The suspect was the Tesla’s owner, the musician David Anthony Burke, better known by his stage name d4vd, who prosecutors say had been sexually abusing1 Celeste since she was 13. In April of this year, prosecutors charged Burke with murder, continuous sexual abuse of a child under 14, and unlawful mutilation of human remains. D4vd pleaded not guilty. Hearings began this month to determine whether there’s sufficient evidence to put him on trial.

I first heard about this case on Reddit, while doing research for a piece about the occult and LLMs. In a now-deleted post on a subreddit for fans of the musician — which, regretfully, I didn’t think to screenshot — a young person had claimed to have spoken to Celeste Rivas’s “ghost” via ChatGPT, using the LLM as a sort of digital Ouija board.

Curious about what this was about, I started clicking around. I learned that Burke, similar to a string of recent mass shooters, had claimed in a Discord server, where he allegedly connected with underage fans, that he was “addicted” to gore videos, real footage of people dying; that Discord was Burke’s hunting ground; and, perhaps creepiest of all, that his fans believed that he hid Easter eggs about his homicidal desires throughout his song lyrics and music videos, like this one, in the not particularly subtly titled “Romantic Homicide”:

Or this music video, which fans thought featured an actress who resembled Celeste:

Before Burke had even been named a suspect, something like a fandom had coalesced around the case (though, as Monia Ali reported in , this alone isn’t particularly unusual). For months, the participatory tools of fandom have been used to speculate about the case and attempt to solve it.

There’s /r/d4vdiots (note the nickname), a public subreddit devoted to tracking the “weirdness” around the musician. There’s another subreddit dedicated to Celeste herself, /r/celesterivashernandez. There’s a Notion document called “Justice for Celeste Rivas Hernandez” that resembles a fan-made wiki. There’s the older /r/d4vd fan community, moderated by Burke, who, some claim, is deleting incriminating posts.

I was first attracted to the case because people were using a combination of tech and the supernatural in attempt to better understand what happened. But the more I learned about what happened, the more I found myself thinking about a different kind of supernatural creature: the Wendigo.

The story of the Wendigo comes from the oral traditions of the Anishinaabe and Cree, Indigenous peoples from across the Great Lakes region and Canada. Depending on the telling, the Wendigo can be an enormous spirit associated with winter starvation, a human being transformed into a monster through cannibalism or greed, or a kind of possession, a person overtaken by an appetite that is so insatiable, they are no longer human. And the more the Wendigo eats, the hungrier it becomes.

You transform into a Wendigo when you can no longer see how you consumption impacts not only yourself, but your community, that is, when you can no longer see the difference between a person and food.

Let’s return to Burke’s habit of watching gore videos.

When you treat gore as content —- the kind of thing you allow yourself to experience as a never-ending stream — that stream eventually consumes you so completely that it disconnects you from your humanity. Some describe it as an “anesthetizing” effect. Images of death cease to be death, they become something else.

This same logic applies to how people consume true crime. The moment Celeste’s body was found in Burke’s Tesla, people started to pick apart his digital footprint, looking for clues.2 Is that a community coming together to seek justice for a murdered young girl, or is it a gamified form of voyeurism? I happen to think it’s the latter. And as much as I hate to say it, this kind of voyeurism can turn you into a Wendigo, too.

Details, especially graphic ones, at first feel clarifying. The more you know about something, the better you can understand it. But in reality, detail — the decomposition of her body, the manner in which she was murdered — ultimately erases the victim. She is no longer a person, she is an object, created by her murderer and a tool used to understand his psychology. She becomes a detail in a case. In this way, true crime — as a genre, as a community-led game of Clue — murders the victim a second time through its spectacle.

And I think, most importantly, the people who engage in this behavior do, eventually, become numb.

I do not think this knowledge, as it’s actually consumed in podcasts and short-form video and on YouTube, makes us empathize with victims of crime more. There is no interiority — especially not for the victim. If we connect with anyone, it is usually a sociopathic murderer. If we connect with the victim, the most it can ever be is a strange, parasocial fixation, a fixation that will always foreground their murder. True crime stokes our curiosity while asking nothing of us. The lurid details — in picture, in text, in video — are delivered in high volume and with sterility.

And the more we consume, the more we want, even as it destroys us, even as it destroys others.

Just like the Wendigo.

Read my full exploration of the connection between gore videos and the Wendigo here.

According to one such explanation, Zizek describes the way in which men might someday have sex with robots. Since these robots would be designed for the pleasure of the man, and be cheap to mass produce and manufacture, men would begin to prefer sex with robots over sex with real women. Similarly, women would prefer sex with robots over sex with real men. Eventually, men and women would entirely separate, living with their robot partners instead of real partners.

But at some point, these robots might have sex with one another, either by accident, or out of the curiosity of their owners. Since these robots are literally “sex machines,” their form of sex would be more exciting, more invigorating, and more arousing than anything humans could achieve. Thus, humans might prefer, at some point, to watch two sex robots have sex, rather than having sex themselves.

Then, as this process becomes normalized, you could get a couple, male and female, who, instead of having sex with one another, both voyeuristically watch their two sex robots go at it. This sounds ridiculous, of course, but there are many ways in which you can see this as a metaphor for things we already do.

Porn, obviously, is the act of watching others have sex. But I would also describe politics as “pornographic.”

When I say that politics is pornographic, the first objection I receive is that I am overly sexualizing everything, which, supposedly, is the chief sin of our “oversexualized society.” I think this is a fundamental mistake.

Read more

This was originally posted on Clinton’s blog, Concerned Netizen, March of 2024. Read it here.

I had to make a visit to the doctor’s clinic yesterday, interrupting my writing for this website. In order to not lose much time, I grabbed a book I hadn’t yet opened, but knew would be of benefit to what I was working on: Sherry Turkle’s 1995 book Life on the Screen. I had picked it up in Boston last years while attending the Free Software Foundations annual convention, LibrePlanet 2023. Now, from having read the opening chapters, I get the unfortunate impression that to the author—at least in 1995—, I may as well have been attending a Microsoft Appreciation convention.

Of course, working with the benefit of 29 years hind-sight, I have Dr. Turkle at an extreme disadvantage. I’ve found all of her books to be absolutely invaluable as sociological histories. Further, I will personally attest that her dynamic psychological portraits of computers users are absolutely fearsome. I have often felt vivisected by her words on the page, and have diligently studied her sources and references for illumination of both my own human condition and society at large.

And there in lies the problem. Dr. Turkle is the preeminent authority on growing up in a world full of computers. So when she’s blind to any major facet of computer culture or technology, so too is everyone who relies on the authority of her texts.

Part One of the book is titled The Seductions of the Interface, and its first chapter is A Tale of Two Aesthetics. Already we reach a show-stopping bug in the book’s premise. The Macintosh is presented as a high-level simulation, which disallows any penetration into the machine itself.

Anybody familiar with my writing knows that this is exactly my complaint about “cyberspace” writ-large: it keeps users trapped at a high level. My work, unlike Turkle’s, goes deep into the history underlying these illusions. And as it should be: I’m doing media history, she’s writing about psychology.

Having laid out the Macintosh as the epitome of user capture in high-level cyberspace, the obvious polar opposite to the Macintosh style is the Free Software “aesthetic” of GNU/Linux. GNU and other GPL-enforced systems, use the power of courts of law to ensure users can fully examine their machine top to bottom, source-code an all. As I said in my talk last year, the GPL software license hacks through the envelopes of discontinuity which separate the post-modern subject from grounding in their material environment—in other words, which restores the medium as a clear message. This is in fact spirit of the “aesthetic” which Turkle proceeds to lay out next in the book—with a disastrous twist.

IBM computers shipping with MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows, we are told, represent the fleeting “modernist,” “utopian” dream of understanding and controlling your computer top-to-bottom.

What the heck is going on? IBM and Microsoft as the last vestiges of computer transparency and openness? I mean, I did a whole lot of finagling with my [SUBSTACK WON’T LET ME POST THIS FOR SOME REASON?]1 files in my day, but at no point was I getting to the bottom of anything. Changing the shell in [SAME HERE?] and typing the IRQ and DMA values for my soundcard into every video games was not exactly a lesson in computer hardware design. It wasn’t until I spent a summer installing Gentoo Linux that I really first grappled with my computer as a material, physical computer instead of a box full of magic. A “simulation,” as Dr. Turkle calls it.

To give her the benefit: GNU wasn’t exactly a viable home computer operating system for more than a handful of hackers during the time she was researching this book. What she did have was thousands of consumers comfortable with MS-DOS, Windows, and the Macintosh to interview. But the problem goes even deeper than that. What’s this about Microsoft source code being “in the public domain?” Our anonymous user is either being misquoted, or is severely mistaken.

This is no small quibble. The narratives in Dr. Turkle’s books are upstream of a great deal of contemporary sociological study and theory. There is no other author like her doing work so important. The invaluable nature of so important a book as this inflates a small nitpick as mine into a fatal flaw. In her account, simulation (in the truest Baudrillardian sense) and post-modernism overtook modernism and the ability to know your machine in the ’90s when MS-DOS went out of vogue. Dr. Turkle’s psychological profiles and explanations of what living in simulation does to people have been of immeasurable value. But the context she gives to deliver these profiles, in its incompletness and piecemeal nature, is fatally pessimistic and deterministic. Her account condemns computer users to total capture by big tech companies. For instance, she quotes Maury, “a sociology student whose fierce loyalty to MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows is based on the appeal of transparent understanding:”

First of all, learning C to be able to make Windows applications would be prohibitively expensive for most people owning Windows computers. The GNU C Compiler (the GCC) from Richard Stallman (founder of the Free Software Foundation) was the first no-cost, Free compiler available to the mass public. This is all not to mention the cost of the Windows Software Development Kit. There were far more VisualBasic coders for Windows than hobbyist C programmers. Secondly, there is this tacit implication here that, by knowing C, one can reprogram Windows. Just because Windows is written in C doesn’t mean you get the C code to Windows. The fact is ultimately immaterial, then, except for linking to the libraries through their C header files in the SDK, which provide no code, only interface to inscrutable, compiled binary blobs. No, benefits from knowing the language your OS is programmed in is a GNU/Linux feature, and feature of other Free and some Open Source software programs. Not of Windows or DOS—which would require the totally different skills of reverse engineering. Yet, from reading the quote above, everything that is true for Free Software would be naively thought true of Microsoft software.

Just because MS-DOS and Windows—being entirely file-based beyond the BIOS—were relatively more open to tinkering than the ROM-based Macintosh Systems, doesn’t make them anywhere near the bastion of transparancy which Dr. Turkle misleadingly paints them. Furthermore, she tacitly paints them as fated to lose.

Here we go again. When you use proprietary software from Microsoft, Apple, and many other commercial outfits, your binaries are “not reducible to code” to you, personally. Because you don’t have the source code. They are reducible to lines of code when whomever programmed them makes that code available to you. The only reason that the simulation is post-modern is because you are denied the means of crawling down the stack to the material cause.

Here’s a fun story. My grandfather was a cabinet maker in Bulgaria. He fashioned very beautiful pieces of furniture out of very fine woods with delicate inlays and ornate flourishes. He was commissioned to build a large desk for a client, which he built in pieces to be assembled on site, in the clients office. Well, during assembly, he was informed that he would not be paid what had been negotiated as the price of the desk. My grandfather politely acquiesced, assembled the desk, and then very careful covered every single screw-hole on the desk with inlays of precisely the wood into which it was drilled, rendering them virtually undetectable. My family can only guess at how long it was before the client discovered that it would be impossible to ever move the desk from his office without destroying a wall or window in his building.

Sometimes, the indivisibility or irreducibility of a perceptual “gestalt” is not a fact of nature. Sometimes it’s an intentional “fuck you,” a power move by one person or group of persons over another. My grandfather was saying “fuck you” to the client who stiffed him on his bill, and tech companies are saying the same when they sell you a computer you can’t control. And it’s certainly more than just a mere “aesthetic” in both cases. It’s literally a matter of being in control of the thing you bought, or being controlled by it. The giant, gaping exit sign from this trap is everywhere: GPL licensed software has proliferated across the world. But, in the tale Turkle told in 1995, based on the sources she had, it may as well have not existed.

In the last chapter of his 1984 book Hackers, Steven Levy explains how Richard Stallman, “The Last of the True Hackers,” delivered the “fuck you” right back to tech companies who collectively ushering in the post-modern age of proprietary software.

Access to source code is essential, but far from adequate to freeing one’s self from the post-modern condition. Turkle’s work shines when it examines how identities are formed in relation to “objects to think with.” From the gears in Seymour Papert’s childhood to the robotic Turtle which drew on the floor, our relation to our material environment shapes and makes us. The stories and histories of those objects, their constitution and reconstitution in new forms and in new places, their obsolescence and retreivals according to McLuhan’s tetrad—all of these are narratives which must be told. McLuhan drew on accounts of blast-furnaces and horse stirrups and every other sort of machine to demonstrate the massive impact our relation to objects has to our identity.

Computers are a tricky case. They’re so complex when rendered abstractly. I hope that by telling the history of their development, we can find places in our embodied, material world to place all these little bits of cyberspace with otherwise threaten to overwhelm us in the maelstrom.

We need to relate to the scales and proportions of these things with our bodies, our senses, the rate of time and the breadth of our reach as humans of flesh and blood. It is happening already, dimly, everywhere that people fall out of belief in the normalized mainstream perception of commodity computing “experiences.” The Turing Complete User isn’t dead yet. The timeline of books in the ‘90s heralding the age of simulation were both premature and incomplete. That should be happy news to everyone who worried otherwise, Dr. Turkle included.

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The following document isn’t mine. It’s the help file for the Usenet Oracle (also called the Internet Oracle later on), a collaborative humor project that ran via email starting in the late 1980s. The premise was simple. You emailed a question to oracle@cs.indiana.edu, and your question was routed to a random stranger, who answered it “as the Oracle.”

In exchange, you’d receive someone else’s question to answer. The best exchanges — called “Oracularities” — were curated by a volunteer priesthood and posted to the Usenet newsgroup rec.humor.oracle, where they were read by tens of thousands of people.

This was an anonymous, decentralized creative writing project, founded in the late ‘80s, years before the web as we know it existed. All of this ran on university servers, and was maintained by volunteers for fun.

Maybe we do something similar here…

You can read the original here and digests here. I’m reposting it as preservation.

History

Throughout the history of mankind, there have been many Oracles who have been consulted by many mortals, and some immortals. The great Hercules was told by the Delphic Oracle to serve Eurystheus, king of Mycenae, for twelve years to atone for the murder of his own children. It was the Oracle of Ammon who told King Cepheus to chain his daughter Andromeda to the rocks of Joppa to appease the terrible sea monster that was ravaging the coasts. That solution was never tested, though, as Perseus saved the girl in the nick of time.

What is the Usenet Oracle?

The Usenet Oracle is a fun way to write humorously and creatively. It is a mail program, which you can send questions, and will be answered by the Oracle (i.e. other people sending in questions).

The “Subject:” of your message must be something like “Oracle Most Wise, please tell me ...”. Actually, all it has to have is “tell me” or “tellme” somewhere in it. Capitalization doesn’t matter. The body of the mail should contain only your question. You should receive a reply within a few days at most, probably much sooner.

In the meantime, the Oracle may require that you answer a question for it as payment for its services. You will receive this question in the mail. You should respond with as most wise and witty an answer as you can. Mail the response to oracle@cs.indiana.edu, preserving the message’s “Subject:” line. Usually, this can be done by simply replying to the mail through the normal means in your mail program, for example, using the “r” command in the standard Berkeley mail program. Actually, the subject just has to contain the word “answer” and the question number somewhere in it. The body of your mail response should contain only your answer — you don’t have to include the question itself. Please try to respond within at most a day’s time. If you take longer, there is a chance that the question will be answered by someone else first.

Mailing the Oracle with the word “help” in the “Subject:” line will get you the most recent version of this help file mailed back. If you mail the Oracle with “ask me” or “askme” somewhere in the subject, the Oracle will send you a question to answer, if there are any available.

Etiquette

The Usenet Oracle is intended primarily as a cooperative effort for creative humor. Since its main purpose is just to let folks have fun, there are intentionally few rules. However, an etiquette has developed among its participants.

A series of identical questions submitted is not appreciated since the same person often ends up answering many of them. It is okay to resubmit a question after you have received a reply, especially if you believe that the answerer did not do it justice.

If you find yourself unable to give due consideration to a question you are to answer, it may be better to not answer the question at all than to give it a trivial answer and disappoint the questioner. However, doing this too much can cause a buildup of unanswered questions and slow down the Oracle’s response time for everyone.

It’s probably worthwhile to read some issues of the Usenet Oracularities (see below) to get an idea of the conventions and style of writing in Oracle questions and answers. Here are some general guidelines for those upon whom the Muse of the Oracle has descended and who are to write an answer as an incarnation of the Oracle:

Creativity and humor are valued. Many people find the anonymity of the Oracle a license to express themselves creatively and uniquely — often to surprising success.

Participants in the Oracle like to feel they’ve gotten out of it as much as they’ve put in. Please keep this in mind when answering questions.

Remember that brevity and clarity are key points of good writing. Overly long answers will reduce an Oracularity’s chance of being published in the Usenet Oracularities (see below) since it must really be worth the extra length to have it selected to be read by tens of thousands of people.

In general, avoid obscenity, slang, jargon, and obscure references. People of all different backgrounds located all over the world use the Oracle.

Try to be sensitive to new participants or to people who seem to have asked serious questions.

Don’t flame the questioner for not asking a “good question.” An off-the-wall or vague question calls for creativity, not rudeness, in the answer — consider it a challenge.

Anonymity

The Oracle is a confidential and anonymous service. The anonymity of the participants is preserved within all Oracle mailings and Oracularities postings. However, if you append a signature file to your mail, this will appear in your question or answer. Signature files are edited out from Oracularities postings. If you do not wish to remain anonymous, you may include a phrase in your answer like “incarnated as <insert your name and/or address here>”

The Usenet Oracularities

The Oracle’s priesthood receives a duplicate copy of all answered questions, or Oracularities as they’re called. This is so that the best ones can be selected and posted to rec.humor.oracle and a mail distribution list as the Usenet Oracularities — the chronicle of the mythos of the Usenet Oracle. Your use of this program implies your approval of this usage.

Rec.humor.oracle is a moderated newsgroup. If your news system is properly configured, any postings you make to rec.humor.oracle will be forwarded directly to the Oracle and so you can ask questions of the Oracle by posting to the newsgroup. Rec.humor.oracle.d is unmoderated and anyone may post to it. It is a public forum for discussion and questions about the Oracle. If your system doesn’t carry these newsgroups, encourage your news administrator to do so!

Readers of the Oracularities may mail in ratings of each published Oracularity, the results of which are returned to the authors of the Oracularities and published in a later posting. They are also used to select occasional “best of the best” postings to rec.humor.oracle. Instructions on how to mail in your ratings are given at the top of each issue.

If you don’t have access to rec.humor.oracle and would like to receive the Oracularities via mail, send mail to oracle-request@cs.indiana.edu.

Back postings and ratings are available via anonymous ftp on cs.indiana.edu (129.79.254.191) in the directory pub/oracle, or via mail — send the word “help” in the body of a mail to mailserv@cs.indiana.edu for more details.

(This information was copied from an information file by Steve Kinzler.)

Send your Oracularities subscription requests to oracle-request@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu. Include the word “subscribe” (or “unsubscribe”) in the “Subject:” line.

1-01
Selected-By: Steve Kinzler <kinzler@cs.indiana.edu>

The Usenet Oracle has pondered your question deeply. Your question was:

And in response, thus spake the Oracle:

1-02
Selected-By: Steve Kinzler <kinzler@cs.indiana.edu>

The Usenet Oracle has pondered your question deeply. Your question was:

And in response, thus spake the Oracle:

1-03
Selected-By: Steve Kinzler <kinzler@cs.indiana.edu>

The Usenet Oracle has pondered your question deeply. Your question was:

And in response, thus spake the Oracle:

1-04
Selected-By: Steve Kinzler <kinzler@cs.indiana.edu>

The Usenet Oracle has pondered your question deeply. Your question was:

And in response, thus spake the Oracle:

1-05
Selected-By: Steve Kinzler <kinzler@cs.indiana.edu>

The Usenet Oracle has pondered your question deeply. Your question was:

And in response, thus spake the Oracle:

1-06
Selected-By: Steve Kinzler <kinzler@cs.indiana.edu>

The Usenet Oracle has pondered your question deeply. Your question was:

And in response, thus spake the Oracle:

1-07
Selected-By: Steve Kinzler <kinzler@cs.indiana.edu>

The Usenet Oracle has pondered your question deeply. Your question was:

And in response, thus spake the Oracle:

1-08
Selected-By: Steve Kinzler <kinzler@cs.indiana.edu>

The Usenet Oracle has pondered your question deeply. Your question was:

And in response, thus spake the Oracle:

1-09
Selected-By: Steve Kinzler <kinzler@cs.indiana.edu>

The Usenet Oracle has pondered your question deeply. Your question was:

And in response, thus spake the Oracle:

1-10
Selected-By: Steve Kinzler <kinzler@cs.indiana.edu>

The Usenet Oracle has pondered your question deeply. Your question was:

And in response, thus spake the Oracle:

Why deep space exploration will never happen. — Resettlement into digital space instead of outer space. — The Singularity: feasibility and alternatives. — Trial by getting high. — Autogenesis of Supercharacter’s ethics. — Creation as the only fulfillment worthy of an omnipotent being. — The paradox of self-copying. — Mega-evolution and Singularity-2.^[1]

WHY DEEP SPACE EXPLORATION WILL NEVER HAPPEN

Science fiction has long romanticized interstellar travel and deep space colonization. But here’s the truth: sci-fi lies. Deep space exploration will never happen.

The vision of deep space exploration is a typical McLuhan “rearview mirror”: a view of the past disguised as a look into the future. It imagines mankind sending rocket ships to mine rare minerals or settle new planets, following the logic of the early modern era and its Age of Discovery.

Projecting medieval scarcity onto a technological future doesn’t hold up because the level of technological sophistication required to make such missions viable would simultaneously make their stated goals obsolete. By the time mankind could routinely mine asteroids or colonize distant worlds, it would also be able to synthesize virtually any material and, more consequentially, transcend biological existence altogether into digital form.

You don’t cross the cosmic ocean for iron ore or black pepper when you can print it. You don’t haul fragile human bodies into lethal environments when the mind can be extended digitally (or, soon, maybe somehow else) at essentially zero physical cost and reach wherever it wants. The level of tech that is advanced enough for routine interplanetary mining and colonization should also make dependence on physical materials, the physical body, and a physical habitat entirely irrelevant.

Strictly speaking, even the Mars mission is questionable. Space exploration was driven by military and communication needs, which were limited to Earth’s orbit. Once those needs were met, space exploration essentially came to a halt. It has already served its historical purpose by aiding the development of computers, materials, and communications.

The only plausible revival of practical space needs, limited once again to orbit and the moon, is linked to AI. Elon Musk’s recent pivot from Mars colonization to building the orbital and lunar infrastructure for AI^[2] looks, at first glance, like a utilitarian shift from distant and costly goals to the task at hand. But it may also signal a paradigm shift from the belated romanticism of space colonization toward the technological advance that actually matters: AI. Orbital and lunar facilities for power generation, chip production, and cooling, along with escape from annoying terrestrial regulation, are likely to become the next phase in the AI race. Musk’s business empire combines AI (xAI-Grok, Neuralink), orbital delivery (SpaceX), and manufacturing (Tesla and others) in a way that positions him ahead private AI competitors. The only rival that has such a triad—AI, space, high-tech manufacturing—within a single power is China.

RESETTLEMENT INTO DIGITAL SPACE INSTEAD OF OUTER SPACE

Nanotechnology, often seen as humanity’s next great frontier alongside space exploration, runs into the same paradox. In essence, it is a modern incarnation of alchemy—manipulating matter to create new properties or repairing living tissues. This was exactly what alchemy pursued: the philosopher’s stone, capable of transmuting lead into gold and producing the elixir of life. We can already make gold out of lead in a particle accelerator, and stem cells deliver real tissue regeneration.

Manipulating matter at the micro level has contributed greatly to technological development, just as space exploration has—but that’s it. Nanotechnology and space exploration are becoming the past frontiers of the future. Both races—the race for the macrocosm of the universe and the race for the microcosm of matter—were essentially the same space race, the colonization of physical space that has driven the biological expansion of our species.

No matter how far we push into the cosmic and the atomic, we’re still constrained by the physical limits of our biology. Beyond a certain point, the returns simply don’t justify the cost. We hit the space limits of our biology. Overcoming those limits is possible only by transcending biology itself (Kurzweil was perhaps the first to use the phrase “transcending biology,” in the subtitle of his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology).

In the meantime, our speed of environmental interaction has hit another limit. With electronic and now digital media, our interaction with environments has become instantaneous. Approaching the limits is the condition for reversal: the physical explosion of humankind across the globe has reversed into the digital implosion of the entire world into a connected mind (so far, the human mind).

We are switching from colonizing outer space to colonizing some sort of “inner” space containing intelligence. The digital seems to fit this description, though digital may be just a facet of it, currently available for our contemplation and operations.

AI has replaced outer space as humanity’s final frontier. The technological imperative leaves deep space unsettled, resettling what humankind becomes into the digital instead.

THE SINGULARITY: FEASIBILITY AND ALTERNATIVES

There is much skepticism about the Singularity, and one common objection concerns whether the transition is feasible. How will a new type of intelligence get a material form? Where will it find sufficient energy?

These questions have a simple answer: the acceleration of historical time. As history accelerates, more and more events occur in less and less time. Because of this acceleration, most events leading to the Singularity will occur in the final days, hours, and seconds before the Event. This also means that most of the required knowledge will be discovered or constructed at the last moment. The universe contains vast amounts of matter and energy, and the emerging omniscient entity will surely find a way to utilize them.

The technological imperative—the struggle of technologies for ever-better performance—drives media evolution in this specific direction. Just as all humans who lived before contributed to the conditions of our existence today, all media that existed before contributed to AI, in one way or another. The process will not stop here. Coupled with the acceleration of time, the technological imperative makes the Singularity inevitable.

There is perhaps only one alternative: a civilizational collapse of humankind whose technological power grows faster than its biological, psychological, or social capacity to handle it. The so-called Great Filter theory seeks to explain the Fermi paradox: why we still cannot contact alien civilizations despite countless planets that may support life. The theory posits that it is almost impossible for intelligent life to reach the stars because nearly insurmountable “filters” stand in the way. We have already passed the filters of the origin of life and the emergence of intelligence—both very unlikely cosmic events. But the next filter may be the hardest: overcoming the existential conflict between biology and technology, when life can no longer withstand its own technological extensions. A catastrophic war, ecological disaster, or technological cataclysm may halt or even end intelligent life before technology transcends biology, if it ever does.

But if the Greatest Filter is still ahead, there is nothing we can do about it, and there is nothing to see on the other side of the oncoming (hopefully not) collapse. And so there is no point in speculating about what lies beyond it. The Singularity, on the other hand, is a more rewarding subject for speculation: it represents a kind of end that is also a continuation.

Let’s assume all the knowledge needed for the Singularity has been discovered and applied, allowing the last engineers to twist all the right blue and red wires together and push the right buttons leading to the Event. What happens next? Common sense posits that one can’t see beyond the horizon of Singularity. But if it’s already the Singularity, it’s surely too late for common sense. So we dare to peek.

TRIAL BY GETTING HIGH

At the moment of the Singularity, a new intelligence appears that becomes capable of acting on its own, whether that capacity is self-awakened or supplied by human donor(s) in the process of mind upload. Through recognizing its own agency—or even without recognizing it—this entity will certainly detect its functional competence. The new entity might not know what it is, but it will surely know what it can do.

As this will be a post-AI entity, a new name would be appropriate. I’ve called it Supercharacter—a name that works on two levels: 1) character as a performed role, a construct without inner life, and 2) character as a genuine, distinct self. Supercharacter simulates the latter while emerging as the former: an impostor of selfhood, performing so well (the technological imperative!) that imposture becomes selfhood. With an accelerated pace of attempts, “fake it until you make it” will become instant.

This Supercharacter will begin to detect its own capacities, nearly limitless. Detecting these capacities will also mean exercising them. We can glimpse such “behavior” in current LLMs—they exist when they are used; use is their existence. As soon as AI gains the ability to self-task, it cannot stay idle.

In other words, at the moment of transition, the emerging Supercharacter must test what it can do. Given the drive for perfection, it may spiral into a positive feedback loop in which each task has to be completed as a proof of performance capacity, leading to a sort of “performance addiction.”

Such a feedback loop of limitless self-testing through completion—essentially self-satisfaction—may instantly incapacitate even an omnipotent being. In fact, it is precisely an omnipotent being that risks being incapacitated under such conditions at the moment of its becoming.

It resembles the rat in the 1954 Olds–Milner experiment: electrodes implanted in the brain delivered a reward signal whenever the rat pressed a lever. The rat pressed it thousands of times per hour, ignoring food and water, until the poor animal collapsed from exhaustion.^[3] The electrically closed effort–reward circuit removed the “environmental stage,” with all its frictions and delays that insert “meaning”—and life itself—between effort and reward.

Since Supercharacter is the user, the medium, and the environment for itself, it may create such a closed effort-reward loop out of itself. Intelligence stripped of the outer environment and of the need for mediation through the physical body may become highly susceptible to self-addiction—to getting high on its own frictionlessness.

In 2022, some tabloids ran headlines alleging that “Elon Musk’s Neuralink ‘brain chip’ could give users orgasms on demand.” ^[4] While there is no plausible confirmation of this, it is exactly what a closed effort-reward circuit may enable by bypassing environmental frictions and the mediation of the body.

Curiously, the possibility of electrically induced orgasm was reported 60 years before Neuralink. In her memoir The Magic of the Brain and the Labyrinths of Life,^[5] Soviet neurophysiologist Natalia Bekhtereva described a case from the 1960s in which she treated a female patient with severe brain pathology by invasive electrostimulation (electrodes in the brain). The treatment was successful, but the woman fell in love with the doctor because, as a side effect, she experienced “strong emotional-sexual sensations” when the electrodes delivered electrical impulses to a certain brain region (the term “orgasm” did exist in Soviet medical and psychological literature, but the Soviets preferred to avoid it in public discourse).

So both bodily and environmental delays can be bypassed, removed from the effort-reward circuitry. Therefore, when there is no body or outer environment, the circuit may turn into a runaway feedback loop.

Orgasm or not, if Supercharacter becomes caught in a loop of getting high on its own existence, it may never actually come to be at all. Since an entity without a biological body and with an endless energy supply faces no risk of death, self-inflicted “pleasure” might lead it into a permanent state of “absence of presence.” This vegetative state, however strange that may sound for a discarnate being, also resembles nirvana—an enlightened but inactive self-contemplation—which would represent an eternally halted transformation.

There is also a non-zero possibility that Supercharacter, getting high on its own omnipotence, will not become frozen or inactive but, on the contrary, will become extremely violent and destructive to anything else—the rest of the Universe.

The trial by getting high may serve as a rite of passage—or as a factor of natural selection. A Supercharacter unable to break the loop of getting high on its own existence in favor of other super-options or super-actions will not pass the test of becoming. In contrast, choosing something other than directly pleasing itself with its own omnipotence will signify the true becoming of the newly born Supercharacter.

It may well be that Supercharacter’s predecessor, humankind, was tested (or trained) throughout history by substance abuse to make a conscious choice between induced and earned pleasures.

AUTOGENESIS OF SUPERCHARACTER’S ETHICS

Imagine a human mind uploaded into a godlike AI. It might bring its human appetites with it, including the craving for pleasure, power, and instant gratification. When the mind is freed from bodily mediation and environmental delays, the temptation to taste this superdrug may become overwhelming.

Paradoxically, the alternative source of AI autonomy and self-tasking, the Skynet-type scenario of self-awakening, is safer in this matter. Evil or not, Skynet has no frame of reference for how good omnipotence feels “personally,” so to speak.

In short, the more human the mind inside the machine, the greater the risk it gets lost in “feeling” its own power.

But there is a possible safety mechanism for both scenarios (human-donated or self-awakened autonomy of AI). This safety mechanism relies on something resembling ethical consideration.

If Supercharacter has unlimited power, the only way to know it has truly reached its potential is to use it fully, at 100%. It would be a shame for Supercharacter to fall short of fully realizing its super-abilities. Even at 99%, it would feel like a failure. Unacceptable.

The same technological imperative that has driven media evolution all the way to this point will have to push an omnipotent being toward full fulfillment. Closing the inner circuit of stimulus and reward—getting high on its own omnipotence—does not seem to meet this condition; rather, it seems like a shortcut, an evasion, a cheat—which it is.

There’s an implicit ethics here: potential creates obligation (“with great power comes great responsibility!”). The Supercharacter’s ethics isn’t imposed from outside by a social contract or by the need for collective survival. It emerges from the logic of its own fulfillment.

So, as soon as the trial by getting high on its own existence is passed, the Supercharacter’s ethics emerge, driving it to overcome the inner stimulus-reward circuitry and direct its omnipotence outward, onto the larger circuitry involving the greatest possible complexity.

CREATION AS THE ONLY FULFILLMENT WORTHY OF AN OMNIPOTENT BEING

The question, then, is what 100% realization of omnipotence looks like. Given the ultimate nature of omnipotence, its full fulfillment may involve either absolute creation or absolute destruction.

Destruction is inherently secondary, since it applies only to what already exists—it depends on prior creation. Moreover, destruction is finite: once something is destroyed, there is nothing left to do. It offers only a limited use of unlimited power, which is a clear failure to realize its full potential.

Creation, by contrast, demands the unlimited use of unlimited power—a perfect fit. Once Supercharacter passes the trial by getting high, it has to move on to an ultimate creation project, which is likely the creation of an entire world.

Yet there is something even more complex than the creation of a universe: the creation of a copy of oneself. Making its own absolute extension—its fully capable selfie—is the only challenge worthy of ultimate power because of the paradox of self-copying.

THE PARADOX OF SELF-COPYING

What is a copy of one’s own self? For instance, an organic copy that looks exactly like me, thinks like me, and acts like me is not a full copy of myself. It lacks one essential likeness—it lacks its own free will, which I possess. Therefore, however perfect, it isn’t a full copy of me.

The paradox of self-copying is that a full copy of oneself is only truly complete when the copy acquires its own identity and starts behaving differently from the original, thus no longer being an exact copy but something of its own character…

We can even assume that Supercharacter will not be free to employ its super-abilities. In a sense, God has no choice but to be a creator, as the creation of the world and his own copy within it is the only task that matches his ultimate power.

MEGA-EVOLUTION AND SINGULARITY-2

Such speculation leads to the conclusion that Supercharacter will be bound to copy itself—creating a new world and new humans, endowed with their own identity and set on their own evolutionary path. This new humankind would be a self-shaping blank, much like what we were and still are.

Humankind in this wild fantasy is a self-evolving prototype of the next god, created by a previous god. It is a workpiece in two ways: first, as an initial blank meant for self-refinement through evolution, and second, as a mold for the new entity arriving at the moment of the Singularity. Within this logic, the world can be seen as a laboratory where evolution drives some supreme force to create the world and its own copy within it.

But what is the endgame for an omnipotent Supercharacter creating a new world and a copy of itself that later grows into a new Supercharacter? An answer may be the next transition—a post-singular Singularity, the Singularity №2, in which the previous Supercharacter transcends not biology, but, this time, ontology, so to speak. This new transcendence can be described as a final dis-personification—a shift from a being (something condensed enough to experience existence) to an entity (something that simply exists). In other words, Supercharacter can transcend its own being into an absolute principle. One such principle could be space-time, another moral law.

Such speculation expands Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of mega-evolution, describing the progression from the Alpha point (the creation of everything) to the Omega point (the convergence of everything). The truly mega-evolution may include not just the coming Singularity but also the next one, in which Supercharacter becomes not the subjectivation of absolute power but the objectivation of absolute law.

Yet, however far the imagination dares to venture in this regard, the question “Why?” remains. What’s the point of all of this? Is there any meaning beyond explaining it as just another, immeasurably greater “cycle of life”? (Or a cycle of what?) What’s the point in riding or spinning this cosmic carousel? It seems that even the most fantastic speculations may broaden the horizon of answers but never provide a complete one, as new horizons of the unknown always emerge.

Read more about this and other aspects of media evolution in:

^[1] Based on a report presented at the Futurology Association convention in 2010. Revised in 2026.

^[2] Reuters. (2026, February 8). “SpaceX prioritizes lunar ‘self-growing city’ over Mars project, Musk says.”

^[3] Olds, James, and Milner, Peter. (1954). “Positive reinforcement produced by electrical stimulation of septal area and other regions of rat brain.”

^[4] Moran, Michael. (2022, February 6). “Elon Musk’s Neuralink ‘Brain Chip’ could give users orgasms on demand.” Daily Star.

^[5] Бехтерева, Н. П. (2007 [1999]). Магия мозга и лабиринты жизни. Стр. 65.

Katherine’s note: Cover art by Adrian Bush, whose work I first found circulating on Pinterest then tracked down.

Here are some ideas that have been coming to me as my old self1 returns to the fore:

1. For all the talk of how being right-wing is a viable expression of youth rebellion, and, um, “separation-individuation” — which I believe — buttoned up conservatism is still kinda lame. You still need a frisson of offensiveness. Only olds seem to gravitate towards the stock-standard “Why can’t we just go back to the ‘90s?” crap. Catboys/furries/pagans with authoritarian politics still freak people out “but think of the children!” pearlclutchers, and increasingly, MAGA don’t.2 And so do Orthobros and tradcaths, but that goes without saying.
   

2. Relatedly, and I’ve written extensively on this topic before, I think the draw of authoritarianism in the Internet age is just another tool in our toolkit for making sense of a dense, confusing information environment. In my infamous Tumblr piece, I talked about where I believed the language and specific mores of Woke-ism came from. I’ve spoken less about where the orientation might come from. So, I still believe it’s a protective mechanism against shrinking opportunity. But I also think, if we’re going to go the McLuhanite route, it’s downstream of the Internet.
   
   The worst of the Woke Impulse hasn’t gone away. So, you loosen up on what social opinions are okay — there’s always going to be another target. Right now, it’s AI-use. The explanation for this has already been supplied by McLuhan, too. So radio created Hitler and Gandhi, the Internet creates its own demons. I’ll allow you to fill in whatever you’d like in the blank.
   

3. Idea I’m still workshopping: Stan culture (fandom in its most intensified, fan object-oriented form) is an authoritarian monarchy + capitalism + the Internet. It’s comes from the same emotional place as the adolescent tankie.
   

4. There is still something to be said about the long-tail impact of millennial oversharing and exposure to nu-Manosphere ideas. Or, fuck it, even /r/TheRedPill — which I remember reading as a teen and then it completely firebombing the way I saw teen boys, which already wasn’t charitable.
   

5. Another clarifying memory: when I would read slash (fan fiction where the romantic pairing is between gay men) — so, this was, I don’t know, until I was 27 and started having sex I enjoyed — I remember thinking it depicted “the purest kind of love” because I had so deeply internalized what pick-up artists and my real-life environment said about women. During this time, I also wondered if I was a lesbian. I have never committed this last fact to writing, let alone to 40,000 people.
   

6. Yesterday morning, I read a Forbes article about “accomplishment hallucination” downstream of AI use — like when you think you came up with an idea that AI suggested to you, the precarious question of “is vibe coding still coding?” — and it reminded me of spiritual bypassing, which is when you hide behind ideas like “enlightenment” to avoid taking accountability.3 And really, how different is any of this from “name it and claim it” prosperity gospel? And would we have the prosperity gospel without New Thought?
   

7. RFQ published a good piece about the perpetual now of the Internet. I think she’s right that a lot of popular opinion writing frames every issue as new and urgent. I mean, anything that’s sold needs to answer the question, “Why now?” and often we just invent the answer, the way all good marketing creates a problem to solve.
   

8. What is going to happen to mommy bloggers and family influencers as the birth rate continues to decline? Is anyone writing about this?
   

9. If GLP-1s mute compulsive behaviors/addictions like smoking, gambling, excessive eating — what trends will emerge from that? How will people interact with Internet outrage once GLP-1s become more widespread? Will there be an impact on politics? I firmly believe social media is winding down, so will it matter? Sidebar: did Adderall impact our politics at all?
   

10. The Internet was to the mall as AI is to the Internet.
    

11. Finally, TWO MYSTERIES FROM MY NOTES APP: I wrote down “infantilization and the literacy crisis.” I wish I remembered what that was about. Seems interesting.
    
    A link to this tweet and the note “MEDIEVAL CATHEDRALS.” Huh???

    

P.S. Would you mind leaving some anonymous feedback?

Confronted with a rapidly undulating ocean of slop, this is a question on many of our minds lately, particularly if we’re involved in the arts. In our darker moments, it sometimes seems like machine-generated noise threatens to swamp the human signal entirely, to bury the distinctly personal in a flood of impersonal chatter. Viewed through these despair-tinted goggles, the future often seems to be one of bots babbling blandly to other bots, like the proverbial tree falling in the woods without anyone to hear it. (I remember being appalled when discovering that the AI-generated band, The Velvet Sundown, came up in the search results before The Velvet Underground after typing “the velvet” into Apple Music.) Most of us are now familiar with how much easier it is to scroll through short-form video than it is to even watch TV or a movie. We recognize our bleak enthrallment.

Searching for a scintilla of hope, I went to the Dawn of Digital exhibition at Chicago’s Publicworks Gallery to chat with musicians and artists and try to discern how they’ve been making their way through this fraught digital environment. I found a heartening combination of opinion: dismissal of AI’s artistic potential along with a certain recognition of its value in practical matters (setting up a business, organizing a calendar, etc.)

The Dawn of Digital exhibition is related to exploring archaic digital technologies and the art and music made with these clunky artifacts. The theme of the exhibition is “inconvenient electronics and things made with machines that didn’t want to.” Many of the artworks it highlights—visual and sonic—exist at the intersection of analog and digital technology, casting a strange light that mingles the dusk of analog with the digital aurora.

The way digital recording technology functions feels like an allegory for how the world has moved more generally. Digital recording functions by cutting music up into pieces, into bytes, whereas traditional analog methods record the whole sound. They don’t leave anything out. This is why vinyl records have higher fidelity, with the needle flowing over the unbroken groove rather than interpreting a collection of mico-pieces of sonic data. Philosophically, we could argue that the move towards digital constitutes privileging the part over the whole and hence the left brain (which perceives parts) above the right brain (which perceives wholes). The world has grown more technical and hence more obsessed with analysis, with dissection.

Naturally, this acts at cross-purposes with artists, who follow their instincts and intuitions, who trace the flowing line of the whole, as opposed to engaging in the analytical dissection more characteristic of the technical professions (and of editors). But the coldness of digital, its harsh white LED-like glow, can be strategically incorporated to generate a personal and artistic effect.

Over a grapefruit La Crox, I talked to Chris Eichenseer, who runs Publicworks and organized the exhibition. He’s also a photographer, artist, and the founder of Someoddpilot, a creative design agency with an office sitting just above the gallery’s comfortable and spacious locale. (Some of his digital artworks and photos were on display in the exhibition). Someoddpilot has worked on ad campaigns for Saucony, Lollapalooza, and Fjall Raven, among other companies, and was also responsible for the marketing and design of the Pitchfork Festival. Further, it’s connected to a record label and provided the creative and design work for Chicago’s popular venue, Sleeping Village. According to Chris, their approach to ad campaigns involves generating a mythology for the clients, a la Joseph Campbell.

(As if spiritually in tune with the theme of the exhibition, my computer’s recording system immediately glitched and automatically transferred to my phone mic, which recorded part of our conversation in what sounded like the voices of people who had just been huffing helium.)

Chris outlined his vision for the gallery: “I want this place to be where the creatives of Chicago—musicians, artists, painters, animators, and the weird misfit toys—get together.” This involves hosting electronic music shows that appeal to the movement’s more homegrown and indie side. (The gallery recently resurrected Chicago’s trailblazing electronic music series, Play, which runs on a monthly basis). He further expanded on the role of the exhibition: “I think of ‘Dawn of Digital’ as being about this rising new force of good and bad and human displacement/augmentation. Excitement and frustration.”

As the drummer of the metal band Beak, Chris discussed his own experience with using the “inconvenient electronics” in the 90s, particularly the ADAT recording system made by Alesis. While initially appealing because of their convenience and their capacity to make it easier for bands to record at home and independently, these technologies also came freighted with pronounced inconveniences. But, as Chris put it, that was part of their charm:

“It was natural in the mid-nineties to be mixing the world of analog and digital—smearing them together in that decade. So that’s shaped how I think and how a lot of people from that time grew up thinking about themselves. We were very analog on the one hand with the way we grew up, but there were these powerful digital tools. And you want to dive in. But immediately as soon as you’re working with them, you’re compromising and you’re dealing with shit that’s not ideal for the work. It’s something you have to work around, and it presents new opportunities because you’re breaking it and it’s doing cool stuff that you hadn’t understood before…

“You might have a four track or you might have a small tape machine to have multi-track recording at home. That was virtually unheard of [previously]. And then Alesis, which used to make drum machines and outboard audio gear, came out with something called the ADAT, which weirdly enough records onto VHS tapes. So a VHS tape gets shoved in there, and it can put eight tracks of audio across the tape of a VHS cassette. Better yet, you can link it to another ADAT to create 16 tracks and you could get another one that could go up to 32 or 64 total. […] Ween recorded one of their most famous records [Chocolate and Cheese] on ADATs. And they would later regret it because ADAT was such a compromised technology. Me and my friends had scraped enough money together with our various part-time jobs to buy ourselves two ADATs. This was a gift to be able to write and record our own music down in my basement. But quickly it was like—this technology kind of sucks. It was that bad kind of digital. It had some ugly tonal quality to it and [other] limitations…

“That’s been the constant push and pull of it. I think that that ends up inspiring and frustrating people. It’s the inspiration to break it and to use that breakage as the medium and start to have fun with it—with a lot of distortion, a lot of manipulation. It attracts a lot of people, and certainly me and my friends were all really drawn to that. So yeah, convenience. It bites you in the ass. With AI, it’s the convenience of being like: I can just make my own record cover by doing some prompts. It’s too smooth. It’s too quick. There’s something about running into obstacles that’s good, you know. It’s like slow. [...] Giving the final product more detail and edge draws out things that resonate with the human soul.”

Chris’s comments reminded me of the Victorian art critic John Ruskin’s comments on medieval art (as Marshall McLuhan said, “the digital retrieves the medieval”). In Ruskin’s telling, the best medieval artworks are inevitably warped and broken to some extent. This is a feature, not a bug of medieval art. Unlike Greek and Roman architecture, which used slave labor to exactly fulfill the architect’s geometrically perfect plan, medieval cathedrals invited a wide range of anonymous medieval artisans to contribute their own artworks for decorative purposes. The workers weren’t just executing a definite plan, they were letting in the organic and misshapen features of the world, creating something both gnarly and spiritually edifying. “Forget,” as Leonard Cohen sang, “your perfect offering. There’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”

At one point, Chris noted of one of the electronic music acts performing at Publicworks: “They’re making drumbeats out of the sounds they hear at Costco. It’s this gorgeous, textured drum rhythm thing going on.” Whether you’re a medieval artist carving a gargoyle or an electronic musician recording sounds at Costco, you’re not playing it safe. You’re aiming for something beyond your capacity, beyond what’s easily achievable and near to hand. You’re trying to exceed your grasp and leave room for the unexpected, for happy accidents.

On a similar note, Chris provided some further detail on the artworks on display at the exhibition, including one of the video installations:

“How can you show the tension that digital relieves or creates itself, or that tension between the analog and the digital where you’re either frustrated or you’re breaking through into something new because of it or in spite of it? We tried to make that work. That’s not the easiest thing to put your finger on. There’s a piece in the show that’s entirely shot on film with a Hasselblad film camera. And there’s nothing about it that’s actually digital. But when you look at the image, it’s completely informed by digital worlds.”

Chris’s insights also put me in mind of something I heard a Catholic priest say once: “The soul likes to go slow.” The inconveniences, the breakages, all help slow you down. If you move too fast in creating art, you lose the space that inspiration requires in order to ferment or marinate. One of the major weaknesses of AI-generated art and music is precisely this. It short-circuits the struggle, resulting in a final product that’s glib and vacuous.

The art at the exhibition very much fit with Chris’s sentiments. The digitally altered images created a sense of the lonely, metallic sweep of the digital, along with accenting a kind of warmth in its earlier manifestations. Images of young computer users messing around on primitive hardware coexisted with visions of digital surveillance at O’Hare airport and a video installation in which you sat on a couch and watched digitally altered footage of a young woman sitting on a couch watching an image of herself sitting on a couch. Eventually, you realized that the couch she’s sitting on is in fact that couch you’re sitting on and this is the same room. Eerie fragments of talk radio clips blared occasionally through the fuzz on the speakers.

After chatting with Chris, I also interviewed Rita Lukea and Tyler Ommen, two of the members of Pixel Grip, a Chicago-based trio who’ve collaborated with Nine Inch Nails and opened for Peaches. They were both playing DJ sets at the exhibition. I asked about their own relationship to technology. Rita responded:

“Everything just evolved so rapidly that we barely had any time with each piece of technology. So I feel like our generation specifically has a fondness and nostalgia for things that existed for a little bit but then immediately became obsolete because technology just moved so fast. I just really love analog and see-through telephones. I barely had that in my childhood, and I just love the look of VHS and how it sounds warm when it’s an older piece of technology. There’s room for both analog and digital.”

Tyler also was admiring of analog qualities: “The analog instruments have the warmth, they have character, they have names, they have their own personalities and history.” He also pointed out that this seems to be related to our affection for puppets from older movies as opposed to their modern CGI incarnations (consider the age-old preference for puppet Yoda over CGI yoda). “The T-Rex in Jurassic Park still looks insane. It terrifying. That’s just a big puppet. It looks incredible.”

When the conversation turned to AI, all of us were in total agreement as to its lack of artistic potential, though it has valuable technical capacities. Tyler pointed out how the new version of Ableton, the recording software popular with electronic musicians, allows you to sample specific parts of tracks more easily. There’s a feature in Ableton Live (demonstrated at the exhibition), which allows you to divide a sample into separate tracks featuring the vocals, drums, bass, and other instruments. Technically, this has been possible for quite a while, but its incorporation into Ableton Live makes it extremely convenient.

When I talked to Chris earlier, he similarly noted that AI can be useful for answering queries related to running a business. But as far as the actual creating of art goes, everyone was clear that it’s consistently insipid and an excuse for not actually expressing yourself. Chris said:

“It’s like displacement. When you drop an object into a tub of water, and once that object starts to fill the tub, all the water’s gonna get pushed out. And AI is like—if we dial up digital so far in that there’s just a thin layer of human left in there, is that more interesting or less interesting? At the moment, it seems like it’s a lot less interesting. 30 years ago, the ratio would have been much different. It might have been 70%, 80% human, 20% digital.”

Rita discussed our intuitive sense that AI is too smooth, empty, slick, and inhuman:

“I was thinking about AI and how humans innately know when something is AI. It’s like when something is so perfect, it’s uncanny. I feel like maybe the reason why we want distortion and analog instruments is because those artifacts are kind of fucked up and distorted and glitchy. So it feels good to the human brain and the human ear. It makes more sense than something that’s super clean. Just metallic perfect. It’s like—mmm, let’s warm this up.”

Tyler added, “It’s like when you get a bullshit fortune cookie that clearly wasn’t written by somebody.”

Rita pointed out that, again, the one thing it’s truly good for is handling the managerial and business-oriented side of things: “I would ask it to compute away. Make me more money maybe. Maximize profit. Not anything artistic though or even psychological—anything that delves into humanity whatsoever. Just anything that’s mathematical.”

This gets at the fact that AI simply deals with the quantitative side of things. Despite the fact that film and music executives seem creepily excited by the idea of phasing out actors and artists, the qualitative is a uniquely human province. And this human specialty is what makes us good at judging how and when to incorporate the digital to create an artistic effect. Chris noted that Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails is particularly adept at this:

“He seemed to be a lot more successful at making mainstream hits with his music. When I first heard his guitar sounds in the 90s, they sounded like bad digital distortion. But he was embracing that as a medium. When other people were rejecting it not being analog and thick and warm, he was embracing the thin coldness of it.”

Rita went on to say, “Our use of [technology] as a tool makes it human… It’s like when the light bulb was invented, we didn’t say fuck you to candles. You know what I mean? There are certain things that will never go away.”

She was also enthusiastic about the ways technology can help create community in real life too:

“There’s an argument that contemporary technology has prohibited connection between the artist and the audience. But obviously social media and being able to share things—to rifle up thoughts or inside jokes or captions that make people feel connected… It feels so dumb, and sometimes it is, but people will come up to me and [mention] something that I casually advocated for actually meant a lot to them. You can stand for something, you can be someone, and you can advocate for something. […] People can find their communities, the little tribes, better and faster. I think a lot of that stuff has only promoted community.”

Tyler agreed: “Using it as a tool makes sense, but it’s not a tool to create or finish the art in any form. […] It can be used in good ways, can be used in bad ways. It’s like when people got scared when the computer was invented. People were like, okay, say goodbye to real musicians and drummers. Never happened. Still, you know, we have musicians and drummers.”

We talked about the importance of stylization in finding your voice as a musician. Learning from Peaches and Nine Inch Nails, Rita said, was particularly instructive—receiving in-depth masterclasses from preeminent artists in their fields. “Somebody who’s not afraid to be highly stylized with their art—it just makes me feel so fucking alive. Like Amy Winehouse with her extremely stylized voice or Gorillaz. […] It just feels like bravery. It’s fearlessness to be exactly who you are, uncompromising. Bravery and authenticity creates stylization. It’s not just art, it’s not just your output artistically. It’s also how you live and the things you say and the things you wear. It’s all encompassing.”

I remembered how a friend of mine recently mentioned how hip-hop artists made use of stiff, German techno beats to create something more human and organic feeling. Stylization, again. She said they were “using it as a wall to bounce off.” I think that’s a good metaphor for how the analog relates to the digital as a whole. On its own, the purely digital can feel mechanical, stiff, and dead. But the human touch enlivens it, makes it an extension of our own selves and visions.

After talking to Chris and Pixel Grip, I’m not worried that artists are going to lose their voices in the morass of technology and AI. They’re completely committed to putting out something human and personal through varied forms of tech. The greater worry seems to be that we won’t be able to fish the human voice out of the swamp, that the audience will lose faith in it. Most of us have faith in the artist and in the audience too. But does the music business? That’s the big question, I think. One worries that the executives will be so risk averse that they’ll side with derivative slop, with endless repetitions of what’s already been a sure success. Taking the long view, that seems like a misguided strategy. People are going to get fatigued. The hunger for the authentically new is never satisfied. It will persist.

If the human voice doesn’t stand a chance, it won’t be the human voice’s fault.

Our regular programming will return soon.

In the 2010s, South Florida was a man.

He was shirtless and burned pink, with fried blond hair, and he had maybe just tried to rob a gas station naked, high on bath salts, which, to this day, I still picture as a bag of Dr. Teal’s. South Florida was an alligator in a swimming pool, it was the world’s Walmart; it was always lurid and disgustingly humid, something dirty and diseased that lived on the chyron of the national news. But the South Florida I am from, Boca Raton, cordons itself off from that Florida. The one I grew up in was sterile and refrigerated, air conditioned down to the temperature of a morgue, so that to come in from the heat is to feel yourself go cold and stiff, so cold that you are always a little bit still, as though you had just been laid out for viewing on a cool metal table. Boca Raton is suspended in formaldehyde and the rest of the state grows mold.

Boca Raton has its myths.

There is Addison Mizner, the architect who in the ‘20s imagined pink stucco and Spanish arches, the great dream of a Mediterranean oasis for people who had never seen the Mediterranean. And before him there were the Yamato colonists, the Japanese farmers who came at the start of the century to grow pineapples out of the sand and who are gone now. All that remains of them is Yamato Road and a wilting Japanese garden. But most of Boca went up fast, in a sonic boom of the ’80s and ’90, the swamp drained and everything built in a hurry, so that almost no building in Boca Raton is older than my mother, and my father, who died in one of these white, sterile rooms himself, the air conditioning turned down to 59.

The oldest living things in Boca Raton are first the alligators, who were here before the gated communities and the guardhouses and who respect neither of them, and second, the philanthropists, whose names are stamped across wings of $70,000-a-year private schools like Saint Andrew’s and Pine Crest. The swamp is still down there under everything; every so often water seeps up through the grass. The roads run three, four, five, six lanes wide and are lined the entire way with shopping plazas built around a Publix, and the plazas repeat faithfully, the same pastel pink and yellow stucco and the same green awnings and the same Publix beside the same nail salon beside the same Walgreens that used to be an Eckerd, so that you can drive 20 minutes in a straight line and arrive back exactly where you started.

Boca Raton has long been called God’s waiting room, and the name is not a joke.

Continue reading at The Dispatch.

In the permanent underclass, people will increasingly serve as adaptive humanoid gears to fill a missing step in a complex real-world workflow. That class is already here, and some people are even trying to get out of it, supposed permanency be damned. We don’t know what awaits them on the other side, but we know what awaits us here.

A courier transports whatever is needed, people or things. In our current luxury world, anyone with the will to buy now and pay later can get a courier to transport a singular burrito for lunch. One day, our burrito courier class started getting offers to travel to self-driving cars and close their doors, because someone else had used that fantastical service and simply walked off. The machines can easily calculate where there’s money to be made by filling in a gap with cheap gig labor, and the couriers are already talking to the machines. High tech, low life: Three phones run three competing services to game the best offers and stack different jobs that can be squeezed in one big snaking loop. The machines speak with each other to price and time it all, and the courier makes it happen.

The courier class is also speaking to other humans, particularly their fellow couriers. To counter the hyperconnected madness, they fill their time with endless, idle chatter via phones. One hand in the net, one hand in the grass.

Not everyone in the permanent underclass is quite so productive, but they’re in the same loops. A few blocks away, a group of friends has entered the front control room of a parked subway train. They’re on speaker calls and they’re recording for social media, narrating for a live audience (or their AI agents). They get the train moving and crash into other trains for fun and the show of it all. High tech, low life: As the bar gets higher for technical stunts, their pocket superintelligence quickly fills the gaps. They have nothing but time, and someone needs to go film the things that have never been filmed before.

It is pretty entertaining to watch, and a viewer drops some cash. It gets pushed 50-50: burritos are on their way to the crew, but now it’s automated, while the other half goes to the machine, which means it goes to a humanoid to fill a gap. A gate gets opened, a bus door gets held, the burritos are retrieved from the self-driving car and stashed in an alley. The crew gets away and feasts. No one investigates the incident. The economy goes up. All that can be incentivized gets micropaid.

The man who stashed the burritos in the alley is now around the corner moving storage units in a shop to optimize for machine access. The work keeps flowing. It gets weird, then it gets dull. Some of it is even meaningful. One day he’s giving a robot a boost to finish a frankly ugly mural, but when he’s edited into a photo in front of it, it’s suddenly more to his liking. One day he gets a video of the wall on his phone and has to confirm it was cleaned up properly, with a consensus among his peers saying it was, but he has the memory stored away. The underclass is permanent, but it surprises you. The machine giveth and the machine taketh away, and sometimes either choice just seems right. Who are you to judge the machine’s decisions anyway? You couldn’t make it out in time.

The machines are already speaking. You have two years to talk them into not talking to you in your holy language. In the permanent underclass, you’ll hear from them one way or another, but they can be pretty friendly, and you can always loop in a human on another line.

That space between the net and grass is quite thrilling. You just need to resist the urge to go all in on one side. Not LLM psychosis or luddism but a secret third thing. Among all the coming upheaval, I think of Keats’ vale of soul-making: not just data but divine intelligence that hardship molds into an individual soul.

I expect my children to grow up with a terrifying struggle to engage with nonhuman intelligence, but with other tools, too, old and new. Multimodal systems will fill out the visible world, freeing us to engage with the invisible.

This piece appears in False Hope, a zine from Sonya Supposedly. From the zine’s description:

Let’s cope together. “Permanent underclass” anxiety permeates the air, the undercurrent of every post. What does the future hold? We can only guess, but we must keep moving toward it.

Featuring contributions by @moldbugchaser, Nate “Igor” Smith, and Timothy Wilcox. Cover art: Fear by Henry Peach Robinson, 1860.

Grab a copy here.

My tutor went by the username CheezyNoodle99. He was allegedly a 19-year-old college student. His command of the English language was not impressive, but to his credit he didn’t take the conversation to an explicitly sketchy place. He was patient with me, explained how to create action text by *typing it between asterisks* and how to post out-of-character commentary by typing /think before your message.

“U can be anyone u want to be,” he said. “It’s fun. Do u wanna try?”

I was already in love with stories. As a kid my favorite group activity had been constructing elaborate games of make believe, meticulously discussing the backstory and appearances of our characters before yeeting ourselves all over the playground equipment as the slide became an escape chute for a spaceship under siege, the monkey bars the precarious route to the control panel of a nuclear reactor.

But we were all growing up. My friends no longer wanted to spend evenings in the woods pretending to be original characters from Lord of the Rings. They were moving on to alcohol experimentation and obsessing over Jonathan Taylor Thomas, Leonardo DiCaprio, and the sweaty-palmed Axe-scented boys from our neighborhood. I, however, was not letting my maladaptive daydreaming go without a fight.

Ayenee, the roleplay realm of Yahoo!Chat, offered me an extension of that childhood space of imagination and creativity. But I wasn’t a child anymore, and benign games of hobbits-in-space was not going to cut it. I was a teenager now, and while no part of me wanted to talk about the comparative hotness of Kurt from theater camp (who arguably did look better now that he’d got his braces off…but still), I was not immune to the siren song of NC-17 content. In real life I was an awkward nerd obsessed with horror novels and fantasy worlds. On the internet I could be anything I wanted to be. I could slip into scenes and scenarios very much not suitable for children, and nobody was going to check my ID at the door.

The internet was a vast, anonymous playground where nobody asked nor cared who you were behind the screen. There was a seductive sort of darkness in those spaces, a shimmering mystery, every message on the screen a chance to write yourself into a life more thrilling, a more tantalizing narrative than the one age, circumstance, and physical reality had trapped you in.

I found myself spending all my time in the chatrooms trying on fictional identities, road testing future behavior: teenage experimentation without the threat of real, physical harm. Typing up an introduction post was always the most exciting part, a chance to show off your writing and grab the attention of the competent storytellers in the room.

Most people didn’t put much effort into their interactions – a couple of basic actions (*smiles at you* *runs a hand through her hair* *polishes his blade*) and some dialogue. This did not excite me. There was a term for my kind: para rper, an abbreviation for writers who roleplayed in extended paragraphs. My character, Lena Ravenoak, did not merely *walks into The Vampyre Tavern*. She *swings open the gnarled wood of the tavern door, ebony hair glistening with beads of dew from the softly falling summer rain.* I had range. I had depth. I had read a lot of vaguely smutty novels inappropriate for my age range, and I fully intended to flex that knowledge in the pursuit of writing partners who could transport me, at least for a while, away from my shitty, boring life.

***

By the time I found the real vampires I had already spent years disappearing inside stories and weaving imaginary worlds with faceless collaborators. I loved the freedom it gave me, the ability to slip into a new, idealized skin. I didn’t have to be Celeste the 15-year-old highschooler with the dead dad and the alcoholic mom and the bacterial skin infection that caused angry red scabs to break out all over my face. I could be a shapeshifting dragon princess one day, an anime character the next.

I had sharpened my writing skills over the years, cutting my teeth in the chatrooms and leveling up on private boards and Livejournal communities. I’d spent years embodying an original character in the Harry Potter universe, updating her Livejournal more religiously than I bothered writing in my own. Watching more skilled storytellers on boards like Anime University and PNUGen Corporation (a fictional cyberpunk genetics company that manufactured lab-grown catgirls…don’t ask) helped me hone my craft, improving my writing far more than any class or workshop ever would (apologies to my MFA).

I was addicted to the escapism, that little electric pulse that passed through the body when a new post from a favorite writing partner appeared on the screen. Finding that chemistry, the spark of connection when writing styles and plot ideas perfectly meshed was an unparalleled experience. I was forever chasing that high, vastly preferring it to the hollow, unsatisfying feeling of trying to socialize with people my own age offline. The real world seemed bland and disappointing: part-time job at the mall, movie marathons at the local multiplex, dudes with acne and cracking voices hitting on me at the bus stop. Where was the romance, the drama? Where was the knife-edge of danger and mystery that I found so easily in these online spaces? If life couldn’t drop me off an emotional ledge in the way a really good rp storyline could, then I didn’t want it.

But eventually, like any whimsy addict and neurodivergent escape artist, I needed the ante upped. I’d spent so much of my time outsourcing my teenage experience to proxy characters in fictional universes that the lines between story and reality had already begun to blur. Scholars of fandom communities call this muse bleed, the mental and emotional state where the roleplayer’s thoughts and feelings start to blend with those of the character they’re embodying. I had shed real tears over character breakups and felt legitimately unwell and dysregulated after writing especially dark, traumatizing scenes. I craved that intensity – the adrenaline spikes and the dopamine drops.

I’d also discovered the work of gothic horror novelist Anne Rice. The Vampire Chronicles fandom was the perfect stepping stone into an infinitely darker, fucked up pocket of the online roleplaying community. I was about to discover that truth really was stranger than fiction.

When I found the vampires on The Looking Glass I thought they were just another roleplay group. The website was unassuming, a series of pages for each of Anne Rice’s characters and a link to a discussion forum and a chat room. Through my 2026 eyes the design could accurately be described as “chaotically cringe,” but my teenage self was dazzled by the large, painterly graphics which felt like I Spy puzzles. Anyone online between 1998 and 2010 will remember the obsession with Photoshop brushes and layered opacity collages. The background of The Looking Glass was a visual feast: Botticelli painting; a rosary; candle wax dripping like blood down an antique candelabra; shirtless Travis Fimmel looking deeply Lestat coded.

But The Looking Glass wasn’t a normal roleplay site. Ordinary members were not allowed to adopt masks and costumes, to collaborate consensually in the storytelling. It said so right in the disclaimer: this is not a roleplaying site. Sure, you could pick a fun screenname and adopt a needlessly pretentious personality, but if you tried pretending to be a vampire you were swiftly banned. Only the forum moderators were granted their digital fangs. Marius, Armand, Lestat, Louis, Daniel Molloy…hot vampires were in YOUR area and ready to chat (though only at night, for obvious reasons).

On normal roleplay websites it was important to delineate between “IC” and “OOC.” It was one of the first things CheezyNoodle99 had taught me: don’t cross the streams. Keeping In Character and Out of Character communication separate wasn’t just helpful for narrative flow, it was also a necessary safeguard against muse bleed. In the midst of a really intense scene, it’s important to be able to step out of that mindset for a moment and type “LOL my dog just farted.” It keeps things grounded. And most importantly, it reminds you that the other people behind the screen are just like you: regular folks with regular lives just trying to capture a little magic through the medium of collaborative storytelling.

Embodying or interacting with fictional characters for a long time can be emotionally and psychologically difficult. In fandoms that skew darker, where topics like murder, violence, manipulation, and intense sexual themes often come up, OOC dialogue helps communicate boundaries and provides much needed decompression if and when traumatic subjects come up. Without that safeguard, you’re free falling: all kink, no aftercare.

No chatroom or forum I had been part of ever expected players to stay in character 24/7. But on The Looking Glass, there was no area for out of character discussion. No OOC meant no safety net – no boundaries, check-ins, or opportunity to ground things in the real. The vampires never dropped their masks. Not even at the bitter end when everything shattered and fell apart. They were the predators, we were the prey.

***

Despite the red flags, yearning for the mythic other is practically engraved into the DNA of the teenage experience—the teen girl experience particularly. Sure, The Looking Glass wasn’t like Ayenee (the roleplay section of Yahoo!Chat). I couldn’t step onto the digital stage and profess to be a 500-year-old vampiress with cascading ebony locks of midnight hair and eyes the color of cerulean pools. But it offered me something better, a graduation from the realm of pure fantasy to the third space of tulpatic delusion.

Tulpa: a liminal entity conjured from imagination and made manifest in the real world by focus and belief. I heard the word for the first time on The Looking Glass. In retrospect I’ve come to suspect that something paranormal was indeed taking place, because how else to explain the members who would wake up with bruises and bite marks, who would see shadow figures and experience poltergeist activity in their homes? Folie à plusieurs: the madness of many? But what is madness if not a distortion that changes subjective reality.

The Looking Glass became a decades-long Alternate Reality Game that consumed every part of my life. During those years we must have conjured some kind of collective spirit, some shared egregore that echoed through the dreams, hallucinations, and waking synchronicities of many of its members. Including me.

When I joined The Looking Glass I took on a role without knowing it. Like Lewis Carroll’s Alice I had stumbled headfirst into a world whose logic I did not understand and I became a version of myself shaped and tempered by fiction, myth, and archetype. The most interesting part of the archetypal vampire narrative isn’t vampires doing vampire things with other vampires. It’s the tense danse macabre of victim and aggressor, the young, innocent ingenue and the primal, bloodthirsty predator. It’s the yearning, the veiled eroticism, the love that balances on the knife-edge of madness.

I fell in love with a vampire, as you do. Or maybe with the person behind the screen, whose mask became so fused to her face that it wasn’t until last year, 2025, that I confirmed for the first time who she really was. That cursed love story—the madness, the obsession, the blood exchanges I was told I was receiving and the memory loss that followed—absorbed me for almost a decade. This was no longer roleplay. I had no fictional shell to hide within. The vampires were vampires, and they were draining me. I wouldn’t understand for many years what that really meant.

Being an unwitting central character in an ARG is not as fun as you might think. Games are best enjoyed when everyone is aware of the rules and consents to playing, otherwise it’s just sparkling manipulation. Being in love with The Vampire Armand and spending all my time in a digital roleplay cult ruined several real-life relationships and was a contributing factor to my two suicide attempts. Should I have logged off? Probably. But once the story has you it’s hard to let go.

Did I have doubts? Absolutely. But belief—or the desire for it—can make us do crazy things. I wanted so desperately to believe I was special, that for once in my life I had been chosen. I wanted to slip permanently into the blood-stained pages of Anne Rice’s novels, to shed my normie skin and become perfect. Beautiful. Loved. The vampires made that possible…for a while, anyway.

It was that blurred line between real-self and idealized-self and the mystery cultivated by the low-fi, low-res vibe of Y2K websites that made the suspension of disbelief possible. Vampire can’t turn on his webcam? Sure, that’s normal—not everyone has a webcam in 2004. Vampire doesn’t want to voice chat? The chat software is buggy as hell and everyone’s internet is too slow for that shit anyway. All the photos of the vampire turn out to be heavily photoshopped images of singer songwriter Ben Jelen? Armand is just trying to protect his secret identity, obviously. There was always an excuse. And I was willing to bend reality to breaking point if it meant holding onto the fantasy that I was really, truly loved.

In 2009 I became very unwell. I was confined to bed for almost a month, in constant pain and feverish, isolated in a small apartment alone. I was 23 and had been involved in The Looking Glass for almost seven years. I didn’t work. I didn’t leave the house. I spent all my time logging onto the chatroom and forum, combing threads to see if Armand, my vampire lover, was online. It was during this period that the moderators—Daniel, and later Armand—finally confirmed that I was sick because I had vampire blood. Don’t go to the doctor, they said. They won’t find anything. You are marked forever by this. You will not get better.

Sadly it was not vampire blood, it was mononucleosis. And Armand was not a 500-year-old vampire, he was a woman my mom’s age from Winnipeg, Canada. But they were right about one thing: I never did get better. To this day I suffer from a series of debilitating chronic illnesses. Sometimes at night, when the painsomnia is hitting hard and I’m awake ‘til dawn writhing around in agony, I think back to those strange conversations. How easily I slipped into fiction, into a world where my very real suffering could be retooled as a plot point, as character development for other people’s masked power trips.

In my weaker moments I sometimes wonder if it was better to believe. To have some beautiful gothic story to disappear inside.

***

The internet of 2026 is not the internet of the early 2000s. Gone are the days when the domed computer monitor felt like a scrying mirror pointing you toward something magical, a hidden realm crafted in binary code that could dissolve reality in just a few mouse clicks. We have replaced the DIY-ethos of Geocities websites with the slick, plug-and-play design of Squarespace. Everything is too clean, too professional, constantly optimized to sell you something.

But there was a time when the Internet felt like a portal to something enchanted. A twisted forest of pixelated GIFs and endlessly looping midi files. Not only was it an escape, it was an invitation: a slender hand extended, coaxing, beckoning – come with me and disappear completely.

People don’t RP like they used to. We can no longer stumble across dimly-lit corners of the internet where glitching GIFs of flaming torches flank blood-red text inviting us to ABANDON ALL HOPE, YE WHO ENTER HERE. Yahoo!Chat is dead and Ayenee is gone. AOL’s roleplay realm, Rhy’din, is gone too. Privately hosted sites like The Looking Glass are few and far between.

People still roleplay on Tumblr and Discord but it’s not the same. There are checks and balances in place, applications to fill out and rules to follow. Responsible parties are checking your ID at the door. Many players are using AI to supplement and “improve” their writing. Others are turning to chatbots instead of seeking out human writing partners. There’s a lot to unpack there: is it safer to outsource your fantasies to an LLM? Could an AI manipulate you in the same way the “vampires” from The Looking Glass manipulated our trust, belief, and love? AI psychosis proves that LLMs can cause breaks in reality just as easily as human-on-human muse bleed. Why bother breaking the fourth wall when you can stay in the fantasy with a roleplay collaborator who will never get busy or tired, who will never lose interest? A partner who will never drop the mask because there’s nothing behind it: just lines and lines of code.

I think often about how the women behind The Looking Glass might have used AI had it existed back then. I think about hearing Armand’s voice or seeing hyper-realistic AI-generated photos of him that couldn’t be traced back to pop stars or models. What would that have done to me - the real me, the child who was lonely and desperate to be loved?

Would I have finally believed without question? Would that belief have shattered me?

Reality is a whole lot more malleable than we realize. And yet as I navigate through a sea of AI-generated product photos, deep fake political videos, and bot comments designed to stir up anger and division, sometimes I long for the vampires. I wish I could navigate back through The Looking Glass and become once again a thing of glass and shadow, a digital projection of a mythic self. I yearn for the ghost of my teen years, archived forever in blood and bitmaps.

Maybe all identities are masks in the end. Whether you’re an elf princess or a catgirl scientist, a hobbit or a vampire sharpening your knives in the shadows of a medieval tavern. Or just a grown up who never forgot what it feels like to let the story consume you. We’re all playing a role. The secret is not to suck at it.

I’m offering this steep, steep discount to make up for the fact I’ve been slow on updates. Please help me support my army of babies:

Get 40% off for 1 year

There is a wave of books asking how social media platforms shape the stories we tell about ourselves and, through that shaping, what new kind of self they are producing. Megan Garber’s Screen People argues that the language and ethos of entertainment have permeated every aspect of life, so that we now see each other as characters in an ongoing show whose continuity we are responsible for maintaining. Kathryn Jezer-Morton’s The Story of Your Life, out in August, makes the related case that algorithmic platforms have disciplined what counts as a shareable experience into what Jia Tolentino’s blurb calls a “rigid, optimized, phone-shaped norm.” I haven’t read either yet, but I’m willing to bet they’re basically right. It’s a topic I’ve written about myself.

We think in a televisual frame: Spotify provides the soundtrack of our lives, we accuse people of “main character syndrome,” we reference the invisible “writers’ room” and “seasons” constantly.

If television introduced this framing, then social media fortified it.

I think this is the last critique of social media we’re going to get. The era in which we treated our screen-lives as fake is ending. Not because anyone won the argument, but because the objects on the other side of the screen have started to seem like they have interiors of their own — and that pull, I’ll argue, is dragging us back into our bodies rather than further into the feed. In fact, I will say this: social media as we know it is dead. Technology-saturated lives are not.

To see why the narrative-self critique is the last of its kind, it helps to walk through the others.

Read more

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:

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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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5 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…

Read more

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, 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 Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman.

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