im a beige monitor housing a mirage. im 2000 something.
im anthologizing glittery gifs on a piczo site. WWW dot don’t talk to me! im world building. im compiling lore. im @ my house. im digitally daydreaming between technocratic night terrors.
im a hot refraction of light. im nothing. im nowhere.
im having ego death on tiktok live. im double tapping towards something terrible or divine.
im a flailing floating point. im hypertextually hysterical. im a satirical surfing system. im in optimistic opposition to online oligarchy. im everywhere. im watching monkeys dance at the circuit circus. im desperate for dopamine. im an entity encoded in its entirely. im reposting respite. im free. i am posting to potentiate myself.
once upon a time a beautiful optimism existed on the world wide web... a hopefulness.... a romanticism around its potential.... a for-the-people spirit was alive...... it was a means of connection.... of community organizing....... of exploring our selfhood..... i attempt to channel this spirit even under the shadow of big tech monopolies of today’s internet world...... a place we can be anything..... a place we can dream.... my first email was love_cool_peace@hotmail.com...... from this, one of my first screen names, to the piczo sites i coded in the mid 2000s at my parents’ beige PC to the memes i post/repost on my instagram story today in 2024, i like to think i’m logging on for more than just lolz. perhaps in a loose form or fashion, im microdosing my manifesto...... potentiating a better self.... a better world.... through a collection of posts, reposts, memes etc. in three parts, this book is a reckoning with this process....... .. enjoy (L) - myra (@nice.damage)
01 selfhood
“online i could be whatever i wanted. and so my twelveyear-old self became sixteen, became twenty, became seventy. i aged. i died. through this storytelling and shapeshifting, i was resurrected. i claimed my range. online i found my first connection to the gendered swagger of ascendancy, the thirsty drag of aspiration [...] i toyed with power dynamics, exchanging with other faceless strangers, empowered via creating new selves, slipping in and out of digital skins [...] in chatrooms i donned different corpo-realities while the rainbow wheel of death buffered in the ecstatic.”
Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: a Manifesto (2020)
02 radical love + community
“love is profoundly political. our deepest revolution will come when we understand this truth.”
bell hooks
03 play + optimismexistential
“it’s a breathless period of time, as we are saturated in images. of course, we’re not always provided the room to process what it is that we’re seeing alongside what we’re feeling. i am keen on the idea of play these days because it is a radical act to engage with levity, even in moments where things feel pointless and completely devastating.”
“jokes are an open-source weapon of politics, and it is time to tap their power.”
Metahaven: Can Jokes Bring Down Governments? Memes, Design and Politics (2013)
Legacy Russell on Play, Digital Skins and Becoming Triple
this book is set in apple chancery and comic sans. it was made for DART 441: the culture of images, taught by chris moore under the faculty of design and computation arts at concordia university in montréal, canada and designed by myra lintaman in october 2024. thank you for looking at it. love will prevail in the end. and if it hasn’t, it isnt the end just yet.
