MayVaneDay Studios (Gopher Edition)

Jenny

published: 1-29-2019

I keep looking at the time. I move to get some hand sanitizer, I glance at the clock on my microwave. I switch windows on my laptop, I look at the time widget at the top of my screen. I hit the skip button in the music player on my phone to skip to the next song, I glance at the clock in the upper-right-hand corner.

I sit there in anxiety, beating myself up over and over for not using my time to be more productive as the minutes burn on and on and on. I lay in bed for hours in the morning, watching the clock, thinking of all the things I could have been doing had I gotten up earlier and eaten my breakfast earlier and gotten on with my day earlier. I stay up late, even though a migraine rages in my head, because to go to sleep is to surrender the little quiet time I have and skip back to having obligations and noise surrounding me and a sun in the sky, a clock, forever shaming me for the choices I’ve made in my life.

Why aren’t you productive?

Why aren’t you enjoying the best years of your life?

Why aren’t you doing your homework, or studying, or learning a new programming language, or, or, or-

I sell little slivers of my life in order to pay for an institution that only demands time from me to complete projects that do little, if anything, to advance the wealth of knowledge of mankind. Routine tests, routine projects. I scoop spaghetti onto a plate and drip some sauce onto it. The well of noodles is almost empty. I reach into one of the plastic bins to my right and pull out some more and start boiling them. A job an automaton could do better than me. Robots don’t need bathroom breaks, or scratch their ears in absent mind and then need to change their gloves, or accidentally get one specific person’s order wrong multiple times.

Robots don’t randomly experience sensory overload or have chronic fatigue.

Robots don’t question their circumstances.

To be “extremely online” means you spend, well, an extreme amount of time online to the point where it has an adverse effect on your perception of time and the world around you. You know memes, and you know the best shitposters, and if there’s any kind of drama anywhere, you know about it. Like a Danganronpa fictionkin on Twitter having coitus with their friend’s father in a Walmart bathroom and then going on to threaten to murder said friend, or the developers of Pleroma getting bombarded with constant accusations of being Nazis and hatemongers because some of the people who happen to run Pleroma instances decided to harass the developers of a Mastodon app that didn’t want to fix their app to work with Pleroma, or an infamous anti-pedophile blog on Tumblr accruing a mass of people with too much time on their hands with a hate boner for him because he keeps coming out with shittier and shittier opinions. “Extremely online” people tend to care too much about what random people on the internet think of them, and burn hours upon hours away posting on said social media accounts.

There are two types of “extremely online” people. The first, you’ll find information about with a cursory search on the clearweb with a cursory search into the mainstream search engine of your choice, privacy-respecting or not. If you don’t want to do a search, imagine a KPOP-obsessed young adult stalking the Trump’s Twitter account to reply snarky comebacks and then subtweeting people for not being woke enough, and you’re probably halfway there. I won’t spend much more time on these people, since they’re not the main focus of this post.

The other group are people more resembling you and me. Maybe they’re on Neocities, maybe they’re on Gopher. Maybe they idle in IRC channels as opposed to Discord servers. Maybe they use Mastodon or Pleroma or other ActivityPub services as opposed to Twitter and Tumblr and any of the other silos.

Perhaps they’re self-professed “lainons”, or just normal channers.

A little over a month ago, I published a post. Not much stands out about it to me, just the first seeds of whatever’s come over me in the past month, except for this quote:

I still haven’t fully adjusted to being immersed in the Wired instead of just a passer-by, or a surface user. Baptized in the code, reborn as fully me instead of just a digital representation of me.

There’s a lot of ways this quote could be interpreted, or misinterpreted, that I’ve thought of since publishing that post:

• I spend late nights up on my computer instead of sleeping like the people around me. It’s nice and quiet at night, and I can concentrate, and I can fulfill my bodily needs (bathroom breaks, eating, showering, etc.) on my own schedule instead of the arbitrary schedule that society set up hundreds of years ago to cope with our collective domestication. Somehow, despite having less in common with my peers in this way, operating as my body tells me to instead of fitting in to not bother everyone else feels more human. And now I’ve decided to accept this as my normal instead of just a deviation from their normal, somehow inherently bad just because it’s different.

• I’ve stuck with the same group of friends for more than one consecutive month now. I’ve gotten my nomadic urges to leave my chippie friends, definitely, but unlike every other internet friend group I’ve put myself in and then ripped myself out of, this one seems to be more… supportive. We didn’t come together because of a collective delusion and thus fractured expectations of who we were in past lives; we didn’t come together out of a shared interest in some piece of media that I lost interest in. It was a combination of shared interests, and shared uses of fringe technology like Linux and XMPP, and a shared cultural background in the anime Serial Experiments Lain (which is where the whole “Wired” thing comes from). I’m an integral part of something, instead of just an implant.

• I’ve become “extremely online”, to the point where the allure of a life beyond this one and yet within grasp now instead of after this mortal coil actively harms me in the here and now. How many sensory meltdowns have been a result of looking into a computer screen for almost all of my waking hours not spent in class or in the cafeteria? How many threats to my life and my future could have been avoided had I just kept my hands away from the keyboard for a few seconds, minutes, hours? Am I really me, or am I just the collective sum of everyone else’s perceptions of me?

A friend of mine, tA, argued the latter a few months ago: “If no-one knows you exist, if you have no interaction with anyone, you do not exist.” I’m going to have to respectfully disagree: regardless of how people perceive me, or regardless if people ignore me or outright don’t know of me, that does not negate the reality of my existence. That does not negate the changes I’ve already affected in the world, or the imprints I’m to make in the future. Some part of me will survive, regardless of if my name is attached to it, or if it remains obscure in some archive somewhere. I exist through my work. A webpage does not cease to exist just because it gets no pageviews save for that of its creator.

Or maybe I’m the one doing the misinterpreting.

It wouldn’t be the first time.

If this were a person I only knew for a few days, I wouldn’t hesitate to pack up and disengage and leave. But tA is one of my friends, and nothing in that place is truly serious enough to sever ties for, and friendship like with the chippies only comes once in a lifetime.

I’m their “Seliph.”

And yet, I’m not. There’s a person behind the persona.

And sometimes the persona poisons the person beneath the mask.

Late 2016, sitting in a hotel room after yet another school event that would have pushed too late at night to warrant the long commute home only to wake up in a few hours for a new day. Still on Windows 10 (I didn’t start experimenting with Ubuntu until the school year had ended), still on my girlfriend’s Spotify account, before her family upgraded to a family plan and I had to log out so they didn’t get suspended for “unauthorized account sharing”. Playing around with the radio function.

I discovered a lot of new music in those six months. Angry, loud, frustrated, just plain weird. Lots of them have been lost to the annals of my memory since I couldn’t pirate them before I forgot the lyrics, but one of them has stood out to me this whole time. Even after I torrented the whole discography in FLAC, even after I stopped using Spotify. A little over two years, now.

Maybe one of my favorite songs of all time, “Jenny” by Nothing More:

I’ve done a lot of falling these past few months, don’t you think?

I keep bumping my head, but nothing’s knocked my ocular stems back into place so I can perceive unadulterated reality again. Wired Me and Life Me keep choking each other, locked in a brutal fight, edging closer and closer to fatality.

Do you think it’s ever truly possible to jack out of the Wired, if just for a little while? To unplug the link among us all and regain a little piece of mind as everyone else’s voices fade into nothing?

Tranquil, tactile, paper beneath my fingers. A slip of fingers across skin.

You cannot see my eyes. Throughout all of these lives, mine or not, we have always hidden from each other in some form.

In some lives, I haven’t even had eyes out of which to see.

Is it this life?

There still remain filters, and delusions of grandeur, and false pretensions outside of these defiled places. But paradise lies not in a single place, but in the hearts of the ones who dream of it.

Do you believe in paradise?

Do you believe in coincidences?