The Computer Room

Katherine and Gio review the wonderfully weird film Rukus (2018), which is one part of coming of age story and one part mockumentary about furries. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit default.blog/subscribe

Katherine sat down with Tal from the Tally Mark System to discuss the much-misunderstood Dissociative Identity Disorder and its complementary TikTok community. You can find Tal here."Windows have become a powerful metaphor for thinking about the self as a multiple, distributed system," Turkle writes. "The self is no longer simply playing different roles in different settings at different times. The life practice of windows is that of a decentered self that exists in many worlds, that plays many roles at the same time." Now, real life itself may be, as one of Turkle's subjects says, "just one more window." – Dr. Sherry Turkle, Wired, 1996The more recent conversations about Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) or Multiple Systems (MS), also once known as Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD), are frequently centered around two claims.The first claim is that DID is not a “real” clinical condition, it’s just one of the myriad avenues young people can go down to help them claim victimhood status. In this worldview, Millennials and Zoomers are the snowflake generations. Unlike Boomers, they don’t want to “find themselves,” so much as find new diagnoses to substantiate their status as oppressed. The second, and related, claim is that this desire is mimetic. It’s a social contagion young people learn about from social media platforms like TikTok.I take issue with writing these people off as “merely attention-seekers,” as is typically the trend in culture war pieces. DID or MPD is neither an emergent phenomenon (online or offline) nor yet another expression of self-indulgence. Even if you treat the diagnosis with apprehension—though, I don’t know if that is quite as productive as well-meaning skeptics might immediately assume it is—it’s an important lens through which we can understand identity.Dissociation as a theme onlineDissociation is one of the Internet’s most persistent themes, from the more recent lobotomy chic to the off-handed remarks about dissociating that have been a hallmark of “girlblogging” on every conceivable platform since the '90s. The reason why is probably obvious. We’re not only disembodied online (as in, not physically there!), but the act of being online is also, itself, disembodying.Anyone who’s spent too much time looking at a screen knows that feeling of disconnection; that palpable separation of mind and body. Sometimes it just feels like over-indulgence, a disorienting sense of not knowing who you are or where you are, and other times it’s more acute: the screen has engulfed your physical body.If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I’ll share a story that may be illustrative.A friend once confided in me that on Twitter, she was treated like a hot girl, but this didn’t translate into her real life at all. When she logged on, she was desired—and sexy!—and it began to shape her self-perception. Alone at home, she would feel the same way. She was a “hot girl.” But because this wasn’t validated by any physical world experiences, eventually, a sense of dissonance developed. There were two people, not one: a hot girl and her physical world self. The whole thing was confusing—she was feeling herself split, her word.If you pay close attention, you may recognize this process happening to you in more or less extreme ways. In a mediated environment, we’re all susceptible to it.In 2024, it’s well-known that the Internet challenges our conception of identity as a singular, fixed construct. But it’s not that the Internet introduced or invented this idea. In the words of Sherry Turkle in her article “Multiple Subjectivity and Virtual Community at the End of the Freudian Century,” it only “concretized and dramatized it.”My favorite description for understanding how this happens is also Turkle’s, who described our identities as being distributed across different computer windows. Today, it still holds up. Who I am on my Twitter alts is not who I am on my Twitter main is not who I am on Instagram is not who I am on TikTok.Though this is arguably also true to some extent at, say, work and at home, the Internet both provides a physical representation of these differences and allows you more freedom to construct who you are, with profound psychological impacts. You aren’t just tweaking your presentation and behavior for your environment—you are playing a new character.(Self-constructions and other people’s perception of you online can also get complicated, too. Say you “seem female” because your typing style or avatar, but in physical reality, you’re male.) Turkle, and writers like her, described the self as a “multiple system” — coincidentally, the same shorthand people in the DID community use to describe people with “alters,” or multiple personalities. In neither the case of the Internet user nor the person with DID is this fragmentation of identity voluntary, even if in the latter, their presentation is more pronounced.Do you feel fragmented online? Or is this all overblown? ~Join the community~ I want your money but I’m too shy to ask. Think of it as a tip…? Me around the web:* Taylor Swift’s AI porn debacle alters our reality * AI art will never replace the human soul * The depressing truth behind the polyamory trendUpcoming events:* Join our February book club! We’re reading Negative Space by B.R. Yeager. No film club this month. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit default.blog/subscribe

In our first episode of 2024 (naturally recorded in September), we interview pretty intense early Japanese language YouTuber applemilk1988 about Stickam, Encyclopedia Dramatica, proto-e-girls, and living in Japan.* That McDonald’s ad from forever ago* applemilk1988's YouTube channel* applemilk1988's Twitch This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit default.blog/subscribe

Gio and Kat discuss Agamben's book The Open: Man and Animal and what it has to do with otherkins. They read some of it out loud and may or may have not butchered some of the pronunciations. If you need to fast-forward through those parts, peep the PDF of the book here. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit default.blog/subscribe

Fictophilia. Today, I spoke to fictophile/fictosexual Cait Calder about what it’s like to have a fictional crush. When I first talked about fictosexuality over at UnHerd, I got a lot of pushback: Why does this need to be labeled? Don’t all women do this? To some extent, sure. The success of Twilight and Fifty Shades is illustrative. Before that, Stephen King wrote an entire book about women's tendency to fall in love not only with fictional characters but with fiction itself—Misery. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth both labeling and exploring. I’m not of the school of thought that the exercise of labeling these more fringe expressions of sexuality is excessive or decadent. If I’ve learned anything from being Terminally Online, it’s that most of these things aren’t “fake.” They’re unconventional and our language hasn’t caught up the way even television has impacted people’s emotional landscapes.Online dating, objectum sexuality (when you fall in love with an object, like a robot or a rollercoaster), the limerence of writers like Dante Alighieri, fandom, divine devotion, and fictophilia all exist on a spectrum. What are the contours of that spectrum, though? “Loneliness” isn’t a good enough answer. I’m still figuring it out. Have you noticed… Two related thoughts I’ve had to all of this: * I feel like with faeries/witches in particular, there was a real shift between thinking of them as outside entities to fear or treat with reverence to identifying with them. I wonder why that is. Identification seems to be one of our chief modes of engagement.* Fictional characters are more often treated as people than they are art—sometimes even going as far as being “victims” of their authors.Upcoming episodes of The Computer Room. It’s been a minute since I put out a full episode of TCR. They’re coming, I promise, I’ve just got a lot on my plate between stuff going on in my personal life and other freelance projects. On the docket, though: furries, otherkins, and some interviews with e-celebrities past. One of the big things that slow me down with editing is—and this is going to sound lame as hell, so please forgive this—Gio and I both have a tendency to go off on crazy tangents and love talking to one another, so inevitably, every episode is like 6 hours long and a big time commitment to edit. Thank god neither of us drinks on air, could you imagine? Femcel Fridays. I’m still collecting essays about femcels (movie reviews, personal essays, histories). I’ve received some great internet culture submissions, but only one was about femcels! I want to hear from women. Submit by responding directly to this email.Gift guide…? I wanted to do a gift guide at the top of the month, mostly because everyone else was doing one, but nothing stood out to me. No list of favorite products I can smuggle into my blog under the guise of a suggestion, either. Maybe it’s because I’m not a big gift-giver myself. Or because I don’t really decorate my living spaces. There are no home goods I feel compelled to evangelize or candles that make me feel like I’m doing my due diligence as a young-ish urbanite.Then there are books. When you buy people books, it’s a symbolic gesture, the recipient rarely ends up reading them, let’s be real. I have a similar feeling about using this space to plug the books, Substack/podcast subscriptions, or magazines authored by my friends, even if I enjoyed them myself. This is all deeply personal stuff. Is a yearlong sub to Blocked And Reported a good stocking stuffer? Or MemeAnalysis’s book of poetry? Does your girlfriend want to unwrap a copy of The Case Against the Sexual Revolution or Rethinking Sex even if it’s up her alley? Up to you.So, long way of saying, no gift guide. Use your intuition. Sometimes, when I feel moved, I like to scour eBay for antiques that show my cadre of autist pals that I’m paying attention to their special interests. Right now, though, I think I’m both post-gift and weirdly, post-shopping.The Internet completely destroys what it means to be an embodied person. I’ve been reading too many of these meandering, stream-of-consciousness meditations about being online, please excuse my own contribution to that discourse:The Internet is both an extension of our bodies and the collective unconscious. We live in a world where identity is supposedly no longer fixed—nothing is. There are no boundaries in any sense of the word. Time and physical space haven’t become meaningless, but their meanings have changed.Our imaginations are more accessible than ever. They are no longer private. Many of our relationships are completely disembodied, everyone is getting to know one another “soul-first.” That’s a lot of pressure, some people are just better in the physical world. We are no longer accountable to one another—if someone bothers you, you can just ignore them. Erase them. Mediated communication conditions us to be hypervigilant, to develop a sixth sense about how “people really feel.” (Is the period in that text meaningful? Is that a subtweet?) Everyone is text— to be re-interpreted, de-contextualized, and re-purposed. We are all living history. We are all literature. I think of all the people who have vast screenshot libraries of me, and who reconfigure those screenshots in any which way they like to build a person completely divorced from who I am in reality, or who I think I am. But everyone’s in this situation.Many people experience great tension between who they think they are and who other people insist they are, a major fault line of the culture war. A lot of effort is put into making sense of this climate, and the reactions to it. It often comes down to ideology, not infrastructure. I don’t think that’s quite right. It’s not what we think. It’s how we think.Default Wisdom is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. It’s only $5. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit default.blog/subscribe

A couple of weeks ago, I interviewed nabby (@inviteonlycomic on Instagram), a former fiction-kin. You can listen to it here or on The Computer Room main feed.Before I explain what a fictionkin is, we first need to understand what an otherkin is.Otherkin refers to an identity category where one’s soul does not match one’s body. There are human otherkin, like is often the case with fictionkin, mediakin, or otakin/otakukin, who identify with fictional characters, and historykin, who identify with historical figures (you may remember the non-binary TikTok personality who went viral after claiming they “kinned” Hitler, or this iconic Tumblr post). There are also non-human otherkin, who identify with, or in the verbiage of the community, whose kintype is, animals, mythological creatures, aliens, etc.Otherkin is one of these identity categories that receive unfair treatment. The perfect avatar for social critics foaming at the mouth to critique the excesses of kids online, it has variously been dismissed, conflated with the thematically similar but wholly unrelated furry fandom, or used as a pawn in the ongoing conversation about transgender identity, a “that’s what’s next, folks!” None of these describe what otherkin are, or how and why they emerged, or even convincingly theorize about what purpose they serve in an individual’s life. I don’t think it’s fair to cast otherkin as a punchline; nor do I think they should be used as pawns in a moral panic about technology. And to echo Thiel for a moment, while I don’t fault anyone for not taking them literally, I do think we should take them seriously.Some people have described “otherkin” as a community, but they are only so in the broadest sense. Otherkins exist in a network of related experiences. Like many other online phenomena, including political ones, like the e-right, otherkin exist more in an ecosystem than they do a community. There’s a broad rubric of what it means to be an otherkin, but no single ideology or experience they subscribe to. The religious scholar Danielle Kirby, who’s done some of the most thorough research on otherkin, describes it as a “morass of individual preferences.” Like so much of contemporary identity, being an otherkin relies on something called unverified personal gnosis (UPG) or subjective personal gnosis (SPG). UPG, a term you may already be familiar with if you’ve ever been in neo-pagan circles, is exactly what it sounds like: unfalsifiable knowledge that can only be received through personal experience. But in otherkin world, like the spiritual circles they’re downstream of, UPG isn’t always law.In some otherkin communities, fictionkin are viewed as “less authentic” than those who kin with animals, angels, aliens, or mythological creatures. This perception stems from the belief that kintypes grounded “in history,” even if inaccurately represented, have a more solid foundation in reality. This idea is similar to trends seen in neo-paganism and various digital communities, where historical or tradition-based practices are valued over those influenced by pop culture or are somehow “newer.” For instance, in neo-paganism, practices with alleged historical roots are considered more legitimate, even if the history is partially or completely revisionist or fabricated, as in the case of Gerald Gardner’s Wicca. Similarly, fandoms centered on political or historical themes are often deemed more credible than those based on pop culture, despite the fact they function in the same ways. Ironically, the concept of otherkin as we know it today, is a product of neo-paganism’s collision with Lord of the Rings, that is, Lord of the Rings (LOTR) flavored fictionkin. “Otherkin” originated from the neo-pagan group, The Elf Queen’s Daughters (EQD), which was part of several Tolkien-inspired spirituality movements that emerged during the late 1960s and early 1970s, after LOTR was printed in paperback and, coincidentally, there was a surge of interest in neo-paganism. EQD spread their message the way all other nascent fringe identity groups did, through handwritten letters and zines like The Green Egg, eventually—and please fact check me on this, I’m operating from memory—culminating in a 1980s listserv that was run by the Silver Elves, who are the premiere historians of humans-who-identify-as-elves. On the listserv you were either elf kind or other kind: eventually, shortened to otherkin. (BTW, for all the oldheads out there, I’m not forgetting alt.horror.werewolves! Maybe in another newsletter, I’ll dive into the newsgroups that coalesced around these identities.)Anyway, I digress.In other communities, contradicting people’s kin-experience is considered poor etiquette. From an otherkin Discord server, one rule states, “Reality checking is not allowed,” and users are encouraged not to argue about people’s identities, “even if they contradict one another.” This is partly influenced by personal preferences or the political leanings of each community's administrators, but it’s also significantly affected by the metaphysical beliefs that support the concept of otherkin. There isn’t a single otherkin cosmology, and the metaphysics which support each person’s beliefs are as diverse and complex as the identity itself. While some otherkin individuals do not contemplate this aspects of their identity, others have robust ideas, sometimes culminating in fully-developed New Religious Movements, as is the case with the SIlver Elves and the Tribunal of the Sidhe. A few things stand out to me about otherkin metaphysics: * Many otherkin believe in the existence of a multiverse, multiple dimensions, or parallel realities. Some believe that the possible number of realities is finite, while others believe they’re infinite. (I can’t help but think of the Mandela Effect here.) * In some otherkin belief systems, your soul or even your body can travel across the multiverse. Sometimes this happens before you’re born, like with reincarnation, but other times it can happen in the present day. Reality shifting, a term which trended on TikTok during the pandemic, describes the process of “changing realities.” * Speaking of reincarnation, some otherkin believe that their souls are reincarnated into human bodies. This includes fictionkin. One explanation for kinning a fictional character is that there’s a parallel universe where that character is real. Danielle Kirby describes the role of the author in that worldview: “[This] recasts the author as a channel or medium, expressing, perhaps unintentionally, another world or plane of existence. The second possible explanation is that the readers themselves, through their attention and interest, actually create the worlds or creatures of the fantastic. This process seems to be based in an idea of energy transfer, and implicity assumes the validity of psychic powers and magic. The former proposal assumes the alternative world is already existent before the composition of the author, whereas the latter includes the audience in the process of worldmaking.”Something striking to me about this is that these two ideas are everywhere in the mundane or non-otherkin world. Of course, there are New Age beliefs like manifestation, which is just one way people express the idea that belief = power, that everyone is essentially a chaos magician that can create his or her own reality if they simply want it badly enough. In that vein, there’s also the contentious, but I think related, idea that, “You are X if you say you’re X.”  (In the future, everyone will see you exactly as you want to be seen for 15 minutes.) But there are other ways these ideas manifest, too. For example, our increasing inability to differentiate fiction from non-fiction, as was famously the case with the short story “Cat Person,” may suggest that authors are mediums not inventors. What was described in “Cat Person” is a reality that must be considered within the context of this reality. This thinking also allows you to more easily separate the art from the artist. A problematic artist, like J.K. Rowling, can be irrelevant, because she was only an imperfect channel, not the originator of the idea. Or that social media creates or guides reality, whether it’s journalists writing trends into existence or the meteoric rise of Donald Trump. In one interpretation, the popular one, we’re willing these outcomes into meatspace via magic or the machinations of “the Cathedral.” A related thought is that groups of people are working together to “reality shift” or manifest their desired outcome.  Another interpretation is that when we post, we’re channeling something that’s always been true. We’re tapping into something. And sometimes? More than one thing can be true at once. Two realities can co-exist, side-by-side. The other thing that stands out to me about otherkin is how closely the process of coming to identify as one mirrors other identity groups. Otherkins often describe the process of “awakening,” which can happen in any number of ways. “Awakening” is that moment when finally, you understand why you’ve always felt like a stranger in a strange land (another highly influential book I should write more about later), why your life has been characterized by feeling like an outsider. Otherkin awakening, as I’ve seen it described, sounds an awful lot like realizing you’re trans, autistic, BPD, a vampire, queer, POTS or other chronic illnesses, a starseed, a witch, DID (multiple personalities or multiple systems). Unsurprisingly, otherkin identity is often “co-morbid” with many of the identity categories on this list. I say this descriptively, not pejoratively. I’m of the school of thought that all of these identity groups are useful, and tell us something important about the world we live in, and shouldn’t be relegated to clickbait fodder. Again, while they not always be literally true, they are serious. Everyone is searching for something—some kind of box to put themselves in—some kind of narrative. I’ve noticed, anecdotally, though I don’t have data to back this up, that many of these more fringe identities like otherkin emerge among the white working class. So does neo-paganism. Being a neo-pagan or otherkin or both might be a way of reclaiming a sense of history and identity for these people—it was for the people I’ve personally known. I don’t know much about it, but I would imagine that the revisionist histories of the 1960s and 70s pan-African movements served a similar purpose. These are groups of people whose history and identity have been hollowed out. New narratives and the identities that come with them give them a new opportunity to have a more robust and transcendent sense of who they are. There are other ways that the identity categories I listed above mirror one another: they’re deeply contingent on what, today, we call “vibes.” Something that is strongly felt, but can’t be fully articulated. It’s what I imagine ecstatic religious experiences were like, or what love is like (for me, at least). It’s something that moves me, but I don’t know that I have the language to describe it. A tendency towards hyper-categorization in the young or Very Online has been criticized—as narcissistic, as a replacement for a personality, as somehow “entitled”—but I think that’s the easy explanation. We’ve put people in a strange position. We live in a disembodied, text-based world of pure feeling.We’re simultaneously not experiencing a whole lot in the traditional sense, but we maintain deep affinities. And all of this is in a mostly text-based universe, among people who have been conditioned to navigate a text-based world from birth, with plenty of white space for our imaginations to fill in the blanks. So many of these identities that the culture war regularly discredits and individuals struggle to find the language to describe are about something you feel, not something you do. And so what happens? What Substack-favorite Humdog described as “hysterical identification” in her famous essay pandora’s vox, but what I think might more compassionately be called vicarious experience. Everything is a vicarious experience and we don’t know how to talk about it. We don’t know how to write about it.  So we express it with all sorts of concepts and images. Sometimes it’s more complete in an image, or an emoji, or a gender, though that may not be the right word or the way we describe our souls. The same impulse that moves us to say “Literally me” when looking at a picture of Ryan Gosling or Christian Bale undergirds neo-pronouns and otherkin identity. It’s what makes fictosexuality and aegosexuality make sense. I believe it’s a huge motivation in fandom—when you feel it in your heart that the Cowboys lost or somebody said Taylor Swift is fat. You look at something or someone and you feel it so strongly that all you can say is “That’s me.” Some of these ideas were born because of the Internet, but sometimes I wonder if the Internet evolved the way it did because of the way our self-conception changed.This state of living within one's own mind isn't a result of being so online; rather, we are so online because we're more comfortable in our imaginations. Role-playing games and MUDs didn't cause people to splinter; they exemplified an existing splintering that had nowhere else to go. The same holds true for all the new forms of expression that seemed to flourish and find their own in the late 60s and 70s: Trekkies/Trekkers, elves, furries, neo-pagans, tabletop roleplayers, etc.When I'm honest with myself, that was the catalyst for me, personally: I wasn’t comfortable in the physical world and made the conscious decision to retreat. The screen became an extension of myself, though it didn’t have to be. I didn’t become Very Online; I was born Very Online, and the internet was there waiting for me. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit default.blog/subscribe

Gio and Katherine discuss the 2005 film Hard Candy, To Catch A Predator, Lucas' room, and the moral panic around and reality of chatroom pedophiles.  This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit default.blog/subscribe

Katherine is DONE with Zoomers re-writing Internet history and being smug to her about it. It is NOT a girl's world, ladies -- at least online. Gio has some other ideas. She and Gio discuss WIRED's "Everyone Is A Girl Online," miladys, Biggie Slonk, pregnant Megumins, and the myth of the "Girl Internet." They collectively mispronounce Tiqqun at least a dozen times.   This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit default.blog/subscribe

Vers and Lukas  drop by and talk about e-dating, e-girls, e-ating disorders, and secret political Facebook groups.  This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit default.blog/subscribe

Steff and Katherine discuss Lauren Oyler's Fake Accounts and Patricia Lockwood's No One Is Talking About This. Warning, Katherine struggles through a Harper's review. She got a little too big for her britches with the whole "reading quotes out loud" thing. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit default.blog/subscribe