I’ve been sitting on this post for a while, had a whole outline, left it unwritten. I tend to want to bite off more than I can chew, or perhaps I want to eat the seeds along with the apple; care must be taken with concepts, communities, ideas. They require respect. I fear my capacity to overstep, especially since there is a part of me who wants to overstep so very much, to troll, to get a rise out of people.
I figure the way forward is to just write the damn thing, and say what I mean, but more importantly, avoid saying what I do not mean. And with that, I want to dive a little bit into the relationship between subjectivity, in particular its process of emergence, and the internet. Might as well get started.
Text, Speech, & The Subject
A starting point: what is novel about today’s internet? One view: what makes the internet special right now is the capacity for text to act as speech. This is not new in the online era, going back to tools like IRC and AIM, but the former seemed limited to hardcore technologists, and the latter to teenagers looking to bully each other at a distance. What’s new is that almost everyone now performs speech via text. Millennials famously can’t take phone calls, or even email; they’d rather send an iMessage, an instantaneous speech-like piece of text.
Text was historically seen as categorically separate from speech, but the temporal properties of the internet shatter this binary into a spectrum, whereby some text is more “speech like” than others. A phone call is speech, an email is writing (as is this blog), but most communication is somewhere in between: not quite speaking, not quite writing. I find that the key property determining whether some communicative act is “speech-like” is the degree to which the speaker conceives of themselves as within a “We-relationship”1, i.e. the extent to which the recipient of the communication is presupposed as “another person”, themselves oriented toward me, sharing the same stream of time. Writing proper is for a temporally distant subject, whereas speech proper is for a listener, right beside you.
The telephone was the first step along this path, freeing speech from bodily distance; formerly, speech required bodily co-location. Not so, for the last hundred years or so. With “texting”, speech seems to have been distanced from the body itself, and develops the capacity to come from nowhere and everyone all at once. And as telephones, radio, etc. problematized “speech”, the notion of the “speaker” itself is problematized online. This is made obvious with the fear surrounding bots and GPT and real name verification.
So, who is the speaker? “I” am. But who am “I”? I am some kind of speaking entity, who appears to persist across time. I have a twitter account and a substack, and most readers rightfully assume that there is a single, relatively continuous subject speaking on all these platforms, from my Twitter account’s creation through today. My “identity” is thus the unity of these subjects across these spaces. I am (“identify as”) snav, which is a point surrounding by other signifiers, such as my Twitter avatar, my age, location, etc.
The important part here is that identity emerges across time, from persistent spaces, within which I identify myself and am identified by others. The topic of the “most stable” identity space is tricky, but we might be able to argue it’s “the body” or “that which thinks” (the Cartesian subject, the brain). But what of the “least stable” space? Twitter is a place where “a (subject) speaks”. But the limit case, a place where instead it seems as if “speech occurs”, is one of total anonymity: 4chan.
4chan as a space is at the radical limit of subjectivity and identity. As I wrote in my last essay, Tinder is anonymous in a certain sense, because users are temporally distant. But in another sense, Tinder is not anonymous, because subjects on Tinder are able to enact some kind of identity: a profile. The identity on Tinder is grounded in difference, i.e. I am not just “anyone”, but I am pointed to by this set of persistent signifiers. In physical spaces, the body acts similarly, carrying some context about “you” into wherever you are. But 4chan is a space that explicitly precludes the imposition of difference. All 4chan users are “the same” (except trip-code users, of course, but they are not the typical case).
If, as we noted earlier, identity emerges from persistent spaces across time, then on 4chan, few can be said to have a differential identity at all. Any “subjectification” or “identification” that takes place must tie back to a small set of distinctions (writing style, etc), or, more importantly, to the space itself. Invoking an “I” on 4chan is to step into the role of “any 4chan user”. What this means is that 4chan is a space which acts as a collective subject2, speakers stripped of identity, rather than as a space of individuals with a uniqueness to them.
A corollary is that posting on 4chan is closer to a form of thought than to speech: the “other” to whom you’re responding is pure content, seemingly emerging “from the same place” as your response to them. If thinking is, as Hannah Arendt would call it, a “two-in-one conversation”, then 4chan is a “many-in-one conversation”.
It is only with this subjectlessness in mind that we can make sense of certain 4chan memes. One I find particularly interesting is “there are no girls on the internet”. My claim is that this meme only makes sense because of the “presubjective” nature of imageboard anonymity I describe above. It’s not that “every 4chan user is a man”, but that all properties such as “male” are absent from the 4chan user, because they are identified first and foremost by their participation in the space.
In practice, given the set of associations made with 4chan as a space, the proper form of “there are no girls on the internet” is “4chan is male”: this demonstrates a recognition of how the “imageboard subject” emerges from the space, as opposed to the time-dependent nature of a less anonymous subject, such as on Twitter. Note how it’s irrelevant whether “some 4chan users are female”; what matters is that the space itself is “male” as a collective subject3, which is only a feasible construction under the constraint of radical anonymity.
The “there are no girls on the internet” seems obviously false on sites like Twitter, where there are plenty of women around, denoted through their personal identity on the website (given that Twitter permits such a thing, unlike 4chan). A better phrase may well be “anyone can be a woman on the internet”. This may seem to presuppose a certain view of gender as something projected onto the subject by observers, but I didn’t write “anyone can appear as a woman”, I wrote “anyone can be a woman”, in that the fracturing of identity that happens online (that I wrote about in the last essay) permits novel interpellations of subjects, no longer necessarily contingent on the subject’s historical constitution. Put more simply, the internet is a world composed of spaces where one can be reborn.
I’ll leave it here for now, sorry for the abstruse language, I’m trying to grapple with ideas that I haven’t really seen worked through before in this context, and it’s difficult. There is a second half planned to this essay (note that I haven’t even mentioned Freud or Lacan yet), expect that sometime in the future.
Pornography & Insight
I wanted to do a little digest-ing, while you’re still here. First, a brief conversation on Curious Cat that calls back to Sadly, Porn:
Q: What exactly are the differences between the 'pornographic' and the sexual?
A: “Sexual” is under-defined in colloquial speech, and, in Freud, relates to bodily pleasures alone. My sense of the pornographic is that it's a specific mode of cultivating desire, by setting up a projective “subject” of desire (in many cases “the person behind the lens”), to whom the viewer delegates their perspective, and who then proceeds to attain satisfaction (on the viewer's behalf). So in this sense, modern advertising is pornographic, as well as some forms of relatively common social media usage.
Q: in your example, how is modern advertising pornographic? if lets say a gaming console is advertised, what satisfaction is the console attaining? or would it be somebody playing the console in the ad that attains the pleasure on the viewers behalf? greetings from bulgaria!
A: It’s not about the content of the advertising but about the form, how it's advertised. Imagine a stupid ad for a gaming console that shows a regular guy who's bored, listless, unhappy, looking for something… and then the gaming console appears with a bright halo, and he's shown laughing and relaxed. This is pornographic because it gives the viewer a character to identify with, who has a desire, and then portrays its satisfaction. You imagine yourself “as him”, buying the console, oh how happy you would be! It's pornographic because it creates the conditions by which it imagines its own fulfillment or satisfaction.
I want to expand on this answer, because I think the topic deserves a little clarification. A broad shift in advertising happened during the 1980s, specifically the invention of “lifestyle advertising”. Here’s a classic example of a Pepsi advertisement from the era:
The “trick” of this advertisement is that it gives no information about Pepsi as a product. Rather, it sets up the conditions for the viewer to project themselves into the scenario (or to desire the situation itself), and positions Pepsi the product as a way for the viewer to “self-insert” into this world, drink acting as basically a fetish object. It is in this way that advertising is pornographic, or became pornographic during the 80s.
It is through this lens that we can understand, cynically, the modern world of “woke” advertising: the point is to give all different kinds of people the chance to identify with the product, i.e. it’s pornographic “lifestyle marketing” targeted at specific audiences (obese people, older people, etc.). There’s not much to it beyond profit motive.
Freud even lays the groundwork for “insight pornography” in his seminal case study of “Rat Man” (real title: “Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis”):
In other words, if a writer can deploy an appealing line of thought and then bring it to a conclusion, this fits the form of “pornography”: what is delegated and eroticized (brought into relation with desire), though, is not who you are, like in Pepsi’s case, but thought itself.
I’ll leave it to the reader to decide what the connection is between insight porn and this blog.
Further reading from Oliver Noster, a Lacanian take on the connection between metaphysics and technology and pornography:
Miscellania
Get yourself a guy so you know what to do when your catalytic converter gets stolen (short thread that did the rounds a bit):
Song of the week:
See Alfred Schütz, The Phenomenology of the Social World (1932), “The Face-to-Face Situation and the We-Relationship”.
We can locate the idea of the “egregore” along similar but distinct lines: the egregore is a collective subject composed of an idea rather than of a space. The person speaking on behalf of the egregore is thus subjectified by virtue of their participation in the egregore’s constitutional idea, which can happen anywhere. This contextlessness, the possibility of running into an egregore in any possible space, is what lends them an air of terror.
We could go further and call this “maleness” of 4chan a structural quality, which closely parallels the notion of “patriarchy” as it’s used in current discourse: a description of a presubjective quality of “maleness” within certain important spaces.