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Created Mar 20, 2012

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pandora's vox: on community in cyberspace
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pandoras_vox.mdown

pandora's vox: on community in cyberspace

by humdog (1994)

when i went into cyberspace i went into it thinking that it was a
place like any other place and that it would be a human interaction
like any other human interaction. i was wrong when i thought that. it
was a terrible mistake.

the very first understanding that i had that it was not a place like
any place and that the interaction would be different was when people
began to talk to me as though i were a man. when they wrote about me
in the third person, they would say "he." it interested me to have
people think i was "he" instead of "she" and so at first i did not
say anything. i grinned and let them think i was "he." this went on
for a little while and it was fun but after a while i was
uncomfortable. finally i said unto them that i, humdog, was a woman
and not a man. this surprised them. at that moment i realized that
the dissolution of gender-category was something that was happening
everywhere, and perhaps it was only just very obvious on the net.
this is the extent of my homage to Gender On The Net.

i suspect that cyberspace exists because it is the purest
manifestation of the mass (masse) as Jean Beaudrilliard described it.
it is a black hole; it absorbs energy and personality and then
re-presents it as spectacle. people tend to express their vision of
the mass as a kind of imaginary parade of blue-collar workers, their
muscle-bound arms raised in defiant salute. sometimes in this vision
they are holding wrenches in their hands. anyway, this image has its
origins in Marx and it is as Romantic as a dozen long-stemmed red
roses. the mass is more like one of those faceless dolls you find in
nostalgia-craft shops: limp, cute, and silent. when i say "cute" i am
including its macabre and sinister aspects within my definition.

it is fashionable to suggest that cyberspace is some kind of island
of the blessed where people are free to indulge and express their
Individuality. some people write about cyberspace as though it were a
60's utopia. in reality, this is not true. major online services,
like compuserv and america online, regular guide and censor
discourse. even some allegedly free-wheeling (albeit politically
correct) boards like the WELL censor discourse. the difference is
only a matter of the method and degree. what interests me about this,
however, is that to the mass, the debate about freedom of expression
exists only in terms of whether or not you can say fuck or look at
sexually explicit pictures. i have a quaint view that makes me think
that discussing the ability to write "fuck" or worrying about the
ability to look at pictures of sexual acts constitutes The Least Of
Our Problems surrounding freedom of expression.

western society has a problem with appearance and reality. it keeps
wanting to split them off from each other, make one more real than
the other, invest one with more meaning than it does the other. there
are two people who have something to say about this: Nietzsche and
Beaudrilliard. i invoke their names in case somebody thinks i made
this up. Nietzsche thinks that the conflict over these ideas cannot
be resolved. Beaudrilliard thinks that it was resolved and that this
is how come some people think that communities can be virtual: we
prefer simulation (simulacra) to reality. image and simulacra exert
tremendous power upon culture. and it is this tension, that informs
all the debates about Real and Not-Real that infect cyberspace with
regards to identity, relationship, gender, discourse, and community.
almost every discussion in cyberspace, about cyberspace, boils down
to some sort of debate about Truth-In-Packaging.

cyberspace is a mostly a silent place. in its silence it shows itself
to be an expression of the mass. one might question the idea of
silence in a place where millions of user-ids parade around like
angels of light, looking to see whom they might, so to speak,
consume. the silence is nonetheless present and it is most present,
paradoxically at the moment that the user-id speaks. when the user-id
posts to a board, it does so while dwelling within an illusion that
no one is present. language in cyberspace is a frozen landscape.

i have seen many people spill their guts on-line, and i did so myself
until, at last, i began to see that i had commodified myself.
commodification means that you turn something into a product which
has a money-value. in the nineteenth century, commodities were made
in factories, which karl marx called "the means of production."
capitalists were people who owned the means of production, and the
commodities were made by workers who were mostly exploited. i created
my interior thoughts as a means of production for the corporation
that owned the board i was posting to, and that commodity was being
sold to other commodity/consumer entities as entertainment. that
means that i sold my soul like a tennis shoe and i derived no profit
from the sale of my soul. people who post frequently on boards appear
to know that they are factory equipment and tennis shoes, and
sometimes trade sends and email about how their contributions are not
appreciated by management.

as if this were not enough, all of my words were made immortal by
means of tape backups. furthermore, i was paying two bucks an hour
for the privilege of commodifying and exposing myself. worse still, i
was subjecting myself to the possibility of scrutiny by such friendly
folks as the FBI: they can, and have, downloaded pretty much whatever
they damn well please. the rhetoric in cyberspace is
liberation-speak. the reality is that cyberspace is an increasingly
efficient tool of surveillance with which people have a voluntary
relationship.

proponents of so-called cyber-communities rarely emphasize the
economic, business-mind nature of the community: many
cyber-communities are businesses that rely upon the commodification
of human interaction. they market their businesses by appeal to
hysterical identification and fetishism no more or less than the
corporations that brought us the two hundred dollar athletic shoe.
proponents of cyber- community do not often mention that these
conferencing systems are rarely culturally or ethnically diverse,
although they are quick to embrace the idea of cultural and ethnic
diversity. they rarely address the whitebread demographics of
cyberspace except when these demographics conflict with the
upward-mobility concerns of white, middle class females under the
rubric of orthodox academic Feminism.

the ideology of electronic community appears to contain three
elements. first, the idea of the social; second, eco-greenness; and
lastly, the assumption that technology equals progress in a kind of
nineteenth century sense. all of these ideas break down under
analysis into forms of banality.

as beaudrilliard has said, socialization is measured according to the
amount of exposure to information, specifically, exposure to media.
the social itself is a dinosaur: people are withdrawing into
activities that are more about consumption than anything else. even
the Evil Newt says that. ( i watched his class.) so-called electronic
communities encourage participation in fragmented, mostly silent,
microgroups who are primarily engaged in dialogues of
self-congratulation. in other words, most people lurk; and the ones
who post, are pleased with themselves.

eco-green is a social concept that is about making people feel good.
what they feel good about is that they are getting a handle on what
amounts to the trashing of planet earth by industrialists of the
second industrial revolution. it is a good and desirable feeling,
especially during a time where semioticists are trying to figure out
how they are going to explain radiation- waste dumps to people thirty
thousand years in the future. eco-green is also a way to re-package
calvinistic values under a more palatable sign. americans are
calvinists, i am sorry to say. they can't help it: it arrived on the
mayflower.

i also think that the idea of electronic community is a manifestation
of the triumph of sign-value over worth-value. there is nothing that
goes on in electronic community that is not infested with sign-
value. if electronic community were anything other than exercise in
sign-value, identity hacking, which is entirely about surface-sign,
would be much more difficult. signs proclaiming electronic technology
as green abound in cyberspace: the attitude of political correctness;
the "green" computer, the "paperless" office and the illusion that
identity in cyberspace can be manipulated to obscure gender,
ethnicity, and other emblems of cultural diversity; the latter of
course being both the most persistent and most ridiculous. both of
these concepts, the social and the eco-green, are directly nourished
by an idea of progress that would not have appeared unfamiliar to an
industrialist in the nineteenth century.

i give you an example: the WELL, a conferencing system based in
Sausalito, California, is often touted as an example of a "social
cluster" in cyberspace. originally part of the Point Foundation,
which is also associated with the Whole Earth Review and the Whole
Earth Catalogues, the WELL occupies an interesting niche in the
electronic-community marketplace. it markets itself as a conferencing
system for the literate, bookish and creative individual. it markets
itself as an agent for social change, and it is, in reality,
calvinist and more than a little green. the WELL is also afflicted
with an old fashioned hippie aura that lead to some remarkably
touching ideas about society and culture. no one, by the way, should
kid themselves that the WELL is any different than bigger services
like America OnLine or Prodigy-all of these outfits are businesses
and all of these services are owned by large corporations. the WELL
is just, by reason of clunky interface, a little bit less obvious
about it.

in july of 1993, in a case that received national media coverage, a
man's reputation was destroyed on the WELL, by WELLpeople, because he
had dared to have a relationship with more than one woman at the same
time, and because he did not conform to WELL social protocol. i will
not say that he did not conform to ethical standards, because i
believe that the ethic of truthfulness in cyberspace is sometimes
such as to render the word ethics meaningless. in cyberspace, for
example, identity can be an art-form. but the issues held within the
topic, called News 1290,(now archived) were very complex and spoke to
the heart of the problem of cyberspace: the desire to invest the
simulacrum with the weight of reality.

the women involved in 1290 accepted the attention of the man
simultaneously on several levels: most importantly, they believed in
the reality of his sign and invested it with meaning. they made love
to his sign and there is no doubt that the relationship affected them
and that they felt pain and distress when it ended badly. at the same
time it appears that the man involved did not invest their signs with
the same meaning that they had his, and it is also clear that all
parties did not discuss their perceptions of one another.
consequently the miscommunication that occurred was ascribed to the
man's exploitation of the women he was involved with, and a
conclusion was made that he had used them as sexual objects. the
women, for their parts, were comfortable in the role of victim and so
the games began. of the hundreds of voices heard in this topic, only
a very few were astute enough to express the idea that the events had
been in actuality caused more by the medium than by the persons who
suffered the consequences of the events. persons of that view
addressed the ideas of "missing cues" like body language, tone of
voice, and physical appearance. none of this, they said, is present
in cyberspace, and so people create unrealistic images of the Other.
these opinions were in the minority, though. most people made
suggestions that would have shocked the organizers of the Reign of
Terror. even the words "thought criminal" were used and suggestions
about lynching were made.

hysterical identification is a mental device that enables one person
to take on the sufferings of a group of persons. it is something that
until the 1880's was considered a problem of females. in our society,
many decisions about who a person is, are made through the device of
hysterical identification. in many cases, this is brought about by
the miracle of commercial advertising which invests products with
magical qualities, making them into fetishes. buy the fetish, and the
identification promised by the advertisement is yours. it is tidy,
easy, and requires no investment other than money.

in october of 1994, couples topic 163 was opened. in this topic, user
Z came on to discuss her marital problems, which involved a daughter
who was emotionally disturbed. it began in a very ordinary way for
this type of thing, with the woman asking for and receiving advice
about what to do. in just a few days, though, the situation
escalated, and the woman put another voice on the wire, who was
alleged to be her daughter, X. the alleged daughter exposed her
problems and expressed her feelings about them, and the problems
appeared to be life-threatening. this seemed to set something off
within the conference, and a real orgy began as voices began to
appear to express their identification with the mysterious and
troubled daughter X. the nature of the identifications and the tone
of the posts became stranger and stranger and finally user Z set the
frightening crown upon the whole situation by posting a twistedly
lyrical monologue of maternal comfort and consolation directed at the
virtual Inner Children who had appeared to take refuge within her
soft, enveloping arms. the more that the Inner Children wept, the
more that the Virtual Mommy lyricized and comforted. this spectacle,
which horrified more than one trained mental health professional who
read it on the WELL, went on and on for several days and was
discussed privately in several places in disbelieving tones. when the
topic imploded, the Virtual Mommy withdrew reluctantly insisting that
only a barbarian would believe that she would commodify her own
tragedy.

one of the interesting things about both of these incidents, to me,
is that they were expunged from the record. News1290 exists in
archive. that means that it is stored in an electronic cabinet, sort
of like what the Vatican did with the transcripts of the trial of
Galileo. it's there, but you have to look for it, and mention of 1290
makes WELLpeople nervous. Couples 163 was killed. that means it was
destroyed, and does not exist at all anymore, except on back- up tape
or in the hard disks of those persons (like me) who downloaded it for
their own reasons. what i am getting at here is that electronic
community is a commercial enterprise that dovetails nicely with the
increasing trend towards dehumanization in our society: it wants to
commodify human interaction, enjoy the spectacle regardless of the
human cost. if and when the spectacle proves incovenient or alarming,
it engages in creative history like, like any good banana republic.

this, however, should not surprise anybody. aesthetically, electronic
community of the kind likely to be extolled in the gentle, new-age
press, contains both elements of the modernist resistance to depth
and appeal to surface combined with the postmodern aesthetic of
fragment. the electronic community leaves a permanent record which is
open to scrutiny while maintaining an illusion of transience. in
doing this, it somehow manages to satisfy the needs of the orwellian
and the psycho-archeologist.

people can talk about cyberspace as a Utopian community only because
it is literature, and therefore subject to editorial revision. these
two events plus another where a woman's death was choreographed as
spectacle online, made me think about what electronic community was,
and how it probably really did not exist, except like i said, as a
kind of market for the consumption of sign-value.

increasingly, consumption is micro-managed, as the great marxists
alvin and heidi toffler suggest when they talk about "de-massing."
so-called electronic community may be seen as a kind of
micro-marketing of the social to a self-selected elite. this denies
the possibility of human relationship, from which all authentic
community proceeds. if one exists merely as sign-value, as a series
of white letters, as a subset, then of course it is perfectly fine
and we can talk about a community of signs, nicely boxed, categorized
and inventoried, ready for consumption.

many times in cyberspace, i felt it necessary to say that i was
human. once, i was told that i existed primarily as a voice in
somebody's head. lots of times, i need to see handwriting on paper or
a photograph or a phone conversation to confirm the humanity of the
voice, but that is the way that i am. i resist being boxed and
inventoried and i guess i take william gibson seriously when he
writes about machine intelligence and constructs. i do not like it. i
suspect that my words have been extracted and that when this essay
shows up, they will be extracted some more. when i left cyberspace, i
left early one morning and forgot to take out the trash. two friends
called me on the phone afterwards and said, hummie your directory is
still there. and i said OH. and they knew and i knew, that it was
possible that people had been entertaining themselves with the
contents of my directories. the amusement never ends, as peter
gabriel wrote. maybe sometime i will rant again if something
interesting comes up. in the meantime, give my love to the FBI.

@niklasp
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niklasp commented Oct 19, 2018

do you have the source information of the text

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@driscoll
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driscoll commented Nov 8, 2019

    do you have the source information of the text

Yes, humdog continued to explore and write about cyberspace for many
years after. For some background, see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmen_Hermosillo

Sorry, something went wrong.

@rvklein
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rvklein commented May 15, 2020

This essay was an excellent read. What the author expresses at the
time this was written and published is still very much applicable to
the cyberspace of today outside of the details of now-historical
anecdotes.

Thank you for sharing this.

Sorry, something went wrong.

@MitchZinck
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MitchZinck commented Jun 20, 2020

I really enjoyed reading this.

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