SUCKMYCODE: Part Three
by Eleni Maragkou
I Would Prefer Not To
The G-Point, designed by Andy Kurovets.
A concise history of sex and the internet
I will begin with a double entendre: in 1969, ARPANET was commissioned by the US Department of Defence to build the first node of the internet, a Sigma 7 computer running the SEX operating system.[1]
If sex has the capacity to engender existence, we can apply this metaphor to other domains of our lives. One aphorism goes as follows: sex created the internet, as we know it. It gave form to the ways ads and search results are displayed and digital payments are conducted. It influenced new modes of cultural production and vernacular creativity. Take the modern vlogger, a sanitised descendant of the OG camgirls like JenniCam, who performed their exhibitionist lives for hungry viewers. In her book, How Sex Changed the Internet and the Internet Changed Sex, journalist Samantha Cole suggests that “many of the financial technologies we now use and find indispensable” are a product of early web pages devoted to sex. Affiliate linking programs, A/B testing, subscriptions and members-only content, online credit card transactions, online advertising models. Why then is sex (work) scrubbed, not only from the platforms it built, but also from techno-history itself?
The internet has amplified the visibility of diverse sexual tastes, niches, and paraphilias. The early internet made possible easier, faster, more intimate ways of seeing and experiencing sex. In the late 1970s, the first computer bulletin board systems emerged, and very quickly people began to use them in order to send sexually explicit material to one another. Early operators included the appropriately named Sleazenet, Throbnet, and Pleasure Dome. The latter branded itself as “an electronic gathering place for homosexuals, bisexuals, heterosexuals… to talk, learn, advise or joke about sex”. There, interested parties could retrieve onto their home computers “hundreds of pictures of naked people, or people engaging in sexual acts”[2].
Indeed, such rudimentary, almost primitive to the modern smartphone user, technologies like the BBS or even Teletext[3] became avenues for sexual exploration. At the time, regulation of explicit online materials was minimal, and individual operators were responsible for manually policing access to adult content, often using basic age-verification methods like questionnaires and phone calls. While some administrators took precautions and restricted some users’ access to platform features, the legal landscape was still unclear.
To accommodate the increased scale of platforms, these processes now take place through the algorithmic suppression of so-called “borderline content” in the form of shadowbanning and deprioritisation, practices which include a broad range of content, spanning from hate speech to pole dancing. The opacity of algorithms allows them to leverage epistemic authority in order to destabilise, delegitimise, and undermine criticism against them — call that “black box gaslighting”[4].
One of the most infamous cases of an outright ban on sexual content in recent internet history occurred on 17 December 2018, when Tumblr banned all porn content, with its bid against “female-presenting nipples” and other such horrors. Tumblr, which ostensibly functioned as an informal archive of “counterhegemonic pleasures and bodies”[5] that often transcended the monosexist limitations of mainstream porn platforms, offering a heterotopia “where the excess of one’s desires need neither be tapered nor ordered within hegemonic taxonomies”[6]. Though the ban did not explicitly target pornography, this algorithmic “moral” clean-up “gave merit to the fears that queer visibility can still be intolerable and unintelligible when we choose to vaunt that which makes queers horny”[7].
The Teletext Babez read theory. Teletext pages from german private cable TV stations collected by Dragan Espenschied and edited by the author.
The “other other Victorians”
There is something to be said about the sterile sexual imaginaries of our time. Though accused of being sex-obsessed, Western (especially American) culture is essentially “[a] room full of beautiful, bare bodies, and everyone is only horny for war”[8]. In the words of Virginia Barratt, we are missing the “guts and viscera [in] that clean and sterile environment”, we are missing the “flesh and biological fluids”[9]? Though wars have been waged in the name of freedom, including sexual freedom, at home, sexuality that transcends the limited imagination of cis-heteronormative reproductive sex is treated at best with suspicion, at worst with violent hostility.
It is perhaps for this reason that public recognition of queer people has become contingent upon the performance of visible and respectable social identities. In the words of Lauren Berlant, “the social order ‘teaches you to renounce your desire’s excess so that you can be intelligible under the discipline of the norms that make hierarchies of social value seem natural”[10]. Queer politics have always had a tense relationship to visibility, identification, and recognition. Though much of contemporary LGBTQ+ activism is structured toward representation within established institutions (the government, the media, the military, marriage), queerness is historically linked to destabilising the normative structures that work to solidify identities. The onus is placed on queer and trans people: conform to the gender binary, solidify your identity in ways that the public is willing to tolerate.
As mainstream queer politics drift further from an intersectional, materialist, and class-based analysis, their demands become increasingly tied to individualised identity politics and integration within normative social institutions. The hyper-specific, almost personalised labelling of identity becomes essential, and, new media technologies and new forms of soft control “displace the question of linguistic representation and cultural identity from the centre of cultural struggle”[11], increasingly identity becomes re-articulated and standardised in the arena in which much of queer discourse takes place: the internet.
Consider the normative formats by which gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and identity are made legible online: the social media dropdown menu, the dating app preference UI, the porn category. Over the years, dropdown menus have grown longer, more inclusive. Man. Woman. Other. Man. Woman. Non-binary. Man. Woman. Two-Spirit. It seems as though what was once seen as an “aberrant third-ness” is slowly being integrated “within an otherwise normative system of relations”[12]. Or, in the words of John Cheney-Lippold, “Google’s gender is a gender of profitable convenience. It’s a category for marketing that cares little whether you really are a certain gender, so long as you surf/purchase/act like that gender”[13].
Feeld, a dating app for “open-minded people” boasts an exhaustive list of preferences, genders, desires[14]. On it, I learn about terms like “GGG”—good (in bed), giving (of time and pleasure), and game (for exploring and being open-minded)—and “skoliosexuality”, or the attraction to genderqueer, transgender and/or non-binary humans. This methodical cataloguing of each sexual preference, proclitivity, fetish, and desire winks at the meticulous discourse around Victorian sex lives described by Foucault in his History of Sexuality. Pornography, on the other hand, though it potentially engenders unpredicted ways of experiencing sex, porn categories often feed into normative imageries/imaginaries, rather than subvert them.
What about the bodies that “transcend the bureaucratic violence of a single-box tick”[15]? “If a body without a name is an error,” writes Legacy Russel, “providing more names, while proffering inclusivity, does not resolve the issue of the binary body.[16]” It only produces new binaries, new categories, new boxes to be ticked—and it frames legibility as the normative way of being. This legibility makes its way into slang and casual interactions, where superficial markers of identity are registered as evidence of sexual preference and are predicated on a homonormative interpretation of white, middle-class, cisgender male subjectivities.
From furtive shibboleths to fugitive data
Technologies are gendered, and they engender gender. When the internet was nascent and strange and uncharted, it was cited as a site of transcendence, poised to upend, disrupt, even destroy the suffocating dualities of public/private, masculine/feminine, self/Other, virtual/real. This utopian promise faltered with the onset of Web 2.0; interfaces, in their omniprescence, unobtrusiveness, and conspicuousness produced and enacted stratified, fixed, and algorithmically parsable identities, and we, in turn, are compelled to speak those identities into existence in a language that the algorithm understands.
The early web was an entity “already socially inscribed with regard to bodies, sex, age, economics, social class and race”, as cyberfeminist artist Faith Wilding notes. “The computer system was explicitly designed to reinstate and strengthen not only the idea of static, permanent, immutable gender, but also to continue to uphold strictly binary gender.”[17] Through their affordances—or the actions which they encourage, allow, discourage, or forbid—platforms encode norms and embed them into design to impose order on vast amounts of data. Yet, these affordances are not set in stone. Those who have been fucked over by the system will always find ways to hack the cis-tem.[18]
Before the internet, when queer people had no choice but to form kinship in the physical world, the ways through which to signify belonging, while also evading repressive homophobic regimes, were limited. The politics of recognition here are reversed: when navigating public cruising areas, gay men were able to recognise each other without being perceived through anti-languages like Polari or Kaliardà, used in the UK and Greece respectively. Although (Black and Latino) queer slang has been watered down as it flowed through the Paris Is Burning to RuPaul’s Drag Race to TikTok pipeline, there was once a point in which speech was peppered with furtive shibboleths, or secret words which were recognised only by those “in the know”, while being obscure or unnoticed by outsiders.
With more and more of our lives performed and experienced online, design and programming practices inscribe cultural assumptions into the technologies we use. Identities and social relations are established, codified, and reproduced in order to optimise the storage, retrieval, and reproduction of information. Crude ways of inferring social and demographic categories from using postcode data to tracking browsing habits, emerge and become central to marketing segmentation efforts and database management. What would happen if some of the values in the database were unknown, indeterminate, or nonexistent?
To paraphrase Donna Haraway, our interfaces are distubingly intimate, and we frighteningly strangers to ourselves. What if we became strangers to our interfaces instead? What if we went out of our way to become unrecognisable? What if, in response to the all-seeing eye of data brokers, we embraced queer darkness, failure, incalculable states of being, and grammars of possibility that “refuse to confirm the hierarchies of knowing”[19]? For so long, we have been made to yearn for inclusion and representation in the system, and for good reason; when the inability to be recognised by the algorithm leads to discrimination and exclusion, the need to supply the algorithm with more accurate data about the idiosyncrasies and niches of the human experiences seems like the remedy.
Platforms, just like any other major profit-driven institution, are only interested in the participation of marginalised or excluded bodies in the techno-social ecology as long as the former are easily detectable and can be used to represent and predict consumer behaviour. If queerness is supposed to be inherently ambiguous and unfixed, why are we so eager to taxonomise it, to make it legible? Like Bartleby, the refusing clerk from Herman Melville’s short story Bartleby the Scrivener, I would prefer not to.
::Epilogue::
Imagine the internet as a queer uncanny heterotopia.
Why should our bodies be subjected to technological recognition in the name of “security”?
How fun would anonymity be?
Why does the state need to know my gender?
Maybe I do not want to be perceived—not as a joke, but as a principle of being, as a moral code.
In the words of dear friend and accomplice Fer González Morales, I want to be “the im-proper body without proper-ties”.
What if we all became NULL values, contaminating databases with our refusal to cohere?
What if queer people no longer needed furtive shibboleths to articulate identity and belonging?
What if we became the furtive shibboleths?
Let us abandon the idea of ourselves as private property.
Let us search for something elusive—that which is messy, slippery, undefined.
That which disidentifies from the extractive logics of classification.
That which defies identification.
That which is unreadable.
That which never sits still.
“Gender,” writes Jack Halberstam, “has figured as an electronic text that shifts and changes in dialogue with users and programs.”
In the age of the so-called “intelligent machine” (whose intelligence, anyway?), our ability to distinguish between our “natural” and our “machine” selves is threatened, he argues.
Let that ability to be obliterated completely.
Citational gratitude
Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker, 2007, The Exploit: A Theory of Networks, University of Minnesota Press.
Dale Beran, 2019, It Came from Something Awful: It Came from Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office, All Points Books.
Faith Wilding, 1998, “Where is the Feminism in Cyberfeminism?”, n.paradoxa, vol. 2.
Jack Halberstam, 1991, “Automating Gender: Postmodern Feminism in the Age of the Intelligent Machine”, Feminist Studies, vol. 17, no. 3, pp. 439-460.
Jack Halberstam, 2011, The Queer Art of Failure, Duke University Press.
Jacob Engelberg and Gary Needham, 2019, “Purging the Queer Archive: Tumblr’s Counterhegemonic Pornographies”, Porn Studies, vol. 6, pp. 350-354.
Jacob Gaboury, 2018, “Becoming NULL: Queer relations in the excluded middle”, Women and Performance, vol. 28, no. 2.
Judith Butler, 2017, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, Routledge.
John Cheney-Lippold, 2017, We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves, NYU Press.
Kelley Cotter, 2021, “‘Shadowbanning Is Not a Thing’: Black Box Gaslighting and the Power to Independently Know and Credibly Critique Algorithms”, Information, Communication & Society, vol. 26, no. 6, pp. 1226-1243. doi:10.1080/1369118X.2021.1994624.
Lauren Berlant, 2012, Desire/Love, Punctum Books.
Lauren E. Bridges, 2021, “Digital failure: Unbecoming the “good” data subject through entropic, fugitive, and queer data”, Big Data & Society.
Legacy Russel, 2020, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, Verso.
Mar Hicks, 2019, “Hacking the Cis-tem: Transgender Citizens and the Early Digital State”, y IEEE Annals of the History of Computing.
Michel Foucault, 2008, The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge, Penguin.
Olu Jenzen, 2007, “The Queer Uncanny”, eSharp Issue 9.
VNS Matrix and Virginia Barratt, 1994, “Interviewed by Bernadette Flynn”, Continuum, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 419–432.
Zach Blas, 2016, “Queer Darkness”, in Fear Eats the Soul, edited by Omar Kholeif and Sarah Perks, HOME Publications.
[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc1000/
[2] https://scholar.lib.vt.edu/VA-news/VA-Pilot/issues/1994/vp941127/11250232.htm
[3] http://1x-upon.com/~despens/teletext/
[4] Cotter, 2023.
[5] Engelberg and Gary Needha, 2019, p. 351.
[6] Engelberg and Gary Needha, 2019, p. 351.
[7] Engelberg and Gary Needha, 2019, p. 354.
[8] https://bloodknife.com/everyone-beautiful-no-one-horny/
[9] Barratt, 1994, p. 422.
[10] Berlant, 2012, p. 52.
[11] Gaboury, 2018.
[12] Gaboury, 2018.
[13] Cheney-Lippold, 2017, p. 7.
[14] https://feeld.co/glossary?show=Desires
[15] Russel, 2020, p. 91.
[16] Russel, p. 91.
[17] Wilding, 1998, p. 9.
[18] Hicks, 2019.
[19] Halberstam, 2011, p. 16.