In Cyberspace, Delusion Is Power

or, the Childish Delusion

I’m Katherine Dee. I read in an industry newsletter that I should re-introduce myself in every post. I’m an Internet ethnographer, sometimes podcaster, and reporter. This newsletter is filled with ethnographic interviews, takes on current events, a sporadic advice column, Craigslist-style missed connections, Internet culture explainers, streams, a book club, predictions and forecasts… There’s a lot of stuff.

On top of all that, I spend maybe 20 hours a week talking to people about how they use the Internet. It’s hard work.

You guys watch a lot of disturbing porn, I’m not going to lie. Consider sending me a few bucks for my efforts! It helps me pay my wonderful contributors like Nico, who authored the post you’re about to read!

It also has the added benefit of moving me up the leaderboard. Right now, I’m #85. We can definitely do better than that. I don’t care about eating or anything like this. Just help me break top 50. Please!!!

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“Many passages in Freud's work show that he felt the need for a complete articulation of the symbolic order, for this is what was at stake for him in neurosis, to which he opposes psychosis, where at some time there has been a hole, a rupture, a rent, a gap, with respect to external reality. In neurosis, inasmuch as reality is not fully rearticulated symbolically into the external world, it is in a second phase that a partial flight from reality, an incapacity to confront this secretly preserved part of reality, occurs in the subject. In psychosis, on the contrary, reality itself initially contains a hole that the world of fantasy will subsequently fill.”

- Jacques Lacan, The Psychoses

“The Young-Boy is not necessarily “edgy”. He is inherently edgy…The sharpness of an edge is determined by how much of the world it cuts off.”

- Baroque Spiral, Theory of the Young-Boy

One thing that the internet taught me was that there are people out there who desire to be mad, that is to say, to be insane.

I don’t mean this in a glib way, as a commentary on people becoming increasingly deranged via posting, nor really as a commentary on subcultures of self-diagnosis. I mean it in the most sincere way, that there are people whose deepest, most heartfelt desires is to be mad. This is the motivation, and driving engine, at the heart of every cyberspace-based movement of the past 20 years: Anonymous, Gamergate, Qanon, MAGA Communism, Zizians, even more “mainstream” movements such as fourth wave feminism, Rationalism, the Sanders and Trump viral presidential campaigns. And when I say that the energy powering these movements is a desire to be mad, I do not mean that they are powered by madness, on the contrary, the ideological blinders they suffer from are a part of the human condition, only the most extreme fanatics truly grasp their heart’s desire. What I mean, instead, is that they are born from the desire deep within to reshape the self, one’s very soul, into a weapon, a desire only made possible to act on by the collapse of socializing institutions in modern liberal democratic societies.

Some 70 years ago, the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan made almost the exact opposite claim, that the desire to be mad doesn’t actually make one mad.

He made this claim during a particular place in time, having lived through the mid-20th century heights of mass political parties, garrison states, and institutional power. This was an empirical observation for Lacan, it was obvious to him, not a consequence of his elaborate theories. And yet, from the perspective of the present, I’m sure that most people sufficiently online can think of counterexamples. Or, at the very least, by the end of this essay, I hope you will be able to identify the phenomena.

In this respect, it is useful to review the most banal example.

That is of the Chunibyo, or the chuuni, a cultural idea from Japan used to describe the delusions suffered by middle schoolers, dreams of having magical powers or arcane knowledge. The term was originally coined by a comedian in the 90s, and by the late 00s he had backed away from it as it had now begun to be taken far more seriously. I personally picture this transition from changes in the depiction of youth in social realist sorts of anime. The 2004 anime Paranoia Agent follows the lives of a number of different, ordinary, people who felt as though they were backed into a corner, and among the cast are two middle school boys. The two boys both have their own delusions about power dynamics in the school and come into conflict with one another, but notably do a good job of hiding these delusions, and, just as key, these delusions were ones they were socialized into via the school and traditional family dynamics. One could easily predict that, if they were to grow older, these delusions and desires would be sublimated into traditional career climbing dynamics. Compare this to the 2010 anime Durarara!!, which also has a social realist type of story, which focuses on a number of teenagers in Tokyo. Unlike Paranoia Agent where conflict was driven by a universal type of anxiety, the conflict in Durarara!! is directly created by the delusions of these teens themselves. In a world where the supernatural does actually exist, the desire to escape the ordinary, or be a real badass, or manipulate others, or pursue idiosyncratic ideas of love, all drive ordinary people to be more bizarre and unpredictable than the real monsters.

What I think is important here is that the delusions of the characters ceased to be informed by how they were socialized, in fact, they were an attempt to escape the limits of that socialization of school and family life. In that sense, the delusions were totally self-generated, albeit with a little help from cyberspace.

The internet, in this way, provided a new dimension to the symbolic universe of childhood delusion. I believe this reflects something true to life, that there really was a change that occurred in the 2000’s in the way that people were socialized, delusional children became active in the production of the broader symbolic universe in a new way. Whereas once it had been the case that the age, gender and social status of participants in a subculture or counterculture would have been obvious to an outside observer, or would have required a transition for participants in a youth culture to be counted as full adults, that ceased to be the case with the internet.

This pseudo-anonymous nature of cyberspace makes the product of this delusion just as real as any other symbolic representation of reality online, and to all observing subjects. Indeed, this was something important to the plot and themes of Durarara!!. Empirically, we see this phenomena in many places, particularly in the way childish fandoms have been important to internet culture as a whole. Anime, gaming, cartoons, things of this nature, have a particular role in the immediate symbolic universe of children and teenagers. When they experience them, they will always connect what they see back to other things in their life and psyche. Lacan, in his interpretation of Freud and psychoanalysis, describes Freudian concepts not in terms of biology, but exactly in this culturalist way, that the bodily functions, and the family relations, are so important to our daily lives that they are necessarily important parts of our symbolic universe by nature of their correlation to other signs and symbols, thereby creating a certain structure to this universe. The same idea can be applied to media experienced during formative moments.

I am not the first to notice this connection between chuuni, self delusion and the pathologies of internet movements. In the book Theory of the Young-Boy, Baroque Spiral effectively paints a picture of the semiotic and libidinal structure of these movements. The titular Young-Boy is not a literal young-boy, it is rather a bundle of correlated signs and behaviors anti-correlated to a similar bundle called the Young-Girl, the theoretical object of an edgy French anarchist collective called Tiqqun.

In short, the Young-Girl was a gestalt portrait of modern capitalism turning people into docile and vapid plastic mass consumers. The Young-Boy, in turn, represents the various rebellions to this docility, attempting to find symbolic points of resistance to this system. If it is a gendered concept, it is only in this purely oppositional sense, rather than referring literally to the gender of the subjects that can stand in for it. As Baroque Spiral says:

This unsettled status, like the pressure and desire-driven conformity of the Young-Girl, can also be universalized to anyone who fails the impossible program of becoming Young-Girl, and attempts to realize the desires she mediates from the opposite direction - a failure that is just as carefully engineered. Like the Young-Girl, the Young-Boy is obviously not a gendered concept. The black bigender disabled feminist blogger conforms to it just as much as the /r9k/ gymcel with a worrying gun collection. The forty-year-old bluecheck holding an increasingly deranged grudge against anonymous trolls and the helplessly self referential e-girl pandering to her haters both obey the concept.

This was written before bluecheck was made to mean something else, but I think you get the picture.

Chuuni behavior is one facet of this Young-Boy psychology, but at the same time this typology also shows the extent to which many other phenomena share the same characteristics as the chuuni. The Young-Boy harbors intense delusions about their symbolic universe, they fixate on signifiers they find, usually in cyberspace, and take them to mean something of great significance: to be a threat to the actually existing order. What, exactly, this “order” is thought to be by the Young-Boy varies greatly, it could be globalism, capitalism, communism, modernity, patriarchy, matriarchy, the political establishment, online content moderation, fandom shipping in-groups, the gestalt of the collective unconscious, or the masses themselves. The point, as Baroque Spiral makes clear, is this oppositional position which is created from a single source: the failure to live up to the commandments of this order which, in post-modern capitalism, are so totalizing they have become the symbolic water we breathe and swim. These are the commandments to enjoy, and, if not quite to be “normal” in the conformist way of our fordist grandparents, to sublimate our more perverse, uncontrolled enjoyment directly into the inescapable demands of social reproduction, whether it is within the family, the university, or the workplace. The Young-Boy is dissatisfied with the commodified, fully socialized demands on his desire, the type of socialized desire represented by the Young-Girl. These commandments stand in for the whole order of the world, a symbol for the way things “really work”, and therefore, when people find themselves stuck outside of this order, they try to find a place of resistance to it, and just like the commandments themselves are a symbol, they reach first for other symbols held in opposition.

What is unique about the Young-Boy, compared to the Young-Girl, is the sheer variety and obscure esotericism of these points of symbolic opposition. This is not, I would argue, just a result of a rebellion against conformity as such, previous rebellions of this type were actually remarkably similar in the points of resistance to social power identified. This variety of the Young-Boy’s symbolic universes is the direct result of the breakdown of socialization that has occurred everywhere in developed capitalist countries. The disappearance of clubs, associations, mass political parties, churches, unions, a common media environment, and even extended family connections has meant there are few opportunities for people to become fully socialized, shaped into the specific subjects required by our society to function. These sort of institutions are what Louis Althusser, French philosopher and associate of Lacan, called State Ideological Apparatuses, he said that they interpellated, that is called, people into certain ideologies. Churches, for example, call to us when they tell us the good news, that though we are sinners we can be saved. When people accept that call, that interpellation, they change their own understanding of themselves, as well as change their internal understanding of the world. And of course, in order for these institutions to do the calling, there must be people doing the speaking. When one speaks within a certain ideological discourse, just like praying, the act of doing so cements their position as a subject of the type certified by their ideology (the act of praying, partaking in the sacraments, certifies one’s identity as a christian to themself). So too are these institutions generative of ideology, not just merely repeating the same message throughout history. Ideology production entails stringing together new symbols and signs, literally expanding the realm of meaningful statements. With the loss of these institutions, therefore, 21st century people lost both the things which properly socialized them into their roles in society, and the ability to articulate their circumstances and values through official channels.

It’s into this absence that cyberspace has arrived. In place of official state ideological apparatuses, the internet has allowed delusional Young-Boys the means to auto-generate their own socialization and ideology. Think of all the social media accounts, blogs, youtube channels and twitch streamers built around this premise: the production process for ideological partisans that hardly have much grounding in “real life” official institutions, even if they occasionally get co-opted after the fact. Ok then, one might then begin to say that this is a clean replacement of what was lost, a regeneration of socializing institutions in the digital world. But this is not the case, precisely because of that desire to be mad I spoke of, the beating heart of the Young-Boy. It was simply not the case that this desire was entertained in previous socializing institutions, it was meant to be suppressed and sublimated into properly normal behavior. In Lacan’s time, you really could not go mad simply because you wanted to be, and that is no longer true today.

In the delusions of psychosis, Lacan suggests that people reject the gap that exists between their symbolic universe and the real, and therefore try to fill it in with their imagination, extrapolating from the signifiers available to them (words, symbols, categories), and their relation to other signifiers rather than signified (actual meanings), in order to make it seem as if this gap does not exist. And people love their delusions as if they were loving themselves! This is a constant empirical observation of psychoanalysis and ordinary experience. People experiencing real psychosis are not the people who “wish to be mad”, but the sort of operation going on here, of cutting off signifiers from their meanings, and repurposing them to fill this gap, is the sort of thing which is desired, people desire to be delusional. Of course, they do not desire to be delusional in the same way as the psychotic, there is no sort of primordial jealousy, for the most part, of those who are locked up in mental hospitals. Rather, what people want is to be delusional in a way that is directly advantageous to them and other goals and desires they have. People wonder, “what if I could be ontologically good and my enemies ontologically evil”, or “what could I accomplish if I disregarded everything else in the world for my goal” or, most simply, “what is possible if I just give up on being normal” even if, in that moment, they know these statements to be untrue or flights of fancy.

They believe, fundamentally, that delusion is a source of power.

To understand the logic behind these ideas, it is necessary to go deeper into the logic of the signifier and signified, into semiotics (the science of signs and symbols). Signifiers are things which stand in for other things: letters can stand in for sounds, words for ideas or even phenomenal experience, sentences have particular meanings. Think of a simple substitution code, for example a restaurant menu that has numbers to stand in for particular dishes. In an elementary way, each number is a signifier, and each dish is the signified. But we can’t stop there, for when we decode a code, what we are left with does not automatically establish the meaning of the signified. Let’s say this restaurant is a very fancy italian place, and every number stands in for a different type of pasta. For the uninitiated, would there be any means of distinguishing all these pasta dishes? Perhaps, like a young child, they only know “pasta” or “spaghetti” and are unfamiliar with linguini and fettucini. In order for the signified to have meaning, you have to relate it to, and compare it to, everything else, such that divisions emerge. Just as well, the signifiers must be distinguishable from one another in order to convey distinct meanings (in the case of the restaurant code, repeating numbers or gibberish fonts would be quite confusing). How is it, then, that we speak of the meaning of a code when we arrive at its decoding, that when we point to number 1, we mean “the spaghetti”?

This process, of pointing to decoded statements, of isolating a part of a system of signs, is the process of sign function collapse. A sign is a signifier/signified pair, one slice of a code where the two elements are connected. We can further break up signs into two basic types, first order signs, and higher order signs. First order signs refer directly to something real, higher order signs refer to other signs. Within a given signifier, we usually see both first and higher order signs. To understand what I mean by this, consider apple juice. If it was your first time hearing the phrase, but knew what “apple” and “juice” were, you could piece together what “apple juice” was by combining the two ideas, this is apple juice as a higher order sign as it’s created with reference to other signs. In contrast, if we take “apple juice” as a proper name for a certain substance, the golden sweet tasting liquid, it becomes a first order sign. Moving from the first understanding of apple juice to the second, for example by forgetting what “apples” or “juice” mean, would be sign function collapse. Hence, when we use “1” to point to spaghetti qua spaghetti, we’re collapsing the sign function which previously might have encompassed the entirety of the code which compared the spaghetti to every other type of pasta.

For the Young-Boy and the Chuuni, sign function collapse is the process by which their delusions are produced, whether it is done consciously or unconsciously. For actual young children learning the ropes of the broader symbolic universe of their society, the experience of sign function collapse is less like actively cutting off a web of signs from a signifier, and more like a fog of war. All signs we learn as children, after all, have to come to us in a specific sequence in time. Hence, a child might learn what “juice” is before they learn what “apples” are, a situation that might radically change their understanding of precisely what “apple juice” is compared to the alternative. For adolescents and teens, the media they are exposed to will show them the active fantasies of society at large, but exactly what part of the media is the fantasy is not something that arrives all at once at first glance. For the most naive, magical powers or super-hero abilities might be taken literally as the correlative to having actual power and agency in the world. As they get older, and learn more about the symbolic universe society has created for them, the reverse process begins to take hold, attempting to collapse sign functions in order to regain those childish delusions. In present day society, where socialization has broken down, this takes the form of the desire to be mad.

In these self-induced delusional subjects, those desiring to be mad, sign function collapse promises to be wielded in a way directly in line with their desires promises to cut off huge chunks of the world, whether that’s the world waiting to be discovered or which they already know and desperately wish to reject. In the psychotic, according to Lacan, the subject extrapolates from known signifiers in order to fill the conspicuous gap between their symbolic world and reality, and indeed, all operations are operations on signifiers in this way (when we add 2 + 2, whether in a calculator in the mind, we are only ever dealing with the symbols rather than the platonic form or other such essence of the number). But unlike with addition, these operations produce outputs which are not necessarily valid. Let's say someone applied the theological logic of the Holy Trinity to their relationship to their boss and spouse, that's the sort of thing we're talking about. This extrapolation of signifiers that's unhinged from a grounded sense of reality creates psychosis and the associated delusions. And all such unhinged extrapolation requires sign function collapse, for otherwise, the complexity of a sign's connection with the sign for realness would interfere with this delusion. The sign for the real, for reality, is after all a higher order sign, and collapsing it flattens our world, making many things that should have been higher order signs into first order signs, making our delusions just as real as the sun on our face, the air in our lungs. The Young-Boy whishes for his own sort of delusions, motivated delusions, not the overdetermined type of the psychotic, yet it still requires this sort of suspension of disbelief, this sign function collapse.

Now we can begin to make sense of Baroque Spiral’s comment that the sharpness of the Young-Boy’s edge is determined by how much of the world it cuts off. When it comes to childish delusions, the less that is known about a sign, the more powerful, all-encompassing its signifier can be. For the youngest Chuuni, the belief in magic and supernatural is operationalized by ignorance of what magic and supernatural actually mean, this is what gives these delusions power. For the edgy Young-Boys, actively cutting off their own knowledge of the world creates the same effect. This is where the internet revolutionaries come in, producing ready made signifiers for these aspiring delusionals. What has the past decade of impotent hashtag activism, hacktivism, protest, even random violence, amounted to except blind faith in various signifiers and their ability to disrupt the order of the world?

Of course, the side of normalcy and order also relies on delusions plenty, let’s recall the worldly, socialized delusions of the boys in Paranoia Agent. But there is a key asymmetry here: the real know-how of making this normal world tick operates at a level more fundamental than these delusions, the basic facts of life, of jobs, families, schools, is institutionalized in a way to reproduce itself. In many ways, there’s a little revenge of the Young-Girl here, who’s consumption and well-socialized delusions actually work in practice. The problem with the edginess of the Young-Boy is that, by the very act of cutting off the world to facilitate these delusions, the responsibility for creating a concrete alternative to the existing order he is trying to tear down is lost. This is not to say there are not practical minded people involved in internet movements, particularly those of more mainstream political consequence, it’s simply that the intrinsic motivations behind the virality of these movements runs counter to this practicality.

At the limit of this desire to be mad, this role of the signifier and sign function collapse borders on culminating in actual psychosis. Perhaps the best and most well documented case of this is Tatsuya Ishida, the author of the webcomic Sinfest. The comic began in the early 2000s as a fairly standard, even well written and drawn, cartoon of the sort one could see in the sunday paper, but as Tatsuya entered the internet age, about 2011, he became increasingly radicalized, first as a strident feminist, then various waves of reactionary conspiracism like Qanon, anti-semitism, ect. As the comic evolved over time, by its very nature, readers were treated to direct access to what signifiers the author identified as points of opposition to the matrix-like (the metaphor of choice in the comic) oppressive nature of the symbolic order of broader society, beginning with female sexuality and ending in neo-paganism. Unmoored from reality, this is where the logic of the Young-Boy ends up, an endlessly inventive stream of signifiers that impotently try to kick the shins of the failing order.

There is a quality to all of this that’s a bit like a child putting on their parent’s clothes and pretending that it imbues them with all the authority and power of an adult. Reflecting back on the cambrian explosion of online ideologies, I feel this is undeniable.

As the internet age comes of age, it seems this quality is just as well infiltrating actual halls of power in government and corporations, to our collective detriment. How else should we take the recent extremes in tariff policy except to see tariffs reduced to a signifier within some larger fantasy, where sign function collapse has destroyed the actual knowledge of how the economy actually reproduces itself among those in power?

As the differences between Trump 1 and 2 become more apparent, it’s become clear to me that the ascendency of those socialized by the anti-socialization of the internet, such as political staff, have embraced this lack of responsibility for making things work. But childish delusion doesn’t necessarily have to be the defining quality of cyberspace ideology, for close enough obsession with the point of resistance to the symbolic order may eventually produce a desire to understand the signified, the materiality of this order. The trouble is that this materiality of the order is located in reality, or at least something closer to it, and therefore will not necessarily produce the same desires as the existing desires for delusion. Overcoming this childhood comfort found in these signifiers is a part of growing up, and much growing up is necessary.