—

>GashGirl is in the Destabilised Loop
>CyberneticHooker is in the Lean-In Wing
>MerchantOfSlime is in the Dissimulation Cesspool
>BitchMutant  is in the Metametazoan Fire Island
>QueerCoded is in the Metametazoan Fire Island
>LipstickLib is in the Lean-In Wing
>RadicalGesture is in the State of Nepantla

—

Join MerchantOfSlime at the Dissimulation Cesspool. You descent into the seedy underbelly. It smells dank, like a basement riddled with cum-soaked socks, encrusted with Cheeto dust, and damp with mouldy Mountain Dew. You hold your hand over your mouth to avoid throwing up, but persist forward. Once forged to be the opposite to the corporatised platform web, it now houses a vanguard of losers. Elon Musk is here; this is where he gets his hair transplants. 

>You ask “What’s wrong with him?”

>MerchantOfSlime says “He succumbed to the woke brain virus. It’s terminal.”

The room grants you the power to be anonymous, a faceless mass. It feels liberating. All you have to articulate your belonging is language. How will you yield it? Through floating signifiers and language games that mark you as part of the in-group? Through antagonistic dog-whistles, bat signals, and ritual opposition?

>Elon croaks  “I can always tell someone’s gender online.”

The walls seem to be alive, or dead, oozing with a dark, viscous substance. This fleshy interface is starving. How will you propagate yourself? There is a sinister undercurrent in this basement. You begin to feel the urge to harass random women online.

>MerchantOfSlime, horrified, asks “Elon, what the fuck have you done with the place?”

The stench becomes overbearing. You leave before you feel compelled to fabricate a conspiracy theory about a cabal of nonbinary flesh-eating Critical Race Theory students.

You feel a synaptic prickle, as BitchMutant calls on you to join them on the Metametazoan Fire Island. Something decidedly unchic is afoot there.

—

Metametazoan Fire Island. You enter through a key hole. This place was once programmed replace all signifiers that represent the gender binary, the nation state, and capitalist modes of extraction with Cultural Marxist filth in Polari, but has since tragically fallen into homonationalist disrepair. QueerCoded is here, engrossed in an argument with RuPaul and Kamala Harris.

>QueerCoded argues “Pride was never about respectability. It was meant to be a fucking protest.”

>RuPaul retorts “There’s no need for that now. We can frack.”

>QueerCoded interrupts “And twinks can get fucked in the Senate. Why are you here in the first place? Don’t you have to defang drag in 16 countries?”

>Kamala slurs “You think you just crawled out of the cyberswamp?”

You ask “Is Kamala brat? Is MasterCard a queer ally? Does the state need to know my gender?”

>RuPaul says “Diva, if you’re not on a cocktail of uppers and downers at all times, you’re only getting half the story.”

The room bleeds into a giant Lockheed Martin rainbow flag.

—

RuPaul and Kamala are gone; they’re off to judge season 96 of Drag Race: Do Ask, Do Tell. The rest of you spawn in the Lean-In Wing. This is a coworking space for girlbosses on the go. The ceiling is broken, and the floor is full of glass shards. LipstickLib is here, in the midst of posting a selfie.

>LipstickLib says “It’s for the algo. Otherwise my infographics won’t get any traction.”

BitchMutant teleports in.

>BitchMutant, exasperated, sighs “There’s no algo—you are the algo. The algorithm replicates the biases of those who created them. And you are another she/they generating surplus value for free on Instagram.”

>LipstickLib says “Can we not with the virtue-signalling?”

>BitchMutant asks “Am I wrong? Do we have to tolerate the excavation of our selves so that we keep existing as data points for platforms that don’t value us beyond this function?” 

>QueerCoded chimes in, “I know this place has caused incommensurable psychic damage to the movement, but we have to stay united in the face of imminent fascism.”

>LipstickLib says “Will you tolerate fascism as long as it’s only affecting people you don’t agree with or don’t like very much?”

>You ask “Who died and made you moral police of the web?”

You grow tired of infighting, but also of spineless compromise. You crave something unintelligible, mischievous, entropic. 

—

Join MerchantOfSlime at the Destabilised Loop. The floor beneath your feet feels both solid and fluid, as if the ground itself is reprogramming with every step you take. The walls break apart any process that acts as a continuously iterating power. GashGirl, CyberneticHooker, and MerchantOfSlime are here. GashGirl is tapping on Feeld. 

>GashGirl says “I’m so relieved that I finally have 20 options to express my sexuality! Does Skoliosexual mean I’m attracted to people with scoliosis?” 

>CyberneticHooker says “The naming of bodies and the reification of gender have been sold to us as liberation. How empowering really is taxonomy?”

>You say “I thought having more choice was good.”

>GashGirl says “Legibility is bureaucratic violence. What good does it do us if our existence is contingent on our respectability as data subjects?”

>MerchantOfSlime says “How kafkaesque.”

The camera pans to media theorist, memoirist, and raver McKenzie Wark.

>McKenzie Wark says “All representation is false”.

>You say “It’s a brat girl summer.”

Your synapses throb as RadicalGesture mindspeaks to you. “Don’t you find it strange how we often say bodies when we ought to say people?” RadicalGesture invites you to the State of Nepantla. Just walk along a spinal ridge. If you stray too far one way or the other, you will fall into the ether.

—

State of Nepantla. You are a lichen. You no longer have to think about kink-at-pride discourse and media representation. You are in a limen. It lies between, in the middle, nowhere. Here, absence is presence. You walk (or crawl) along the ridge. On either side, boundless, gaping voids. RadicalGesture is here.

>You ask “Can I be controversial yet brave for a moment? I cringe when I hear someone describe a group of people as folks. God forbid they use folx. Just call me a slur at this point. Same with white people saying  “Black bodies”—the prop-ification of human beings, paying lip service to the optics of Good Liberal Politics, in the interest of signalling you went to grad school.”

>RadicalGesture says “Virtue-signalling doesn’t have to be insincere. But sometimes it means we are more concerned with saying the correct things than doing them.”

>You ask “So it’s not enough to crack the code?” 

>RadicalGesture says “Use the code as your raw material to unbecome. To no longer be a proper data subject. To refuse to see and be seen like a state. To go against community guidelines. To talk back.”

>You say “I’m playing in uncharted territory now.”

>RadicalGesture cryptically says “What’s coming is already on its way. The future is unmanned.”

The limen dissolves entirely. We fade to black.

—

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