Bölümler
-
Katherine and Gio discuss âThings Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke,â a novella by Eric LaRocca about a complex BDSM relationship between two women that unfolds through emails, forum posts, and instant messages in 2000. They talk about what it meant to âlog onâ in 2000, lesbian media, and whether online relationships are uniquely suited to BDSM dynamics. Gio also reveals that, somehow, he didnât know Katie Herzog of BARPod is a lesbian.
Help make ânumber go upâ by subscribing:
This is a public episode. If youâd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit default.blog/subscribe -
âThe most un-American thing you can do is reject fame.â
In a recorded phone call, Katherine and Laura Albert, the writer best known for JT Leroy, explore the fuzzy boundaries of truth and fiction in our digital era. They discuss the telephone as a medium, catfishing, imagination, and lying as a form of storytelling.
This is a public episode. If youâd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit default.blog/subscribe -
Eksik bölüm mü var?
-
Katherine talks to a brony Zoomer about being online, mediated friendships, the fantastical world of My Little Pony, and the revival that the fandom is experiencing right now.
Buy your Mare Fair tickets here, read the infamous MLP fan fic âThe Lunar Rebellionâ here, and watch the first four seasons of MLP here.
This is a public episode. If youâd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit default.blog/subscribe -
Kickstarter and Metalabel cofounder Yancey Strickler walks in on Gio and Katherine gossiping. Together, they talk about the meaning of gossip, the Internet as a source of power, and what happens when everything moves from main to the group chat.
Check out Metalabel.
Read Yancey's writing:The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet The Post-Individual
This is a public episode. If youâd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit default.blog/subscribe -
Lauren and Grady are Chicagoâs hottest couple. Katherine and Grady talk about playing a role thatâs not yourself but based on yourself, their appearance on Help! I'm In a Secret Relationship, where all the weirdos have gone on the Internet, if those chamoy pickles were worth it, and his relationship with Lauren.
This is a public episode. If youâd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit default.blog/subscribe -
This week, Gio and I are joined by Benjamin Studebaker, a writer, political theorist, leftist, and former co-host of the infamous podcast âWhatâs Left?â to discuss the Millennial Left.
One question I wish we had asked, and I invite our audience to leave their thoughts about, is whether there is/was a meaningful difference between the Millennial Left and the Tumblr Left. Was the latter a subset of the former, or did it have its own unique character?
In the future, Iâd like to explore the contours of the political communities on SomethingAwful, Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook Groups. How were they different? Where was there overlap? As always, if youâd like to share your experience from the Left or Right, please drop us a line.
From Benjaminâs blog post, âThe Millennial Left as a Moment in Internet History,â which you can read in full here:
To find a new politics, we have to abandon our old politics. But we cannot abandon our old politics if our old politics still pays our bills. The millennial left is a declining business model rather than a political movement. It was a fluke of a particular moment in the political economy of the internet. That moment has ended. No one in their right mind would try to start a new left media enterprise in 2024. But those that still exist will carry on until they run out of money. This zombie millennial left will be with us for years to come, compelled by the business model to pretend it is still engaged in political activity. But it has been years since this activity could even plausibly appear meaningfully political. The appearance died with the form of internet that generated it.
All told, the millennial left existed in a plausibly political form for just five years. It began in 2015 and it ended in 2020. It peaked the year it was born, and it declined continuously throughout its lifespan, becoming less and less plausible every year. Death finally came for it over the span of four months, in the form of Jeremy Corbynâs defeat in December of 2019 and Bernie Sandersâ defeat on Super Tuesday in March of 2020. Consign it to the abyss.
This is a public episode. If youâd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit default.blog/subscribe -
What exactly was the alt-right? A digital subculture? A political movement? An umbrella term encompassing several contradictory movements?
What did the press get wrong? Katherine and Gio sit down with Scott Greer and attempt to demystify What Happened eight years agoâŠ
BTW, if youâre reading this, and you know who you are, YOU WILL come on this show and talk to us about the #GamerGate/imageboard component of the history of fringe right-wing politics. This is a threatâŠI will stop at nothing until you come on this podcastâŠyou promised⊠in 2022âŠ
This is a public episode. If youâd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit default.blog/subscribe -
Katherine sat down with cyberethnographer and artist Ruby Justice Thelot and discussed the role of imagination in computer-mediated communication, paracosms, building durable relationships with AI, and more.
* Ruby's book, A Cyberarcheology of Checkpoints
* Ruby's Twitter
* Ruby's blog
* A really cool video Ruby made, Why Aliens Love America
This is a public episode. If youâd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit default.blog/subscribe -
I spoke to 23-year-old reality shifter Maddie about her experiences traveling to other timelines.
You may have heard of reality shifting beforeâprobably through the lens of the now-familiar genre of âthis dangerous TikTok trend is endangering your kidsâ clickbait. âReality shiftingâ is, simply put, when people shift their consciousness to another timelineâan alternate realityâincluding ones with fictional elements. My friend EsmĂ© Partridge has written about reality shifting extensively through the lens of occult studies, and contributor Clinton has touched on it (though unintentionally) through the lens of media studies in some of his articles on this very website.
The more I talk to people with these types of unconventional experiences, the more I believe that weâre experiencing a fundamental shift in our perception. Itâs one that the scholar Patrick Galbraith has documented extensively in JapanâI highly recommend his work, too, for people who want to gain a deeper understanding of how one might experience the shifts in their consciousness or fall in love with a fictional character like Iâve been documenting here.
This shift in perception is something that I think too many people write off as âmental illness,â a âfakeâ mental illness people use to differentiate themselves or get attention, or a pernicious, TikTok-specific form of brainwashing.
Recently, I have seen it pop up in the culture war, too⊠often with the note that ânobody is talking about this.â Hopefully, if you read this blog, you know none of that is true.
I recommend you listen to these two other interviews and read this mailbag note, if you havenât already, as companion pieces to this one:
Watch Maddieâs videos on TikTok here, and check out her shifting resources here.
This is a public episode. If youâd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit default.blog/subscribe -
Katherine and Gio discuss the Cut's Andrew Huberman profile, what does and doesn't count as "being political," emo kids, and which up-and-coming public intellectuals they want to model themselves after.
This is a public episode. If youâd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit default.blog/subscribe -
Ross Jeffries, the author of How to Get the Women You Desire into Bed, The Secrets of Speed Seduction Mastery and webmaster of seduction.com and speedseduction.ai, is considered the Godfather of the Red Pill. In his own words, he "doesnât know s**t about relationships, but he can teach you how to get laid."
Gio and Katherine sit down and talk to him about the first PUA newsgroup, alt.seduction.fast, seduction.com, and how the PUA community evolved and the Manosphere developed into what it is today.
This is a public episode. If youâd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit default.blog/subscribe -
Katherine and Gio review the wonderfully weird film Rukus (2018), which is one part of coming of age story and one part mockumentary about furries.
This is a public episode. If youâd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit default.blog/subscribe -
Katherine sat down with Tal from the Tally Mark System to discuss the much-misunderstood Dissociative Identity Disorder and its complementary TikTok community. You can find Tal here.
"Windows have become a powerful metaphor for thinking about the self as a multiple, distributed system," Turkle writes. "The self is no longer simply playing different roles in different settings at different times. The life practice of windows is that of a decentered self that exists in many worlds, that plays many roles at the same time." Now, real life itself may be, as one of Turkle's subjects says, "just one more window." â Dr. Sherry Turkle, Wired, 1996
The more recent conversations about Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) or Multiple Systems (MS), also once known as Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD), are frequently centered around two claims.
The first claim is that DID is not a ârealâ clinical condition, itâs just one of the myriad avenues young people can go down to help them claim victimhood status. In this worldview, Millennials and Zoomers are the snowflake generations. Unlike Boomers, they donât want to âfind themselves,â so much as find new diagnoses to substantiate their status as oppressed. The second, and related, claim is that this desire is mimetic. Itâs a social contagion young people learn about from social media platforms like TikTok.
I take issue with writing these people off as âmerely attention-seekers,â as is typically the trend in culture war pieces. DID or MPD is neither an emergent phenomenon (online or offline) nor yet another expression of self-indulgence. Even if you treat the diagnosis with apprehensionâthough, I donât know if that is quite as productive as well-meaning skeptics might immediately assume it isâitâs an important lens through which we can understand identity.
Dissociation as a theme online
Dissociation is one of the Internetâs most persistent themes, from the more recent lobotomy chic to the off-handed remarks about dissociating that have been a hallmark of âgirlbloggingâ on every conceivable platform since the '90s. The reason why is probably obvious. Weâre not only disembodied online (as in, not physically there!), but the act of being online is also, itself, disembodying.
Anyone whoâs spent too much time looking at a screen knows that feeling of disconnection; that palpable separation of mind and body. Sometimes it just feels like over-indulgence, a disorienting sense of not knowing who you are or where you are, and other times itâs more acute: the screen has engulfed your physical body.
If you donât know what Iâm talking about, Iâll share a story that may be illustrative.
A friend once confided in me that on Twitter, she was treated like a hot girl, but this didnât translate into her real life at all. When she logged on, she was desiredâand sexy!âand it began to shape her self-perception. Alone at home, she would feel the same way. She was a âhot girl.â But because this wasnât validated by any physical world experiences, eventually, a sense of dissonance developed. There were two people, not one: a hot girl and her physical world self. The whole thing was confusingâshe was feeling herself split, her word.
If you pay close attention, you may recognize this process happening to you in more or less extreme ways. In a mediated environment, weâre all susceptible to it.
In 2024, itâs well-known that the Internet challenges our conception of identity as a singular, fixed construct. But itâs not that the Internet introduced or invented this idea. In the words of Sherry Turkle in her article âMultiple Subjectivity and Virtual Community at the End of the Freudian Century,â it only âconcretized and dramatized it.â
My favorite description for understanding how this happens is also Turkleâs, who described our identities as being distributed across different computer windows. Today, it still holds up. Who I am on my Twitter alts is not who I am on my Twitter main is not who I am on Instagram is not who I am on TikTok.
Though this is arguably also true to some extent at, say, work and at home, the Internet both provides a physical representation of these differences and allows you more freedom to construct who you are, with profound psychological impacts. You arenât just tweaking your presentation and behavior for your environmentâyou are playing a new character.
(Self-constructions and other peopleâs perception of you online can also get complicated, too. Say you âseem femaleâ because your typing style or avatar, but in physical reality, youâre male.)
Turkle, and writers like her, described the self as a âmultiple systemâ â coincidentally, the same shorthand people in the DID community use to describe people with âalters,â or multiple personalities. In neither the case of the Internet user nor the person with DID is this fragmentation of identity voluntary, even if in the latter, their presentation is more pronounced.
Do you feel fragmented online? Or is this all overblown?
~Join the community~ I want your money but Iâm too shy to ask. Think of it as a tipâŠ?
Me around the web:
* Taylor Swiftâs AI porn debacle alters our reality
* AI art will never replace the human soul
* The depressing truth behind the polyamory trend
Upcoming events:
* Join our February book club! Weâre reading Negative Space by B.R. Yeager. No film club this month.
This is a public episode. If youâd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit default.blog/subscribe -
In our first episode of 2024 (naturally recorded in September), we interview pretty intense early Japanese language YouTuber applemilk1988 about Stickam, Encyclopedia Dramatica, proto-e-girls, and living in Japan.
* That McDonaldâs ad from forever ago
* applemilk1988's YouTube channel
* applemilk1988's Twitch
This is a public episode. If youâd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit default.blog/subscribe -
Gio and Kat discuss Agamben's book The Open: Man and Animal and what it has to do with otherkins. They read some of it out loud and may or may have not butchered some of the pronunciations. If you need to fast-forward through those parts, peep the PDF of the book here.
This is a public episode. If youâd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit default.blog/subscribe -
Fictophilia. Today, I spoke to fictophile/fictosexual Cait Calder about what itâs like to have a fictional crush.
When I first talked about fictosexuality over at UnHerd, I got a lot of pushback: Why does this need to be labeled? Donât all women do this?
To some extent, sure. The success of Twilight and Fifty Shades is illustrative. Before that, Stephen King wrote an entire book about women's tendency to fall in love not only with fictional characters but with fiction itselfâMisery. But that doesnât mean itâs not worth both labeling and exploring. Iâm not of the school of thought that the exercise of labeling these more fringe expressions of sexuality is excessive or decadent. If Iâve learned anything from being Terminally Online, itâs that most of these things arenât âfake.â Theyâre unconventional and our language hasnât caught up the way even television has impacted peopleâs emotional landscapes.
Online dating, objectum sexuality (when you fall in love with an object, like a robot or a rollercoaster), the limerence of writers like Dante Alighieri, fandom, divine devotion, and fictophilia all exist on a spectrum.
What are the contours of that spectrum, though? âLonelinessâ isnât a good enough answer. Iâm still figuring it out.
Have you noticed⊠Two related thoughts Iâve had to all of this:
* I feel like with faeries/witches in particular, there was a real shift between thinking of them as outside entities to fear or treat with reverence to identifying with them. I wonder why that is. Identification seems to be one of our chief modes of engagement.
* Fictional characters are more often treated as people than they are artâsometimes even going as far as being âvictimsâ of their authors.
Upcoming episodes of The Computer Room. Itâs been a minute since I put out a full episode of TCR. Theyâre coming, I promise, Iâve just got a lot on my plate between stuff going on in my personal life and other freelance projects.
On the docket, though: furries, otherkins, and some interviews with e-celebrities past.
One of the big things that slow me down with editing isâand this is going to sound lame as hell, so please forgive thisâGio and I both have a tendency to go off on crazy tangents and love talking to one another, so inevitably, every episode is like 6 hours long and a big time commitment to edit. Thank god neither of us drinks on air, could you imagine?
Femcel Fridays. Iâm still collecting essays about femcels (movie reviews, personal essays, histories). Iâve received some great internet culture submissions, but only one was about femcels! I want to hear from women.
Submit by responding directly to this email.
Gift guide� I wanted to do a gift guide at the top of the month, mostly because everyone else was doing one, but nothing stood out to me.
No list of favorite products I can smuggle into my blog under the guise of a suggestion, either.
Maybe itâs because Iâm not a big gift-giver myself. Or because I donât really decorate my living spaces. There are no home goods I feel compelled to evangelize or candles that make me feel like Iâm doing my due diligence as a young-ish urbanite.
Then there are books. When you buy people books, itâs a symbolic gesture, the recipient rarely ends up reading them, letâs be real. I have a similar feeling about using this space to plug the books, Substack/podcast subscriptions, or magazines authored by my friends, even if I enjoyed them myself. This is all deeply personal stuff. Is a yearlong sub to Blocked And Reported a good stocking stuffer? Or MemeAnalysisâs book of poetry? Does your girlfriend want to unwrap a copy of The Case Against the Sexual Revolution or Rethinking Sex even if itâs up her alley? Up to you.
So, long way of saying, no gift guide. Use your intuition. Sometimes, when I feel moved, I like to scour eBay for antiques that show my cadre of autist pals that Iâm paying attention to their special interests.
Right now, though, I think Iâm both post-gift and weirdly, post-shopping.
The Internet completely destroys what it means to be an embodied person. Iâve been reading too many of these meandering, stream-of-consciousness meditations about being online, please excuse my own contribution to that discourse:
The Internet is both an extension of our bodies and the collective unconscious. We live in a world where identity is supposedly no longer fixedânothing is. There are no boundaries in any sense of the word.
Time and physical space havenât become meaningless, but their meanings have changed.
Our imaginations are more accessible than ever. They are no longer private.
Many of our relationships are completely disembodied, everyone is getting to know one another âsoul-first.â Thatâs a lot of pressure, some people are just better in the physical world.
We are no longer accountable to one anotherâif someone bothers you, you can just ignore them. Erase them.
Mediated communication conditions us to be hypervigilant, to develop a sixth sense about how âpeople really feel.â (Is the period in that text meaningful? Is that a subtweet?)
Everyone is textâ to be re-interpreted, de-contextualized, and re-purposed. We are all living history. We are all literature. I think of all the people who have vast screenshot libraries of me, and who reconfigure those screenshots in any which way they like to build a person completely divorced from who I am in reality, or who I think I am. But everyoneâs in this situation.
Many people experience great tension between who they think they are and who other people insist they are, a major fault line of the culture war.
A lot of effort is put into making sense of this climate, and the reactions to it. It often comes down to ideology, not infrastructure. I donât think thatâs quite right.
Itâs not what we think. Itâs how we think.
Default Wisdom is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Itâs only $5.
This is a public episode. If youâd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit default.blog/subscribe -
A couple of weeks ago, I interviewed nabby (@inviteonlycomic on Instagram), a former fiction-kin.
You can listen to it here or on The Computer Room main feed.
Before I explain what a fictionkin is, we first need to understand what an otherkin is.
Otherkin refers to an identity category where oneâs soul does not match oneâs body. There are human otherkin, like is often the case with fictionkin, mediakin, or otakin/otakukin, who identify with fictional characters, and historykin, who identify with historical figures (you may remember the non-binary TikTok personality who went viral after claiming they âkinnedâ Hitler, or this iconic Tumblr post). There are also non-human otherkin, who identify with, or in the verbiage of the community, whose kintype is, animals, mythological creatures, aliens, etc.
Otherkin is one of these identity categories that receive unfair treatment. The perfect avatar for social critics foaming at the mouth to critique the excesses of kids online, it has variously been dismissed, conflated with the thematically similar but wholly unrelated furry fandom, or used as a pawn in the ongoing conversation about transgender identity, a âthatâs whatâs next, folks!â
None of these describe what otherkin are, or how and why they emerged, or even convincingly theorize about what purpose they serve in an individualâs life. I donât think itâs fair to cast otherkin as a punchline; nor do I think they should be used as pawns in a moral panic about technology.
And to echo Thiel for a moment, while I donât fault anyone for not taking them literally, I do think we should take them seriously.
Some people have described âotherkinâ as a community, but they are only so in the broadest sense. Otherkins exist in a network of related experiences. Like many other online phenomena, including political ones, like the e-right, otherkin exist more in an ecosystem than they do a community. Thereâs a broad rubric of what it means to be an otherkin, but no single ideology or experience they subscribe to. The religious scholar Danielle Kirby, whoâs done some of the most thorough research on otherkin, describes it as a âmorass of individual preferences.â
Like so much of contemporary identity, being an otherkin relies on something called unverified personal gnosis (UPG) or subjective personal gnosis (SPG). UPG, a term you may already be familiar with if youâve ever been in neo-pagan circles, is exactly what it sounds like: unfalsifiable knowledge that can only be received through personal experience.
But in otherkin world, like the spiritual circles theyâre downstream of, UPG isnât always law.
In some otherkin communities, fictionkin are viewed as âless authenticâ than those who kin with animals, angels, aliens, or mythological creatures. This perception stems from the belief that kintypes grounded âin history,â even if inaccurately represented, have a more solid foundation in reality. This idea is similar to trends seen in neo-paganism and various digital communities, where historical or tradition-based practices are valued over those influenced by pop culture or are somehow ânewer.â For instance, in neo-paganism, practices with alleged historical roots are considered more legitimate, even if the history is partially or completely revisionist or fabricated, as in the case of Gerald Gardnerâs Wicca. Similarly, fandoms centered on political or historical themes are often deemed more credible than those based on pop culture, despite the fact they function in the same ways.
Ironically, the concept of otherkin as we know it today, is a product of neo-paganismâs collision with Lord of the Rings, that is, Lord of the Rings (LOTR) flavored fictionkin. âOtherkinâ originated from the neo-pagan group, The Elf Queenâs Daughters (EQD), which was part of several Tolkien-inspired spirituality movements that emerged during the late 1960s and early 1970s, after LOTR was printed in paperback and, coincidentally, there was a surge of interest in neo-paganism.
EQD spread their message the way all other nascent fringe identity groups did, through handwritten letters and zines like The Green Egg, eventuallyâand please fact check me on this, Iâm operating from memoryâculminating in a 1980s listserv that was run by the Silver Elves, who are the premiere historians of humans-who-identify-as-elves. On the listserv you were either elf kind or other kind: eventually, shortened to otherkin. (BTW, for all the oldheads out there, Iâm not forgetting alt.horror.werewolves! Maybe in another newsletter, Iâll dive into the newsgroups that coalesced around these identities.)
Anyway, I digress.
In other communities, contradicting peopleâs kin-experience is considered poor etiquette. From an otherkin Discord server, one rule states, âReality checking is not allowed,â and users are encouraged not to argue about peopleâs identities, âeven if they contradict one another.â
This is partly influenced by personal preferences or the political leanings of each community's administrators, but itâs also significantly affected by the metaphysical beliefs that support the concept of otherkin. There isnât a single otherkin cosmology, and the metaphysics which support each personâs beliefs are as diverse and complex as the identity itself. While some otherkin individuals do not contemplate this aspects of their identity, others have robust ideas, sometimes culminating in fully-developed New Religious Movements, as is the case with the SIlver Elves and the Tribunal of the Sidhe.
A few things stand out to me about otherkin metaphysics:
* Many otherkin believe in the existence of a multiverse, multiple dimensions, or parallel realities. Some believe that the possible number of realities is finite, while others believe theyâre infinite. (I canât help but think of the Mandela Effect here.)
* In some otherkin belief systems, your soul or even your body can travel across the multiverse. Sometimes this happens before youâre born, like with reincarnation, but other times it can happen in the present day. Reality shifting, a term which trended on TikTok during the pandemic, describes the process of âchanging realities.â
* Speaking of reincarnation, some otherkin believe that their souls are reincarnated into human bodies. This includes fictionkin. One explanation for kinning a fictional character is that thereâs a parallel universe where that character is real. Danielle Kirby describes the role of the author in that worldview:
â[This] recasts the author as a channel or medium, expressing, perhaps unintentionally, another world or plane of existence. The second possible explanation is that the readers themselves, through their attention and interest, actually create the worlds or creatures of the fantastic. This process seems to be based in an idea of energy transfer, and implicity assumes the validity of psychic powers and magic. The former proposal assumes the alternative world is already existent before the composition of the author, whereas the latter includes the audience in the process of worldmaking.â
Something striking to me about this is that these two ideas are everywhere in the mundane or non-otherkin world. Of course, there are New Age beliefs like manifestation, which is just one way people express the idea that belief = power, that everyone is essentially a chaos magician that can create his or her own reality if they simply want it badly enough. In that vein, thereâs also the contentious, but I think related, idea that, âYou are X if you say youâre X.â (In the future, everyone will see you exactly as you want to be seen for 15 minutes.) But there are other ways these ideas manifest, too. For example, our increasing inability to differentiate fiction from non-fiction, as was famously the case with the short story âCat Person,â may suggest that authors are mediums not inventors. What was described in âCat Personâ is a reality that must be considered within the context of this reality. This thinking also allows you to more easily separate the art from the artist. A problematic artist, like J.K. Rowling, can be irrelevant, because she was only an imperfect channel, not the originator of the idea. Or that social media creates or guides reality, whether itâs journalists writing trends into existence or the meteoric rise of Donald Trump.
In one interpretation, the popular one, weâre willing these outcomes into meatspace via magic or the machinations of âthe Cathedral.â A related thought is that groups of people are working together to âreality shiftâ or manifest their desired outcome. Another interpretation is that when we post, weâre channeling something thatâs always been true. Weâre tapping into something. And sometimes? More than one thing can be true at once. Two realities can co-exist, side-by-side.
The other thing that stands out to me about otherkin is how closely the process of coming to identify as one mirrors other identity groups. Otherkins often describe the process of âawakening,â which can happen in any number of ways. âAwakeningâ is that moment when finally, you understand why youâve always felt like a stranger in a strange land (another highly influential book I should write more about later), why your life has been characterized by feeling like an outsider.
Otherkin awakening, as Iâve seen it described, sounds an awful lot like realizing youâre trans, autistic, BPD, a vampire, queer, POTS or other chronic illnesses, a starseed, a witch, DID (multiple personalities or multiple systems). Unsurprisingly, otherkin identity is often âco-morbidâ with many of the identity categories on this list. I say this descriptively, not pejoratively. Iâm of the school of thought that all of these identity groups are useful, and tell us something important about the world we live in, and shouldnât be relegated to clickbait fodder. Again, while they not always be literally true, they are serious.
Everyone is searching for somethingâsome kind of box to put themselves inâsome kind of narrative.
Iâve noticed, anecdotally, though I donât have data to back this up, that many of these more fringe identities like otherkin emerge among the white working class. So does neo-paganism. Being a neo-pagan or otherkin or both might be a way of reclaiming a sense of history and identity for these peopleâit was for the people Iâve personally known. I donât know much about it, but I would imagine that the revisionist histories of the 1960s and 70s pan-African movements served a similar purpose. These are groups of people whose history and identity have been hollowed out. New narratives and the identities that come with them give them a new opportunity to have a more robust and transcendent sense of who they are.
There are other ways that the identity categories I listed above mirror one another: theyâre deeply contingent on what, today, we call âvibes.â Something that is strongly felt, but canât be fully articulated. Itâs what I imagine ecstatic religious experiences were like, or what love is like (for me, at least). Itâs something that moves me, but I donât know that I have the language to describe it.
A tendency towards hyper-categorization in the young or Very Online has been criticizedâas narcissistic, as a replacement for a personality, as somehow âentitledââbut I think thatâs the easy explanation.
Weâve put people in a strange position. We live in a disembodied, text-based world of pure feeling.
Weâre simultaneously not experiencing a whole lot in the traditional sense, but we maintain deep affinities. And all of this is in a mostly text-based universe, among people who have been conditioned to navigate a text-based world from birth, with plenty of white space for our imaginations to fill in the blanks.
So many of these identities that the culture war regularly discredits and individuals struggle to find the language to describe are about something you feel, not something you do.
And so what happens?
What Substack-favorite Humdog described as âhysterical identificationâ in her famous essay pandoraâs vox, but what I think might more compassionately be called vicarious experience. Everything is a vicarious experience and we donât know how to talk about it. We donât know how to write about it.
So we express it with all sorts of concepts and images.
Sometimes itâs more complete in an image, or an emoji, or a gender, though that may not be the right word or the way we describe our souls. The same impulse that moves us to say âLiterally meâ when looking at a picture of Ryan Gosling or Christian Bale undergirds neo-pronouns and otherkin identity. Itâs what makes fictosexuality and aegosexuality make sense. I believe itâs a huge motivation in fandomâwhen you feel it in your heart that the Cowboys lost or somebody said Taylor Swift is fat.
You look at something or someone and you feel it so strongly that all you can say is âThatâs me.â
Some of these ideas were born because of the Internet, but sometimes I wonder if the Internet evolved the way it did because of the way our self-conception changed.
This state of living within one's own mind isn't a result of being so online; rather, we are so online because we're more comfortable in our imaginations. Role-playing games and MUDs didn't cause people to splinter; they exemplified an existing splintering that had nowhere else to go. The same holds true for all the new forms of expression that seemed to flourish and find their own in the late 60s and 70s: Trekkies/Trekkers, elves, furries, neo-pagans, tabletop roleplayers, etc.
When I'm honest with myself, that was the catalyst for me, personally: I wasnât comfortable in the physical world and made the conscious decision to retreat. The screen became an extension of myself, though it didnât have to be. I didnât become Very Online; I was born Very Online, and the internet was there waiting for me.
This is a public episode. If youâd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit default.blog/subscribe -
Gio and Katherine discuss the 2005 film Hard Candy, To Catch A Predator, Lucas' room, and the moral panic around and reality of chatroom pedophiles.
This is a public episode. If youâd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit default.blog/subscribe -
Katherine is DONE with Zoomers re-writing Internet history and being smug to her about it. It is NOT a girl's world, ladies -- at least online. Gio has some other ideas. She and Gio discuss WIRED's "Everyone Is A Girl Online," miladys, Biggie Slonk, pregnant Megumins, and the myth of the "Girl Internet." They collectively mispronounce Tiqqun at least a dozen times.
This is a public episode. If youâd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit default.blog/subscribe -
Vers and Lukas drop by and talk about e-dating, e-girls, e-ating disorders, and secret political Facebook groups.
This is a public episode. If youâd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit default.blog/subscribe - Daha fazla göster
