Heaven banned for your terrible headcanon.

thought digest, 06.02.2022

Heaven banning. It turns out heaven banning, a controversial practice where sites ban users by hiding posts by real people and populating their replies with bots, isn’t real. It isn’t even hypothetical; it was just a resurrected joke post from HackerNews (h/t a random Reddit thread). It’s interesting, though, especially situated in the broader context of theories that postulate that the Internet is a swamp of bots and fake, recycled media. Neither linked theory is true, but they do seem to reflect our shared anxiety about the Internet.

Even when we’re communicating with people, there’s a certain deadness to the Internet. That’s a given with any non-physical activity—there’s a deadness to watching TV, too.

We see, and I don’t think fully appreciate, the fingerprints of an attempt to alleviate this anxiety everywhere: the prevalence of body modification-based digital communities, like RWBBs, high raw vegans, and pro-anorexia; mimetic TikTok dances; the flattened experience-hounding or authenticity-fishing of Facebook, Instagram, and even early 2010s Vice Media.

As always, the solution is less “add more infrastructure” and closer to “raise the barrier of entry.” I still believe the answer to a pro-social Internet is one that’s more complicated and tedious to use.

A few months ago, I described an essay from The Subculture Reader about how people used newsgroups to find concerts. Not as trivial as a point as it seems on the surface. In hindsight, it’s romantic: those newsgroups were supplementing, not supplanting, in-person events.

To me, that’s what the Internet should be. And should a more immersive area of the internet exist? It should exist for the truly strange or marginalized.

Katherine Dee @default_friend

Crazy how on TikTok, despite ongoing scandals, gay seems to mean anything but…uh, gay. Silken tofu? Gay. Marxism? Gay. Gender conforming woman who exclusively talks about loving men? You guessed it—gay.

Katherine Dee @default_friend

BAP’s homoeroticism is genuinely subversive in the face of TikTok queers.

Asexuality. A friend asked me what I thought about digital manifestations of the asexual community today, and it was one of the more interesting conversations I’d had in a while, so I thought I’d share some of what I said to them here.

As far as I know (slash remember), asexuality has a long history online. Like many other nascent digital identities, it started as a groups-bound subculture. I can’t remember if it has its origins in a standalone site or a newsgroup or a Yahoo! group or what, but what I do remember is that it was early.

Tangentially, these early communities have a unique texture that I think is worth calling out. Pre-social networks, you see this last gasp of the authentically weird. I’d say the real death rattle was Facebook groups, meetup.com being a close second. But they’re subcultures that defied commodification in a real sense—there was something about them that was intrinsically unglamorous, even freakish.

I’m not suggesting that the identities they formed around were necessarily freakish, just the way they were expressed digitally. From the outside looking in, many of them read like they weren’t just hard to find, but only committed people had an interest in joining them. Self-selection may have been more judicious in the 90s and early 00s, though that’s just my guess.

Around 2008, many of these identities started coalescing into Tumblr communities. In the case of asexuality, I hypothesize that people fall broadly into two camps. Those with an affinity for “asexualness” and those who are reacting to the culture of the platform.

As an affinity, some qualities are understood as inherently “asexual.” In my post Affinity vs. Experience, I describe how this functions with lesbians. It’s common for people to say they’re a lesbian, but they truly mean they identify with some essential lesbianness. They’re not labeling an experience; they’re labeling a set of desires or interests.

As a reaction, the asexual community exists in the absence of an affinity. Tumblr was a high-traffic platform teeming with pornography and adolescent sexuality. I sense that users bought into that structure, and instead of critiquing the site, they critiqued themselves. Asexual aromantics come to describe people who lack the hypersexuality characteristic of Tumblr, but not a sexuality, period.

Imagine if the person who created this was serious.

Projection and the headcanon. I recently re-entered a fandom as a fan instead of a lurker. One unusual thing I’m reminded of is just how much characters become proxies for one’s own creative impulses.

There’s headcanon (what’s true about the story to you, even if it’s not explicit in the text), and then there’s headcanon that’s so divorced from the reality of the work that I struggle to understand it.

Why choose one fandom over the other in those cases? Sometimes the fan works are even separate from superficial elements, like aesthetics or settings. If you’re struggling to understand what I mean, here’s an outlandish example: Harry Potter, but it’s set on Mars, there’s no magic, and Harry is a black woman. There’s nothing wrong with writing that story, but I don’t understand what compels people to do it within the confines of a specific fandom.

Is it just that it’s a reliable way to have your work seen? I know that I wrote fan fiction and role played in part because I knew that I would struggle to find an audience for my original work. Why wouldn’t I? I was 12 and there wasn’t much of a practice of sharing original writing outside of erotica.

The other thing that stands out to me is that it feels trivial when it’s a random YA book character, but it becomes much more curious with Real Person Fandoms, like bands, public figures, or actors.

I’m not even thinking about “How must the One Direction boys feel about this?” here, because who cares? What’s more interesting to me is what this says about the fan’s psychology and how they read people.

More musing about Borderline Personality Disorder. In Ben Agger’s Oversharing, he makes several interesting points about BPD and the Internet:

1. The Internet imposes a BPD-style relationship pattern by encouraging early, un-earned, unbounded oversharing (which we mistake for intimacy) that can be turned off at will and requires no meaningful commitment

2. At the same time, we become used to oversharing without even realizing it because typing is less emotional than other forms of communication.

3. Borderlines fear rejection. The Internet allows you to avoid “meaningful” rejections while also fostering high volumes of “cheap” rejection, which enforce the fear. This includes conditioning people to expect instant accountability.

He also makes an interesting distinction between non-pornographic and pornographic public spheres, where oversharing is a form of pornography, and early on, implies that digital subcultures are the digital equivalent of television show genres. Definitely an interesting book, though unfortunately it’s suffered from some (probably) unfair negative reviews.

Still from CAM (2018)

My next movie night. I am gearing up for our next movie night on June 16 at 7 PM CT. We’ll be discussing CAM (2018) and Profile (2018). I’ve decided to open this one up to ~the public~, hopefully as a way to coax you all into becoming a paid subscriber. You can register here.Some things to think about as you go into these films: mediated relationships, parasociality, and how we present ourselves online.

🔒 u mIRCin', brah?

Zyzz. I recorded an excellent episode about “the male fitness internet,” including bodybuilding forums and mIRC roleplaying with Oliver Bateman of What’s Left? Paid subscribers already have access, the paywall drops on Wednesday.

As you may have read in the free preview, I’d love to record an episode just about Zyzz, whose story makes me cry, without fail, for reasons that elude me. Maybe it’s how he’s transcended himself, somehow: Zyzz the symbol is more meaningful than the living person.

He’s like the Selena of the Digital Age. Which, you know, isn’t really all that different from the headcanon point from earlier.

Anyway, I’d like to have a guest for that episode. If that person is you, please leave a comment below.

Oh… and before I go: quarterly pulse check. What would you like to see more of? Less of?