1994-95, early discussion on internet addiction http://www.alansondheim.org/what.png http://www.alansondheim.org/what.mp4 The user is an addict "in the midst"; the user projects; thwarted, projects again. The membrane appears in the guise of discarded pornography; one is thrust into pure consumption, no longer beneath the guise of another pornography, capital itself. Assertions are lost in the echo of the machine. Thought is defined by flux, by an absolute symbolic for the user who must be assured of the purity of his or her drug. The purity is in the form of a well-definition (in the logical sense) to which no one any longer pays attention; the absence of well-definition does not result in a program cancellation, but only a retry which is part of the program itself; it does not matter where one is; location is irrelevant. Voices are heard behind the screen words (toggle on, echo on; the screen chants itself, hides itself, reveals the nipple); face to face replaces the face; double blinds allow the truth of double binds. This is the only truth there is: that which occurs beneath or behind the blind, that is, the lie (which is truth's double, truth's mirror, not converse or inverse) (which is truth's perverse, that is, truth's abject truth); this is the framework of classical Greek philosophy bound to classical Greek torture (both bound with identical cords, hieroglyphs): Xenophon's Socrates was the first user. Voices are heard, and voices are nothing but machine chatter, the ideal forms so many subroutines... The user. The user is an addict; the user inscribes throughout the network (temporary, electronic, absolute: an entirely new category), micro-tendrils extending in every direction. This contains the appearance of power; the network is a fantasm reflecting emissions back through local paths. The wonder of the internet is its locality, the construct of neighborhood (packet channels slowing down just right for the home terminal) redefining the body; the body becomes extension; extension becomes noise; noise seethes at the edge. The process is one of fast-forward rooting, and the roots are blind. Now we can speak of the mouth or eye of the user; now we can speak of the hand or its mobility. No matter how (much) sensation is transcribed, it occurs at a distance characterized by zapping and invasions. Nothing but the materiality of the body is a stake; everything cuts everything off. The user is confined to a scientism in the form of THAT which articulates the THERE IS, just as addiction develops out of the action of a particular drug or behavioral sequence. One is tied to the THAT. The user has nothing to do with the internet; the user is of no consequence. Conference exists or dissolves beneath the sign, not of gender or capital, but of chaotic inscription. The sign itself dissolves; sign is, after all, only recognition. This is the final corruption of humanism; even the self is no longer centric - not through the Lacanian inscriptive/linguistic unconscious (through which IT may still find a path or coagulation), but through addiction, self as THAT, or self as nodal intensification, always castrated, furiously addictive, always reading/writing, always rewriting: the self becomes its own recursivity. It no longer matters; its reports are from marauders, vandals, on the edge of the Roman Empire; it exists only within the interstices of power; it is displaced by power; it is no longer one or many; it no longer responds to the pronoun; it responds only to the login which may well (it does not matter) be a construct of the machine itself - just as gender- bending relies no longer on gender, but arbitrary and chaotic signifiers, signifiers undercut, in a continuous process of dissolution, murmuring, forgetting, forgotten, forged and forgotten, emissive. The machine recognizes no gender; the machine recognizes nothing. The machine recognizes every gender; the machine is never a machine, but an episteme. Just as the episteme is lost in time, so is the subject; just as music video and popular culture announced (by absenting, forgetting, by a- signifying) the end of historicity, the subject no longer announces itself (and certainly no longer announces herself and himself): an emission is no grounds for announcement. In this manner the subject avoids death (always the plan, thwarted and perverting, procuring and devouring, but always the plan) which is already always forgotten; intensification is subject to dissolution, but subjectivity dissipates or sublimates elsewhere, as if it ever existed. But just as if it ever existed, there are no longer ontological con- siderations; as plasma, the internet bypasses existence (always already... the litany repeats as murmur). It is within this that the projected eternality of the digital has full reign or resonance; noiseless, the digital proclaims the clean and proper body (which is rendered problematic by the maternal which becomes uncanny, fantasm, the circulation already on the move, already elsewhere), genderless and absent. Clearly in this fashion, everything is absent within the internet. (Everything announces, dresses, address. A character, screen or otherwise, is an announcement.) The human dream of eternal life occurs by a draining of temporality; therefore nothing occurs or can occur. It is irrelevant whether or not the human is "ready" for this when readiness implies an a priori teleology; such an impulse becomes a trail or trace left by a gopher through the compu- tational/server holarchy, not an end in sight or sightlessness. Naturally, then, it is also irrelevant to ask where one goes from here... _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] https://lists.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
