SOPHIA BOROWSKA
media, as Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, have an extraordinary ability to rewire the people who are using them and the cultures in which they circulate.”[5] Expanding on this wellknown theory in a more contemporary context, media scholar Finn Brunton says: “technologies are never merely passive vessels for holding ideas and ideologies but active things in the world that open new possibilities and capacities. They change the communities that created them and those that take them up. […] More important, however, is that the values embedded in the technology, intentionally or unintentionally, become dominant. Those values reflect an arrangement of power, control, and prestige that the design constituency would like to see in the world, whether centralized and privatized, open and egalitarian, or otherwise.”[6] Creating a theoretical disconnect between our bodies and what we do online is part of a larger problem in Western thought, one which actually takes us back to weaving: “The zeros and ones of machine code seem to offer themselves as perfect symbols of the orders of Western reality, the ancient logical codes which make the difference between on and off, right and left, light and dark, form and matter, mind and body, white and black, good and evil, right and wrong, life and death, something and nothing, this and that, here and there, inside and outside, active and passive, true and false, yes and no, sanity and madness, health and sickness, West and East, North and South. And they make a lovely couple when it came to sex. Man and woman, male and female, masculine and feminine: one and zero looked just right, made for each other: 1, the definite, upright line; and 0, the diagram of nothing at all: penis and vagina, thing and hole… […] It takes two to make a binary, but all these pairs are two of a kind, and the kind is always a kind of one.”[7]
a turning point the moment the first spam message was sent out on ARPAnet in 1978. Rigidly controlled newsletter chains were hijacked for a commercial purpose, destabilizing the contained system of trust that was the first Internet. To Plant, such a turning point is achieved through a connection at the fingertips to “all the zeros and ones of machine code, the switches of electric circuitry, fluctuating waves of neurochemical activity, hormonal energy, thoughts, desires…”[10] The body’s urges become intertwined with keystrokes, networks, and eventually wind up as data. Dougal Phillips posits that, as online sharing platforms (and, I would add, social media platforms in general), “develop their own logic of energy and social exchange, we glimpse the very powerful economy of ‘libidinal’ energy.”[11] Humans crave tactile experience, and though we might try “to escape from ‘the meat’”[12] into Cyberspace, our Internet use all too often comes back to the embarrassing or distasteful, albeit primary, demands of the body.
POPULAR IMAGES - IMAGES THAT CAN BE MADE AND SEEN BY THE MANY - EXPRESS ALL THE CONTRADICTIONS OF THE CONTEMPORARY CROWD: ITS OPPORTUNISM, NARCISSISM, DESIRE FOR AUTONOMY AND CREATION, ITS INABILITY TO FOCUS OR MAKE UP ITS MIND, ITS CONSTANT READINESS FOR TRANSGRESSION AND SIMULTANEOUS SUBMISSION. A SNAPSHOT OF THE AFFECTIVE CONDITION OF THE CROWD, ITS NEUROSES, PARANOIA, AND FEAR, ITS CRAVING FOR INTENSITY, FUN, AND DISTRACTION, THE IMAGES SPEAK OF THE COUNTLESS PEOPLE WHO CARED ENOUGH ABOUT THEM TO CONVERT THEM OVER AND OVER AGAIN.
The “overwhelming, bedazzling”[8] spread of computer-usage and the Internet, though it shook up so much so fast, also served to reinforce imperialist, class-based, and gendered hierarchies of control. Yet the Internet is such an unstable platform that it offers unprecedented means to subvert these structures. “There is always a point at which technologies geared towards regulation, containment, command, and control, can turn out to be feeding into the collapse of everything they once supported.”[9] Email experienced such
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