I'm always trying to encapsulate how we, as emotional beings, interact with the world and the machines and technology around us - being able to emote through those things. They're not antithetical or mutually exclusive. The development of writing and the visual organization of life made possible the discovery of individualism, introspection and so on. My phone, or rather what my phone connected me to- the internet, had changed the way I operated, and perhaps, even, who I was. Although internet culture comes into being through complex technical ensembles, it is characterized by a change that is very difficult to grasp unless it is experienced over time. Any invention or technology is an extension or self-amputation of our physical bodies, and such extension also demands new ratios or new equilibriums among the other organs and extensions of the body. "Whole movements can appear, disappear, change meaning or exist just for short time," Espenschied argues, "and still be highly relevant." The knowledge of net art accumulates primarily in the bodies of its users. Embodiment thus refers to how particular subjects live and experience being a body dynamically, in specific, concrete ways. If human bodies are in some cases factual objects to be discovered and analyzed, they are at the same time the very medium through which such knowledge is attained. As an object of analysis, that is, the body is unique in that it is always also the means for analysis. An individual conception of self makes it harder to know yourself in some pretty profound ways because it involves a kind of denial. A lot of coming of age stories are about getting lost and finding yourself. But coming of age in the early days of the internet has felt, to me, like a kind of getting lost and not finding myself…getting lost and finding not a single self but rather a number of different selves within me, and learning how to live uncertainly with each one. Not only is man not monolithic but he has several layers and, in addition, he is at the same time internally split. It is the syntax of the culture of computer-mediated identity which, by the way, can include simultaneous multiple identities, or identities that abridge and dislocate gender and age. Identity is the first thing you create when you log on to a computer service. By defining yourself in some way, whether it is through your name, a personal profile, an icon or mask, you also define your audience, space and territory. The internet is a place for self-presentation—from Facebook to YouTube to Instagram—but likewise in the “real,” or let’s say “analog” world, one is expected to be responsible for the image they present to the gaze of others. At the same time, over the past few decades, ideas of social welfare and community had been pushed aside for individualised notions of resilience, wellness and self-improvement, promoted through a ballooning ‘selfcare’ industry which relegates care to something we are supposed to buy for ourselves on a personal basis. As a result, design has transformed society itself into an exhibition space in which individuals appear as both artists and self-produced works of art. The subject of self-design is therefore not only interested in their own existence, but also in that of mankind, their only possible spectator. Like a lover’s interest in the existence of a partner to find love and be loved by, the subject of self design is interested in the existence of society to find and receive recognition and admiration. This interest is intense because mankind is, as we know, vulnerable and mortal. Truth is precisely based on the inauthentic. Masks become part of the grammar. In the architecture of networks, geography shifts as readily as time. Communities are defined by software and hardware access. Anatomy can be readily reconstituted. Like a mapmaker restricted by the conventions of cartography, there’s only so much we can do online within the boundaries created by the architects of our platforms. That this is a chilling contradiction to the claim that TikTok is a platform for authenticity seems obvious. But I think the issue here is even more mysterious and complex. After all, these kids were very young when their parents gave them iPhones and tablets—they’ve never known a self that wasn’t subject to anonymous virtual observation. And so it may well be that whatever we mean by “authentic” here isn’t the standard definition that Rousseau and the Romantics first fathomed—a true effusion of your unvarnished personality—but is “authentic” in the sense that their identities have been made in perfect, unconscious sympathy with whatever their mob of online followers has deemed agreeable and inoffensive. Disclosing such information about oneself elicits a sense of trust, sympathy, and interpersonal warmth in the recipient. Hence, self-disclosure is an effective and frequently employed means for creating a personal connection and relationship with others. Regarding the potential impact of the Internet, it has been found that people are less reluctant to engage in self-disclosure in computer-mediated (vs. face-to-face) communication, presumably because of the reduced public self- awareness, partial anonymity, and limited availability of social cues characteristic of the medium. The enhanced propensity for self-disclosure is likely to promote or spread awareness of others' inner states in Internet communication. Of interest, this characteristic of the medium may thus facilitate the creation of shared reality with strangers. Distinct features of interpersonal online communication could also affect the creation of shared reality in interpersonal communication. According to the most recent definition, shared reality is the product of the motivated process of experiencing a commonality of inner states about the world. Shared reality requires that people infer or know the other's inner state (e.g., an attitude, judgment, or feeling), are aware of the target of another person's inner state (e.g., a new colleague at work, a political speech, or a religious issue), and experience connecting with the other person based on the commonality between their and the other's inner state. Creating the commonality is driven by fundamental human needs and motives, specifically the (epistemic) need for a reliable and confident understanding of the world and the (affiliative-relational) need to connect with others. Our digital platforms now give us spaces to connect and share our lives with one another – but are these platforms committed to our ability to better understand ourselves, explore what gives our lives meaning, and forge meaningful connections? Unfortunately, continued openness is not a foregone conclusion and future dreams of technology may be only what the corporations and institutions can imagine, which would be the biggest failure of all. The fervor for connections, the compulsion to disclose and express, and the desire to belong are all themselves varieties of religious experience. The history of the church—as an apparatus that profits from people exposing themselves—mirrors the ways social media works today. This may be why confessions and other testimonial forms play such a significant role online. Now, across social media, we too can film, edit, and post our own confessional-style content. Like it or not, the reality-TV confessional has shaped our digital lives. The confessional hasn’t just conquered reality TV — it now dominates the digital landscape too. Its most lasting legacy is the birth of the social-media influencer. The world’s biggest YouTubers have taken a similar approach — filming, editing, and posting their own confessional-like videos. They ground what is being shared in some semblance of naked and unadorned reality, even though there may be nothing real about them. They testify to the power of what is now more real than reality: the relations that bind artifice to what is most essential about oneself. It wasn’t hard to see why someone in this position might come to mistrust language, doubting its ability to bridge the gap between bodies, traumatized by the revealed gulf, the potentially lethal abyss that lurks beneath each carefully proffered sentence. Unveiled language does not propose an escape but rather a thoroughgoing transformation of the world. In the employ of exploiters and oppressors, language exploits and oppresses. But in the service of dreamers, language dreams… The feminist dream of a common language, like all dreams for a perfectly true language, of perfectly faithful naming of experience, is a totalizing and imperialist one. In that sense, dialectics too is a dream language, longing to resolve contradiction. While many of us leaving long-standing institutions for the internet believe that we are rejecting the scripts of institutions and forging our own, most of us are really just embracing different institutions with different scripts. Which means that our approach to using these platforms isn’t the only thing that will have to change. The platforms through which we connect, reflect, and share our lives will themselves need to change the ways in which they operate, shifting away from models that prioritize profit above all else. In a digital world guided by the priorities of capitalism, many of us have replaced religious scripts with ones shaped by the ways brands can monetize our lives, which is why so many corporations have embraced buzzwords like self-care and authenticity. While we might think we are leaving institutions and making our own way in the world, Craig Martin points out in Capitalizing Religion that this new freedom is heavily scripted, confirmed, and controlled by market forces – which means it’s not really freedom at all. With so many people leaving the institutions that connected us for ages and moving to platforms with a financial interest in driving us apart, it’s hard to imagine that individualized story changing. Which is why, while my fellow nonreligious people have cheered on the headlines about the rise of the “nones,” I’ve found myself worrying instead. While I celebrate that we live in a time when people are able to change, abandon, or live their entire lives without a religious category without as much fear of social reprisal as they would have faced in the past, I’m deeply concerned about where we religiously unaffiliated turn in times of need. Where are the nonreligious (or even the religious but nonparticipating) getting their narratives about who they are and what it means to belong, and do these narratives help them see the ways in which their well-being is bound up in that of others? As long as God was considered to be alive, the design of the soul was more important than the design of the body. The subject wanted their soul to be loved or at least recognized by God. The desire for admiration by others, by society, was regarded as a sin because it substituted “worldly” recognition for the only true spiritual recognition—external values for inner values. Thus, the relationship of the subject to society was ethical: one did something good for society to please God—not society itself. The death of God signified the disappearance of the divine viewer of the soul, the viewer for whom the soul had been designed for centuries. In the secular age, God was replaced by society, and thus, instead of an ethical relationship, our relationship to society became erotic. Suddenly, the only possible manifestation of human subjectivity became its design: the look of the clothes in which humans appear, the everyday things with which they surround themselves, the spaces they inhabit, and so forth. Where religion once was, design emerged. The old saw of man made in imitation of God is outdated on many levels, but it is probably a good model for how machines will imitate humanity. In the meantime, by opting out of traditional institutions, we have just transferred the work they were doing to new ones. It is not clear who makes and who is made in the relation between human and machine. Becoming a machine; hiding behind machines; employing machines as companions or managers of human communication and connection: Andy was as ever at the vanguard, the breaking wave of a change in culture, abandoning himself to what would soon become the driving obsession of our times. His attachment at once prefigures and establishes our own age of automation: our rapturous, narcissistic fixation with screens; the enormous devolution of our emotional and practical lives to technological apparatuses and contraptions of one kind or another. It is not clear what is mind and what body in machines that resolve into coding practices. It is impossible to know how these will turn out, but since the human being has evolved to assess complex information through visual means, we have no reason to believe that the same thing won't happen in the realm of machines. Marx thus formulates on the one hand the separation of the workers from their means of work, their determination through the machines, the domination of living labor by objectified labor, and introduces the figure of the inverse relationship of humans and machines: from the machine as a means for the human being to ease his or her working and living conditions to the human being as a means of the machine. From this perspective, human action on the machine, ultimately limited to preserving the machine from disruptions, is thoroughly subjected to the order of the machinery and not the other way around. Through the process of objectifying all forms of knowledge in the machine, the producers of this knowledge lose the undivided competency and the power over the labor process; living labor itself regards itself on the one hand as objectified, dead labor in the machine, on the other as scattered, divided among single living workers at many points in the machinery. It may be that the Internet is taking the place not just of other people as external sources of memory but also of our own cognitive faculties. The Internet may not only eliminate the need for a partner with whom to share information—it may also undermine the impulse to ensure that some important, just learned facts get inscribed into our biological memory banks. As advances in computation and data transfer blur the lines between mind and machine, we may transcend some of the limits on memory and thought imposed by the shortcomings of human cognition. The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time without the oedipal project. The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust. Perhaps that is why I want to see if cyborgs can subvert the apocalypse of returning to nuclear dust in the manic compulsion to name the Enemy. Cyborgs are not reverent; they do not re-member the cosmos. They are wary of holism, but needy for connection—they seem to have a natural feel for united front politics, but without the vanguard party. The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential. But this shift does not mean that we are in danger of losing our own identity. We are simply merging the self with something greater, forming a transactive partnership not just with other humans but with an information source more powerful than any the world has ever seen. But wait... Silliness - diversion - isn't this the superpower we took on when we lost the superpower of linear time perception? Was this a good trade? I think most people are second guessing that it wasn't, but, if you were to ask these same people if they wanted their old brains back, and no more information 24/7, would they? Guaranteed not one person would. So regardless of how we morally frame the human soul, one thing is certain: we wanted something, and we got it. We're not innocent here - and we all feel ourselves turning into something new. What is that thing? We want to be it as quickly as possible. We don't want to be plain old us any more. Just happen, whatever it is. I don’t know what I’m saying. I guess what I mean is that sometimes I don’t know what or who we are. Days I feel like a human being, while other days I feel more like a sound. I touch the world not as myself but as an echo of who I was. Can you hear me yet? Can you read me? How real am I feeling right now? Am I absorbed? Am I a picture or not? Instead of thinking gigantic thoughts, I tried to focus on something small, the smallest thing I could think of. Someone once made this pew I’m sitting on, I thought. Someone sanded the wood and varnished it. Someone carried it into the church. Someone laid the tiles on the floor, someone fitted the windows. Each brick was placed by human hands, each hinge fitted on each door, every road surface outside, every bulb in every streetlight. And even things built by machines were really built by human beings, who built the machines initially. And human beings themselves, made by other humans, struggling to create happy children and families. Me, all the clothing I wear, all the language I know. Who put me here in this church, thinking these thoughts? Other people, some I know very well and others I have never met. Am I myself, or am I them? No, it is not me. It is the others. Do I sometimes hurt and harm myself, do I abuse the unearned cultural privilege of whiteness, do I take the labor of others for granted, have I sometimes exploited a reductive iteration of gender theory to avoid serious moral engagement, do I have a troubled relationship with my body, yes. Do I want to be free of pain and therefore demand that others also live free of pain, the pain that is mine and therefore also theirs, yes, yes. When I opened my eyes I felt that I had understood something, and the cells of my body seemed to light up like millions of glowing points of contact, and I was aware of something profound. Then I stood up from my seat and collapsed. Why do we buy self-help books? Why do we throw ourselves into a new exercise routine or wardrobe or political campaign, a hobby or diet, or a new social media platform? Why do we find solace in the certainties of fundamentalist religion or self-important atheism? Why do we post status updates or Instagram stories about the minute details of our lives? We want to be understood – by others, but also by ourselves. To document our lives in the hope we might get to a point of self-actualization where we truly understand ourselves and the world around us. In part this may be our attempt to reach a state in which neither the world nor our own selves can take us by surprise. Whether we frame it as such or not, it’s chasing enlightenment. Because if we figure out who we are and where we belong, then we’ll always know what to do; how to be in the world, and who. If you sincerely understood yourself – knew exactly who you are and why you want the things you want – you’d know what to do in difficult situations and how to avoid them in the first place. The desire to find this kind of understanding can feel especially acute in times of transition, like during adolescence or after a big breakup. It’s in these moments, next to you, that I envy words for doing what we can never do – how they can tell all of themselves simply by standing still, simply by being. Imagine I could lie down beside you and my whole body, every cell, radiates a clear, singular meaning, not so much a writer as a word pressed down beside you. The longing for security, for a deeper understanding of what was happening to me in that difficult year of breaking up, leaving my job, moving, and battling parasites, was what drove me to that tarot reading and what made me ask a search engine what it means to be real. I was confused – about why I wanted the things I did, why the vision I’d once had for my life wasn’t matching reality, why I was struggling – and I wanted answers. I wanted a solution to the problem of being a person, this person. A shortcut. My breakup had caught me off guard; I hadn’t seen it coming and I didn’t want to ever be caught off guard like that again. I feel very embarrassed by all that now, but I was lonely and unhappy, and I didn’t understand that these feelings were ordinary, that there was nothing singular about my loneliness, my unhappiness. I wanted to understand myself so that I could protect myself from myself. To become real so that I could be safe from uncertainty. “What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?” “Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.” “Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit. “Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.” “Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?” “It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to the people who don’t understand.” Whether FAKE! is meant to destabilize one’s self-integrity or to destroy trust in the world out there, the aim is the same: to atomize individuals through severing social bonds and to destroy our capacity to care, to be curious, to engage. FAKE! is never about truth, it’s about domination. We do not need a totality in order to work well. It is the attempt to solidify the world, self, and others into distinct and separate categories, and the misguided and dangerous calls for some kind of purified state of being that has always been the problem. What causes fragmentation? Taylor says it "arises when people come to see themselves more and more atomistically, otherwise put, as less and less bound to their fellow citizens in common projects and allegiances." Self-amputation forbids self-recognition. How, then, do we rebuild the capacity to imagine together a common world? The reality is that social construction is co-construction: it requires ethical commitment and practice. It demands situationality and embodiment, but also a relational commitment to others and to the world, and requires accepting that one will inevitably be changed: in other words, it is about transformation through constant discovery and rediscovery, through acknowledgment that things are indeed and have always been in flux. Part of why we tend to think about our digital challenges in terms of individual behavior changes is because of the obsession with the individual that results from these conditions. Only in a world of hypercapitalism can we focus so much on an individualized conception of ourselves instead of one rooted in an understanding that we are part of a collective. We see this emphasis on defining yourself singularly in the way these platforms emphasize individuality and self-expression above all else. Facebook asks you “What’s on your mind?” and rewards you if you always have an answer. As a generation leaves institutions that are, at their core, about helping us see ourselves as a part of a greater whole – moving instead to platforms that often push us to think about ourselves as unique individuals – I worry that these platforms are training us to locate our value in whatever increases theirs, regardless of how it affects the common good. In short, if the self we’re constructing online is being built in venues inherently designed to make money, that informs who we become. And because these platforms also encourage us to see ourselves as individuals rather than part of a greater whole, we begin to think more and more through the lens of our own needs and interests. Thinking in terms of ourselves makes the collective issues we face feel too large to address, which makes us really anxious. The imaginary is transindividual (Stiegler 2012): it arises through the circulation and sharing of thoughts, ideas, and practices among individuals and collectives and is always an evolving projection about what life together could be like. The concept of the imaginary is inseparable from the practice of building and maintaining social bonds through time and space, that is to say, the constant work of building supportive networks among beings who, while mostly strangers to each other, craft the same values and desires for helpful and empowering connections to create potentials for the emergence of resilient ways of being in the world and in relation to each other. As bigger pieces of our self-construction happen online, we could become all the more anxious as a result. The principle of numbness comes into play with electric technology, as with any other. We have to numb our central nervous system when it is extended and exposed, or we will die. Thus the age of anxiety and of electric media is also the age of the unconscious and of apathy. But it is strikingly the age of consciousness of the unconscious, in addition. With our central nervous system strategically numbed, the tasks of conscious awareness and order are transferred to the physical life of man, so that for the first time he has become aware of technology as an extension of his physical body. Apparently this could not have happened before the electric age gave us the means of instant, total field-awareness. With such awareness, the subliminal life, private and social, has been hoicked up into full view, with the result that we have "social consciousness" presented to us as a cause of guilt-feelings. Existentialism offers a philosophy of structures, rather than categories, and of total social involvement instead of the bourgeois spirit of individual separateness or points of view. In the electric age we wear all mankind as our skin. The desire for the other’s desire is permanently haunted by the possibility of mankind’s final disappearance—the physical death of human spectators after the metaphysical death of God. Most of what we will leave behind is our digital trail. It's like a return to the '80s arcade-design aesthetic. We are returning to basics. We are returning to the ancient versions of ourselves. We are nomads once again, untethered to one place, people, language, or belief system. We flit from browser to browser, job to job, country to country, partner to partner. All we now share, together, is the sky and the internet.

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