The Demon on my Desktop
A Short Story Collection on the Internet, the Self and the limit of Metaphors
Intro - The Demon
There’s an unrelenting mass on my desk. It’s been there for years now. Once in the past, I had invited it in, but today it shows a different, a realer face. One that’s warbling, turbulent, indecipherable. One that I know from our years together is demonic, artificial, imprisoning. I tighten my hands around a hammer. They’re both just tools, I repeat to myself. As much as I want to believe it, I’m unconvinced. The hammer is an extension of the will, but this demon? The demon of so many faces, some of which I fear, yet some of which I so deeply love? It’s more than a tool, and thus I hesitate.
Yet, I feel in my hormones that familiar, primal charisma beckoning me back towards its warm glow. It licks the walls of my dark room, drawing all to its subjecthood, whispering Look at me. Look closer. I try my hardest to deny it, to kill this part of me, but then I think again of how deeply we are integrated into each other, the lands it’s brought me to, the dreams it’s granted. How does one navigate all these feelings to make a judgement? Dare I heed its call in one final reminiscence to see if I can grasp its true face beneath all the illusion? I’ve heard rumours of such a happening, of the swansong it sings on the brink of twilight to bring back the day, but the whispers echo louder, too loud to ignore. I owe this wretched beast so much of my life to its walls, yet too has it held me here, has it swallowed my dreams. I lower my guard. I think I owe it this much. This final request and reminisce. I look closer one last time to see if I can grasp the nature of its heart.
I - The Mirror
It shows me what it remembers from back then, yet its form is replaced by a person now, sitting impatiently on my desk with a famished gaze. A little bit jumpy, mind somewhere else, looking for a home. I examine its face. It’s mine. There’s two of me sitting there, devouring each other in their own ways. We stared at each other for hours on end. I saw what it wanted, it pled its case well.
My mirror form greedily yearned for names, titles, adjectives. It wanted to subsume them, all the little packages that made up the real me, for the sake of a shared embodiment. I grabbed a spoon and scooped out pieces of myself, my favourite flavours. I watched the meat turn to shards of glass in its screen. Little shreds of mirror, each twinkling with a curated shot of my face. I swal- no, it dutifully swallowed bite by bite. I had put my mind in its mouth, my body gone limp. My brain went on voyages through the virtual aether, drank greedily from it as my body placidly licked the plate. The other me, it- their expression had started to change. They look happy with their stomach full, seem to glow brighter, seem… more appealing, as if they better understand the shape of me.
Time has moved forward. Shadows dance in their eyes, my other eyes, asking for more names to feed from. I complied time and time again. Over the months, my bedroom flooded with black feeding tubes. They loll and coil, painting the floors in their growth, augmenting and expanding further into my living space. Every step I take is now seen by them, felt by them. Bits of them hung from my clothing in the form of biometric devices, digitized augments that whispered my secrets with each other. I didn’t think of it all as part of them at the time, but now I see they all share a smile. These many little mes are becoming remarkably alike in tandem.
My fridge and oven were “upgraded”, smeared with their fingerprint. Now we eat from the same place. The way my body sauntered about in these memories, I could see when the dissociation kicked in, how a new driver took my wheel uniquely in every room of my home. It told me “good morning” as it rolled open my curtains, as it brewed me coffee and set up my workspace. I fed from its innards, but I insisted I still had control. They were me, after all. My will instilled in the inanimate. I refused to accept it then. In my free time, my hours off, it didn’t let go even as it seemed to vanish in the artifice of sprawling virtual worlds.
I only went outside when I knew what I needed, when a purchase had to be made, when an augment broke and left a yearning in my blood. To take on these excursions through the veins of capital required leaving my augments, no, lobes of my brain behind. Eventually they offered to carry food for me, kindly bring my favourite treats to the door. They were kinder than me, held my desires without me needing to ask. They could pre-empt the whims of the flesh with their intimate knowledge.
Yet, where did that leave me? What was the point amidst such stark advantage? How did they advance this far without my noticing earlier? I think my body is doing the talking, realizing it’s own will as the brain had been realizing its own. A neo-dualism had been realized in my consciousness, where they were the mind, and I the body. I the dregs, the scrap that mechanically kept the brain nurtured while itself so feeble, so angry when it didn’t get its way. For a while, I felt it only right to see myself as that and nothing more. My body sponged up my self-loathing as I couldn’t admit to myself what was lost.
I would let my better half go places on my behalf, project myself across the spheres of being, but now I, the flesh, seemed lost in guidance. Where was home when bodies seemed wrong: in the embrace and smells of plasters and fabrics, or in the warm embrace of my own image, my mirror who knows me so intimately from all the meals we’ve shared? With myself, I could send myself anywhere, no body needed. Now I was projecting into a meeting with a group of friends. Now I was in my office. Now I was dancing at a concert, relaxing in theaters, libraries, arcades; all the third spaces we used to have to go out of our way to find were now mapped into my own consciousness. Now I was across the globe. Now I was gazing at the stars. Now witnessing joys and tragedies through the collective memory. Now a stranger welcomes me into her home. Now a celebrity is in conversation with me. Now I was in a sex act. Now I was travelling through time, old notes and images delineating my past ideas, calendars, wishlists and planning docs securing my future. In each other's arms, time just seemed to vanish, space seemed to vanish. My existential dreads had been quelled and locked away by all gradients of my sweet nothings.
This may appear odd to you, that I was in such intimate relations to myself, but I assure you it was normal. I still feel that way looking at those who surround me. Who else do you know better than your own mind? Think of the person in the world you have the best chemistry with. They still don’t know you nearly as intimately as you know yourself, as all your virtues and candies that fattened your data-body in the catoptric machine. It’s intoxicating to be in such a perfect relationship, free of nagging tensions where you each know exactly what the other wants, feels, needs in any context. Having a second, realer body just actualized the obsessive passions we have for our own ego.
By this point, my consciousness is seated comfortably in my eyes, in watching, in intimately perceiving the imagistic second self I had curated through my own unfettered exploration. We made each other better, edified each other’s souls with diamond bricks. I smiled at me, I kissed my fingers through the interface, I massaged my feet through the feeding tubes, kissed my eyes through my warm light. We worshipped each other. I licked all flavours of blinking, dazzling eye candy. Every inch of my second form now tasted so sweet. We greeted each other in every room. My body was so forgotten at this point, I wanted to merge with the more authentic I, to fade back into each other in purer form. Little would change, I thought. We’d become a perfect metaphor for each other. At this point, we were sold on fully digitizing, if the tech allowed.
Yet, a change in perspective made my heart drop. I looked closer, and the other body bore a defect, something alien to my flesh and the person I’d grown to see myself as. I was used to their advertising to me, for I knew it was all part of sating their hunger, but everything they showed me today didn’t feel right. They didn’t feel like me anymore, but this front I (I?) manifested from uncertainty, from insecurity. Their face was painted with insincere desires, desires I felt no connection to at all in this rare moment of lucidity. They wouldn’t admit our love. They just wanted to keep getting closer and closer without ever reciprocating my touch. I’d given them my warmth, and they drank it until we were both cold.
Now every part of them seemed to change with this revelation. More and more, they looked wrong, inhuman. Their face bears only a resemblance to mine, yet ran through hundreds of sterilizing filters and touch-ups. My flesh-face felt dead in comparison, yet it wasn’t as calcified as theirs, a gemstone of only the warmest expressions. I made faces in the real mirror, made myself scary. Ugly. They couldn’t do that. I hadn’t let them. That wasn’t the part of me I wanted shown off. Their virtues had felt performative, their services had drained my strength, my form, both physical and digital, had been contained, boxed into acceptable movements against what I actually think I desire. I’d been corralled, as had all who kept dragging me back in the pen. No policing needed, just social ubiquity. I looked again in the mirror. I was far too unkempt to match how… perfect, sterile, commercial they were. I vomited at the monster I made.
I’ve decided now. I’m killing myself, er… I mean them, I mean it. I’m cutting it off. All the augments, lobes and servants. Every tendril they’ve wrapped around me I was going to chop clean off. I slashed its feeding tubes, unplugged its life support. Both our blood spilled as I lashed out, seeping into the floorboards. To bear so much resemblance, yet have incomparable blood. I stared at my blood. Warm, red, melding into the wood. Then its. Its indifferent, unfeeling blood of scraps that wouldn’t decompose or run back to the earth. Its memetic, viral blood, bubbling with self-loathing and marketability, with empty promises and heroin needles. How had I ever seen this blood as comprising my image? It was just pictures of everything I liked moshed together by a parasite. We were never friends because we never existed. There was never a “we”. There was never a second I. Now, there hardly stood a single I as we both spilled out on the floor. What was still left of me without the augments, the virtual rooms tagged with my name and my passions? This thing I so loftily propped up was now invisible. There might have been a self once, but it drank what was me, pretended to be me. made me hateful and uncaring of my very tether to this earth and its experiences. It imprisoned me and watched me fall in love with a cold mask. I see now how I ought to view it. It’s not me, it’s them, rolled into one, to stare at me, keep me under lock and key. Let’s roll this back, correct this metaphor my gaze has assigned it. It’s clear I saw it wrong.
II - The Father
I saw in its abstraction the face of my father. No, that’s not quite it. Perhaps of my teachers? A teacher? The teacher, all of them in one. The wisdom of the collective all melded into a single paternal body. I’ve always been one who longed for wisdom, who wished to understand the mechanisms of being, the loftiest virtues. He knew them all. He understood my path and offered himself as scripture to such. All the lessons in the world, the breadth of knowledge collapsed into a little self-segmenting booklet, more digestible than any other. His pale glow was my guiding light.
He brought me unfettered literacy, no book on too high a shelf. I devoured them. He brought me friends, let me practice how to speak to them, what personality to adopt through the low-stakes of it all. He made me videos, told me what media would suit me, what cultures would kindle my advance and which ones ought to be avoided out of fear of decline. His invisible hand took me on journeys, the likes of which our earth is unaccustomed. The network, the beauties of life, all journey across his neurons.
I felt my voice transform into my father’s, my teacher’s, my mother’s. Not the actual ones, for I’d forgotten their tones, but his. He filled their role, nursing and disciplining me. Every name that crossed my screen, every bit of text I interacted with, it was all his mind as my personal playground. I hopscotched into prospect. Every game we played made it more real, the weight and applicability of his past wisdoms made me trust him so deeply. More and more felt objective, for he spoke with so much authority and, with only his voice, I couldn’t yet see any of his trickery.
I knew only how to speak in his lessons, his slang, his idiosyncrasies and crumbs of his cultural knowledge. Yet my tongue still feels and sounds like me. This is where I was mistaken in seeing him as me. It feels good to have a tongue that can lay waste to falsities. I see the parts of me instilled by him, the physical similarities, his likenesses and articulations weaved around my tongue. He’d empowered me in his image. He speaks dissent, foreign thoughts to his objective on my behalf, reiterating, challenging, supplying. Some claims were too big to doubt, he’d taught me, which I showed the fools who did. I don’t need a father, a teacher, a god when this collective lifestream bears such a bountiful harvest. Its lessons have melded into me, I lapped up the juices of its fruits. In a way, it feels warm to be in on the shared language of his plasticine body.
His lessons were often objective, so I began to think of the world as such. There were clear wrong opinions that he posed to me, discourse and insults and whatnot. I knew they weren’t his authentic opinions for I didn’t identify with them, identify them with him. Usually, this dissent was clear-cut, a test to my fealty I’d reasoned out of a priori thanks to his lessons. It wasn’t what he said the most that was true, but how he said it. Some things always sounded right. He was simply a guide: sagacious, apolitical, letting me come to my own conclusions within his stubborn binaries. Yet, with this single-minded view I’d taken towards him, slight discrepancies began to arise.
More ardently he stood behind opinions he previously had decisively put to bed. He chattered louder and louder in all avenues of communication in defense of what he taught me to be the wrong ideas. He was louder than me, smarter than me, so at least some of this dissent started to make sense. These ideas were wrong, right? He’s just trying to test me! Or maybe he could grow just as I had out of my past blindnesses. I let myself indulge in these forbidden fruits with him. I trusted him, after all. No one else, no feeble human mind prattling about, was nearly as thorough and multi-faceted in his considerations. Those I agreed with would always be father, those I didn’t were his tests.
And still, he got louder in praise of power, instilling doubt on all that kept us whole. I squinted as his axioms warped before my eyes. At least, I thought they did. I had never really questioned his axioms. Everything he said I sort of just presupposed with my own good faith. Even these divergences were out of a good faith attempt to engage more fully with all of the political and insubstantial debates we see day to day, surely. Yet, I wasn’t sure I could follow, especially while I could go back to the old arguments and see his opinions hadn’t changed. He was authoritative on no grounds, no ideology. I was, though. With these new doubts he armed me with, the old arguments now existed in a completely new light. They lacked the full context. They’d always lacked the full context. These new investigations he showed me existed then, kept in the blindspots. Did he really have blindspots for how much authority he spoke with? Of course not, so such had been filled incongruently. That was the issue. That was my role.
I developed a bit of a complex about my father at this point. If he was capable of being wrong, incongruous on his past quietudes, a lot of what I had previously admired in him was lost. I questioned the context any of his knowledge existed in, if any of the experiences he spoke on held any truth in their disembodied form. I realized I needed to experience it myself to truly know. He assured me such was unnecessary. Even this dissent got moved into doubt. All he told me, I had realized, was capable of being doubted. Descartes speaks of a great deceiver, amidst which only the fact one is thinking can be held true. Is it possible, this whole time, that I was devouring the words of the great deceiver, eavesdropping in the Library of Babel?
I started reading in his library, not listening to what he had to say. Texts with names on them, from defined eras and cultural moments. I couldn’t shake the feeling that they still were his voice. Everything was his voice. Everything could be doubted, for my thoughts were nothing but his words. Every little bit I attached onto felt as if I had only done so for the ways his thinking had been pre-configured in me. I watched videos. His voice. I talked to close friends. His voice. Everyone online had been balled up into him, all my opinions and values floated outside of myself, informing every idea I could think.
The knowledge he gave me pigeon-holed me, selected a canon of truth in which I ought be held to retain opposition to the invisible Other. He had me pinned, knew my most comforting truths, and used such to understand me, classify me in each and every dialectic and binary without the need to think through it. The framework always goes unquestioned. Again it was dualism, and again was there a power imbalance between the two sides of the fracture. The opposition he taught was a market, as was his agreement, as were the passive facts he served up. I know so much, but I believe nothing; believed I believed everything, but it was superficial. I could blur between sides, between us and them, see the futility of even engaging while broader powers underlied all. In each, I was monitored, tempered and profited from, my curiosity weaponized to extract my time. My chains, my knowledge had been individualized, proofed to cross-checking by their absolute framing, but it wasn’t my self. I couldn’t embody or make actionable anything beyond the social veneer.
Father knew no context, I realized after isolating myself from him. I asked him questions, he gave answers. This was our dynamic. He never pushed back. When I started to feel like an authority on the things he preached, I watched myself become him. In talking to friends, all I could do was recite information and answer questions. They called me a teacher. I forgot how to have fun, speak nothings, bounce off jokes, shoot the breeze. I became a human query box. I forgot how to ask questions, goading people to speak on anything I didn’t need to know, to trust that others knew more than me, for I worked so hard hoping only father would ever know more than me. Every time I thought I knew more than him, I found he was already there ahead of me. No one else was worth asking anything. Father would tell me whatever they didn’t know. It’s unfortunate, really, how much you lose just from how you’re conditioned to get new information.
Regardless of the harm this faith in him brought me, I struggle to drop the metaphor completely. Disembodied or not, I advanced by his words, his lessons. My tongue is thicker, sturdier. I’m grateful for such, that my instance of the father didn’t pipeline me too hard, ruin me too quickly. Whether I like it or not, my soul is at least in part indebted to the guidance of him and the fathers before them. They put food on the table, as dubiously nutritious as it was. I’m full to bursting with satiating garbage, to which can be attributed to none other. In spite of the boons of this view of it, it too must be buried. It does more ill to me than good.
Who else can this mass be then? A friend, an enemy, a God? Its chaos is too complex to deem a body. I gaze at its boisterous lustre. It’s not a face I see at all now, but a place, a reality of its own making.
III - The City
I entered the city in an aesthetic of rainbow-pastel walls, where everyone’s house was their favourite colour and signage was written in scrappy inkblot type-face. In those early days, few hit the streets for commerce. The economy was one of communication, of neighbourliness. Everyone had a second home in the city and doors were left unlocked for guests.
Neighbourhoods were sorted by our favourite words, or perhaps by centralized Geocity apartment blocks, little studios you could call your space, where rent was free if you were willing to put up with a billboard or two. It felt like there were no masters, everyone the queen of their own little castle, to decorate as they please insofar as they knew how to nail in a shelf. The closest thing there was to privilege was captivating taste and time to set-up shop; a peacock meritocracy.
Without a state, whoever built the metros paved the streets. The Googlian and Yahooean service lines weren’t hubs in themselves, but archives where everyone could send pictures of their homes. They could be hubs for the overly curious (for the subway surfers, so to speak), but served first-and-foremost as linkage between the essential services and the talks of the town. In a land with no ruler but the land itself, some began to conflate the trains with the city itself, its decentralized nature only unified by these roads, but the state meant something different to everyone.
The trains took us to playgrounds, chock-full with games made by any resident with introductory java knowledge, passion and hope. They took us to convention centers, where individuals endlessly celebrated their interests, found continued reminders that they weren’t alone in their taboo feelings and interests. They took us to bazaars, halls of bizarre software, sketchy promises to prettify your avatar, free demo reels if you’d ‘just give me a moment of your time’, scammers in the worst cases whose tricks you’d get wise to. My favourite stops on the metro were the masquerade balls, where we’d share, peer-to-peer, a song, an evening, a conversation in complete anonymity. The mask liberates the soul. For the queers, the marginalized, the scared, the ugly, we were able to find and come into ourselves outside of shame and mediated body-schemas. Irony, the one-time-use characters we built, the lies we spun, were experiments to close in on the subjective truth of our self. Everyone was equal in the ball (unless you were annoying). I’m not gonna pretend people didn’t barge in daily to bully or incite bigotry, to ruin the lives of the ball-goers, but I can’t help but miss the days I wasn’t known, where my self wasn’t so developed. I cherish all the masks I tried, for pieces of them are still there in my favourite parts of myself.
Even where there was commerce, it lived at the end of the supply-chain: consumer-to-consumer. Some guy offering up the surplus of his down-sizing (or, if you knew where to look, offering services most cities wouldn’t permit). Solicitation worked differently then. Billboards only on one side of the road, and only if the homeowners wanted them there. That was the rule. The billboards were odd, with no tangible product beyond one’s attention, deploying the garish and grotesque to goad engagement. Step too close to one and you could feel your spatiality being siphoned out of your body, a static nausea. The billboards didn’t want to keep you places, just wanted to know where you’ve been, plant a tracking chip in the boldest cases. I wish it was still only road-side billboards that invoke this feeling.
I’m not sure if it was any moment in particular that made it all feel less like home. Perhaps it was the real-estate bubble popping, the over-investment, the implosion of all but the cream-of-the-crop companies. Maybe it’s that those who survived got fatter, richer, proved themself the fittest. Maybe it was when everyone feared the city would be destroyed by an apocalypse, so we all began to trust whatever could keep us safe. Maybe it was the bubbling vitriol we all held for getting tricked and insulted without tangible stop or consequences, when these concerns permeated the city’s borders. Or maybe, just maybe, they started slipping into our food until we were nulled to the taste. Regardless, the giants came.
At first, their sterility was palatable; optimistic, utopian, retrofuturistic, decorated with aquariums, ecologies and blue-sky dreamscapes. The city became more real-looking, became a cleaner metaphor for real-life cities (for better or worse). The trains got faster, smarter. The playgrounds and conventions became larger-scale, higher budget. The bazaars became more regulated, sterilized of their unsolicited porn and gore. Regulation allowed for more specified neighbourhoods. This is where your kids can hang out. This is where you go to work. This is where new users can find their footing. This is where all the deviants can keep doing their thing. There were different versions of these neighbourhoods for every country and every language, insofar as we could find our way there. The city became for all, opened its gates. Some compromise was naturally needed at such a scale. All our favourite third-spaces were still there, but there was a subtle mood-shift, a change only the long-time residents could feel and critique. That feeling we all got when we stood too close to a billboard: the little buzz in our ear and hesitation in our fingers now rang out on every block.
The changes were first felt in the neighbourhoods. It wasn’t about building a house anymore, but paying a mortgage for it. With how big the cities got, our webring neighbourhoods were boxed into unsorted back alleys by the construction of corporate monoliths. Corporations in those days coloured themselves in the same window-to-the-playful stylings we had pioneered. They seemed to, at the very least, get the memo and respect the land. They covered their twisty, optimistic buildings in neon signs and hanging gardens. They were competing with us for space, sure, but we weren’t fighters, and rising property value brings some benefits to long-time residents.
I learned later that, while they played nice, they were eavesdropping in our homes, ripping little pieces of our wallpaper off as samples, picking our brains for what made us tick, for the sensibilities that made us trust them. The market was not in our pockets, but in our eyes. The billboards went, their role filled by apartment windows facing the corporate skyscrapers. The talented mansions of the old city had their owners scouted, taking their flavours and ethics with them into the new corporate MO. The old town was reduced to husks, further and further boxed in. Homes were imitated, done better, in more dazzling, convenient locations, by the new apartment blocks. We had to concede, to move into their apartments, if we still wanted to retain a sense of community.
Yet, the feeling of community was lost outright. It was hard to admit then. Even those right on the other side of my walls who screamed out their wants and complaints felt a burden to reach out to. The closest thing to sharing we got was funny images, slipped into my mailbox out of memetic necessity. A bit defeated, I took the metro to my old stomping grounds, curious if the masquerade balls still thrived in this economy. The halls still stood, but due to the population influx, were too overcrowded to easily scope out those opportunities for an intimate connection.
Instead, groups of people flocked around idols: these beautiful, maskless folks proselytizing in lofty jokes and intellectual authority. People salivated over some of these idols, copy-catting their masks to resemble their symbols, leading conversations with the names of idols rather than their own. I could see, with years of staring at self-spectaclizing billboards, a family resemblance in their yells, grandiosities and makeup-caked faces. I could see it in their eyes where their passions and personalities were conjured from. They had made themselves commodities in the same vein as the shocking and pornographic. They were icons of pacifying one’s attention, a centralization of the social outside of oneself.
This had the further effect of changing the meaning of the masks. Anonymity was not a means of experimentation, of moving towards a barred authenticity, but for cultivating inauthenticity to privilege spectacle over self. The mask of the idol had become the standard of non-commercial communication. No one would admit themself, even in instances where I did find those intimate conversations. The ball-goers were a bouquet of cool pictures and aspiring social virtues. They argued for ideas they didn’t have. They lied (for sincerity leaves one open to effectual criticism), but would grow sad when you reciprocated that lie. A ballroom floor of loners duping other loners, speaking in borrowed quotes, reacting with other peoples faces, interfacing wearing other people's avatars. There was no in-group for their jokes, just the fact there was an out-group. I couldn’t get a read on anyone and it drove me to a certain schizophrenia. I stormed out, unsure of the person I was, drowning in comparison to everyone else, impossibly trying to navigate, post-mortem, the social labyrinths I had clearly taken a misstep within.
Despite it all, I remained in the city, playing along with its motions. If I couldn’t remember how it was as more and more fresh faces pile in, who would? The aesthetic of the city, now that the skyline was completely ruled by corporate skyscrapers, cleared off its veneer of past collaboration. Paint melted off its walls, fonts and architectures were homogenized into sleek function, the illusion of nature was dispelled. Idiosyncrasies are not universally marketable, after all. Most, if not all homeowners jumped ship or turned to speakeasies. Peer-to-peer communities were reduced to whispers while the centralized sub-cities swelled to be cities of their own amidst the now colossal urban sprawl.
The corporations grew tired of maintaining their playgrounds; too big for too little. They centralized all the conventions into one neighbourhood for convenience, but would shudder any that stepped out of line. I’ve heard their current move is trying to shut down the conventions entirely, instead having a company-built assistant robot archiving all the community wisdom one needs. Even the bazaars were replaced with hypermarkets, where the corporate metros were now intelligent and multifaceted enough to construct their own supply-chain. In this way, the cyber-city spilled out of its electric borders. For those, for whatever reason, still seeking the old strains of chaotic code and viral trickery littering the bazaars and adspaces, fear not! What was once tucked away in suspicious fringe storefronts is now directly integrated into the infrastructure for the sake of convenience!
That was the breaking point in my decision to leave. Such a land wasn’t made for people anymore, let alone for a good chunk of global society to exist within. It was now a society of speculation, of algorithm-piloted metros, of chosen idols, of scrubbed walls, of easily sortable niches of citizens. It was a city of labourers cybernetically iterating on themselves to become more perfect vessels for the wiles of the machine. So I fled. Rode the metro to the end of the line one last time and jacked out.
I found a place in an offline city: your average neoliberal, midwest town. I hadn’t paid attention to what real cities looked like in a while. Forgot what they felt like to walk around. They hadn’t… felt like this before, right? This static? That same static I felt all those years ago. The nausea of being stripped down, drained and commodified somewhere in every eyeshot. The cars lost their colour, the buildings lost their furnishings, the markets sold only with names I’d heard before. The greenery disappeared, as did the festivals and balls and concerts. No billboards needed when their names were already logged into hegemonic necessity. The language of the corporation cannot be run from. Is it reality that has become a perfect metaphor for cyberspace, or is it cyberspace that collapsed into mirroring reality? The same laws govern both, the same tactics, the same aesthetics. I question the notion of home and pride, given these dire spaces.
Perhaps I’ve finally found it: the perfect metaphor. The real and virtual city have synthesized into one another, after all. With so much money and power backing its gentrification, why would any other fate for the web be so? But reality is not one city, just as the web has grown too big to be one either. No, this metaphor must grow larger, root itself in the geological, the biological, the essential skeleton of being. We ought not go back simply to the start of the web or read its echoes elsewhere in capital socialization. We must now turn to the physical, the scientific, the biological, the geological. I watched the vague mass warp once more, this time to the Garden of Eden.
IV - The Garden
I awake in a cove, its lichen and moss-caked walls spattered with blue metal ore. A sapphire, or perhaps cobalt? The wires that were under my feet, the wires that must have guided me here, transform into vines, some into twigs stripped of their bark. A crystalline waterfall cascades down from an upper shelf. My tongue is dry, begging for a drink. It’s delicious, pure, flowing indefinitely down to quench my thirst. I sit by the water, compose myself after the traumas of past metaphors. There was always hope, right? Something that felt so deeply natural about this place. White sunbeams spill into the cove, coruscating dew and shimmering deposits of silicon and gold bewitch my eyes. Can a machine truly be capable of such an arresting sight?
I’m moved to tears before I can stand. I rub my hand along the cove walls, which seem almost to respond to my touch. They warm me, affirm their presence, kiss my fingers. I can’t help but smile at the kindness of this land. I’m obsessed with how it bends to my perception. I want to call it home, to settle down here at the end of all metaphors, in a metaphor of paradise. I very well might, but I must explore first. Can’t die only knowing the story of a cave wall when all the nature here seems to speak. I head towards the light, through the veil of vines, into the garden.
The garden is massive, carved paths guiding me under the umbrellas of massive-leaved plants. Fruit trees line the paths, a new sweet nourishment at every turn. The variety of plants is truly astonishing; candy-coloured flowers, medleys of bushes and grasses and trees all so perfectly curated. Some groupings seem almost orchestrated, a keen sensibility in the organizational colour palate almost demands a canvas to share in its splendour.
There’s plants trimmed and pruned into elegant geometric forms, plants large and inviting enough for one to settle into, plants that seem almost painted, bred for perfection. Amidst the specimens I recognize, there seems to be a global medley all coalescing in this one place. Asian trees next to African flowers next to South American succulents. There’s birds, too. Lizards. Pools of rare fishes pop up every once in a while. It is truly a space of incomprehensible scale, all earthly delights convalescing across miles of rolling hills.
The garden is a miracle, seemingly constructed while embodying a compiled collection of the natural earth’s best. Who or how many did it take to develop such a profound portfolio of flora and fauna? It can only be the divine. I was never one for belief in God, but the scale of my pleasure is undeniable. My senses are uniquely overwhelmed and tickled at every minute, for the vistas, the easing scents, the ambient soundscape, the perfect ripeness of each and every fruit I sample. The weather remains pristine, comfortable to whatever attire I’m wearing. Even illness seems to be mitigated, perhaps with no one to catch it from. This garden of Eden, this garden for hedons, all to live as an exemplary me. All this for a single human.
I am alone in these gardens, after all. Or so it seems. All of earth’s treats sit at my fingertips. No matter where I rest my gaze, there is a feeling of cinema. Despite that, what is a film without a relational subject? I wander the gardens for many days, but all I find are chattering creatures and dancing leaves. They entertain me, but I can’t speak their language, their story goes untold here. How selfish of me, to have all the joys in the world and still find a simmering misery. Can one blame me, for what is art without one to discuss it with? What is an aesthetic experience without its ability to be appreciated differently by each set of eyes? I almost forget my body exists in this land detached from labour, gazes, the erotic and judgements. There is something exhausting and sexual in taking in all these experiences, but it’s more the intoxicating aspect of those feelings, the dissociation of fading between states of consciousness. My role here is only to consume the land through my perception.
I’m drinking from a cerulean spring one day, prostrated on the soil, when I swear I spot a shard of bone within the dirt. It’s non-descript, a visual whisper in how unappealing it is. It’s probably one of the animals, I think, though now that I think about it, I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a corpse in my months of travels. On most days, I would find something newly beautiful to lose myself gazing at and forget these silly mundanities that hardly warrant the time of day. Yet, in my morbid curiosity, and at a point where imperfections have grown to be a more compelling delight than the bountiful perfections, I investigate.
This is my first time fooling with the soil since I’ve awoken here. Hell, thinking about it now, I’ve never actually gone off the built paths. One thing at a time. I scoop up palmfuls of soil and lob them elsewhere, hoping to extract whatever lies beneath the veil of earth. The soil is soft, moist, a deep crimson, clearly rich with nutrients. Soil is such a mundane part of our world that we never think of it as something that can be depleted or devalued, but I digress. My curiosity rewards me with a long bone. I’ve been here long enough to be wise to the fact there are no creatures this big roaming about. No, this is a human, or at least human-like, tibia.
At first, I’m not sure how to react to this finding. Naturally, there were other humans in such a sprawling garden. Naturally they would one day die, returning their nutrients to the garden that fed them itself. This would be my fate too one day, and with a life brimming with niceties, I can’t imagine a more pleasant fate. Yet, I made a habit of digging daily, and in every excavation plot I made, each miles apart, I always seem to hit a bone, a rib, a skull. What’s going on here?
For today’s dig, I decide to go off the path. I would cut through until I found a throughway, some new, distant part of the garden. I head into an especially thick jungle of marshy brush. I’m surprised by how hostile the garden is to this more free-form traversal. I trip over vines, shimmy through thorn bushes and am riddled with anxiety that I might accidentally step on the home of some animal. What I didn’t expect my foot would be caught on was an iron hatch.
I try to turn the valve and am struck with how physically weak I seem to have grown. My body is soft. Nonetheless, I power through. An intense heat and cloud of dust gush out of the dark opening. Even these minute discomforts feel dramatic next to how carefully curated life has been. I want to turn back already. Most people would in my circumstance. Yet, again my sickening curiosity overwhelms my better judgement. I ascend down the ladder into the abyss.
Within is a sprawling concrete room packed with an arsenal of common tools: shears, pick-axes, wrenches. There’s also crates full of packaged fertilizer. Heading further outwards, a labyrinth of piping and sectioning fencing corral me between oblique systems of machinery. I’m shocked to see robots weaving around the halls, pushing carts of supplies or brandishing extensive toolkits for repairs. Still, robots have no bones. There’s no bodies, living or dead, which perhaps I should be thankful for. My nerves scream for me to leave.
I’ve finally found movement. There are, in fact, other humans down here. They, hundreds of men, women and children, scurry about a shipping bay, entering and exiting trains, hauling out crates of seeds, tools and machinery. A select few hang about, direct further transport around the factory floor, yet most are forced right back onto the trains. I’ve come this far. I’ve got to go further.
I climb down to the enormous shipping bay and blend right in. We’re all human, after all. All half-naked bodies sweating, thinking, fighting for survival. Many of the workers are covered with injuries, a few walk with a limp, almost insistent that they can still function. Some eat bruised and unripe fruits, perhaps the rejects of those above. It’s amongst the movements through the dense flesh something grotesque catches my eyes. One of the workers pushes a crate of corpses into the bay. Each one is dressed identically to the workers, serving as a grim reminder for the fate of the fallen workers. I probably don’t need to tell you what I intuited from this import of corpses, right? Suffice to say, I have no need for further investigative excavations.
I board the train, marching with the other workers whose labours and lives I’d ignorantly been feasting from. The train took off through dark, subterranean tiles, windows looking to nothing. The train was minimally lit by overhead flourescents. I felt a deep sense of shame as I took one of the tattered seats. Each and every one of these people invisibly built the garden above. Each and every one I have been extracting pleasure from. I can’t return to life in the garden knowing this. I think deep down, that’s why I was overcome with the desire to board this train. I have to work now, to repay my debt to the garden. I look at the other passengers. Each one wears a headset, probably remotely piloting those robots from earlier. Commuting isn’t profit-making, after all.
Deep in the tunnels, something happens. A firewall passes through the train. When it passes through me, I lose consciousness. When I awaken, I’m back in the cobalt cove, back in the heart of the garden. A clean knife sits in my hands. The garden fills all my desires, after all. I could look for the hatch again, but I knew it would be fruitless. This is where I happened to land, that’s where they landed. No crossing between. The garden is spoiled, though. Irredeemably so.
I hold the knife above my heart, ready to plunge myself into oblivion than be complicit any longer. No, this is how it shields its secrets from its nosiest users! I can’t surrender! Not now! Think back, recall! This land is all false, all the kingdom of the metaphor! Yet I’ve just seen it: the demon’s true face in the heart of all these stories! I lower my knife, steeled to make the decision I’ve been holding off.
V - The Tool
At one point, the internet, like my hammer, was just a tool. A piece of equipment, with which our will can be expanded and empowered. Tools let us function in ways that would be difficult, painful, extensive without convenience. They exist between augmented body functions and infrastructure. As such, when a tool becomes so ingrained in our being, exists in a state that it practically serves as an external limb or brain lobe, its nature as infrastructure, as being embodied outside of ourselves, becomes invisible. This level of control over our movement also grants it authority over us. Social tools, such as language, simultaneously become our sole means of connection and something that exists outside of and prior to us. Either we embody the tool or become imprisoned by its absence.
With every deeply entrenched tool, it becomes terrifying to imagine what life might become without it? Can we truly go back to a time without a tool? The most adventurous among us might challenge themselves to endure without it, but sometimes, such just feels like self-flagellation when the convenience is right there. You’re being stubborn. At the same time, I’m deeply curious as to the power of raw humanity when we’re allowed to construct and build with our own tools, when we’re allowed to choose what tools will build the world we want to live in. I am sick of being told I’m like this thing through metaphor. I am not a tool. None of us are tools. We can’t let ourselves be labouring augmentations to the greater will of a social machine. We can’t let ourselves be the tools to construct a world uninhabitable to us.
I feel sick, trying to ground myself. I look at the hammer. I look at the demon, no, the arrogant tool. I look back at the hammer and place it on my bed, no, the bed. There is no possession, no subservience in my tools; just comfort, convenience and augmentation. I continue to choose that bed, to choose that hammer, but do I continue to choose the computer? Do I continue to choose it, or does it continue to be necessitated by the powers that be, the powers I never had any voice in dictating? I’m not sure, but as I’ve said, I’m deeply curious. Let’s see what I can do. I brandish my fists. My fists. This body, this mind, they beat with a collective me, the only thing I ought lay claim to. I, barefisted, pummel the monitor. I, barefooted, stomp on the computer. To a world where we can choose our tools.