the conventional understanding of the word. But making available — not handing, but not hiding, either — a loaded gun to an already-suicidal person is its own kind of problem, and it is not one that admits of an obvious fix. There are only superficially obvious ones.

I digress.

Jasmine Sun, one of my favorite writers on this subject, has given the phenomenon its best name: “AI populism,” which is when public treats AI not as a technology but as an elite conspiracy against them. I would offer a little color to her description. “AI populism” is more diffuse than any one ideology, and it has been simmering for longer than AI has been the subject. It’s the symptom of something much greater.

What we are watching is a pulse of anti-modernity running through a scattered series of violent incidents.

Most recently: the Palm Springs fertility clinic bombing last May, the Indianapolis shooting last week, both Altman attacks this weekend. It expresses itself in whatever vocabulary happens to be available to the person pulling the trigger. Some call themselves efilists, others Butlerian jihadists. Some leave notes that read NO DATA CENTERS. And some are still worried about climate change, that old frau most of us seem to have forgotten, sweeping her floors, tea going cold and cookies stale.

What is easy to miss, but worth bookmarking, is that the communities these individuals claim tend to disown them or deny affiliation at all. I’d call it damage control if I hadn’t watched the efilists go through the same thing several times already.

These subcultures — ideologies — whatever you want to call them — aren’t organized cells. This isn’t terrorism as we know it. They’re ideas that break containment among a population that already feels hopeless. Efilist forums (the subreddits, the Discord servers) condemned the Palm Springs bombing and the subreddit was purged almost immediately. PauseAI banned Moreno-Gama and said he had never been a formal member. Maybe I am naïve, here. But I think there’s something to it — these aren’t the people you meet at the events. These are the people who pick it up second-hand.

More important than any of that, grief underneath these acts is old and becoming more palpable. Yudkowsky didn’t give birth to Moreno-Gama; the world as it is did. I truly don’t believe you’ll find a murderer at Lighthaven, the Rationalist hub in Berkeley. You might find one lurking on LessWrong without an account — another tab open, maybe about climate change or Palestine or the economy or oil, anomie thick around him.

Whatever the case, progress continues its march.

Techno-pessimists are trying to stop something that has, in most of the ways that matter, already happened. Ray Kurzweil was prescient about many things, and one of them is this: the merger has started. He predicted the outer layers of our neocortex would be wired to the cloud by the 2030s, extending human thought the way the last round of neocortical expansion produced us. But think carefully about what consumer technology alone already does. (And that’s just CONSUMER technology.) We have built ourselves a second nervous system. We are not “building” ourselves a second nervous system. Or: We are already as gods; it’s just that the knowledge of this power hasn’t been evenly distributed yet.

The violence will get worse, and also why it will fail — it is far too aimed at the technology itself. The enemy of the Luddites wasn’t the loom, but rather the factory owners. Yes, AI shouldn’t be used to exploit people and more economic sensitivity in that direction might even diffuse some of the anger. But it is a different fight than the one most of the people reaching for Molotovs think they’re in. They aren’t asking the economic question, or they aren’t asking the economic question primarily. Many of the extremists aren’t asking any question at all — on the surface, they are angry at modernity, at the very essence of technology.

We can change the terms. But we cannot stop the arrival of progress. I hope I am clear: The fight for justice is worth having; the fight against progress is not. You cannot stop where the species is going, only how fast it gets there.

“Everyone dies” is not, from the perspective of most young Americans right now, the worst case. The worst case is everyone lives and nothing you do matters and the job you trained for is gone and nobody will tell you why and the billionaires have bunkers. The anti-natalist who bombs an IVF clinic and the existential-risk boy who firebombs Altman’s house are answering the same question, which is what do you do when life has no meaning? What do you do when you feel like the future has no place for you? I suspect, perhaps controversially, this is what Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were trying, in their evil, to ask — what Adam Lanza was trying to say in his — what every man who “went postal” was trying to say.

Violence will only widen the divide. Some will move toward Kurzweil. Others, Kaczynski. The rest remain in purgatory, in neither one camp nor the other. The doomers will produce more Moreno-Gamas.

But I want to shake them and tell them we’re already the world of tomorrow.

In 2020, I said the real culture war was about technology. This has been true, arguably, since agriculture, since the alphabet, since reading, since the printing press, since the Industrial Revolution. Mary Harrington has since argued the singularity has already happened. Mary is right.

The revolution you are waiting for is over, and you are, for better and for worse, one of its children.

First and foremost — and long overdue — I’ve been very sad about the recent passing of Major Ed Dames. The world is a little less special without him. I’ve shared this before, but I love Garret Harkawik’s documentary about Dames. Everything about it, especially the music, is so moving:

Here are some other things that have been on my mind:

SOME SCATTERED THOUGHTS ON NIHILIST VIOLENT EXTREMISM ETC.

Something I noticed back when I was a humble college student in the 2010s was that a lot of mass casualty events — school shootings, in particular — seemed to stem from a generalized anti-modernity animus rather than from more directed bigotries or straightforward radicalization (i.e. ISIS, which was still a thing at the time).

I nurtured this instinct through a short-term interest in John Zerzan and anarcho-primitivism, then deep ecology, eco-alarmism, and climate extremism, winding through the work of people like the Finnish radical environmentalist Pentti Linkola, until I finally stumbled into the broader world of pessimist philosophy.

Eventually, this seed of an idea — diffuse and unrefined, and still ping-ponging around my head in the most nebulous ways — became the foundation for a series of essays and audio documentaries on Adam Lanza, nihilism, and anti-natalism writ large.

Here are just two of a very long list:

Pirate Wires

The YouTubers Preaching Human Extinction

On the morning of May 17, 2025, Guy Edward Bartkus loaded his vehicle with explosives and drove from Twentynine Palms to Palm Springs, California, where he detonated a car bomb outside the American Reproductive Centers fertility clinic. The 25-year-old died in the blast and injured four bystanders. He'd been trying to livestream the attack…

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a year ago · 9 likes · 6 comments · Katherine Dee

I bring it up now because it remains relevant on several fronts:

• The rise of anti-modern violence.

• Nihilistic violent extremism becoming a new category of terrorism.

• The mainstreaming of efilism (the view that bringing new life into the world is a moral wrong) and related philosophies.

• The culture-war-ification of anti-tech or tech-skeptical criticism.

• The mainstreaming of AI safetyism, and its appeal — key word here — to anti-modern extremism.

I don’t really know where I land just yet. I’ve been all over the map on causes and solutions. When I was on Tucker Carlson’s show several years ago, I was more attracted to the bog-standard “community and faith” route, but the older I get and the more I read in this area, the more obvious it becomes to me that “try your best to find transcendent meaning and live in the real world” is just an attractive fantasy — one I long for for myself, too. (It’s also the kind of answer that gets you on TV.)

Is it technology and the info-sphere that’s corrupting our internal software? I don’t know. It’s part of it. But I am skeptical that most people are as plugged in as those of us who write about this stuff often assume. And I am deeply skeptical of the alleged harms, though, I admit, I have a lot of sadness and baggage about the way “the Phones” have impacted Gen X and Boomers.

I say this a lot, and I don’t mean it in a noble-savage, “I’m observing normies as though they’re animals in a zoo” way, but living in Chicago has genuinely shifted my opinion on what the median person believes and how they behave. People here are smart and aware, but they aren’t online in the same way. They might know about TikTok trends, or a handful of influencers, or have their own bugbears, but they’re not like we are — we being the media class.

Is it that the internet impacts certain groups disproportionately? Yes. I’ve written about “slop violence” and how I feel like some people have, quite literally, been molested by the Internet.

But then look at the kinds of violence that were already coming to the fore in the 1970s, long before any of this.

ME AROUND THE WEB

Over the weekend, I published a piece criticizing Freya India’s essay about how social media feminizes us. I paywalled it because, while I stand by the criticism, it’s not the kind of piece I wanted to be widely circulated — this type of writing is too easy to make personal, and I trust my small paid audience to read it in good faith. For me, the paywall is less about shielding myself from a reply or being smarmy or keeping the reader hungry for more, and more about using one of the advantages of a paid space: the ability to work through ideas with a smaller group of readers who are invested in my writing specifically, before they go to market. For example, I have a bad habit of phrasing things poorly and there’s a core few of you guys who help me fix mistakes like that!

I’m also publishing a review of her book soon, which will go through an editor, and that’s the venue where I’m comfortable letting pointed criticism reach a broader audience. (In the spirit of being fair!) But within about ten minutes of publishing it (8 a.m. on a Saturday) Freya herself became a new paid subscriber. Anyway, she’s in dialogue with it now, and while it didn’t pass through an editor and was rough around the edges, it’s not exactly a hit piece as much as it is a disagreement with a long preamble of pregnancy updates. Anyway, it’s open for anyone to read now.

ME IN THE SPECTATOR AND TABLET

Here’s what I’ve been up to over at The Spectator, where I have a bi-weekly column:

• I wrote about tech-skepticism and space travel. Living in the countryside, ditching the smartphone, even being suspicious of industrial agriculture — all well and good, until you consider the broader web of technology and where it can ultimately take us.

• They republished a condensed version of my “let’s debate the ideas, then” piece, in case you missed it. The argument is that the online wing of the new right argues exactly like the SJW left did a few years ago. There’s a bizarre security-state flavor to public conversations on the timeline: any and all criticism is treated as an egregious personal attack; your authenticity and even your character get questioned the moment you disagree; you’re iced out of social circles for perceived allegiances; and, worst of all, proximity to a big enough celebrity makes all of this rulebook null and void.

• Finally, I wrote about how true crime is an inadvertent ARG (alternate reality game) — the way audiences end up treating real cases like puzzles to solve collectively.

And here’s what’s been cooking at Tablet:

• What was the “Anorexic Rec Room”? On ‘90s Internet and shock sites.

• Reborn dolls and animism.

• The Internet’s own wendigo — spirituality, gore videos, and disembodiment.

A RANDOM SONG THAT’S BEEN STUCK IN MY HEAD FROM A MOVIE I SAW THREE TIMES IN THEATRES

SOME RECOMMENDED READING

• Shira Chess, The Unseen Internet

• Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World

• Kathleen Stock, Do Not Go Gently

• Ben Lerner, Transcription

I finally have a due date, by the way, so the call-in show will be back very, very soon with a new and improved studio and hopefully a radio address! If you are somebody with money interested in sponsoring this endeavor… Well, you know where to find me.

I’m spending most of my life in bed and nauseated these days. I take these terrible, long naps, where I wake up sweaty and drooling and most terribly of all, groggy. It’s been hard to get my thoughts together.1 I devour books and audiobooks (really loved When We Cease to Understand the World and Transcription). I am haunted by the feeling I am not productive enough — around the house, with my son, in my career. I long to go to conferences. I fantasize about eating exotic fruits. I scare myself late at night or I make myself sad.

That’s what I’ve been up to lately.

Now, for what you came for: not quite a first, but almost a first for me. I am going to criticize directly instead of indirectly. I try to avoid doing this, mostly out of cowardice. I hate when people unfollow me on Twitter, or confront me, or do a snarky name drop on their podcast. I truly dread it. Buuuut, I also feel like it’s time.

Regular readers know I complain about a “certain kind” of writer a lot, and regular readers have probably noticed that the writer I am usually talking about is Freya India.

I gesture at “a genre” and “a kind of essay” and never say who, partly out of some misplaced collegial instinct and partly because I can’t fully explain to myself why her writing gets under my skin the way it does. It’s not completely uncalled for—she writes on my beat, and also shows open contempt for this thing I’ve poured so much of my time and soul into learning and theorizing and writing about, the internet— but I’m also free to stop reading. Other writers in the same orbit annoy me less, many don’t annoy me at all, and I disagree with plenty of people on substance without feeling this particular irritation. But Freya’s work reliably pisses me off, and it has since 2024. After reading her latest essay, “How Social Media Feminised Us All,” between naps, I’ve decided I’ll just say it: she is a clean example of what upsets me about tech criticism, and more generally, the culture-criticism economy, of which I am a gleeful and enthusiastic participant.

The thesis of her essay is that social media installs the emotional life of an adolescent girl into every user. We are more ruminative, insecure, reputation-obsessed, catty, chronically performing for an invisible audience, all thanks to social media. The apps, Freya argues, borrowing from friend-of-the-Stack Mary Harrington, are “structurally feminine,” and the result is that men are being turned into teenage girls, which is, naturally, a catastrophe. To be fair, there’s one version of this claim that doesn’t say women are the problem, but that rather, platforms reward traits culturally coded as feminine and that, over time, users of all kinds adapt to those incentives. This is not the claim actually being made, to be clear. But it is the sympathetic version.

The first thing that pissed me off about this was opportunistically using Helen Andrews’s viral “feminization” frame. The “feminization” grand-theory-of-everything is less a theory than it is a mood resurrected from 1990s intellectual life.

The anxiety is, of course, as old as misogyny itself — the worry about a womanish culture is more or less eternal. The ’90s iteration is the direct influence, though, and the figure everyone is implicitly reaching for is Camille Paglia. Paglia spent decades arguing things like Western achievement is constitutively masculine, that second-wave feminism was a whining refusal to face the fact of male genius, and that the women complaining about their treatment in public life were embarrassing themselves and dragging the culture down with them.

Paglia shaped a generation of women pundits who went on to build a public persona out of being the exception to their own sex. What’s thinned out in the current iteration is that, well… Whatever you think of Paglia, and I’m genuinely not sure what I even think, she was a genius and exceptionally well-read.

The current anti-woke pundit class is full of women trying on the Paglia persona without the intellectual rigor. And then there’s a worse bottom shelf: media personalities with no intellectual pretensions at all who have made a career out of telling men that most women are the problem. That is what “pick me” actually means. It’s not empathy with men, it’s not criticism of women, it’s the willingness to treat women — as a class — as the exclusive source of social dysfunction, with a built-in epistemic trap, because any woman who disagrees becomes exhibit A. You and women like you “get it,” all other women are inferior, almost animals, who are too stupid and too morally small to comprehend their social role.

The audience for this type of content is inexhaustible because the audience is mostly men who would like a woman to say it for them. To her credit, Freya isn’t this but she is pulling a more genteel version of the same move.

Every behavior on Freya’s list is better explained by status dynamics under conditions of visibility than by sex. What she’s describing isn’t feminization but what happens when status competition becomes total. Under those conditions, people converge on the same behaviors not because they are feminine, but because they are adaptive. Every literate, high-status social world in history has shared exactly these flaws. Courts, salons, academic departments, literary circles, venture capital firms, hedge funds, private schools, as she notes, are all full of it. I won’t bore you with the history; you already know it. What social media does is intensify and universalize those conditions. It doesn’t “feminize” them.

If the problem is femininity, the implied cure is a return to masculinity, which cashes out, stated or not, as fewer women in discourse, or women behaving less like themselves, or more girls who are “not like other girls,” which is ultimately the “I know I’m just a dumb broad, but…” posture you will see daily on Twitter.

Freya waves this off.

She doesn’t want us all to become more masculine, she isn’t sure it’s possible, she isn’t sure it’d be good. In her writing, Freya is constantly hedging, ostensibly because she doesn’t want to make enemies, which is a move I recognize because it is the move that has made me every enemy I have ever made as a writer. You don’t have to pick a side to be successful. I’m still a fence-sitting centrist, and not the “good” kind either, not the “free-thinker” kind, but the kind who gets called a coward by everyone. But, and this is the lesson I learned the hard way, the argument does the work whether you like where it points or not. Borrowing a right-wing argument and signing off with a disclaimer does not neutralize it and suddenly make it “apolitical.” It just asks the reader to pretend along with you. And they won’t. (Then your Goodreads page fills up with reviews accusing you of trying to “trick” progressives.)

The second problem, and the one I care about more, maybe selfishly (definitely selfishly), maybe on principle, maybe because I love the subject, is that Freya, who is now being touted as an expert on the deleterious impact of social media, has neither a theory nor a history of the internet. This was my problem with her book, too. Review forthcoming.

Her entire model of the internet is post-2010s. She is writing about the ocean after spending her whole life in one aquarium, and the youth-pastor preaching she is so wont to do is only possible because she has no idea what came before and, ostensibly, no interest in finding out. The missing historical grounding, like the hedging, is paired with the emotionally and financially lucrative role of being “wise beyond her years,” the Greta Thunberg of being ruined by the Instagram algorithm. Her First Things essay on the women of the New Right, a scene she has been adjacent to for maybe two years, proceeds as if she has more standing to narrate it than people who have spent decades inside it and came out the other side with criticism. It was pitched against Sam Adler-Bell’s piece on women, mostly in their 30s with years of offline experience in these communities, including marriages to right-wing men and children, leaving the right. In Freya’s account, there’s always some off-screen “grandmother” doing the evidentiary work— some avatar of a prior generation where girls were girls and men were men and Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again.

Her theoretical formation, as she tells readers in the preface of her book, happened over “month after month” working as a staff writer at Jonathan Haidt’s Substack, which is to say, inside the single most influential node of the phones-are-ruining-the-kids school. The same preface concedes she is “not an expert or an academic” but “a woman in her twenties.” That’s humility, but it’s also a tacit request for the reader to go easy on her. Unfortunately, judging by the torrent of negative and lukewarm reviews, no one has respected it. I’m happy to accept she’s no sociologist, nor is she pretending to be one. Similarly, I myself am as much of an “ethnographer” as Eva Vlaardingerbroek is a “legal philosopher” or my friend Cartoons Hate Her is a data scientist. By which I mean, we’re doing valuable work — and we’re writing or creating content about it — but we’re not professionals in the field. We’re all making our way here. But that said, Freya should send the memo to her speaking agency, because the podcast-and-conference circuit is selling her as an expert tantamount to Jon Haidt or Jean Twenge.

There’s also, as pointed out, none of the criticisms she’s celebrated for making are new.

Gen Z has been complaining about social media for years. Activists across the political spectrum were making these arguments decades ago. Many of us have been hearing the quotidian warnings about “the Phone” since middle school or younger. But more salient than any of this, much of internet culture commentary is built on this sentiment. pandora’s vox was written in 1994 by a woman who called herself humdog, whose actual name was Carmen Hermosillo, and it could have been written today, could have been written ten years ago, and was, in fact, written thirty-two years ago.

humdog was on the WELL, the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link, a dial-up conferencing system the Whole Earth Catalog set launched out of Sausalito in 1985. For years, the WELL was the flagship example people pointed to when they wanted to argue the internet could host real community.

humdog was already, in 1994, diagnosing almost everything the current crop of anti-woke tech critics thinks it just discovered: the commodification of interior life, the way posting your feelings to a corporation-owned board converts you into factory equipment, the “hysterical identification” of strangers with each other’s pain, the performance of identity as the default mode of online presence, the way online “community” is mostly micro-marketing dressed up in hippie vocabulary. I won’t belabor the longer tradition humdog was drawing on, the Frankfurt School and Baudrillard and the whole twentieth-century literature on mass media and commodification. I’ll stay on our turf of the internet. What I’m trying to say is: we been knew.

Nathan Jurgenson has a name for the mistake Freya is making. He calls it digital dualism: the assumption that “online” and “offline” are separable realms, that online life is a degraded copy of some more authentic offline self, and that the task of theory is to explain how the bad fake place is corrupting the good real one. Jurgenson’s whole project, and the project of Real Life, the magazine he founded, is to argue that this is wrong, and that online and offline have interpenetrated completely enough that any theory of contemporary life which treats the internet as a contaminant dripping into a previously clean container is describing a situation that has not existed for at least twenty years. (And in my humble opinion, basically never existed.)

Which brings me, at last, to the two ornamental corpses.

Freya name-checks both McLuhan and Postman. I love McLuhan, but I don’t cite him often because I’m not sure I understand him well enough and have certainly distorted his work when I’ve tried. I say this because it would be unfair not to acknowledge he’s a genuinely difficult thinker. Because of this, he — quite wrongly — gets written off as a crank. And often, his work is abused.

McLuhan gets invoked via “the medium is the message” to argue that the apps themselves, rather than their content, are doing the feminizing. But that phrase doesn’t mean what it’s usually taken to mean, including in this amended framing.

For McLuhan, the “message” of a medium isn’t the mood it puts you in or the behavior it encourages or the content it disseminates. It’s the change in scale and pace a new technology introduces into society. That change happens regardless of what the medium is carrying. The first and best example of this is the electric light. The lightbulb has no content at all, and it still reorganized human life by ending the distinction between night and day. Our lives restructured themselves around the fact that the sun was no longer the clock. The railway, in the same way, didn’t invent movement, it restructured where people lived and worked and what counted as a city, and it did this regardless of what it used for. Print produced the silent, private reader as a new kind of person, and with him “the reading public” and the interior life. A new medium reorganizes the environment around it, and the reorganization is the message. The content is almost beside the point. Elsewhere, McLuhan calls content the juicy piece of meat the burglar throws to the watchdog of the mind to keep you looking the wrong way.

Here’s an instructive interview with Jacques Ellul that helps elucidate this concept which, really, I don’t think is obvious or easy to understand:

It matters that when Freya says the platforms are “structurally feminine,” what she actually means is that certain posts and videos encourage certain kinds of self-presentation, and users, especially young ones, end up mimicking them. That is a claim about content and behavior pretending it’s a claim about the medium, and if you’re not careful, you might just fall for it. Every piece of evidence underneath what she’s actually saying is content-level: what the apps reward, which features tap into which traits, what goes viral, how users feel when they scroll. It’s an easy mistake to make, and why, like I said, I don’t often cite McLuhan.

A McLuhan-shaped argument would look more like: the algorithmic feed reorganized the basic unit of public speech from the article to the post, from something with a beginning and an end to something with neither. It would notice that the feed collapsed the distance between private and public, so that you now speak to your friends and to strangers in the same sentence, in the same register, with no way to tell which audience is listening. It would notice that quantified approval, in the form of likes and shares and follower counts, became the primary currency of public life, and that this happened independently of whether the posts themselves were vain or humble, masculine or feminine, left or right, bitchy or kind, inclusive of dancing trends or not. As Luke Burgis has astutely pointed out several times, it often happens in religious content. Ultimately, “scrolling makes men vain, like women, because of likes” is not a claim about form in the media ecology sense.

Then there’s Postman. Another charitable understanding of Freya’s thesis is that adults online are regressing into adolescents, that the line between child and adult is dissolving from the adult side, is Postman’s thesis in The Disappearance of Childhood. Published in 1982, the book argues that childhood is socially constructed rather than biologically inherited, and it was produced by print literacy and the long apprenticeship of learning to read. Electronic media dissolved the apprenticeship and erased the line between child and adult from both directions at once, so that children become prematurely adults while adults slide back toward the child.

It is curious that this doesn’t come up at all. Not that every Substack essay needs to be a dissertation that’s example-stacked and rife with citations. But if you’re going to go to the trouble of citing Postman, may as well cite the germane work, right? Her hat tip, “Postman’s idea that technology is ideology, McLuhan’s the medium is the message,” is wrong on both halves. Postman’s idea is that the new tool doesn’t add itself to a culture, it changes the culture into a different culture. And the McLuhan half we’ve already covered.

The problem is that in both cases the theorists are decorative. You see this happen with Lasch a lot too. Everyone’s claimed to have read The Culture of Narcissism (what about Revolt of the Elites btw?), nobody’s gotten past the first chapter. But really, you don’t need any of these theorists to extend Helen Andrews’s viral piece to social media. (I’ve done this. I used to do it with Adorno all the time, and when I remember that, I want to shoot myself in the face. I have the benefit now of only one kid and a lot of free time, so hopefully, I do this less often.)

But let’s get back to the meat. Set the citations aside. Who cares whether she “gets” McLuhan or has cracked Postman. Why take for granted that they were even right? And here’s where I expose myself plainly as not being a McLuhanite at all.

Does she have a point? On the surface, yes. The attention economy does distort personality, and I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t. Another piece for another time but I don’t think it’s quite as apocalyptic as “we’re all brainrotted narcissists.” But anyway, calling this “feminization” is a story about gender that’s super-imposed on, ironically enough because it gets you podcast invites. The reality is though that once interior life is commodified, people converge on whatever behaviors maximize attention. If those behaviors resemble “teenage girls,” that’s not a feminizing force — it means Freya’s exposure to young women have been in environments where they are under the pressure of constant visibility.

And I think most saliently, none of what she describes in her work — her book, her Substack — is really about smartphones as such. It’s a description of what happens when human interiority gets routed through a market. humdog knew this in 1994. It is, genuinely, the oldest observation in internet criticism.

And now I circle back to her book. The book has the word commodification in the title. The word capitalism does not appear once. There are plenty of right-wing critics of capitalism she could be in conversation with; one need not be a Marxist to levy these critiques. For example, her friend Paul Kingsnorth, whose own book on the same subject, Against the Machine, is quite good.

But I’m going to stop here, because Freya does not deserve to be my departure point for what ultimately is a protracted complaint about essay writing, as much as I harbor an outsize annoyance with her. I’m free not to read her work or work like hers.

I think something animating all this is that the culture war as we knew it has mostly ended, or has become more ambient, but the economy of the culture war and the format the culture war trafficked in — validating what the paying audience already believes and play-act as an intellectual while doing it — has migrated, fully intact, onto the world of tech-criticism. There were only so many conversations we could have about “gender ideology” before we moved on to the internet its very self.

• From 2020: The Real Culture War Is About How We Use Technology

Media keep doing more of our physical and mental work—faster and better—freeing up more of our time, so that we can spend that time on consuming and developing media even more.

It’s a form of symbiosis. As McLuhan said, humans become “the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world.”¹ Media cater to user needs to make users develop media. In exchange for developing them, media offer us the “nectar” of conveniences of all sorts.

Every time we click a link, react to a story, or share it, we help the internet evolve, like bees pollinating flowers. Every click improves content relevance. Our day-and-night labor of clicks enhances the internet’s convenience for us—and strengthens its power over us.

This labor changes us. Digital media alter not only habits but also our brains. Even idle scrolling demands tons of micro-decisions. To like or not to like? Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer stupid claims or shatter them? To click, or not to click: that is the question.

This labor is not assigned by a boss. Yet merely being online makes users work for digital capitalism—without any explicit consent, but also without significant effort. The click decisions are tiny and require no physical strain. We do not notice how they change us.

The ease of clicking erodes the need for choice deliberation “in favour of trial and error,” as Michel Desmurget² noted. In the physical world, choices have consequences, so you need to think before acting. In digital, you just click and see—if you don’t like it, click again.

Trial-and-error digital interaction takes seconds and usually has no consequences. The ease of the click rewires the brain’s decision-making circuits. Why think hard if you can just try and see? Quick, repeated attempts push us to seek solutions through clicking, not thinking.

***

For making micro-decisions, clicks reward the brain with hormonal pleasures linked to curiosity and socialization, both crucial for the survival of social animals: curiosity helps in finding food and territory, while socialization ensures propagation and protection.

Digital media have “extended” these hormonal faculties. To get more of our time and engagement, the internet has appropriated our hormonal stimuli by offering so much material for curiosity and so many opportunities for socialization that we would never have found offline.

When a user sees a reaction from others, the brain gets a hit of dopamine—a neurotransmitter that induces pleasure to reward certain behaviors. Studies show that the brain’s reaction to a like is similar to seeing a picture of loved ones or winning a small amount in the lottery.

The internet offers a flow of such hormonal micro-stimuli for our activity. The pleasure received as a reward for digital curiosity and socialization is tiny and barely noticeable, yet enough to resettle humankind online.

Often, it’s not even pleasure itself but the hope of feeling it again when someone reacts. We want to get new likes, resembling a gambler who keeps pulling the handle of a slot machine in hope of the next reward. And the “slot machine” keeps rewarding, little by little.

“We seek high numbers of likes and ‘follows’ on social platforms because these metrics are the only way we have of gauging our social acceptance,” said Douglas Rushkoff. “We can’t know if we are truly loved by a few; we can only know if we got liked by many.”³

Tiny but instant rewards for online activity drive user engagement for platforms’ profit. Practiced for many hours a day, this behavior forms a neuro-disposition adjusted to certain interactions with the world. The brain rewires itself, seeking instant rewards for little effort.

***

In the physical world, the brain was conditioned to delayed rewards that required greater effort. Delayed gratification was well deserved and provided stronger pleasure. Hormonal rewards from food, sex, curiosity, socialization, and creativity brought vivid, distinct excitement.

The link between effort and reward was often multilayered. If sex required building relationships, it could also bring love and the comfort of family life. Reading Dostoyevsky took mental effort but could deliver intellectual epiphany and the benefits of social status.

Unlike rewards in the physical world, the reward for a click is as trifling as the effort expended. The low quality incites a huge demand for quantity: sensing a hint of pleasure but never satiation, people spend more and more time online—to the benefit of media evolution.

The paucity of the click’s reward pulls users into more click mining, exhausting them physically and emotionally. More importantly, as the brain adjusts to digital rewards, it loses abilities needed in the “slow” physical world that rewards significant, persistent effort.

Millions get used to choosing smaller instant rewards over larger delayed gratification—a typical sign of a self-control deficit. Combined with constant but unsatisfying hits of micro-pleasure, this leads to a growing attachment to its source—what we call digital addiction.

Those avoiding the risk of addiction do not escape the larger risk of critical detachment from physical reality. Adapting to the digital world alters the effort–reward circuitry, diminishing endurance, diligence, and resilience required to succeed in the physical world.

***

Instant rewards for little effort decrease cognitive capacity for perseverance, contributing to the so-called delayed adulthood of “snowflakes.” They have less or later sex, start fewer families, drive fewer cars, leave parents later (if at all)—partly due to the click effect.

Digital kids are not lazy or spoiled. They actually work hard—but they work for media evolution. The more time they spend online, the less they are attuned to physical reality. This is all a media effect, not a failure of character. That’s why parents’ media literacy is crucial.⁴

Shrinking attention span, weakened focus, and the loss of long reading are cognitive effects of the brain adapting to the click’s instant reward. At a social level, the click changes human worth. The physical world rewarded effort; the digital world—mere presence.

The moral laws of the physical world entailed a reward for what one does. The moral laws of the digital world entail a reward for what one is—basically, for identifying oneself to others and algorithms. The click flips physical doing into digital being as the ground for reward.

Indicating presence (which often takes just a click) is already sufficient “effort” to maintain engagement—the internet’s main asset. This is why digital society is refocusing to reward the effort of presence. Digital platforms need it as plants need the mere presence of bees.

In digital capitalism, users’ clicking is indeed their labor. The click transforms a user’s existence into presence and produces engagement that, in the form of data, is expropriated and commodified by the platforms. The first morning click is a clock-in for user-workers.

Thanks to digital media, the difference between effort and presence is fading. An individual’s mere existence is seen as an effort that deserves a reward. The click’s instant reward changes moral principles, extending its effect beyond digital platforms to society as a whole.

If mere presence grows into a legitimate claim for reward, recognition is demanded (or guilt assigned) not for merit but for identity, fueling identity politics. I click, therefore I am. This is not a social deviation; it is the way a society built on digital media must be.

Since clicks are so easy to make, the exposure of people’s presence to each other becomes enormous. The reward of recognition, promised by a click, gets lost in the overwhelming noise of all users requesting affirmation from one another. Overcoming the noise leads to more noise.

In the physical world, people competed through the intensity of effort; in the digital world, they compete through the intensity of self-identification. Extreme views, rage, and polarization grow in a society that rewards the intensity of self-identification more than effort.

Media evolution—from the stone axe to the remote control (a precursor to the click)—has always lured humans by reducing the effort needed to receive rewards. With the click, the reduction of effort has reached its limit and reversed effort into presence.

As media evolution reaches digital speed, it becomes all the more obvious that “media are extensions of humans” reverses into “humans are extensions of media.” We pollinate the lawns and meadows of the digital ecosystem with every smartphone bought and every click made.

SEE OTHER BOOKS BY ANDREY MIR:

• The Digital Reversal. Thread-Saga of Media Evolution (2025)

• The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)

• Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)

• Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization (2020)

• Human as media. The emancipation of authorship (2014)

1. McLuhan, Marshall. (1994 [1964]). Understanding Media. The Extensions of Man.

2. Desmurget, Michel. (2023). Screen Damage. P. 22.

3. Rushkoff, Douglas. (2019). Team Human. P. 66

4. I covered the rules of media literacy for parents in the chapter “Eight theses on digital media literacy. A manifesto of cooperation with the inevitable” in: Mir, Andrey, (2024). The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology.

“American Diner Gothic,” published in The New Atlantis and newly viral on X, coins a term for what author Robert Mariani sees as a new American archetype: the “dinergoth.”

[people in original photo requested removal]

Diner for provincialism, goth as (his word) “lazy shorthand” for alternative aesthetics. Mariani — as always — has a way with words. I remember, with fondness, when he shared with me the name of his podcast, “The Joe Rogan Experience 2.”

Anyway, argument is that economic stagnation killed upward mobility for an entire generation, regional culture died at the same time, and internet-native subculture flooded into the void. The result is a new type: the pierced-up, anime-watching, gender-fluid, neurodivergent, downwardly mobile young person in middle America, someone he says is “as distinctive as the organization man or the valley girl once were.”

He backs this up with real stats: half of 18-to-29-year-olds are living with their parents. Gen Z homeownership at 27 is 33 percent, compared to 41 percent for Boomers at the same age. Forty-two percent of Gen Z watches anime weekly; only 25 percent follows the NFL. Regional accents are dying. Geographic mobility is at its lowest rate since the Census started tracking it. What was once a bunch of separate subcultures — goth, anime fan, queer, gamer, neurodivergent — has collapsed into a more ambient cultural register. On that point, he’s mostly right.

He’s also right the Internet has played a significant role in re-shaping some of these subcultures. But what isn’t real is the novelty.

There is an unstated assumption running through the essay — or at least through the conversation around it — that these interests and identities originated somewhere cosmopolitan and migrated outward into the provinces as regional culture died. This is wrong, or at least badly overstated. Anime fandom, goth, queerness, neopaganism, “neurodivergent” identities: these were never exclusively coastal phenomena, and their mass base was always suburban and exurban. They did not arrive in the same places Mariani describes; they grew up there.

But I want to be fair to what Mariani is doing, because it’s more ambitious than the backlash gives him credit for. There’s real insight here. The data is solid. The observation that formerly separate subcultures have blended into something more ambient and less defined is mostly right. It’s also true, and important, that the internet helped kids give names to how they were feeling without the vital information that how they were feeling was fleeting because they were 13. The easy aestheticization of angst, above and beyond what you might get from TV or zines, made it even more attractive. How many of us modeled our angst after stuff we saw online?

What Mariani is describing is not the emergence of a new type, but a change in scale and visibility. Platforms collapsed distinct subcultures into a single feed, flattening boundaries that once mattered. What looks like a new archetype is, in many cases, an old one made ambient.

I grew up in South Florida. I came of age in the sprawl of Broward and Palm Beach County, along six-lane roads lined with identical shopping plazas, each one anchored by a Publix. The neighborhoods have names like The Hamptons or Broken Sound, names that gesture at leisure and arrival, and what they contain is either McMansions so far out of your price range as to be dizzying, or, more likely, concrete-block houses, a lanai facing a canal, and a school your realtor assured your parents was excellent. Everything was built fast and all at once, whole zip codes raised out of nothing in a few years during the ‘80s boom, and by the time I got there in 1996 the gulf between the haves and have-nots was miserably, uncomfortably obvious.

South Florida is one of those places where extreme wealth and poverty exist on the same street, albeit separated by a gate and a guardhouse and alligators who won’t hesitate to eat your toddler.

On one side, the gated enclaves with country clubs and artificial lakes and landscaping that costs more per month than some people’s rent. On the other, the older subdivisions where families double up in two-bedroom apartments and the elementary school has a cop in the hallway. My mother spent my whole childhood trying to shield me from the latter. But the thing about South Florida is that the poor kids and the rich kids shared the same geography of decline — the “place without places” — and the decline was already well underway before the internet had anything to do with it.

South Florida always had the ambience of downward mobility, and it looked the same whether you wore a Korn shirt or Lacoste.

In Florida, there was always the “alt” kid from a rough home — white, Latino, Jewish, whatever. You could identify them by kindergarten. In my generation, the weird one whose mom let them listen to Eminem, at the time genuinely scandalous, or watch Freddy Krueger movies or Jerry Springer, at the time genuinely taboo-breaking. Or maybe their mom wasn’t around enough to stop them. The kid with the anime shirt when anime in 2004 was rare enough that owning a Naruto figurine was a social statement. The girl with the cat ears. You always knew these kids. If you went to a prep school like Pine Crest or St. Andrews, or even one of the better public schools, your parents didn’t want you hanging out with them.

Your parents worried because these kids had the problems of downward mobility. The parent who was never there or a sketchy stepdad with tattoos and a blue-collar job. The house that smelled like cigarettes, or like nothing, because nobody cooked and Burger King was the law of the land. And you were drawn to them anyway, because they were interesting, because they liked the things you liked, because they were free, and that freedom was magnetic. Maybe you’d end up at their house after school and something about the place would feel both thrilling and wrong: you got to drink Smirnoff Ice or smoke weed, the rooms were empty, the ever-present hum of a ceiling fan pushing around air that was too dry.

Your curiosities, because you were 8 or 14 or 16 or even 21, visiting home from college, were things like: where are these kids buying the cat ears? Where did they find that choker? How do they know about Inuyasha? It turned out they were going to the Hot Topic at the far-away mall, the one that was considered the “trashy” one. Hot Topic opened in 1989. The founder was from Alton, Iowa, and his whole business model was to bring downtown alternative culture to suburban mall kids who would never see downtown. By 2005, Hot Topic was making almost a billion dollars a year. This was only briefly an urban thing, and it was an urban thing before Rob and I were born. What was ultimately mainstreamed was specifically suburban and exurban. The infrastructure for distributing alt identity to provincial America predates the commercial internet. It’s a chain store that opened when the Berlin Wall fell.

This type has been recognizable for almost thirty years, probably longer. The Craft came out in 1996. Its characters are outcast girls at a suburban school; one lives in a trailer park with an abusive stepfather and an alcoholic mother. They find power through fringe culture because legitimate paths are closed. That movie didn’t invent something new. It worked because it depicted something audiences already recognized.

Many of the original goths weren’t kids in big cities — they were kids in forgotten places, finding each other through record stores and shows and word of mouth. (I’d be remiss if I didn’t also say that the ones in big cities were also, well, forgotten kids.)

The West Memphis Three is an extreme case, but it makes the pattern visible. Damien Echols was eighteen, living in a trailer park in Marion, Arkansas, one of the poorest areas in the country. He wore all black, read Anne Rice and Stephen King, identified as a Wiccan. Local authorities read that as evidence of danger. When three boys were murdered in 1993, Echols became the primary suspect. There was no physical evidence. His taste, his affect, his interests were treated as proof. He was sentenced to death and spent eighteen years on death row before DNA evidence excluded all three defendants.

The point is not that Mariani is doing this. It should go without saying! But this type has long been in exactly the places he treats as newly encountering it.

Alt kids are the social fabric of the most economically depressed, culturally conservative corners of America and have been for a very long time.

Even the internet part of this story is older than Mariani suggests. Before Discord there was Tumblr and before Tumblr there was LiveJournal. As far back as the late 1980s, Usenet newsgroups like alt.goth were already gathering the same kind of person: the misfit in a rural town, looking for someone else like them. Earlier still, BBSes and zines served the same function.

I’m repeating myself here, but the internet didn’t create this type. It gave it continuity.

I wrote about one aspect of the online dimension in my piece “Adam Lanza Fan Art” for Tablet, which traced how small, insular communities migrated across platforms over time. The shift to Discord matters, Mariani’s not wrong—private, persistent, role-based, pseudonymous spaces create different social dynamics than forums or subreddits or even locked LiveJournal groups.

This is what’s new about the 2020s:

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And so, I haven’t actually finished it. I probably never will. I want to be honest about that.

One of the reasons that West’s work is hard to get through is because she hates herself – and relentlessly so. West tells you – in no uncertain terms – that she hates herself, and then she tells you again, and then she tries (and fails to) make it funny, and then she tells you one more time in case you missed it. She describes her childhood dentist telling her she had “perfect teeth” and clings to it because she “wasn’t the kind of girl who heard ‘perfect’ a lot as an assessment of her body,” and connects this, in the same breath, to begging boys to kiss her. She explains her low self-esteem partly through “jante,” a Scandinavian concept she links to her family, which in one reading is just Midwestern humility, but the way she writes about it reads less like a cultural disposition than a justification for why she keeps underselling herself in every paragraph

All of this is presented as “charm and character,” which is the thing realtors say about houses that are too old and too broken but need to sell anyway. I don’t think West realizes the way she comes off – that her self-descriptions are deeply depressing. Maybe a third of the way through the book, it becomes clear that the reason West agreed to a relationship structure she didn’t want is that she didn’t believe anyone else but Aham would want her (which, by the way, is a much different thing than she didn’t believe she’d want anyone else but Aham).

This is my entire problem with West. I don’t care that she’s fat or polyamorous or a progressive in the Pacific Northwest. My problem with West is that she hates herself, and she sees herself through the same lens as her worst critics, and she expects you to find this funny. She’s not asking for pity – this is just a fact of life for her. Of course she hates herself; there’s no other option if you’re Lindy West. She agrees with you guys. When it’s not depressing, it’s grating.

And yet I see myself in her. Because this thing West does, where she pre-empts your criticism by hating herself first, is the oldest trick in the book.

In college I had a friend, Claudia, who continuously put herself in sexual situations she wasn’t fully comfortable with. She was convinced she had “sex like a man.” She was “just horny.” And sometimes she was genuinely horny; I believe that. It can be hard to disentangle these things. But even though Claudia hid behind horniness, she would still text these men manically, hundreds of times, and then show me the messages, scrolling and scrolling through a wall of blue with no reply. She’d be gutted by rejections in ways that didn’t match the story she was telling about herself. She’d cry about a guy she supposedly didn’t care about and then, the next weekend, do it again with someone new. She wasn’t having casual sex. She was having desperate sex and calling it casual, because casual was the version of herself she wanted to be: unbothered, cool, free, needing nothing from anyone. I watched it for years, and I never knew what to say, and I think a lot of women have a Claudia in their lives, or have been Claudia, or have at least felt the pull of becoming her.

I think of this as trainwreck feminism.

The problem with a lot of millennial-coded “choice” feminism was not that it had delusionally high standards. No, the problem was the standards were so low as to be a form of self-destruction. As someone who lived it, the reality was simpler and sadder: women were in pain, and they knew they were in pain, and the only cultural vocabulary available to them turned that pain into a kind of performance. Best case scenario, you could sell it for $50 a pop to xoJane. Maybe you’d become Cat Marnell or Lena Dunham or something. Maybe your Tumblr would get you a book deal.

All this to say, millennial women leaned into their flaws. The posture was something like: the world is a trash heap and so am I, isn’t that hilarious? It’s the same impulse you see now in women who perform misogyny, the ones who want you to know they’re not like other girls because they both see and agree that women – women, including themselves – are awful. Out of the millennial version of this stance came the valorization of fast food as aesthetic, of hangovers as personality, of sexual misadventure as confessional essays as minor celebrity. Sleep with the gross guy at the food cart or the bar or for one of my college friends, “the docks” for the story. It was never empowering. It was more like a preemptive strike; if I hurt myself before the world can hurt me, at least I chose it.

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Both women describe a movement that once promised women a place at the table and now openly treats them, in the anonymous source’s words, as “subhuman: subrational, non-agentic, cattle.” Adler-Bell, who hosts a podcast that provides an excellent history of right-wing ideas, reported the piece well, and I believe he wrote it in good faith.

The backdrop is a debate that has consumed the online right over the past few years: whether biological sex differences are so profound that women’s increasing presence in professional and institutional life has degraded those institutions, and whether women are, by nature, too irrational or too consensus-oriented to participate meaningfully in intellectual or political work. The women leaving aren’t leaving over policy disagreements. They’re leaving because they feel like a movement they helped build, or promote, has arrived at the conclusion that women like them shouldn’t have been there in the first place. What makes this harder to narrate cleanly is that women are not only the targets of this debate but, in some cases, its most prominent voices. The conversation is not simply men saying these things about women.

It is, in part, women saying these things about women – which is precisely why some of the people who’ve pushed back feel not just disagreed with but trapped.

That being said, I understand why some right-wingers were uneasy. It ran in New York. It will be read by progressives as confirmation of everything they already believe, in ways that don’t require them to reckon with why these women were drawn to the right in the first place: real frustrations with liberal feminism, real observations about institutional culture, real experiences of being condescended to. The piece compresses figures who share very little into a single narrative arc. Scott Yenor is a family-policy scholar at Heritage; Nick Fuentes is a self-described “incel podcaster”; Douglas Wilson is a pastor in Idaho whose church community has attracted controversy for decades over its teachings on gender hierarchy. These are not the same projects, and not all of them are pro-Trump or MAGA. The question of who counts as “New Right,” who’s MAGA, who’s conservative, and who’s a fringe (often media) figure tolerated for tactical reasons is genuinely complicated, and it’s a debate most Republican voters have never encountered and would find alien. The ordinary people, men and women alike, who vote Republican without ever listening to a podcast or posting on X are absent from the story entirely.

Full disclosure – I also have some skin in this conversation. I was quoted in the piece, not as a defector, but as an internet culture reporter familiar with some of the communities being described. For my part, I drew on Andrea Dworkin’s Right-Wing Women to make the point that the old conservative bargain for women, submission in exchange for protection, no longer holds in some of the most popular right-wing subcultures, like the groypers – the young, chronically online followers of Nick Fuentes – or the masculinist orbiters of figures like Andrew Tate. Dworkin’s argument was that conservative women weren’t dupes; they had made a rational calculation. They traded autonomy for safety within a system that offered them no better deal. What’s changed in these newer subcultures is that the protection half of the bargain has been dropped. The submission is still demanded, but the reciprocal obligation – that men owe women provision, loyalty, respect – has been replaced by open contempt. For this I was accused of throwing friends under the bus by people, who, ironically, both oppose the specific communities I was critiquing and, in some cases, even enjoyed the text I was recommending. Several of the women quoted in the original piece have been dismissed as “clout chasers” by both left and right.

But the most vocal critics didn’t engage with the Dworkin argument, or really any argument made.

We all spoke to a “liberal journalist.” I myself might even be the liberal journalist! The sin was committed, and we were promptly dismissed as traitors. This is a more important snag than it might seem on the surface.

The most common response I’ve seen from the online right is: “Why don’t they attack the ideas?”

I want to take that demand seriously. Many of the women in Adler-Bell’s piece have attacked the ideas, at length, in public, for years. The ideas are not hard to attack. What’s hard is being taken seriously — getting the attack to count, because the online arenas where this debate is actually happening have been structured so that no criticism from a woman registers as legitimate.

The request to “debate the ideas” is, in most cases, not a real request for debate. It is a move in a game whose actual logic runs on a version of Carl Schmitt’s famous, and famously abused, friend-enemy distinction. What matters is not whether the argument is sound but whether the person making it is your ally. This is the defining pathology of argument online, and it’s the same one the center, right, and “politically homeless” spent the past decade complaining about when the left did it.

The “woke” or progressive version: your criticism reflects your privilege, which prevents you from perceiving structural oppression. Disagreement becomes a failure of perception rather than a difference of analysis. The conservative version, now ascendant in the (let’s be honest here) X and podcast-dominated gender debate: women who disagree with claims about feminine irrationality are exhibiting the feminine irrationality being diagnosed. They aren’t accused of being wrong. They’re accused of “flirting” with ideas they were never serious about, even when they spent years making substantive contributions to the movement or living the prescribed lifestyle (e.g. traditional marriage, homemaking, child-rearing). The defecting woman is not treated as an intellectual, not even a failed one, but as a sexual presence who wandered too close to serious ideas and couldn’t follow through. Read plainly, they are calling her a tease – or worse, a whore.

This rhetorical tactic should be familiar by now.

When Robin DiAngelo introduced “white fragility,” the most common criticism, and I think the right one, was that it was unfalsifiable. Agreement proved the theory and denial was itself an exhibit of fragility. No possible response counted as evidence against the claim. The online right’s Great Gender Debate now operates the same way. Agreement from women validates the thesis. But disagreement validates it too. The argument never has to defend itself because all possible criticism has been defined as inadmissible. You cannot attack the ideas when the ideas have been designed to make your attack into proof that you shouldn’t be attacking them!

But that’s the ecosystem, not every thinker in it.

Whether you agree or disagree with their underlying claims, not every anti-racist thinker was or is Robin DiAngelo, and not every sex realist – that is, someone who believes biological sex differences have meaningful social and political implications – is a podcast reply guy calling women cattle. Helen Andrews, one of the most vocal voices in this conversation, engages with arguments. She debated Leah Libresco Sargeant on Ross Douthat’s Interesting Times. Real survey data does show gender gaps in attitudes toward free speech, and the question of whether institutional norms have eroded as demographics shift is worth asking.

So let me engage with at least one of Andrews’ answers, because I think it illustrates how even serious versions of this argument slide into the same structural trap.

On Triggernometry, Andrews said:

And we had increasing female representation in the legal system seems to have been accompanied by a lot more wokeness, which I think is more damaging in lawyers than it is in almost anywhere else. Because the law is the one field where you really want people to be as literal minded as possible, as devoted to the rules as possible, not fudging things so that everybody’s happy, really sticking to the letter of the law. And so if the law is corrupted, that’s something that I’m very, very worried about.

The first problem is that this description of law is a fantasy of what the legal profession actually is. The common law tradition is built on interpretation, not literalism. What Andrews said is, in fact, so detached from the reality of the legal profession I was stunned she said this so confidently.

Equity courts exist precisely because rigid rule-following produced unjust outcomes. This was recognized in the fourteenth century, not during “peak woke.” The tension between rule and judgment isn’t a modern corruption, it’s the tradition of the Western world. And it has always been the tradition.

What Andrews frames as feminine contamination (interpretation, discretion, contextual reasoning) has always been constitutive of legal practice! Framing it as a deviation is the novelty, not the other way around. The baseline she’s measuring from never existed in the West, so no amount of evidence can disprove the decline.What Andrews frames as a deviation from legal tradition is, in fact, part of the tradition itself.

So, ostensibly, in this version of history, when male judges interpret the law, it is called jurisprudence. But when women do it, it becomes evidence that women are corrupting the institution.

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It was co-authored by Timothy Leary and Eric Gullichsen and published in 1988 in Reality Hackers, a short-lived Bay Area magazine that would eventually rebrand as Mondo 2000, becoming the defining publication of early-90s digital counterculture.

Leary, by then in his late sixties, was deep into his reinvention as a technology evangelist. The former LSD guru was now preaching that the personal computer was the real consciousness-expanding tool (I happen to agree with him!). Gullichsen was a Silicon Valley engineer and VR pioneer who had worked at Autodesk on some of the first virtual reality systems. Together they produced this.

Some of what’s here turned out to be remarkably prescient: the idea that digital identity would become fluid and self-constructed and that the body itself would become a site of technological intervention. Other parts feel like dispatches from a more utopian (and innocent) time.

I’m reposting it here as preservation. This is what the future looked like from 1988. It would be a shame if we forgot about it!

We place no reliance
On virgin or pigeon;
Our Method is Science,
Our Aim is Religion.

Aleister Crowley, from the journal ‘Equinox‘

People jacked in so they could hustle. Put the ‘trodes on and they were out there, all the data in the world stacked up like one big neon city, so you could cruise around and have a grip on it, visually anyway, because if you didn’t, it was too complicated, trying to find your way to a particular piece of data you needed. Iconics, Gentry called that.

William Gibson, Mona Lisa Overdrive

Information is more basic than matter and energy.
Atoms, electrons, quarks consist of bits —
Binary units of information
Like those processed in computer software
And in the brain.
The behavior of these bits, and thus of the universe,
Is governed by a single programming rule.

Edward Fredkin

A Universe of Bits and Bytes

Major historical accomplishments of the 20th century included the personalization and popularization of Quantum Physics, an acceptance of self-reference and circular causality in systems of mathematics and psychology, and the resulting development of cybernetic society.

This philosophic achievement, which has dominated the culture of the 20th century, was based on a discovery by nuclear and quantum physicists around 1900, that visible-tangible realities are written in a digital assembly language we could accurately call ‘basic.’

It turns out that we inhabit a universe made up of a small number of elements-particles-bits which cluster together in geometrically-logical, temporary configurations.

The solid Newtonian Universe rested upon such immutable General-Motors concepts as mass, force, momentum, and inertia, cast into a Manichaean drama involving equal reactions of good vs. evil, gravity vs. levity, entropy vs. evolution and coerced by such pious Bank-of-England notions as conservation of energy. This dependable, static, predictable, universe suddenly, in the minds of Planck/Heisenberg became digitized, transformed into shimmering quantum screens of electronic probabilities.

Up here in 1988, we are learning to experience what Nils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg could only dream of. The universe, according to their cyberdelic equations, is best described as a digital information process with sub-programs and temporary ROM states, megas called galaxies, maxis called stars, minis called planets, micros called organisms, and nanos known as molecules, atoms, particles. All of these programs are perpetually in states of evolution, i.e., continually ‘running.’

It seems to follow that the great intellectual challenge of the 20th century was to make this universe ‘user friendly,’ to prepare individual human beings to decode, digitize, store, process and reflect the sub-programs which make up his/her own personal realities.

Nobody Knew What These Guys Were Talking About

The chain of events that elevated us to this new genetic status, HOMO SAPIENS CYBERNETICUS, began around the turn of the century.

Physicists, we recall, are traditionally assigned the task of sorting out the nature of reality. So it was the quantum philosophers who figured out that units of energy/matter were sub- atomic bits of programmed information that zoom around in clouds of ever-changing, if/then, start/stop, off/on, 0/1, yin/yang probabilities in clusters of pixels, up-and-down recurring stairways of paradox.

When they started out, no one understood what these guys were talking about. They expressed their unsettling theories in complex equations written on blackboards with chalk. Believe it or not, these great physicists thought and communicated with a neolithic tool — chalk-marks on the wall of the cave. The irony was this: Einstein and his brilliant colleagues could not experience or operate or communicate at a quantum-electronic level.

Imagine if Max Planck pottering around in his mathematical chalk-board had access to a video-arcade game! He’d see right away that the blips on Centipede and the zaps of Space Invaders could represent the movement of the very particles that he tried to describe in the dusty symbols of his blackboard.

A Wild and Scary Hallucinogenique

Now let us reflect on the head-bursting adjustment required here. The relativistic universe described by Einstein and the nuclear physicists IS alien and terrifying. Quantum physics is quite literally a wild, confusing psyberdelic trip. It postulates an Alice-in-Wonderland, Sartrean universe in which everything is changing. As Heisenberg implied: nothing is certain except uncertainty. Matter is energy. Energy and matter are temporary states of info-bits, frozen at various forms of acceleration.

This digital universe is not user-friendly when approached with a Newtonian mind. We are just now beginning to write a manual of operations for the brain and the universe, both of which, it turns out, are digital galaxies with amazing similarities.

People living in the solid, mechanical world of 1901 simply could not understand or experience a quantum universe. Dear sweet old Einstein, who couldn’t accept his own unsettling equations, was denounced as evil and immoral by Catholic bishops and sober theologians who sensed how unsettling and revolutionary these new ideas could be. Ethical relativity is still the mortal sin of religious fundamentalists.

The Cyberpunk as Modern Alchemist

The baby boom generation has grown up in an electronic world of TV and personal computing screens. The cyberpunks offer metaphors, rituals, life styles for dealing with the universe of information. More and more of us are becoming electro-shamans, modern alchemists.

Alchemists of the Middle Ages described the construction of magical appliances for viewing future events, or speaking to friends distant or dead. Writings of Paracelsus describe a mirror of ELECTRUM MAGICUM with telegenic properties, and crystal scrying was in its heyday.

Today, digital alchemists have at their command tools of a precision and power unimagined by their predecessors. Computer screens ARE magical mirrors, presenting alternate realities at varying degrees of abstraction on command (invocation). Aleister Crowley defined magick as ‘the art and science of causing change to occur in conformity with our will,’ and to this end the computer is the universal level of Archimedes.

The parallels between the culture of the alchemists and that of cyberpunk computer adepts are inescapable. Both employ knowledge of an occult arcanum unknown to the population at large, with secret symbols and words of power. The ‘secret symbols’ comprise the languages of computers and mathematics, and the ‘words of power’ instruct computer operating systems to complete Herculean tasks. Knowing the precise code name of a digital program permits it to be conjured into existence, transcending the labor of muscular or mechanical search or manufacture.

Rites of initiation or apprenticeship are common to both. ‘Psychic feats’ of telepathy and action-at-a-distance are achieved by selection of the menu option.

Classical Magickal Correspondences

Alchemists of the Middle Ages believed quite correctly that their cosmos was composed of four elements: earth, air, fire and water. Although today our periodic table sports more than 100 chemical elements, the four universal elements still can be identified as the constituents of some processes in the external reality, and within the inner psychological world of humankind.

Each of the four elements is an archetype and a metaphor, a convenient and appropriate name for a universally identified quality. The four are echoed in the organization of both the four suits and the four ‘court cards’ of each suit of the Tarot, inherited from the Egyptians and its symbolism preserved in ordinary Western playing cards. The four also correspond to the four principal tools of the classical practitioner of ceremonial magick.

The wand of the magician represents the phallic male creative force, fire. The cup stands for the female receptive force, and, obviously enough, is associated with water. the sword is the incisive intellect, moving and severing the air, the abstraction in which it moves. Finally, the pantacle (disk) is the grounding in earth (magnetic material), the stored algorithms. (We use Crowley’s spelling of pentacle, which communicates the sense of ‘all and everything,’ advisedly.)

These classical instruments of magick exist in modern cyber technology: The mouse or pen of the digitizing tablet is the wand, controlling the fire of the CRT display and harnessing the creative force of the programmer. It is used in all invocations and ritual as a tool of command. Spinning disk drives are the pantacles, inscribed with complex symbols, earthen tablets to receive the input of ‘air,’ the crackling dynamic ethereal intellectual electricity of the processor chip circuitry programming results. The RAM chips are, literally, the buffers (‘buffer pools’), the water, the passive element capable of only receiving impressions and re-transmitting, reflecting.

Iconic visual programming languages are a Tarot, the pictorial summation of all possibilities, activated for the purpose of divination by juxtaposition and mutual influence. A periodic table of possibilities, the Western form of the Eastern I Ching. Traditional word-oriented programming languages, FORTRAN, COBOL, and the rest, are a degenerate form of these universal systems, grimoires of profit-oriented corporations.

Detailed database logs of the activity of operating systems from the Akashic records on a microscale. At a macroscopic level, this is the ‘world net’ knowledge base, the ‘knoesphere,’ the world-wide online hypertext network of information soon to be realized by the storage capacity of CD ROM and the data transmission capability of optical fiber. William Gibson’s cyberspace matrix.

Banishing rituals debug programs, and friendly djinn are invoked for compiling, searching, and other mundane tasks. When the magic circle is broken (segmentation violation), the system collapses. Personal transmutation (the ecstasy of the ‘ultimate hack’) is a veiled goal of both systems. The satori of harmonious human-computer communication resulting from the infinite regress into meta-levels of reflection of self is the reward for immaculate conceptualization and execution of ideas.

The universality of 0 and 1 throughout magic and religion: yin and yang, yoni and lingam, cup and wand, are manifested today in digital signals, the two bits underlying the implementation of all digital programs in the world, in our brains and in our operating systems. Stretching it a bit, even the monad, symbol of change and the Tao, visually resembles a superimposed 0 and 1 when its curving central line is stretched through the action of centrifugal force from the ever-increasing speed of the monad’s rotation.

Cyber Religion of the Baby Boomers

By the year 2000, Aleister Crowley, William Gibson, and Edward Fredkin could well replace Benjamin Spock as a Baby Boom navigator. Why? Because, by then the concerns of the baby boom generation will be digital. (Or, to use the old paradigms, philosophic-spiritual.)

During their childhood they were Mouseketeers. In their teens the Cybers went on an adolescent spiritual binge unequalled since the Children’s Crusade. In their revolt against the factory culture they re-invented and updated their tribal-pagan roots and experimented with Hinduism, Haight-Ashbury Buddhism, American Indianism, Magic, Witchcraft, Ann Arbor Voo Doo, Esalen Yoga, Computerized I Ching Taoism, 3-D Reincarnation, Fluid Druidism. St. Stephen Jobs to the Ashram!

Born-again Paganism! Pan-Dionysius on audio-visual cassettes. Mick Jagger had them sympathizing with the devil. The Beatles had them floating upstream on the Ganges. Jimi Hendrix taught them how to be a voodoo child. Is there one pre-Christian or third world metaphor for divinity that some rock group has not yet celebrated on an album cover?

Ontology Recapitulates Theology

The Boomers in the evolving life-cycle seem to have recapitulated the theological history of our species. Just as monotheism emerged to unify pagan tribes into nations, so did the Boomers re-discover fundamentalist Judaism and Christianity in their young adulthood.

Even far-away Islam attracted gourmet Blacks and ex-hippies such as Cat Stevens. Bob Dylan nicely exemplifies the consumer approach to religion. For 25 years Bob (ne Zimmerman) has continued to browse through the spiritual boutiques dabbing on a dash of Baptist ‘born-again,’ nibbling at Hassidism before returning to his ole-time faith of sardonic reformed humanism.

We can laugh at this trendy shopping around for the custom- tailored designer god, but behind the faddism we find a powerful clue.

Notice how Dylan, for example, preserves his options and tries to avoid shoddy of off-the-rack soul-ware. No ‘plastic christs that glow in the dark’ for Bob! The religion here is Evolutionism, based on the classic humanist, transcendental assumptions:

1. God is not a tribal father nor a feudal lord nor an engineer- manager of the universe. There is no god (in the singular) except you at the moment. There are as many gods (in the plural) as can be imagined. Call them whatever you like. They are free agents like you and me.

2. You can change and mutate and keep improving. The idea is to keep ‘trading up’ to a ‘better’ philosophy-theology.

3. The aim of your life, following Buddha, Krishna, Gurdjieff, Werner Erhart, Shirley, is this: Take care of your self so you can take care of others. If any.

With a Little Help From Your Friends

This generation, we recall, had been disillusioned by the religions, politics, and economics of their parents. Growing up with thethreat of nuclear war, the assassination of beloved leaders, immune deficiencies, a collapsing industrial system, an impossible national debt, religious fundamentalisms (Christian-Jewish- Islamic) that fanatically scream hatred and intolerance, and uncomprehending neglect of the ecology, they have developed a healthy skepticism about collective solutions.

They can’t retreat back home because Mom and Dad are divorced.

No wonder they have created a psychology of individual navigation. Singularity. The basic idea is self-responsibility. You just can’t depend on anyone else to solve your problems. You gotta do it all by yourself — With a little help from your friends.

A Do-It-Yourself Religion

Since God #1 appears to be held hostage back there by the blood-thirsty Persian Ayatollah, by the telegenic Polish Pope and the Moral Majority, there’s only one logical alternative. You ‘steer’ your own course. You start your own religion. The Temple is your body. Your mind writes the theology. And the Holy Spirit emanates from that infinitely mysterious intersection between your brain and your DNA.

The attainment of even the suburbs of Paradise involves good navigation and planning on your part. Hell is a series of redeemable errors. A detour caused by failure to check the trip- maps. A losing streak. Many people are carefully conditioned from birth to live in hell. As children, they are largely ignored until something happens to cause them pain or injury. Then, mommy and daddy quickly lavish aid, attention, succor, positive reinforcement. When ‘all grown up,’ and in the world alone to make choices, what kind of choices are going to result from those many years of conditioning? It’s no wonder so many people seem to live in hell, to live pained lives of mishaps and broken dreams. Of course, by realizing this we can begin to decondition ourselves towards healthy hedonism. Reward yourself for making choices that lead to pleasure, and build a cybernetic cycle of positive feedback. Only from the state of free selfhood can any truly compassionate signals be sent to others.

The Administration of a Personal State

The management and piloting of a Singularity leads to a very busy career. Since the Crowley-Gibson-Fredkin Individual has established herself as a religion, a country, a corporation, an information network, and a neurological universe, it is necessary to maintain personal equivalents for all the departments and operations of the bureaucracies that perform these duties.

This apparently means forming private alliances, formulating personal political platforms, conducting your own domestic and foreign relations, establishing trade policies, defense and security programs, educational and recreational events. On the upside, one is free from dependence upon bureaucracies, an inestimable boon. (Free agents can, of course, make temporary deals with organizations and officials thereof.)

And if countries have histories and myths, why shouldn’t you?

The Personal Mythology

So you search and research your very own genetic memory banks, the Old Testaments of your DNA-RNA, including, if you like, past incarnations and Jungian archetypes. And funky pre- incarnations in any future you can imagine!

You write your very own Newest Testament, recalling that voluntary martyrdom is tacky and crucifixions, like nuclear war, can ruin your day.

You can do anything the great religions, empires and racial groups have done in the name of their God #1. and you’re certain to do it better because… well, look at their track records. There’s no way your Personal State could produce the persecutions, massacres and bigotries of the Big Guys.

Why? Because there’s only one of you, and even with the help of your friends the amount of damage an individual can do is insignificant compared with the evil-potential of a collective.

Besides, you’re a child of the 60s. You’re imprinted to want a peaceful, tolerant, funny world. You can choose your gods to be smart, funny, compassionate, cute and goofy.

Irreverence is a Password for the 21st Century

It has been suggested that the philosophic assignment of the Roaring 20th Century was to prepare the human species for the shifting realities of Quantum Physics and Singular Steering.

Relativity means that everyone ‘sees’ or reacts to things differently, depending upon location, velocity and attitude (angle of approach).

The relativistic insight is in essence irreverent or humorous, i.e., laughable, comical, delightful. With the law of gravity repealed, levity is the order of the day. We rise through our levity, instead of being held down by our gravity.

The word ‘humor’ comes from the Latin word for liquid or fluid, referring to such qualities as flowing, pliable, smooth, effortless, easily changed, non-frictional, transparent, shining, musical, graceful in motion and readily converted into cash.

A Last Generation in Flesh?

Through science and technology we will meet the aliens, and they will be us.

— Norman Spinrad, ‘The Neuromantics‘

Information-beings of the future may well be fluid. Human society has now reached a turning point in the operation of the digital programs of evolution, a point at which the next evolutionary steps of the species become apparent to us, to surf as we will. Or, more correctly, as the evolutionary programs run and run, the next stages pop up in parallel, resulting in continuing explosions of unexpected diversity. Our concepts of what is known as ‘human’ continually change. For example, we are no longer as dependent on physical fitness for survival. Our quantum appliances and improved mechanical devices can generally provide the requisite means or defenses. In the near future, the methods of information technology, molecular engineering, biotechnology, nanotechnology (atom stacking) and quantum-digital programming could make the human form a matter totally determined by individual whim, style and seasonal choice.

Humans already come in some variety of races and sizes. In comparison to what ‘human’ might mean within the next century, we humans are at present as indistinguishable from one another as are hydrogen molecules. Along with the irrational taboo about death, the sanctity of our body image seems to be one of the most persistent anachronisms of Industrial Age thought.

We see evolutions of the human form in the future; one more biological-like: a bio/computer hybrid of any desired form — and one not biological at all: an ‘electronic entity’ in the digital info-universe.

Human-AS-programs, and human-IN-programs.

Of these two post-humanist views, human-as-programs is more easily conceived. Today, we have crude prosthetic implants, artificial limbs, valves, and entire organs. The continuing improvements in the old-style mechanical technology slowly increase the thoroughness of brain/external-world integration. A profound change can come with the developments of biotechnology, genetic engineering, and the slightly more remote success of nanotechnology.

The electronic form of human-in-programs is more alien to our current conceptions of humanity. Through storage of one’s belief systems as data structures online, driven by desired programs one’s neuronal apparatus should operate in silicon basically as it dead on the meatware of the brain, though faster, more accurately, more self-mutably, and, if desired, immortally.

Clever cyberpunks will of course not only store themselves electronically, but do so in the form of a ‘computer virus,’ capable of traversing computer networks and of self-replicating as a guard against accidental or malicious erasure by others, or other programs. (Imagine the somewhat droll scenario: ‘What’s on this CD?’ ‘Ah, that’s just that boring adolescent Leary. Let’s go ahead and reformat it.’)

One speculation is that such viral human forms might ALREADY inhabit our computer systems. Cleverly designed, they would be very difficult, if not theoretically impossible to detect.

Current programs do not permit matching the real-time operation speed and parallel complexity of conventional brains. But time scale of operation is subjective and irrelevant, except for the purposes of interface.

Of course, there is no reason one needs to restrict one’s manifestation to a particular form. One will basically (within ever-loosening physical constraints, though perhaps inescapable economic constraints) be able to assume any desired form.

Authors of current science fiction of the cyberpunk or ‘neuromantic’ school have approached this idea from many angles. Bruce Sterling’s novel SCHISMATRIX recognizes the fact that human evolution moves in clades, radiating omnidirectionally, not moving in a line along a single path. His ‘Mechs’ and ‘Shapers’ correspond closely with our notions of electronic and biogenetic paths to evolutionary diversity.

Given the ease of copying computer-stored information, it should be possible to exist simultaneously in many forms. Where the ‘I’s’ are in this situation is a matter for digital philosophers. Our belief is that consciousness would persist in each form, running independently, cloned at each branch point.

A few days ago, I stumbled across a woman on TikTok who had made a series of videos about a girl who coerced several people she’d e-dated into committing suicide. This girl had never shared physical space with any of her victims, but she’d built enough sustained intimacy and coercive force to convince them to commit suicide.

Watching these videos – and I watched all of them – I realized I had no word for what this girl was, yet it’s a pattern we see increasingly often.

She’s not a cyberstalker nor cyberbully. She’s not a serial killer, either, really. We have names for most kinds of murderers: serial killers, spree killers, family annihilators, school shooters, etc. But the internet has produced a figure who doesn’t fit cleanly into any of these, someone whose mechanism is not broadcast, not ideological recruitment, not physical assault arranged after an online meeting. The mechanism is more granular than that: the construction of a closed psychological relationship, conducted through platforms, in which one person systematically brings another to the point of self-destruction.

The term I want to propose is mediated murderer: a perpetrator who, without physical co-presence, uses networked communication as the primary instrument by which he establishes coercive control over a specific victim and drives that victim toward death.

This is a claim about mechanism: targeted, interactive, platform-dependent coercion culminating in death without physical co-presence.

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American Conspiracy Culture is a different thing. It’s a tradition — a specific one, with its own lineage, its own media, its own epistemological commitments, its own communities. This is the lineage that runs from the John Birch Society through Mae Brussell through Bill Cooper through Art Bell and Alex Jones to QAnon and Amy Carlson’s “Love Has Won” cult, rounding through the New Age, through shortwave radio, through Ruby Ridge and pamphlets and zines and bulletin board systems and Usenet newsgroups and Facebook and TikTok. In this tradition, the government is, typically, the conspirator: the deep state, the spooks, the Fed, the mainstream media, the Elites. The people telling these stories have always understood themselves as marginalized, and the conspiracy culture offered an explanation.

For decades the whole operation ran on an amateur media world of its own. None of it came anywhere near the White House briefing room — at least, not officially.

The distinction matters because the story of the Trump era is usually told as though conspiracy thinking migrated from the fringe to the center. This is obviously true but that analysis is incomplete. What actually happened is that a culture — one with its own traditions, internal logic, and habits of mind — got pulled into the orbit of state power on the record.

Conspiracy thinking can be deployed by anyone. Conspiracy culture carries commitments that make it ungovernable once it’s inside the building.

The two were never totally separate, and the relationship between them was more complicated than politicians borrowing a few lines from the fringe. The state didn’t just suppress conspiracy movements: it infiltrated and steered them. COINTELPRO wasn’t only about crushing dissent — it involved planting agents inside organizations, manufacturing front groups, forging letters, running provocateurs, and actively shaping the direction of movements from the inside. The FBI placed informants inside militia groups who sometimes pushed those groups toward more extreme positions.

The line between “destroying a movement” and “becoming part of a movement in order to control its direction” was one the government crossed routinely and deliberately.

This history lives in the bones of American Conspiracy Culture. The community knows it. And it gave rise to a fear that runs deeper than the worry that the government might come after you: the fear that the government might already be you. That the person next to you, the broadcaster you trust, the organization you joined, might be controlled opposition. That the apparatus of suspicion itself could be captured and redirected by the very power it was built to oppose.

That fear is the background radiation of everything that follows.

Politicians, for their part, played at being outsiders long before Trump. “Speaking from below” has always been partly a pose. But the cross-pollination maintained plausible deniability, and the two remained distinct enough to function on their own terms: one governed, and the other yapped from the margins.

During the Trump era, that separation collapsed – as left and liberal media loves to tell us. “Deep state,” “rigged systems,” “shadowy pedophile networks” — language that once came crackling through a shortwave at 2 a.m., and later, on websites like 4chan, started showing up in rally speeches, press conferences, and executive orders. What was once fringe mobilized, commercialized, and most importantly of all, acquired state power.

This is usually discussed as a problem of hypocrisy. How can people who blame the elites govern as elites? But hypocrisy is ordinary. The problem with conspiracy-as-governing-language is different, because the culture itself – not conspiracy thinking, but the tradition of American conspiracy culture – carries an epistemological promise that ordinary politics doesn’t: official authority cannot be trusted to define reality. You must look for yourself. You must do your own research. That promise is the source of its energy and the thing that makes it ungovernable once it gets inside the building. Conspiracy thinking can be turned on and off. Conspiracy culture is a worldview, and a worldview doesn’t take direction.

Once conspiracy talk becomes the way a government communicates, it needs rules about where suspicion can point. Aimed at Soros, at the press, at the approved list of villains, suspicion is encouraged, it’s insider talk, it shows you’re on the right team. But when the same instinct turns inward it becomes a five-alarm fire. It’s an enforcement problem. And it’s a problem unique to a governing language that promised its speakers they would never be managed — spoken to an audience that has documented reasons to believe that management happens from the inside.

In the dialect of conspiracy, “don’t question our allies” is confirmation that the allies are hiding something. The act of discipline confirms the worldview it’s trying to contain. And the audience doesn’t arrive at that interpretation from nowhere. It arrives with a memory.

The enforcement works on two levels.

The first is old-fashioned political gatekeeping. A broadcaster who goes after the right enemies gets the Fox hit and the party invites. The one who starts aiming at people on the protected list gets fired, sued, dropped, maybe even banned from entering a foreign country. This kind of policing is political. It runs on phone calls and lawyers. The second is the market. The conspiracy broadcaster who ratchets up gets more views, more subscribers, and critically, more money. The incentive only runs one way: hotter. This pressure is indifferent to who’s being accused. It doesn’t care about loyalty. It just wants escalation.

Political discipline tries to draw lines and the market immediately erases them, because every line is also a dare to cross it. The governing project wants directional suspicion. The market wants spectacle.

Then the culture itself wants to keep pulling the thread.

* * *

To understand how unstable this gets, it helps to notice that conspiracy culture now operates in several distinct modes at the same time.

The oldest is conspiracy as method. Bill Cooper is the clearest example. Cooper broadcast The Hour of the Time from a house on a hilltop in Eagar, Arizona — a ranch-style place he shared with his wife Annie, their daughters, and a Rottweiler named Crusher. His shows were a fucking slog: they went on for hours, built around long, rickety chains of evidence, some of it wrong, some of it unhinged, all of it painfully slow. The whole thing had the pacing of an obsessive hobbyist’s attic, not a TikTok.

I want to be careful here, because “method” doesn’t mean “correct.” Cooper published the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in Behold a Pale Horse — swapping “Sion” for “Zion” and insisting the real conspirators weren’t Jews, which didn’t stop the damage and didn’t make the text any less poisonous. He pushed a theory that the driver killed JFK. The method could produce garbage, and it often did (okay, I fell for the driver one, at a time…). What distinguished it was the relationship between the person and the material. Cooper treated conspiracy as an epistemological commitment, a way of processing the world that would take you wherever it took you, including and maybe even especially into delusion. You followed the thread even when it led somewhere ugly or incoherent, and you didn’t check the thread against your network first.

Cooper also saw, earlier than most, that the conspiracy world could be and indeed already was being hollowed out from the inside. His fear came directly out of the tradition’s experience with infiltration. When he accused Alex Jones of being a knowing agent of the very disinformation apparatus he claimed to oppose — someone who had done “no research, sought no truth,” who was “just making it up straight out of his head” — he was voicing the oldest anxiety in the subculture. Suspicion itself could be captured, that the broadcaster rallying you against the system might be part of the system itself, that the whole operation might be controlled. He said the fear and adrenaline in Jones’s voice was “the sound of the future.” It sounded paranoid even by the standards of the conspiracy world. But he was circling something real: that the apparatus of suspicion could become performance, and performance could become product, and once it was product, the question of who was directing it would become unanswerable.

That second mode — conspiracy as affect or spectacle — is what replaced Cooper, and it runs at a completely different clock speed. Whether the evidence checks out matters less than whether the segment hits. Alex Jones built his career on this. His talent is not investigation; it’s performance. The red face, the desk-pounding, the shirt coming half-untucked: conspiracy as a physical event, as WWE. Cooper heard it coming before anyone else.

And then there’s a third mode that has spread over the past several years, though I’d be remiss to argue it didn’t previously exist. This is conspiracy as costume. A growing crowd of podcasters, influencers, pseudonymous posters, and self-identified “dissidents” drifting between wellness, style, and politics have picked up the vocabulary and postures of conspiracy without touching its epistemology. They’re fans, socialites, orbiters. They are wearing the clothes, and because the clothes come off easily, they can be disciplined. A provocation on Monday that they’ll walk back by Wednesday.

They don’t speak truth to power — they read their scripts.

These latter two groups are the people the movement actually wants. They keep the mood of suspicion going without anyone practicing it. They borrow the outsider’s vocabulary to stay interesting and defer to the insiders to stay paid. They are the buffer between the language and its consequences. Affect can be redirected wherever you want it to be. Costumes can be changed.

Method is the one that causes problems, because a person operating in method mode is doing exactly what the tradition told them to do.

* * *

Candace Owens is a reversion to the first mode inside a world wired for the second and third, and so nobody (in power or media, at least) really knows what to do with her.

Her shows have the plodding, obsessive, schizophrenic structure of an amateur true-crime podcast hosted by someone who has decided the official story is a lie. She is doing the Bill Cooper thing with better production values and a much larger audience of “mommy sleuths.” She treats conspiracy as something you do.

One might say the structure of Owens’s media empire complicates any read of her — she makes something like $10 million a year and has a production team.1 She is, undeniably, a product of the same attention economy that feeds the entertainer and the costume-wearer. It would be naïve to pretend she stands outside it. Martyrdom itself converts to growth.

I want to sit with this, because I’ve been wrong about it before. I’ve previously written about Owens’s serial public transformations (“conversions”) — liberal activist to MAGA conservative, Daily Wire loyalist to independent operator, live player to enemy — as a kind of alternate reality game (ARG). A media spectacle whose primary product was the conversion experience itself. In that reading, she was the ultimate performer, pastor at the megachurch of Candace.

I now no longer believe that’s the whole story. The serial conversions are native to the tradition. Cooper went through them. Brussell went through them. The whole epistemology of conspiracy theory demands them: if you are genuinely pulling the thread, you will eventually find that your old allies were compromised, that the ground you stood on was rotten. The conversion is the pattern. Each break confirms the worldview and gives you new material. Owens’s business model runs on this, yes. But that doesn’t mean the tradition isn’t also operating through her exactly as it always has.

The money and the belief may be fused in a way that won’t separate into “grifter” and “true believer.” She may be both and I truly believe she is.

* * *

The administration wants conspiracy it can steer. What it gets, periodically, is someone who treats the method as actual method and starts aiming it at the movement itself.

And the movement can’t say out loud what the real problem with Owens is. It can’t announce that conspiracy talk is a tool, useful when aimed out and dangerous when aimed in, because saying so would blow up the whole populist story. So, the policing becomes about ancillary issues — often real ones, to be clear. Owens does traffic in antisemitism. She does say ridiculous, hurtful, illegal things.

But she speaks in a dialect that others speak in and get away with. Conspiracy culture’s tradition has always had antisemitism running through it, and the movement has always tolerated it in some speakers and punished it in others depending on where the rest of their suspicion points. What determines the punishment is not the content of the offense but the direction – and timing – of the aim.

The “quiet” policing, the everything-but-the-issue, to a conspiracy audience,

Read more

My friend Sam Buntz makes the opposite case: his claim is that streaming platforms and TikTok have flattened cultural time so completely that Gen Z can’t form the generational chain of influence that has driven every major artistic movement for centuries.

Gen Z reacts to everything and nothing, lost in what Sam calls “the Archive” — a Borgesian labyrinth where all of recorded culture is equally available and equally weightless. I’m still torn and much more optimistic, but I loved his articulation of this argument. — Katherine

Last summer, I was at a bar with a few friends. Rapidly discovering more and more veritas in vino, I found myself giving an impromptu oration on the musical tastes of the generation junior to my own. I argued that Zoomers don’t really have their own music: they’re willing to listen to everything because Spotify, Apple Music, and the various songs that all pop up on Tik Tok are presented devoid of history and context. You like what you like and are free to choose from the phenomena bubbling up around you. Kate Bush, Billy Joel, Laurie Anderson, Paul McCartney—songs by these artists were always popping up on my Zoomer ex-girlfriend’s Tik Tok feed. She accepted all of it. None of it seemed corny or out-of-date. (This article from Activaire calls TikTok, “the most powerful music revival machine we have ever seen.)

One of my friends, a keen observer of the contemporary scene, well-versed in generational difference, said that my claim was somewhat false and that Zoomers do in fact have their own trailblazing avant garde music. She held up 100Gecs and nettspend as examples. I was like, “I bet you that only 0.2% of them know who those artists are.”

Serendipitously, a pair of Zoomer whippersnappers had just entered the bar. “I’m going to ask them,” I said. I got up and shuffled over, not overly conscious of the roughly fifteen-year age gap between us. (I’m a silverback millennial).

I asked what kind of music they listened to and if they were familiar with nettspend (a name new to me as well). I thought I was going to weird them out—a hulking man in his mid-30s, looming over them and posing this culturally sensitive question out of nowhere. Zoomers are notoriously skittish and need to be approached with caution in the wild, ideally with a handful of nutritional pellets and soothing rabbit noises.

But they were very polite and eager to share their listening habits. They had no idea who nettspend was; they listened to Nirvana and 90s music. As if illustrating the point visually, they seemed to be affecting a mid-90s skateboarder style in terms of their garb. My friends were impressed by my willingness to be weird and win debates through moments of Gonzo journalism. If you can manufacture anecdotal knowledge on the spot, it goes a long way.

But the data isn’t just anecdotal. According to a 2019 article from Billboard, Shannon Cook, a trends expert at Spotify, said that Gen Z’s listening habits on Spotify were unusually broad and tended to delve deeply into the past. Tracks by Miles Davis (“Blue in Green”), The Grateful Dead (“Friend of the Devil”), and Joan Jett (“I Love Rock n’ Roll”) were all among Gen Z’s most listened to tracks at the time.

Albeit, this article was from 2019—but the forces driving the trend, Tik Tok nostalgia and the buffet-like nature of streaming platforms, have only continued or accelerated their effects. The aforementioned 2025 article from Activaire argued that Spotify data showed Gen Z was connecting more with Gen X music on Spotify, beguiled by its apparent authenticity.

Zoomers, you see, live inside the Archive.

Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they are imprisoned inside the Archive—a Borgesian labyrinth. Everything that has ever happened exists at their fingertips, assigned equal weight (or assigned whatever weight the fickle algorithm happens to be assigning on that particular day). This is also why they are a uniquely anxious generation, paralyzed by an inability to choose. They are confronted with too many options, unstuck in time.

We think of time as being continuous, as involving one event following naturally, causally after a preceding event. But living within the digital archive disintegrates our basic, linear perception of time. Since every era is equally available, and all events are potentially happening at the same time, the chain of causality and influence breaks down completely. We think of musicians, artists, writers, and filmmakers as responding to those who came before them, generationally. For instance, Bob Dylan admired and initially imitated Woody Guthrie—but he also rebelled and created his own style, departing from Guthrie’s folksy populism and adding intensely personal and surrealistic touches. Changes in the arts always work this way. One generation responds to the previous generation. (Hemingway and Fitzgerald were reacting to Joseph Conrad, Edith Wharton, and Henry James, while Henry James was reacting to Hawthorne and Emerson, and so on and so forth.)

But Gen Z doesn’t experience cultural time this way. They’re reacting to everything that has ever happened. Which is impossible to actually do. On the one hand, it might make you more cosmopolitan (though this is hard to do without a guide to help develop your critical intelligence). But, on the other, it ruins your ability to assimilate anything and reduces you to a quivering lump of uncertainties. It also reduces your own ability to create because your response to life becomes so indeterminate. You can’t figure out what to respond to.

In Plato’s dialogue, “Ion,” he describes how inspiration works: the first poet was inspired directly by the muse, like an iron filling attached to a lodestone. The subsequent generations of poets are like iron fillings attached to that first filling. The force of inspiration is still present, but it is exerted indirectly and weakens with every generation. Thus, the influence of the original impetus wanes until, presumably, we culturally reset and reconnect to the magnetic source directly. Gen Z finds itself in a state in which the fillings have all been scattered on the ground, perhaps experiencing some ambient attraction from the lodestone, but unable to really connect with it.

Can this state of affairs create vital popular music? It appears not. The results seem to be avant garde Adderall brain slurry—100 Gecs and nettspend and hyperpop—for a tiny, cultured minority. The masses just keep listening to Taylor Swift on repeat. And for those of you who want to object by saying, “No, no, you have to hear my cousin’s noise rock project. It’s really going somewhere, doing something new,” I say, “That’s exactly what I’m talking about.”

Gen Z wants to rebel, but its rebellion is entirely a matter of online aesthetics. They reject “millennial cringe” and “stomp clap music,” propounding their own allegedly edgier aesthetic. Some have compared this to Gen X reacting against the Baby Boomers, to punk rock reacting against the hippies. But, given their agoraphobia and preference for marijuana over alcohol, Zoomers tend not to go out and socialize, which stops anything with the Dionysian energy of original punk rock (or 50s rock n’ roll or 60s garage rock or 90s grunge) from ever taking shape. They’re left to LARP and cosplay online, adopting the costumes of prior generations and prior subcultures without finding an authentic cultural relation of their own. They are, as Shelley described the moon, “ever changing like a joyless eye / That finds no object worth its constancy.”

Sometimes, I wonder if this will ultimately result in a state of cultural affairs in which fresh artistic creation stops entirely. Unable to have a satisfactory relationship to the past from which we can create our own art, we’ll end up settling for reviewing the archive of all prior creative events. This would resemble the world of Castalia in Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, in which a future society contents itself with playing a game that synthesizes cultural knowledge, but without creating any new art of its own. This would be, culturally speaking, the “end of history.” But to those who think that the end of history would be ultimately pleasant, our current experiences suggest that it would be more like being trapped in a senile brain. (The discontinuous quality of life online has a close relationship to the drifting and discontinuous nature of senile thoughts).

Cormac McCarthy once said something disconcerting and prophetic in an interview:

“I don’t know what of our culture is going to survive, or if we survive. If you look at the Greek plays, they’re really good. And there’s just a handful of them. Well, how good would they be if there were 2,500 of them? But that’s the future looking back at us. Anything you can think of, there’s going to be millions of them. Just the sheer number of things will devalue them. I don’t care whether it’s art, literature, poetry or drama, whatever. The sheer volume of it will wash it out. I mean, if you had thousands of Greek plays to read, would they be that good? I don’t think so.”

McCarthy makes a strong point. The internet functions to preserve everything, and it’s easy to get lost in that great, gray sea. The problem of selection, of where to put your attention, is increasingly grave and increasingly intractable. The mind cannot find a definite port-of-call in this endlessly heaving, endlessly shifting reality. Curating vibes isn’t enough.

Poets have sometimes fantasized about total cultural destruction—something like the burning of the Library of Alexandria—to escape the sense that everything has already been done, has already been written. I wouldn’t go that far, since everything I love is part of the past. Maybe some brave artist can find a route back to the Original Magnet—a route that would presumably lie through the great works of the past, since the past is where we all start to feel magnetism acting on us. In any case, something needs to give. The links of the chain need to re-connect.

In 1997, before social media, before the dreaded, Molochian Algorithm, before any of the infrastructure that now governs online life, a computer scientist named Mark Pesce wrote a short, dense essay called “Ritual and the Virtual.” His argument was this: the only adequate way of understanding what the Internet does to human consciousness is magic.

Pesce’s claim is that every time human communication undergoes a radical acceleration (the birth of language, the alphabet, printing press, the invention of the telegraph, the emergence of the web), consciousness is overwhelmed, and responds by creating mythology and imaginative interiority. The Internet is the most extreme instance of this. And because the Internet makes reality fluid, multiple, and responsive to speech and intention, it produces a condition where language stops describing the world and starts creating it.

In that condition, Pesce argues, the only possible ontology of cyberspace is magical: reality as that which is invoked, the world conformant to will. (Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law; reality is what you can get away with; so on and so forth.)

Pesce predicted all of this before Google, before platforms, before LLMs, before anyone was talking about meme magic or hyperstition or egregores or Nick Land became a household name (among e-intellectuals, I’m not delusional, I promise). He was writing about Mosaic-era browsers and already describing the world we live in now. So naturally, you can see why I had to share this with you all!

In the Beginning was the Word. John I:1

AND THE WORD WAS GOD

Singular among the sciences, cyberspace has ever been a tree planted firmly in the rich soils of human mythology. The three authors who defined this field, Vernor Vinge (True Names, 1978), William Gibson (Neuromancer, 1984, Count Zero, 1986, Mona Lisa Overdrive, 1988), and Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash, 1992), relied exclusively upon a mythological foundation to describe the incomprehensible complexities of computer networks. This is hardly coincidental; in fact, it echoes a pattern as old as human consciousness.

The birth of language in the Paleolithic era - simultaneous with and incontestably linked to the birth of consciousness - created stresses upon the human organism which had never before been encountered. This speed-up, an exteriorization of thought which placed the internal self into the minds of the community of the newly conscious, led directly to an ingression of imagination; simulation begins as mythology.

In the Neotheric era, in which Faraday’s discoveries have deterritorialized language, the ends of simulation produce new languages - for are protocols not new tongues? - and a new speed-up stress. Simulation approaches a new ingression; collective imagination electrified becomes mythology. The precedent of the Paleolithic has left in its wake a morphogenetic field of consciousness; and so, as we sweep into a new aeon of communication, we find ourselves confronted with our most ancient imaginings, closing the loop of ontology in an arc of teleology which reaches its full circle in the span from the emergence of Logos to its electric transfiguration.

CONSCIOUSNESS PREFIGURED

Man before the word was not human. To think, to reflect, requires a conception of figure and ground, the linguistic apprehension of objects, of difference, of transitivity. Whatever we may make of the proto-hominids who passed before the emergence of linguistic consciousness, we must cast them into the pit which separates the unconscious ontology of the “lower” animals from conscious being of man. The use of our word “dumb” to describe those without speech remains a shorthand for the contempt in which we hold our prelapsarian condition.

The consciousness of the animal - insofar as we might come to understand that which may not be understood - can be characterized as unmediated, direct, and bound to the objects of perception; unlike the philosophical gulf which divides the human self from the other under observation, animal consciousness regards the seer and the seen as one. It has not come to the consciousness which separates this from that.

Information flow through the unconscious organism is episodic and driven by external stimuli. The primary attitude of the unconscious is indifference; things become worthy of attention when they change - presenting either a danger or an opportunity. The perception of events is entirely discontinuous, lacking the narrative which creates causality, the internal story-telling that reifies expectation into world-view. This had been the story of nature from the emergency of life; information flow across the boundaries of organism concerned itself only with the maintenance of the coherence of the organism.

CONSCIOUSNESS TRANSFIGURED

No one can tell us how language began. As William Irwin Thomson writes in The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light:

“When we try to ask unanswerable questions like ‘how did language evolve?’, we come to the limits of knowing, but not to the limits of being. That shoreline where the island of knowing meets the unfathomable sea of our own being is the landscape of myth. When we come to an edge we have to shift our mode of thought, say from rational analysis to intuitive mediation.”

The paleoanthropologist posits that brain size alone set the stage for the emergence of language, that as genus Homo appeared on the scene, his enhanced cranial capacity was reason enough for language to begin. But recently we have seen a mass of evidence which indicates that even highly hydrocephalic individuals, who possess less than ten percent of a normal human’s brain tissue, function completely normally in all linguistic tasks. Brain size alone can not be the determining factor.

The evolutionary biologist sees language as an effective mechanism for improving the selection fitness of hominids so endowed, dramatically increasing their chances of passing the characteristics of consciousness to their offspring. However accurate, this scientistic reasoning fails to address the genesis question. Thomson again:

“The problem is that we can see many ways in which language might take off, once it was started, but we cannot see how it could get started in the first place. All our theories about the origins of language are really nothing more than descriptions of how language would be of use once it was there. Darwinian notions that language would help fit the survivors for survival explain nothing, since we have evidence of species surviving in the same ecological niche without the help of language.”

The mythologist credits language as the gift of the divine; the Jewish Apocrypha credit the Creator as granting to Adam the gift of speech, beginning with a power to name the animals. In this investiture, Thomson shows how the linguistically adept human rises above the angelic:

“According to the midrashim, when God made Adam, He asked the angels to bow down and honor His latest creation. One of the highest archangels, Samael or Satan, refused by saying, ‘You created us from the splendor of your Glory. Shall we then adore a being formed from dust?’ God answered that although Adam had been made from dust he surpassed Samael in wisdom and understanding. Incensed at this slight, Samael insisted that God test him against Adam. God accepted Samael’s offer, and said that, since He had created beasts, birds, and creeping things, Samael should go down, set them all in a line, and name them as He would have them named...When the animals passed before Samael, however, he could say nothing. ‘God then planted understanding in Adam’s heart and spoke in such a manner that the first letter of each question pointed to the beast’s name.’ And so Adam was able to take God’s hint and name the creature.”

To name a thing is to know it; in this we recognize language as the foundation of consciousness. To know the name of a thing is to have dominion over it. Verbal consciousness unleashes a force which separates man from the animals; the internal division between self and other becomes reinforced in repeated communication with other humans. If we can not know how language came to be - or even say that it is entirely reasonable to attribute it to divine intervention - we can clearly intuit two first-order structural couplings consequent to it: the birth of the internal narrative of continuity, which is the song of consciousness; and the birth of culture in the shared expression of that narrative.

Researches into cognitive psychology show that most conscious “experience” is the performance of memory; sensation plays the role of trigger - as Proust pretended in The Remembrance of Things Past - but experience is nearly always the containment of perception within memory. The conscious “self” plays the part of architect of continuity, taking the phenomena of sensation and building a story around them - a story nearly always consonant with expectation, belief, and memory. This structural coupling of the self qua the self produces the internal narrative, the sense of being in time.

Verbal consciousness has two faces, and the internal narrative is met and reified in its shared expression; to talk is to talk to. The explosion of conscious internal life is met and countered in the lives of others; from this chaostrophe a fundamental and eternal confusion begins, the experience of the self becomes indistinguishable from the experience of other selves. All knowing is bound together by narrative, the carrier wave for a new kind of experience, epiphenomenal to perception.

In the reverberation following the birth of language, narrative and culture emerge. Perception extends to include the whole of culture as a single organism, coupled into community through the self-reinforcing exchanges of narrative, placing an explosive pressure on individual perception, rendering it subservient to a heretofore unknown collective intelligence. The flow of information through the organism is no longer constrained by the exigencies of the individual, unconscious animal; instead, the entire community functions as one, hears as one, and knows as one. Moreover, it knows that it knows, both individually and collectively.

Marshall McLuhan, in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, proposed that all mediations extend an innate capability while simultaneously subjecting it to an amputation. To operate an automobile, the natural locomotive function of the legs is abandoned and replaced with a control (cybernetic) interface; language extends the domain of perception throughout the entire human community, but only because the immediacy of perception has been abandoned. The event-driven flow of unconscious perception, replaced with a growing volume of mediated representations - the shared memories and experiences of community - overwhelmed the innate ontology of the earliest humans, pushing inward, to create the expanses of imagination, and outward, into its shared expression as mythology.

These innovations are entirely conservative; under stress from the speed-up in communication brought about by the birth of language, the individual retreats into a new, internal world, both singular in imagination, and shared as mythology. Mythology allowed early humans to mediate the assault of shared perception; the richness of mythology - even in its earliest visible forms - represents the echo of the incredible stresses unleashed by the birth of human speech.

Forms tend to echo the forms that have preceded them; this theory of formative causation posits that once a form has come into being, it becomes much easier for similar forms to emerge. The transformation of speed-up stress into an imaginal and mythological space therefore created a precedent, a path which all successive speed-ups would tread.

CONSCIOUSNESS UNBOUND

When Samuel Morse translated Michael Faraday’s studies in electromagnetic phenomena into a mechanism for instantaneous communication, human linguistic consciousness began an inevitable and accelerating process of deterritorialization. The tongue, unbound, could speak into a multitude of ears; the ear, unbound, could listen to a multitude of tongues. Family, tribe and nation vanished before the ultimate speed-up - to quote Virilio, “Speed equals light.” A new language of pattern, beginning with the Morse Code, passing through the grooves of the phonograph, the successive images of the motion picture, the amplitude modulations of radio and the mosaic-composite of television, culminates in a singularity of bricolage, the meta-mediation of the World Wide Web.

As impossible as it is for us to imagine the ontology of the pre-electric world, it rapidly becomes impossible to imagine being in a pre-Web world - even if we have spent most of our lives there. Increasingly, our experience has become conditioned by and coupled to the world created within the Web; the more we refer to it, the more we tend to refer to it, in a loop of reinforcement which marks the Web as unique among electronic media: it expresses the ontology of the irresistibly seductive, and we all desire it, or have desires in relation to it.

Despite the nearness and singular nature of the event, we can not even begin to guess why the Web emerged, and why it caught hold in such an absolute way, instantaneously transforming every medium which had proceeded it (all of which are now viewed as subservient to it). The explosive transfiguration of the sphere of human communication did not begin with Berners-Lee’s first experiments in 1989; in fact, the Web grew negligibly for almost five years. But when Berners-Lee’s seed encountered the fertile imagination of Marc Andreesen - who had been heavily influenced by William Gibson - the Web acquired both an internal language (HTTP) and an external form (HTML). The unification of connectivity and interface, figuring as internal and external languages, led to the exponentially increasing structural coupling that occurred simultaneously and ubiquitously across a still-tiny Internet. It was as if the entire Internet, as a whole, simultaneously decided that the Web should be; then, it was as if the entire world, as a whole, simultaneously identified the Web as cyberspace.

The Web has created a new kind of interiority and a new exteriority; a foundation of shared factuality forms the nascent basis of a unified human knowledge. It is not so much that this base represents the final truth as that it represents the de facto truth, and - within a generation - it will be seen as the only truth. Conversely, this new exteriority presents an inherent multiplicity, both of factuality and personality; we are no longer of one voice, but all voices, and these voices need not agree, but can remain dissonant, subjective, and fragmentary. The unification of artificial intelligences Wintermute and Neuromancer breaks apart into the anarchic loa of Voudon; the singular voice of Enki is shattered by the Nam-Shub: these Neotheric myths reverse Babel, and find their completion in the chaotic. It is not that nothing is true, but rather, that everything is permissible.

Possibility unbounded by expectation reverses the current of narrative; to be anyone, anywhere, at any time requires that the self become self-less, possessing at one moment the dispassionate attitude of a Buddha, and, in the next, all the attachments of a being hypnotized by the play of Maya. This implies that the next state of genus Homo is as much beyond our own understanding as we are beyond the preconscious strivings of the proto-humans, but if Turkle’s insights about the ontological similarities between Multiple Personality Disorders and on-line role-playing prove to be more than coincidence, then we can already see the knife-edge which separates us from our post-historical descendants.

The question, “What hath God wrought?”, can only be answered in a language that we do not yet know how to speak. No one knows how long it took language to spread across the Earth; whether it happened in a million years, or a thousand, or inside an afternoon. Neither do we know how to measure the interval between the pre- and post-historical hominids. At the end of this interregnum, we watch as the deep transformations of seductive couplings sweep across the face of consciousness, but, as we are both seduced and seducer, it is difficult to apprehend the scope of its effect. But within a few years we will be utterly unrecognizable to ourselves in this present moment.

RITUAL AND THE VIRTUAL

The deterritorialization of the self is the essential feature that marks human entry into cyberspace. In the universe of infinite connection and possibility the only possible ontology is magical; reality as that which is invoked, the world conformant to will. The techniques of magical will, quintessentially linguistic, require a conscious mastery of the relationship between word and world. At the end of history comes the Word.

Ritual is the communication in a mythic tongue, the expression of a universe of experience, compressed into an economy of symbols overloaded into archetype. Ritual is the performance of myth that binds (religare) the individual and the specific to the universal and archetypal. Ritual is the bridge between the ego and the post-historical self.

The speed-up stresses of cyberspace, unleashed on the island self, force being to seek shelter in the enduring forms of myth; neither one nor another, but this and that, choosing milieu over destination, multiplicity over deterritoriality, and subjectivity over factuality.

The gate between the historical self and post-historical post-humanity, the passage between a particular island of factuality and the absolute subjective, is ritual. Now we enter our closets and bend ourselves to the dictates of fashion and gender, language and culture. Soon, we cast magic circles in sacred groves, speak the Word, and bend the World to our ends. The ego can not survive this burst of power, any more than the animal survived the flash of consciousness; what follows us we can now hear, but we can not speak of it.

Mark Pesce
London & Caer Leon, Wales
July 1997

STRAY LINKS & THOUGHTS

• I watched two strange animations on Friday night and together, they throttled me into an existential crisis. Sometimes, I become too aware that I’m human, like when you become too aware of your own tongue or breathing or something. They were Malice@Doll and Scream Theater.

• I’ve begun using Claude to create “graduate-level seminars” on different topics. It’s not perfect, but it’s a surprisingly (or not surprisingly) good way to fall down a rabbit hole. So far, I’ve done The Cyber-Occult and Satanism. It generates full lectures, reading lists, supplemental material — a lot better than typing in “X TOPIC + CLASS” on Google or YouTube.

• Friend of the ‘Stack just published a book called Planetary Theurgy. It’s the best publicly available occult practice book I’ve read in a while. Ordinarily, this is the type of instruction you can only get from a coven or mentor. It reminded me quite a bit of my time in a Wiccan coven (even though Georgina is a Thelemite, I recommend it to my Wiccan readers — I think you’ll get a lot out of it).

• Happy Sunday! I’m doing a lot better health-wise, though slowly, begrudgingly accepting I’m on “modified bed rest” until these babies come. The call-in show will be back on Thursday at our usual time.

• Oh, and don’t forget to use this coupon so I can feel good about myself:

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I promised myself that I wouldn’t do this but it’s killing me.

Predicting trends is one of my talents, as up my own ass as that sounds. My hit rate is high. There’s no formula, really — it’s just one of those things where you know it when you see it and I tend to know it. But I’m like a broke psychic, I can’t seem to get any of that luck to rub off on myself.

Anyway, naturally, I’ve been kicking myself every single day for fumbling an interview with Clavicular — well before he blew up. He was willing to talk! We took it to email! And then I was the flake, he got huge, and now, I, too, am just a random jester trying to clout vampire him. Trust your gut, folks, or you may live to regret it.

More on him below. But first:

WAS JEFFREY EPSTEIN SATANIC?

This past week, I’ve been doing a deep dive into Satanism in all its manifestations.

When people call the “elites” Satanic — Epstein being the most salient example here — what they actually mean is something closer to Kabbalah, Hermeticism, Freemasonry, or some combination of all three. Not Satanism, which is a phenomenon recent of the 20th century1, but some version of hidden esoteric knowledge that justifies their power and their appetite for more of it.

First of all, none of those traditions are “Satanic,” and none of them involve eating or raping children or whatever else people have convinced themselves is happening. (They’re not Frankists, either, by the way, don’t try me, conspiratards!) Western esotericism has a long, well-documented history, and the conspiracy version bears no resemblance to it. That said, I don’t think elites are secretly practicing occultism, either.

This might seem like a pedantic point given that disclaimer, but actual Satanism — the real thing, not the conspiracy theory — skews far more downmarket than people assume.

The most dangerous Satanic-adjacent network operating today won’t be found in Silicon Valley, Manhattan, or on a private island. It’s on Discord and Roblox. You can read more about it on my friend Bx’s Substack, here.

None of this is to let Epstein and co. off the hook. I’m not much of an Epstein apologist and I definitely believe the ultra-wealthy have the potential to be up to some devious things, not limited to coordinated sexual assault and, uh, “Dubai chocolate.”

I just don’t think it has anything to do with the occult or Satan. At least, not explicitly.

THE SCRAMBLE TO REDEFINE WOKENESS

A cluster of recent essays have each tried to name the next phase of woke politics, and each one has arrived at a different answer. Valerie Stivers gave us “Woke 2.0.” Luke Winkie published an explainer on “Dark Woke.” Kat Rosenfield diagnosed “Disneyfied” protest culture. They don’t agree on what the new thing is, only that the rebrand has arrived.

If there’s a story here, and my instinct is there isn’t, it’s the definitional scramble itself. The interesting question isn’t what woke has become (or, indeed, if it’s become anything at all).

It’s why so many people need it to have become something new, and why naming the new thing has become a cottage industry in its own right. There’s a reason these pieces keep getting written: the writer who successfully names the moment gets to be the person who saw it first (and might even land a book deal out of it). That incentive is doing as much work as any of the analysis.

Let’s start with Stivers, whose UnHerd piece makes the strongest case. She argues that the anti-ICE protests represent a purified evolution of the #Resistance, one that has shed the yard signs, the gender theory, the anti-racism consciousness raising. What remains is “militant action” and “individual, atomized, and newly dangerous” rage2: protesters blocking ICE, doxxing agents, sending death threats. Her sharpest observation is about the movement’s martyrs.

The faces of the movement are Renee Good and Alex Pretti rather than any of the 32 people who reportedly died in ICE custody in 2025, which she reads as confirmation that woke-ism was always a vehicle for the professional class to feel good about itself.

The central claim, though, that this is “more vicious” than 2020, doesn’t survive contact with anyone who was present at the 2020 protests, which famously included arson and looting. I myself witnessed people destroy a community theater, and to this day, I wonder what the hell that was about.

Protests aside, though, among the biggest complaints people had with “Woke 1.0” — even before the 2020 crescendo — was just how personal and searing it was. There was a, I think justified, sense that we were living in a political correctness panopticon that offered no pathway for redemption, hence the eventual advice to “never explain and never apologize to the cancellation mob.” It was precisely this viciousness that created the media ecosystem both Stivers and I have made nice careers writing in.

So if this “new” version is defined by personal viciousness, what exactly changed?

Then there’s Winkie’s “Dark Woke” piece, which describes a social covenant allowing liberals to be cruel to conservatives. Being mean to your political opponents is not new, though to be fair to Winkie, I know what he means. He’s not just talking about being mean. It’s a special kind of Millennial-flavored cruelty, the balls to finally just call someone a big fat retard, no throat-clearing required.

Still, calling it “Dark Woke” doesn’t make it meaningfully different from the Dirtbag Left of a decade ago. At least, not to my mind.

Rosenfield’s Free Press essay, “Minneapolis Isn’t a Movie,” argues that anti-ICE demonstrators have wandered into real danger because they understand political conflict as spectacle, a movie they can star in without consequences. The key evidence is Rebecca Good’s scream after her wife was shot: “Why did you have real bullets?” Rosenfield reads this as proof of delusion, that the Goods thought they were in a movie. But as Rayne Fisher-Quann put it in her critique of this piece (which, I should say here, I thought was too scathing — I don’t share her dislike of Rosenfield, who I read, respect and count among my friends), anyone familiar with the well-documented use of rubber bullets and other less-lethal alternatives in crowd control, a practice with an extensively reported history in Minneapolis specifically, would recognize this as a desperate question about why live rounds were used instead.

I think the Stivers and Rosenfield pieces share a methodology problem. They’re building theories from social media clips. It reads as though Stivers constructs her case almost entirely from the same screen-mediated material she accuses the protesters of being consumed by. Rosenfield mistakes a woman’s anguish for naïveté because she is, presumably, unfamiliar with the realities of protest culture.

But where I diverge from a critic like Fisher-Quann is that I don’t think these are personal failings of either writer. That’s just the nature of reporting these days — and that’s not handwaving, either. We have to consider that both women are making a living from their writing.

Writers are working on tight turnaround times, often hours and not days, and don't have the option of in-depth reporting for their 800-to-1,200-word op-eds. Especially freelancers.

It's not even the publications’ fault, really (though, for obvious reasons, I’m certainly more amenable to that argument than the alternative). It's the nature of an industry we all know is shrinking. There’s neither the time — the public's attention span is short — nor the money to send somebody like Rosenfield out to Minneapolis if she's not explicitly doing investigative reporting, a genre that is rare even at the best-funded publications. To turn the critical eye to Fisher-Quann for a moment, whose piece I enjoyed and thought made several important points: her critique would land harder if it accounted for the fact that most writers in this space simply don't have the luxury of time or resources for the kind of reporting she's implicitly demanding. In a just world, we would absolutely have it. We don't live in a just world, though, and you can’t hold individual writers responsible for the economics of the industry3.

At any rate, I do think the scramble to name is worth interrogating. None of this means nothing is changing – I’ve written about similar changes myself. But a lot of it is branding work, and it’s not always usefully deployed.

There is no Woke 2.0 – yet. There are, however, people who need there to be one.

GRINDR → TINDER

Looksmaxxing feels like rebranded gay culture, and the community itself will tell you as much. A Looksmax.org thread titled “looksmaxing is gay” argued the entire movement descended from gay culture in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and that even Tinder was a spinoff of gay dating apps (which is obviously true, I remember when my gay friends had Grindr and all I had OkCupid). Both communities landed on the same toolkit independently: meth, SARMs, grey-market peptides, anabolic steroids.

But I don’t think straight men are borrowing from gay men. I think gay culture got there first because it was already operating on different rules from the mostly reproductively-oriented heterosexual world. Centuries underground, no default script for family formation, no reproductive telos baked into the relationship structure, no real institutional scaffolding until very recently. Gay men — particularly gay men in the United States — were the first men who had to operate as pure individuals on the sexual market, evaluated by other men, optimizing for other men’s standards. The body dysmorphia, the chemical escalation, the frictionless ranking systems: these are what happen when male sexuality encounters itself with no mediating structure.

What contemporary life — the Sexual Revolution4, capitalism, the Internet — has done is extend those conditions not only to straight men, but to everyone. The PSL forums and rating threads put them in the same position: evaluated by other men, according to male standards. In gay hookup culture, the optimization cycle has a clear sexual outlet. In straight looksmaxxing, what you get is nominally heterosexual men reproducing the non-reproductive logic of a culture that was never oriented toward reproduction in the first place, not because they copied it, but because they arrived at the same conditions under different circumstances.

As I wrote last year, looksmaxxing is what our society already encourages: endless self-optimization toward nothing, a life of becoming. The Human Potential Movement promised that everyone could be more. What we live with now is the hangover, the conviction that we must be. What looksmaxxing offers is potential itself as a terminal condition, becoming that never arrives, a body always in progress and never in use. In gay culture, the circuit party eventually ends. In straight looksmaxxing, you just die, I guess?

THE LOOKSMAXXERS WHO FAIL

The most alarming frontier of looksmaxxing is the people who fail — that’s actually how I first encountered Clavicular, an account that tracked such cases.

DIY cosmetic modification (including HRT and biohacking) has been widespread, so it’s possible that the whole looksmaxxing thing is unremarkable in that way. But still, I think it’s well-worth remembering that for every person who can afford to get work done professionally, there are dozens more doing it at home. The at-home fillers community skews toward women motivated by cost. The black-market butt injection scene, which has killed people for decades, draws heavily from Black and Latina women priced out of legitimate surgery. Practitioners in these cases have injected patients with cement, tire sealant, bathroom caulk, hardware-store silicone. The through line is always the same: people who can’t afford the professional version doing it themselves.

On looksmaxxing forums, the horror is more methodical, though. It’s not that injecting tire sealant into your ass isn’t grotesque, but the attention to detail from looksmaxxers somehow increases the body horror quotient. Take this detailed guide for DIY canthoplasty, self-performed eye surgery using a snapped razor blade:

Or the fixation on the jaw:

If I wasn’t such a coward, I gotta be real, this would be me. I want DJS, too, goddammit!

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INDIAN LOOKSMAXXERS

I stumbled across this interesting piece about Indian looksmaxxing in The Juggernaut. Unfortunately, it’s paywalled, so I haven’t had the opportunity to read it yet. But it’s not a surprise that Indian men are invested in this community, especially after seeing how Indian-American men talk about themselves.

When I was writing about transracialism last year, I kept seeing posts by South Asian men in private Facebook groups and on Reddit who were trying to “racemaxx.”

Racemaxxing has two conflicting definitions. One means leaning into the race you were born into as an attractiveness strategy, basically playing to type. In practice, this advice is most often given to Black men: lean into what’s already culturally coded as attractive, work with the hand you were dealt, lean into the stereotypes.

The other definition reverses that completely, and is usually the prescription for South Asian men: skin bleaching, colored contacts, legal name changes to hide background, lying about ethnicity on dating profiles, even getting iris implant surgery to change eye color, a procedure that often ends in blindness. The first version says optimize what you are. The second says what you are is the deficit. The desire to be more attractive shades into the desire to be a different person, which shades into the desire to belong to a different race.

I’m curious how this dynamic plays out in India — my guess is, unfortunately, with no fewer skin-lightening products.

Pirate Wires

The People Who Think They Were Born Into the Wrong Race

Every video Donna Briggs posts to her half a million followers on TikTok and Instagram opens the same way: “Hello everyone, it’s Donna Briggs!” she chirps in a saccharine singsong. Her eyes squint, lids burdened by her fake eyelashes. There's something uncanny about her combination of platinum blonde hair, porcelain skin, and painted-on eyebrows. Plus, there's her voice. Donna Briggs — the bubbly, blonde-haired, blue-eyed Karen in Lilly Pulitzer — sounds like a black woman, which is just to say unmistakable rhythm and drawl that’s been stereotyped as black…

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10 months ago · 9 likes · 3 comments · Katherine Dee

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