The currency? Why, basically free. You got the juice and a portal and a way to get the signal, you might even think you get the rest for absolutely free. But there is always a charge in this world, starting with the calorie, and on internet you pay in time and attention, which the aforementioned robber barons and slaves-turned-masters realized early on is more valuable than any other resource in the world. Now that, you give away for free, although there is case to be made for the idea that you are, in fact, paying for the privilege to give it away and then have it sold back to you.
Life is rife with such comedies, and was long before internet, but it has been just a thrill ride to see the process take place so quickly, to hear about the old days and the true frontier era as I grew up, to be a part of the first large colonies and explorations in the time of the dot com boom, the puncture, the renaissance, the premodern forms of internet, and then, to have become a worthless old relic typing away into a blog--a fucking blog! lmao--the online equivalent of a typewriter in a derelict old cabin on the stony shore of a frozen lake--in this absolutely poisoned and degraded (and worse, prophecied, planned, and executed) merging of meatspace and cyberspace that even now is undergoing another seismic shift and showing new terrain, outgassing some weird shit as it plays out.
Well, it is the Third World War. Some cracking and tearing of the norm is to be expected. More precisely, it is the latest stage and the beginning of the third peak of what could currently be termed the Global Centennial War, if one had a mind.
*
Before Ukraine, which I wrote about and hoped would be over with quickly, I had prayed nothing would break out in Europe in the first place, because the odds were good that they would and it would seal the deal. China re: Hong Kong and Taiwan and the U.S. by proxy, Russia's perfectly effective soft power maneuvers, North Korea and South Korea, tensions sliding up in the Middle East--a broad and engaging stripe of potential energy. A ground war in Europe would close the cordon, and did, and dragged on, and subsequently (with timing so perfect vis a vis the obvious effect on the United States and its election politics that a suspicious man would, well, harbor suspicions) the most globally contentious centennial conflict pops off again, and now, today, it's all basically engaged in a perfect, classic fault line, from northern Ukraine to the South Pacific. The gravity of this line, which was potential and is now smoldering and sparking, pulls everything else in. I say not that it will; it is pulling. We are going for a ride.
*
Anyhow, back in 1996, when it could be optimistically opined that we might not have to deal with any of this kind of fucking horseshit next millenium, I started clicking around internet in order to explore more about the Animorphs books. Of course they got me with books; Scholastic knew what the fuck was up. "Vist the website at..." right on the back-page ads. And I would! Why not? It was in a book!
So I read everything on the site and downloaded and played hours of their little yet robust browser games. I read about other book series, authors, everything that drew my eye on the Scholastic website. And did I want to read more stuff? Well, yes. I'm into that. And it seemed like there was some stuff to read, there on that old internet. It seemed like there was actually more to read, then. There aren't really websites anymore, but there sure used to be. Dozens of the little guys, at least!
*
My reason for going to internet has always been simple: to satisfy my curiosity and explore culture. This very organically led me to play my small roles here and there throughout the twenty years of culture wars birthed in meatspace and tempered, perhaps perfected, in the message board of old. I have seen no real innovation in the deployment of ordinance and the specifics of that ordinance, at any rate; by and large it is the medium that has evolved, or been taken over by it like a cordyceps; the exponentially expanding factors have been area of effect and penetration. The twitterification of national television "news" outlets is a good example of the latter. I knew those Something Awful Buzzfeed motherfuckers had their proof of concept the second I saw a random tweet on a screen behind a newsanchor talking about the tweet. The facebook effect--making the first space online to truly echo in form and function the sparse, corporate, eternally-tweaking, never-changing, smooth-eyeball smooth-brain virtual reality of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash--served to pull in millions upon millions of the uninitiated, like a wave of immigrants to a new world, induced with pleasures and opportunities but in fact there to serve as a resource, to be strip-mined, to be pickpocketed, to be manipulated and tricked and herded like the cattle they regrettably are.
The weaponization of dangerously alienated and isolated individuals (a common and natural consequence of fundamentally inhuman and hypocritical society, whose schools are the presages and pipelines to its prisons) is an example of collateral damage, fed into and further weaponized by the very systems that created these conditions. Like so much else, it predates the internet--see Richard Wright's Native Son for a compelling narrative exemplifying this--but has been accelerated by its machinations and their interbreeding with the overarching aims of mass media. Roland Barthes' Mythologies is a good book to look at too. Erich Fromm's Escape from Freedom, while we're listing shit that helps explain how fucked up our situation is.
Now we have a whole nation under basically a four-point, double-blind hermenutical delusion enchantment. Not for nothing; a binary division makes both sides easy to play against the middle. A chatter war with very real, on-the-ground, in-your-face consequences, and you need look no further than the events of January 6th 2021 to see documentary-style proof. It ends in blood. Sorry to be such a downer about imminent conflict on these grand dramatic scales in this post, but them's the times*. I'm livin' through history just like you, baby. I mentioned acceleration in the last paragraph--an important theme when discussing internet and its whip-fast tentacles. Since this seems to be the post I reccommend all kinds of supplementary texts, and I mentioned documentary-style proof, Andrew Callaghan's work in This Place Rules is everything that I could have personally asked someone to make on the subject. That dude knows his shit and how to wade through it. For being one of the only journalists in America--by virtue of not really being one, plus the benefit of a solid head and a suite of personal qualities that lend themselves to the task--a natural, in other words--I would like to take this opportunity to extend formal appreciations.
*
Before wikipedia, which I look at every day, there were lots of websites just about sharing information, telling stories, making informative stuff people could access. Message boards are still the place for the deep wisdoms, if you can sift through the wreckage and ignore the limpets clinging to the hulls of those great ruined ships. There was this really great mythology website, just top-shelf that I read all the time. There was also a website where a man detailed his experiences and the ins and outs of having sex with dolphins in the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, a story I love to tell. Eat your heart out, Margaret Lovatt.
The first piece of video pornography on the internet that I ever saw was of what appeared to be a college girl who had a German Shepherd in her tiny dorm room. She let that dog fuck her, dear reader, and my twelve-year old mind, which thought itself hardened by its first season of education at the hands of print smut and jpegs, lay cleaved in twain. I had no concept, even less concept of filming something like that and distributing it. Who is this for? I remember thinking, over and over. Well, plenty of people; in the no-holds-barred, no-one-the-fuck-is-looking days of yore, bestiality porn was crazy prolific.
Check this out: I had to see what some stupid fucking train tickets cost for some stupid fucking homework. I typed "amtrac" into the search bar by accident. It took me to a website that at first blush looked reasonably like the entrance site to buy tickets for a train; logo, the colors looked right, yada yada. But there were no links or text fields. At least, I thought so, until I saw a little button at the bottom, kind of popping out in yellow and green on that dark blue and white page. It said "Extra". Well, what is extra? Why not find out?
Extra is like seventy popups. Girl sucks goat penis, girl puts a fish or a snake up her vagina, girl fucks dog after dog after dog, and of course, the holy grail and crown jewels, girls take horse cocks. Girl fucks lion was probably fake, gorilla too. But like I said, I go on the internet because I'm curious. I know exactly what a goat penis looks like, and the logistics of getting one in your mouth. I don't know who gets off on seeing a girl put a fish inside her, but I've seen the thing done.
I've seen a lot of things done, on internet. It's not all just reading. And when you've seen stuff like that, you have to know what the fuck else people get up to and--for the love of god!--post where people can look at it. I was a teenager, and I did my job: I made it my business to look at every kind of pornography people made, and think about why they made it. Yes, dear reader, I am not made of stone--I looked at stuff for myself, for the purposes of ejaculation--not the stuff with animals. But that represents only the well-worn comfortable patch close to home, my humble knowings of what I want, which is straightforward and quotidian, with a high production value. Stories are good. Yet in my zeal for discovery, for novelty, for the unimaginable, the psychology and effort of it all, I roamed very far afield indeed.
Eventually, I had to concede. It's anything. People will fuck anything and get turned on by the idea of turning into anything and fucking anything while it turns into something else. There is no limit. We'd turn into a gas and fuck other gases if we could. We'd let Pyramid Head rip off our whole skins if we were convinved it would get our rocks off like never before, one last time. Thousands of people, perhaps tens of thousands, have probably already masturbated to that fantasy.
Eventually, I also had to conclude that in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of a thousand, sex stuff is not really creepy or scary or even that strange. Our culture makes even missionary-style for the furtherance of the species a thing of deep and brutal shame, something ugly and dangerous to show and see and know about. But sex is sex. People have a drive, and it is bound up with identity and creativity and embodiment in miltitudinous ways. Mostly, we could stand to leave each other alone about it and have our shit out in the open where it can be a thing of daylight. Also the line between fantasy and reality is generally thick, and the translation from ideal to practical typically fairly modest, and if it has its risks, so does every other human behavior. Even that old missionary can result in penile breakage and vaginal tearing. It's not a safe act, and that statement is manifold--disease, unintended progeny, improbable lighntning strike.
Which brings us to the actual scary shit, which I don't really want to give any power to in this space. That stuff can stay in the dark. The dark is quite good for some things.
*
Look. You can't get that far into seriously discussing internet without discussing bestiality, and bestiality-adjacent phenomena. Definitely internet is basically synonymous with pornography, not to say sex crime. But I'll definitely say sex crime; there's a whole TV show been running for decades about just that.
Guess I should say that you know, the complex issue of having sex with animals, having sex with objects you've anthropomorphized, like pillows or hunting bows or the Eiffel Tower, having sex with anyone or anything--all complicated, all brutally simple--is that we are certainly animals, never more animals that around the issue of and in the throes of sex, and to humanize sex, to moralize around it, is equally complicated and can be as easily and as destructively harmful to society as not giving it any thought or effort at all. People should not be demonized no matter how outsized their proclivities, certainly not in a broad stroke based on sharing those proclivities.
Also I would like to point out that while people wring their hands very publicly about fetishists and drag queens and trans people, hundreds of thousands of women and girls and thousands of men and boys across this continent are very quietly and matter-of-factly being sold into and existing in sexual slavery, which is not really a political hot button issue for some reason, except when it's totally fake.
*
All that being as it is, as individuals we are the first in the line when it comes to understanding and regulating our own actions, and there is no doubt that actions in the sexual realm carry a certain existential weight. So, we must have our own rules and values. We must set boundaries that matter. Here are mine:
-Don't fuck without consent.
-Animals basically can't really consent; if they fuck you, to my mind it's basically because you tricked them. Furries are a distinctly human-type-sentient subset of animals and are not the locus of this discussion, but it should be easy to find that if you want it.
-Don't fuck children or teenagers, their consent is not the same as your consent; curiosity, trust, and compliance are distinct from consent and are not replacements for consent. It is much worse than a trick no matter who you think you are or what you tell yourself you're actually doing.
-Don't fuck without consent, even if you need to bleed or draw blood or worse. Guess you could call yourself unlucky, but you're gotta figure out how to get what you need consensually. Hopefully safely and preventatively against infections.
-Again: don't fuck without consent, the more specific, the better, and don't abuse consent by throwing anybody any curveballs en flagrante delicto.
-Making erotic drawings or generating overtly positive written or filmed portrayals of anything that breaks these rules is a pretty fucked up thing to do too. Using art and the position of the artist to wield power and influence over consent is not consent, and you don't fuck without consent.
Personally I think these are extremely basic and leave room for probably ninety-five percent of the crazy shit I've seen online. If you can't hang with these rules, well, it would be better that we never meet, we shall certainly not fraternize, and don't let me catch you doing your dirt, because probably what I will do is administer a forcible halt. This will very likely involve strong prejudice on my part, and that's just the breaks.
*
We just finished rewatching the first season of True Detective, so maybe I'm a little nerve-frayed on sex violence and the fucked-up conditions we live under at the moment.
Didn't think I'd end up talking about that stuff! Any of that stuff. I had no idea, when I fired up the text field, that this would happen. Am I really going to hit that publish button? I guess at this point it'd be dishonest not to.
--JL
*remember how wrong I was about Kanye vs Oprah 2020, though? I could be wrong like that again. We can only pray.
