Turning the Friggin’ Frogs Gay in Three Easy Steps

My recent dive into anthropology has taken its inevitable post-human turn with a book a friend gave me today, purchased from Book Bazaar here in Ottawa. It’s a collection of academic papers titled Cyberspace: First Steps, edited by Michael Benedikt and published in 1991.

It has inspired me to finally tell you what’s turning the frogs friggin’ gay. And, to be perfectly honest, I’m as pissed as Alex about it.

After the introduction by—of course it is, who else would it be?—novelist and founder of the cyberpunk genre William Gibson, the first paper by Canadian artist and cinema scholar David Tomas provides the perfect interpolation of Arnold van Gennep’s Rites of Passage into the realm of computer-created spaces, via the retrieval of Van Gennep’s theory by American Victor Turner.

If you don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, read on—it’ll be worth your time.

I’m covering this stuff on other blog about my recovery from psychosis. That place has been, um, hoppin’ (frog jokes end now). A piece titled Rituals of Change as Used on You elaborates my recent reading of century-old theories about rituals of transformation, and backs up my earlier polemic about the psychological hazards of Joseph Campbell’s “hero’s journey,” as laid out in his famous text The Hero With a Thousand Faces. I’ll summarize all that in the next section.

But first, read the line I’ve emphasized in bold (the rest is context) from the second essay in the collection, titled Mind is a Leaking Rainbow by Nicole Stenger:

Where is cyberspace? Watching the poor cyberspace visitors throw themselves on the floor in search of an unattainable area of their virtual environment is enough in itself to understand that there is no easy answer to that question. Cyberspace is like Oz—it is, we get there, but it has no location.

Entering this realm of pure feelings is a decision to leave firm ground that may have more consequences than we think. Watching TV, after all, only commits us to being obese. In cyberspace we lose weight immediately; but there is a gravity of choice that is not yet fully understood. Certainly there will be a shifting from the sense of territory, of being an inhabitant of an earthly system of values that includes roots, walls, and possessions, toward a radical adventure that blasts it all. Baudrillard would probably think that cyberspace is the just future of “those peoples with no origins and no authenticity, who will know how to exploit that situation to the full,” peoples who are already satellites of the Earth and who will know, like Japan, how “to transform the power of territoriality and feudalism into that of deterritoriality and weightlessness” (1989: 76). He would also think that it is the destiny of those individuals who, through multiple external prostheses of their inner functions, will become satellites of themselves and deep-fry their neurons in cyberspace for lack of a historical challenge, a war, for example, where real flesh bleeds and bones rot in pyramids. Poor souls that may get drowned in the liquid mirror of their minds and perhaps become females, since “surprisingly, this proposition that in the feminine, the very distinction between authenticity and artifice is without foundation, also defines the space of simulation” (Baudrillard 1990: 11). Cyberspace, one of the greatest challenges of Humanity for the century to come? Cyberspace, last frontier of all? Borne of Disneyland like luscious candy cotton. Atoll of grace between the West and the Orient. Soufflé of desires revolving in the light, whispering the names of the world’s fiancés: Laure, Beatrice, Peter Pan, John Lennon.

Cyberspace the dessert of humanity!

Mr. Baudrillard, how can you sell your dry nuts on the shore when we have so much fun in the water!

This prediction is absolutely everywhere in ’90s books about cyberspace and what intellectuals of the time surmise computers will do to us. It’s still around today, of course, in the post-humanities and especially within the theories underlying contemporary video game criticism where hackers who compete and win are masculine and cyborgs who experience and become are feminine.

When are we going to begin taking the humanities seriously?

Maybe a quick summary of the psycho-dynamics behind transitions of identity, as understood in their most plain-Jane, run-of-the-mill, obvious, boring, Sociology 101 sense can help get the ball rolling.

Rites of Passage

In a nutshell, contemporary anthropology understands metamorphosis, or the transition between one stage of identity to another, into which individuals are initiated. It is a three-part movement 1) out of the stable social structures which one is embedded in, into a liminal space, where 2) symbolic rituals to manipulate the initiate’s identity into a new form before 3) rituals which bring them back into the community in a new place, and as a new person reintegrate them into society in a new relation. The first two stages are communal, including members of the family and society who let  go of the person’s old form and then accept them back again in their new form. The rites of the liminal middle-stage are done in a place alien and unfamiliar to the initiate. Because they have no habits or bearings to know what’s going on, they are highly suggestible and malleable.

First expressed in Van Gennep’s 1909 book Rites de Passage, we see three-part transformation in puberty rites, marriage rites, funerary rights, and other cultural rituals. Many of his examples include adults dressed up in masks as demons or scary things who, after frightening the initiate, reveal their human form and welcome them into adulthood or a higher class of society. Funerals often render the third stage as both the reintegration of the dead into the society of the afterlife, or of living society itself entering a world where the dead person is now present only in spirit or in memory.

Victor Turner brought this concept back into vogue in the ’60s, examining, for instance, a tribal medicine rite where young women who experience birth complications are taken out of the village and undergo a ritual for several days crawling underground tunnels to rid themselves of anti-natel curses from dead ancestors. Turner is also the person who termed the middle-space, wherein the transformative ritual takes place, “liminal.”

Some Problems

As it turns out, the founder of sociology Émile Durkheim defined the terms sacred and profane in a way objectionable to both Van Gennep and to Marshall McLuhan. I’ve already cited and summarized Van Gennep’s objections on my other blog. Van Gennep’s beef is basically that Durkheim took totemism—one aspect of religious ritual—and made it his sociological conception of the totality of religion.

What is sacred to Durkheim are the magical-feeling spaces and symbols and events where society gets its feeling of communion and togetherness. Van Gennep reads this as totally insufficient for understanding the role of rituals because it totally excludes the study or focus on individuals in society. Durkheim is too abstract, he only sees society as a mass, and doesn’t properly integrate people as they actually are—Van Gennep’s rites of passage, by contrast, include both society and individuals and examines their relation.

Marshall McLuhan made two objections of his own in The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), specifically in reference to the terms as used by religious scholar Mircae Elliade.

Having studied the artistic techniques used by poets to evoke various states of being through words, objects to the application of religious language like “sacredness” and “profanity” for purely psychological or sensory states of mind. The linear, logical mind—what McLuhan termed visual space—was one posture, the multi-levelled and cubist or mythological state of mind—the tactile and acoustic spatial sensibilities—were another. Different postures of mind can be cultivated by different environments, and our habituation to different environments, he said, can imbue us with different “sensory ratios.” Wheres the west has been low-level formatting its brains with the silent reading of the perfect, identical letter-forms of the printing press for a few centuries, and thus developed a culture around a visual bias, oral cultures as studied by anthropologists had an acoustical and tactile bias of living, ever-present complex analogies and mythic forms.

That Eliade chooses to call the oral man “religious” is, of course, as fanciful and arbitrary as calling blondes bestial. But it is not in the least confusing to those who understand that the “religious” for Eliade is, as he insists from the start, the irrational. He is in that very large company of literacy victims who have  acquiesced in supposing that the “rational” is the explicitly lineal, sequential, visual. That is, he prefers to appear as an eighteenth-century mind in rebellion against the dominant visual mode which then was new. Such was Blake and a host of others. Today Blake would be violently anti-Blake, because the Blake reaction against the abstract visual is now the dominant cliché and claque of the big battalions, as they move in regimented grooves of sensibility.—The Gutenberg Galaxy, p 70-71

McLuhan’s second complaint, we can read here, is that sociology supposes that all day-to-day regular life is “profane” and logical, and that all ritual experience is by contrast “sacralizing” and enchanted. Turner tries to address this with his added notion of the “liminoid” state to encompass the lessened “sacredness” of ritual in the post-modern world.

McLuhan, always pointing to the ground, would rather bring us back to the individual, just as Van Gennep did. In McLuhan’s case, the reader who has to “put on” the ideas for him or herself and recognize their own environment and what it is doing to them.

As I pointed out, developmental psychology is all-in with social construction in seeing social-belonging as providing the environment for one’s embedding. One’s relations to ones family or friends or schoolmates or co-workers is the fabric one is sewn into and cut out from by Van Gennep’s passage rites.

McLuhan, for his part, is the only person I’ve come across who has explicitly, over and over, explicitly countered that notion by considering the embodied relation, via senses, to the total material world of architecture and urban design and artistic interfaces to media content. It is our bodies—where our bodies are ourselves—which are ripped from their habitats which undergo ritual change, not merely our social identities as moved around in status hierarchies in a change of role.

Getting your driver’s license or age-of-majority card isn’t just a status symbol or a fashion accessory: it radically changes your embodied relation to the world. You can now experience kilometers of space as your own roaming ground, traversable in a matter of minutes. Or you can now enter bars at night and encounter strangers of all ages and types in inebriated and suggestible states. These are environmental changes and they re-configure your total relation to the material and social world.

The introduction of television created a world of meaning different than that encountered in the newspaper. And so to has the computer today.

Rage against the Machined

My relationship to scholarly anthropological and sociological works such as those featured in Cyberspace: First Steps has been, from my first encounter with it during #GamerGate in 2014, a passionate one.

More specifically, I’ve hated it.

My last angry-rant blog-post is both the one I was most hesitant to publish this year and also the one which was most popular on my other blog. So here we go again—if you’d rather not indulge me in an outraged polemic, skip to the next section.

Where the hell do academics get off elevating those who create computer interfaces into remote, untouchable technocratic rulers by only identifying with and studying and addressing people who do not understand computers?

And why is their perspective so metaphysically and rhetorically outrageous? Just look at the sort of language Stenger uses even back in 1991 in the quote above. “Cyberspace, one of the greatest challenges of Humanity for the century to come? Cyberspace, last frontier of all?”

From the first time I heard such utterances in 2014, I’ve been screaming “Lady, it’s just a computer. It’s just a computer! What the hell are you raving about? Cyberspace isn’t real. It’s just a computer screen with pixels on it. There’s nothing inside your computer. It’s just a processor running blindly through the memory map, zapping circuits to make blinky lights go blink. It’s all material, part of this world! It’s all reality! Reality hasn’t gone anywhere!”

By 2019 I was trying—in my own frazzled, discombobulated way—to topple the pillars of cyberspace by revealing the co-existence of its material make-up with our physical world of flesh-and-blood. That’s where five years of well-directed and sublimated anger got me: in front of a podium of academics and students, waving my arms around explaining that computers don’t really have magical worlds inside of them, as they stared in surprised shock. I was still quite staggered and insulted by the total erasure of people who live in reality, but was, and will continue to try throwing bones to all these computer-illiterate cybernaut wordcells.

Remember: McLuhan’s expanded the scope developmental psychology idea of transitions between individuation and reintegration—death and rebirth—out from just the social world. It’s not just other people in society we are living with. McLuhan conceived us as merging with, and separating from the total environment of human-created architecture, urban-planning, art, aesthetic, and media interface.

Because of the materially-grounded nature of “My Cyberspace” growing up—which was not the well-researched and documented floating and postmodern cyberspace which nearly everyone else was living in at the time—I grew socially alienated by remaining materially in-touch.

We all had computers, I used mine more holistically than everyone else—“and that has made all the difference,” to quote Robert Frost. Because I remained materially in-touch, I easily resisted social conditioning to accept the marketing lingo and trickery which has endlessly redefined computer jargon over and over. I dropped out of university because of it. It’s so bad now that nearly everyone working in tech cannot actually understand it, and just lie and use the term “full stack” as a buzzword on their resumés. A great deal of the technical language in professional use is wrong today, and I’m as diligent in avoiding corrupted technical language as GNU philosphers are.

Which, again, alienates me from the important discourses of socially-constructed consensus reality concerning computers. I can barely talk to people because I don’t want to sanctify the language they’re using without condescending to arrogantly qualify every other word with “so-called”s and scare-quotes.

Like, I get it—you studied anthropology or psychology or UX design or Python—not computers as technical artifacts. But then you dare to write books about what computers will do to people? And only books written for people who don’t understand computers? Written for people who don’t understand computers? You never considered that, perhaps, learning how the trick works may be the real liberation? Instead you exemplify basic bitch enslavement to consumer commodity culture—and it’s so hypocritical coming from the people most likely to criticize consumer commodity culture. You write about computers, but you write about them as through everyone on the planet has to pay someone else money to fix their computer when it breaks? As though their only means of power over their machine is their credit card? As though everyone’s relation to their machine, after purchase, is entirely socially-facilitated? Oh.

Oh yeah, that’s me. I’m the guy you ask to fix your computer for you, and have been since I was six years old. You ask me to make or maintain your website for you, to troubleshoot issues for you, to do all your janitor work. I am the mediator between the material world and your social world. You’re social, I’m the extension of your tool. You don’t care about what I say about cyberspace or computer history—you just see my writings on cyberspace and computer history as indicating that I have utilitarian value. By doing things for you, I can help you avoid learning what I know that allows me to fix this stuff. You get to remain ignorant about how to actually control some part of the material world yourself, from your very hands. You get to remain alien to that perspective—the very perspective that would qualify you to write with any real authority about the subject of computers and society. The subject regarding-which you’ve socially constructed an expert-status.

Maybe you should find the responsibility to stop writing about computers and media and stop projecting the fatalistic discouragement of your own confused and hapless enslavement to technology onto the rest of us.

Cyberspace as Liminal Space

I think my anger is justified by the stakes.

According to David Tomas in “Old Rituals for New Space,” cyberspace is the ultimate liminal space wherein transformations happen.

Why choose to treat cyberspace from an anthropological, indeed ritual, perspective? First, as Sterling (cf. 1988: xi) has pointed out, science fiction is an important tool… Second, it allows us to make sense of an advanced information technology that has the potential to not only change the economic structure of human societies but also overthrow the sensorial and organic architecture of the human body, this by disembodying and reformatting its sensorium in powerful, computer-generated, digitalized spaces. This latter consequence of cyberspace will force anthropologists to take into account not only the jaded and contested question of the organic Other…. but also the post-organic, the classical (hardware-interfaced) cyborg and the postclassical, (software-interfaced) transorganic data-based cyborg or personality construct (Tomas 1989). This latter point is, as we shall see, intimately connected to the social and symbolic functions of traditional rites of passage rituals…

Insofar as the liminal phase encompasses the destructuring and restructuring of the subject, it is also marked by the denial of structure and the origin of structure per se. Turner has pointed out, in connection with its creative aspect, that liminality is “a realm of pure possibility whence novel configurations of ideas and relations may arise” (1977a: 97).

Can cyberspace be considered to be a new social space? According to Gibson’s description and contemporary work on virtual worlds technologies, it does indeed hold the promise of new spatial configurations and related post-organic life forms… Anthropologists also have a vested interest in engaging virtual worlds technologies during this early stage of speculation and development, especially those who are interested in engaging advanced forms of Western technology from the points of view of their modes of social production. For there is reason to believe that these technologies might constitute the central phase in a postindustrial “rite of passage” between organically human and cyberpsychically digital life-forms as reconfigured through computer software systems. Should this prove to be correct, existing theories of ritual processes can provide important insights into the socially engineered cultural dimensions of cyberspace, and its social function as presently conceived…

Recall the thesis above from the Nicole Stenger quote above.

Cyberspace is like Oz—it is, we get there, but it has no location…

[Jean Baudrillard] would also think that it is the destiny of those individuals who, through multiple external prostheses of their inner functions, will become satellites of themselves and deep-fry their neurons in cyberspace for lack of a historical challenge, a war, for example, where real flesh bleeds and bones rot in pyramids. Poor souls that may get drowned in the liquid mirror of their minds and perhaps become females, since “surprisingly, this proposition that in the feminine, the very distinction between authenticity and artifice is without foundation, also defines the space of simulation.”

I am not quite the right messenger for this message, but I hope you won’t shoot me for it. It’s not even me saying it, it’s everyone else in the ‘90s before the fruits of cyberspace were yet born.

Let’s read a bunch of passages from books of the period. Bold emphasis will be my own. Here’s the 1995 psychological guidebook to the internet Life on the Screen by Sherry Turkle:

As more people spend more time in these virtual spaces, some go so far as to challenge the idea of giving any priority to RL [Real Life] at all. “After all,” says one dedicated MUD [text-based multi-user dungeon] player and IRC [internet relay chat] user, “why grant such superior status to the self that has the body when the selves that don’t have bodies are able to have different kinds of experiences?” When people can play at having different genders and different lives, it isn’t surprising that for some this play has become as real as what we conventionally think of as their lives, although for them this is no longer a valid distinction…

For Rudy, thirty-six, what was most threatening about his girlfriend’s TinySex was the very fact that she wanted to play a character of the opposite sex at all. He discovered that she habitually plays men and has sex with female characters in chat rooms on America Online (like MUDs in that people can choose their identities). This discovery led him to break off the relationship. Rudy struggles to express what bothers him about his ex-girlfriend’s gender-bending in cyberspace. He is not sure of himself, he is unhappy, hesitant, and confused. He says, “We are not ready for the psychological confusion this technology can bring…”

Yet the status of these fantasies-in-action in cyberspace is unclear. Although they involve other people and are no longer pure fantasy, they are not “in the world.” Their boundary status offers new possibilities. TinySex and virtual gender-bending are part of the larger story of people using virtual spaces to construct identity.

Nowhere is this more dramatic than in the lives of children and adolescents as they come of age in online culture. Online sexual relationships are one thing for those of us who are introduced to them as adults, but quite another for twelve-year-olds who use the Internet to do their homework and then meet some friends to party in a MUD.

Those are some fantastic questions. What happens when people construct their identities in cyberspace (which, again, doesn’t exist—unless you aren’t in touch with what computers materially are and believe marketers and sci-fi authors and interface designers who unanimously conspire you have you believe the screen is window to another world)?

Let’s ask Arthur Kroker and  Michael A. Weinstein, as they present their thoughts in Data Trash, 1994. The authors, of course, are here providing a highly-poetic, first-hand report of the experience of being online for someone who believes they are totally immersed in cyberspace (which, again, isn’t real).

Simply switch on your Mac/DOS screen, and the ideology of virtualized capitalism, is brilliantly displayed. Everything is there. Bodily flesh is reduced to a digital servomechanism. The centering-point of organic perspective is displaced outside normal ocular vision to the nowhere space of virtual optics in the Net. Individual subjectivity crashes as it swiftly merges with an info-economy of data bytes. Here, the mind is filtered by organs without a body, and the body is suspended in the illusion that digital reality maximizes the zone of freedom (misplaced [virtual] facticity), whereas actually we are (finally) growing a cyber-body…

In the windowed world, we pass time by slipping into our electronic bodies, deleting for a while the body with (terminal) organs, and becoming alt.subjectivity in the ether-net of organs without a body. The drag of planetary time eases, and we flip into the hyper-role of “lurkers” wandering through the virtual rooms of the city on the digital hill. Voyeurs of our own disappearance into a recombinant subject-position: perfectly relational and positionless, and, for this reason, fascinated all the more. All twitching fingers as we become a computer keyboard, all burning sex as we stand around the dark edges of virtual bondage dungeons, all drifting feelings as we slip from node to node on the electronic net, and all virtual intelligence as we actually dissolve into a mouse that cursors across hyperspace.

Our technological future has never been more transparent: alt.bondage, alt.sex, alt.fetishes, alt.conspiracy, alt.TV Simpsons, alt.nano-technology, alt.politics, alt.Star Trek, alt.Bosnia, alt.jokes, alt.vacant beach…

Red Rock comes on-line. He tells me about a great new surfing destination in.Taiwan. Seems that it is the largest data storage dump in the virtual world: unlimited FTPing territory, a kind of cyber-world where a hacker could put down roots…

Less like an FTP site than a gigantic data harvesting-machine, the Taiwan FTP site aimlessly strips the media-net of its content, archiving the human story into its humming machinery…

Red Rock signals me to get off at the freeway exit to alt. sex, Taiwanese style. I flip on my encryption sensors, and head straight for this new file horizon. And it’s weird. A vast data storage bank for cyber-sex: bondage rituals, stories of sado-masochism that make you understand for the first time the pure aesthetics of disciplining of the flesh, stories of virtual bodies that merge together to the sound of crackling (electronic) body static as two neuro-skins that would be one make love against a crystalline background of data walls…

No longer localized in bounded energy fields, virtual history is finally free to produce recombinant images of life once the organic body has been fitted with a customized nervous system… Pushed from behind by the will to (data) archivalism and pulled from ahead by the will to recombination, virtual history recounts how electronic flesh comes to full self-consciousness, how the digital body becomes aware of its abandonment of the drag-weight of skin as it synchs smoothly with its bio-machine interfaces. The virtual sex archive beckons to us from the welcoming shore of a third sex, a floating sexual screen where gender signs go to ground, as the electronic body flips into the non-space of the ecstasy of anamorphosis. The electronic body archive scans the future of organs without a body, perfectly fibrillated and hyper-charged for nomadic journeys across the media-net.

Need I go on? Because I can.

The ubiquitous perception of computers as symbolic manipulators—containers full of “information” or “semiotic” signs or “symbols”—lends the computer readily amenable to the language of structuralism and post-modernism.  Beacuse, as I’ve said again and again, post-modernism is cyberspace, because it still clings to a vision of the social world consisting of abstract structures which are encoded in sign systems.

Of course, information isn’t actually a substance and it is not “in” your computer. And society is full of embodied people living in a material environment—not people strung up in the symbolic latticework of abstract stuctures. But if you don’t understand computers or media, you project a non-material world of floating sign-structures into the environment, into other people’s heads, into media, and into your computer. I don’t do that, and I think people should stop doing that, because if those sign-structures are real to you, they can possess you.

And that’s not even me saying that. These passages from Arthur Kroker’s book on The Possessed Individual: technology and the french postmodern should make this abundantly clear:

Anyway, Why fear? and Why desire? No one is grimmer than Deleuze and Guattari on the colonization of subjectivity by despotic capitalism. Their works are about the tattooed body. About the “markings” of the body, its organs, its gestures, its language by a circulating power. Foucault might have ventured onto this terrain of a relational power, but it was only to immediately suppress his fatal insight by a turn to a theory of speech, to a “power without a sex,” to a language without roots. Not, though, for Deleuze and Guattari. Refusing the post-Cartesian inhibitions of the “language subordination” of post-structuralism, they went all the way by writing, that is, a schizo-philosophy of the tattooed body. Tattooed not just on the outside (although that too), but on the inside: a signatured body written where semiology acquires corporeality, where the sign finally breathes, taking possession of the bodily organs it thought it was only denoting from afar.

To read Deleuze and Guattari’s writings on the tattooed body—and they have never written anything else- is really to finally understand Nietzsche: to be in the presence of the “ascetic priest” of On the Genealogy of Morals, ministering doses of sacrificial violence to the scapegoat-lust of the passive nihilists; to understand oedipalization, not as a psychoanalytical theory, but as an advanced and decompositive stage in the politics of ressentiment; to finally know cynical power as the dark infinity of schizoanalysis; and to recognize the masochism of Coldness and Cruelty as doppelganger to Nietzsche’s suicidal nihilists. To meditate, that is, on the tattooed body with its impossible doubling of fear and desire as the (already colonized) limits of subjectivity in virtual reality.

And it is to recognize as well the deep affinity between feminism and the rhizomatic perspective of Deleuze and Guattari. For what has feminist theory always been about if not a refusal of the grand metaphysics of Being, of the unitary male subject, of the phallocentric order of the Subject, Species, and Membership; in favor a world of “multiplicitles,” of a dancing materiality of lines of flight and departure; of a world reenchanted by the language of desire? Not the old boring world of phallocentric oppositions, but liquid doublings where the body finally speaks, where alchemy is the rule, and where the terrestial kingdom of grounded consciousness-the vegetative spatiality of the rhizomatic network-finally usurps abstract univocal perspective.  Where, that is, a new language is articulated which is capable of addressing both the disappearance of women under the sign of despotic power: the material language of markings, of deterritorialization and dematerialization, of gestural signatures; and of inscribing a new feminist possibility: the subject as “longitudes and latitudes, speeds and slownesses, moments of intensity.” The feminist subject, then, as an event-scene, living at the edge of the material body and virtual reality. Neither really pure corporeal denotation or perfect virtuality or desire; but both simultaneously. A “virtual feminism” which is a matter of decodings (the “multiplicities” in the relational world of the virtual self) and resignifications (the re-enchantment of bodily desire). Does this mean, therefore, that virtual feminism is the first and leading subject of post-liberalism?

Mark Dery’s 1999 Escape Velocity is a compendium of testimonies which may be added to the pile, summarized by their collector like so:

The subcultures explored in Escape Velocity act as prisms, refracting the central themes that shaft through cuyberculture, among them the intersection, both literal and metaphorical, of biology and technology, and the growing irrelevance of the body as sensory experience is gradually supplanted by digital simulation…

As we hurtle toward the millennium, poised between technological Rapture and social rupture, between Tomorrowland and Blade Runner, we would do well to remember that—for the foreseeable future, at least—we are here to stay, in these bodies, on this planet. The misguided hope that we will be born again as “bionic angels,” to quote Mondo 2000, is a deadly misreading of the myth of Icarus. It pins our future to wings of wax and feathers.

If you want more evidence just… oh, I dunno… go read everything published by nearly all of academia in the humanities departments for the past three decades.

Finishing the Ritual

Let’s regroup.

1. If you don’t understand and experience computers as being physical objects and existing in the material space your body inhabits, you are overwhelmingly likely to experience computers as portals to an infinite, friction-less space called cyberspace where your body doesn’t matter.
2. Except for my conditional clause in bold face, we have known point #1 for a long time and it is widely understood and studied and discussed. Again, the non-bold part is widely understood—and I’m the only person I know of who claims that the bold part modifies the situation.
3. Cyberspace is a “liminal space,” meaning that learning computers is a rite of passage out of embodied society and into a disembodied space where personality transformations are very easily accomplished.
4. The three-part structure of rights of passage suggests that one must, eventually, graduate from the liminal space back into social reality. And sociology and anthropology have understood culture to be expressed symbolically for a long time. Absent such a ritual, someone is terminally online and belongs nowhere in the social world. People who live in cyberspace are alienated, stuck in a liminal space, not recognized by society as fully existing and communicable. Their rite of passage into adulthood is unfinished.

Are you going to make me say it? Fine.

5. The only widely recognized social ritual of return to embodiment from the liminal space of cyberspace that I recognize is the LGBTQIA2S+ “coming out” ritual. That is because, if a significant proportion of your most important developmental experiences transformed you while you were barely in your body, it’s unlikely you’ll feel comfortable in your body when you’re there. Happy pride, everyone.
6. My bold-faced conditional suggests another possible ritual of return to society besides just coming out as queer and learning to be as comfortable as one can as one’s truly incarnated cyberspace self. I am suggesting, in (roughly) Kroker’s terms, another off-ramp from the post-human information superhighway which is certainly the road less traveled. It’s the one I took. It entails dispelling the illusion that cyberspace exists, by many progressive acts which reify the materiality of computers as physical objects which exist in the same world your body does. This unfortunately means alienating from the social world of present-day corrupted technical language. That is, rejecting all of the socially-constructed terms which reify cyberspace, as propagated by tech-company marketing departments, and learning how computers really actually work and exist. This can, however, be institutionalized and normalized.

And now, after all that setup, my thesis can be put plainly in all its absurdity: computers—as the easy-to-use commodity devices which are widely used today—are likely the primary cause of queer and non-binary gender identity.

Not what’s on the computers, computers themselves, and our lack of cultural rituals for reconciling the two, apparently unrelated domains of so-called “cyberspace” and so-called “meat-space” into the unity which they actually possess.

Queerness is literally just trying to translate, symbolically and aesthetically and performatively, your online-self into your real embodied social life and be recognized as having succeeded at this translation. It’s not a transition, it’s a translation—as though a book is being adapted into a screenplay. It’s a leap across a gap which, if I’m right, doesn’t even exist except in the perception of people who have a giant hole in their brain where the “what computers are” knowledge should be. A whole currently filled with bullshit terms like “apps” and “the cloud” and “information processing” and other abstractions and metaphors which are mistaken for material concreteness by the high-level illusions on the computer screen.

We make these sorts of leaps from fantasy—or media content—into embodied reality all the time in less literal ways. Costume play and role-play and finding inspiration in fictional or historical or celebrity role-models are all along the same spectrum of becoming. But our society is so dumb that it doesn’t know this, and would rather terraform the planet’s society into Baudrillard’s Disneyland than demand its experts take responsibility for having forgotten everything they knew in the ’90s. For recognizing their own culpability for bullshit culture-war issues by sustained will-full ignorance of these overwhelmingly obvious facts.

I knew damn well that the shit I was doing on the internet was rather indulgent and, concurrent with my long stage of becoming “The Concerned Netizen” gave up all my comfortable pop-culture obsessions few years. No more TV or film or music that wasn’t part of a social activity, and an introduction of about 2-5 hours of single-player video gaming a month to stay in touch with that medium. That left me tons of time to work and study and write and socialize and do my own anthropological field-work, on foot, in the city, among people who were nothing like me. That is, I avoided using the internet to find people I had something in common with—since I wanted to grow out of who I had been (while always remaining happily encumbered by it, of course). That’s my third-part of the ritual—my third-act return journey in Campbell’s terms. Oh yeah, that and understanding computers, which was the easy part because I had already done that my whole childhood and early life.

People do not want to understand computers. And so they can’t teach them. I’ve a good friend right now in a government sponsored college education which is supposed to be teaching her computers and it’s a fucking terrible waste of tax money. I’m tutoring her, and the many gaps and inability for tech experts to explain things is atrocious. Schools absolutely cannot explain computers—merely small, ephemeral techniques for very-specific, very minuscule tasks.

When I was a kid, all the adults told me I had to understand computers so I did. But, I much later learned, they didn’t want me to toil away at this Sisyphean task for any reason other than being useful to them. They were happy that I seemed to enjoy it. It spared them the bother of learning it themselves. To have me handy to fix things for them when it broke. Maybe they just wanted to “invest money” in me, hoping that one day I’d make them all proud by concocting some scheme to extract rent against widespread ignorance and get rich. What they certainly didn’t need me to actually try to tell them about it. They don’t have anything to learn from the kids who understand the computer! They’re too busy studying people they actually understand: everyone else who, like them, doesn’t understand computers. Their far more relatable and socialize with.

You know what they do understand? Magick! Shamans! The Hero’s Journey! Mysticism! Endless alchemical reinventions of the self in artistic spectacles! The importance of those magical archetypal characters who exist between worlds, outside of profane reality, enchanted our world with sacralizing totems, revealing our limitations by their transgression of them. It’s much easier to understand the shy, anxious, terminally-online, disembodied people as merely on-their-road to their courageous flowering into living art by completion of tribal rituals, reconstituted by anthropological studies of oral cultures! Yes, that’s what to do with shy kids who hide bury themselves their screens and headphones and pull their sleeves over their hands—urge them to “come out” as all the embodiment of all their adolescent online pre-occupations and then laud their bravery as they throw themselves violently into battle against traditional society head-on!

What else is there, of course? Well, I mean,

• if development into adulthood from cyberspace didn’t actually necessitate the accoutrements of tribal religion and magical thinking and radical physical metamorphosis and violent severance of the social fabric…
• If STEM degrees taught science and technology, instead of abstractions inside of opaque, proprietary, non-free computers which could never be understood except as windows onto cyberspace…
• If development into adulthood from cyberspace entailed learning and teaching science and technology in our world which is ever-more governed by science and technology…

Well, then perhaps it’d have been a giant mistake to have created and profited from heavily commercialized measure entailing rites of return patterned from anthropological studies of superstitious, pre-scientific oral cultures with no industrial or electronic technology.

In the slim chance that that is the case, at least we can thank goodness you hear about it from a bitter university drop-out part-time beer salesmen like me, who spent ten years on a private mission, driving himself psychotic in the process, to figure all this out! (nota bene: my other blog is called “Less Mad,” not “Now Sane.”)

Now what?

If you think I’m way off, please join my substack as a free subscriber and leave your rebuttals in one of the many articles of relevance where people will read them and agree with you. If you think I’m onto something, please subscribe as a paying member and help a brother out.

Because until society gets their shit together, cyberspace will continue to exist in the majority-populations perceptual experience of the material world, and the remodelling of planet earth into Baudrillard’s Disneyland will continue.

Individual queer people, just like everyone else, aren’t going to be immediately persuaded or helped by any of this, by the way, and so must be compassionately understood as the products of our cultural circumstances for decades to come. After all—you can’t reason someone out of the fundamental, years-long habituated constitution of the very core of their being by spewing logical propositions, facts and logic, at them. So respect is paramount. I’m sure lots of people are settled in for a life of being who they are, and that’s not gonna change just because they learn about how they became that way.

At the same time though—we can’t just keep this massive, identity-transmogrifying fissure in the substance of reality wide-open forever. Right?