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@ -298,3 +298,796 @@ body died. By doing so, he was starting to blend the
 boundaries of intimacy through computers and bodies,
 driven by his love and grief. (4)
 When he talked about the bot in previous messages, it
 sounded almost like a joke. A caring haunting of the
 platform, to keep his persona alive for the community
 in a way that could be quite horrific for those grieving.
 In his admission though it becomes clear that this was
 closer to an attempt to deal with his grief around losing
 the community, his unreadiness to let go of a place he
 loved so dearly. A place just as real in emotion, that
 was built in part by Mandel’s digital body and its
 persona.
 In a tribute posted after his death, fellow Well member
 and journalist Andrew Leonard tried to convey his own
 sense of blended physicality and emotion.
 Sneer all you want at the fleshlessness of online
 community, but on this night, as tears stream down my
 face for the third straight evening, it feels all too real.
 (Andrew Leonard, 1995)
 ### c. bot-feelings
 An internet body has bot-feelings if allowed to. Let me 
 explain.
 A bot functions as a different entity from a cyborg, as it
 does not attempt to emulate a human body but rather
 human action and readiness. Its role is to mirror
 human behavior online, simulating how a physical body
 might act, what it would click on, and what would it
 say. On social media, bots engage in a kind of
 interpretative dance of human interaction, performing
 based on instructions provided by humans. (5)
 Unlike an internet body, which represents the virtual
 embodiment of a person, a bot doesn’t seek to be a
 person. It comments under posts alongside many other
 bots, all under a fake name and photo but nothing else
 to give the illusion of humanity. When an internet body
 has bot-feelings, it is a disruptive performance. They
 are feelings that do not attempt to be human body
 feelings, they exist as their own genuine virtual
 expression.
 In “Virtual Intimacies”, McGlotten also incidentally
 argued that a virtual body has bot-feelings (2013). He
 described the virtual as potential, as a transcendent
 process of actualization, making it into, generally, a
 description of bots. Internet bodies, as virtual, would
 be by this understanding also charged with the
 constant immanent power to act and to feel like a
 human body. It is a constant state of becoming, of not-
 quite-pretending but never fully being anything either.
 Most of the time we can tell disembodied bots online
 from tangible people and as such they have the
 potential to be bodies, without ever trying to be.
 Of course, when McGlotten described the virtual as
 such he placed it in a dichotomy, once again, against
 the “Intimacies” which are the other side of his book.
 The emphasis here lies in intimacy being an embodied
 feeling and sense and a carnal one at that. Virtual
 intimacies are, by this definition, an inherent failed
 contradiction. However, McGlotten plays with the real
 and non-real in new ways, using the text to highlight
 how virtual intimacy is similar to physical intimacy and
 then, even more, blurring as he shows the already
 virtual in physical intimacies. Applying this to a body,
 rather than an affective experience, works just the
 same.
 McGlotten uses a conceptualization of the virtual
 based on the philosopher Deleuze’s, (6) which can be
 used to refer to a virtual body as well.
 The virtual is in this case a cluster of waiting,
 dreaming, and remembering, embodying potential.
 Something that is constantly becoming, an object and
 also the subject attributed to it (2001). An internet
 body with its bot-feelings is a body in the process of
 being one, acting as one, an ideal of one beyond what
 is physical but including its possibility.
 Going a step further in McGlotten’s interpretation of
 Deleuze, this also plays into how virtual intimacies
 mirror queer intimacies as they approach normative
 ideals but “can never arrive at them”. Both queer and
 virtual relations are imagined by a greater narrative as
 fantastical, simulated, immaterial, and artificial—poor 
 imitations and perversions of a heterosexual,
 monogamous, and procreative marital partnership
 (2013). A virtual body is similarly immanent, with both
 potential and corruption at the same time. It carries all
 the neoliberal normative power of freedom that a
 queer body can carry today but also reflects the
 unseemly fleshly reality of having one.
 This is where the story continues. The body from the
 dream ocean leaves the primordial soup of the internet
 to stage a disruptive performance.
 It moves from potential creation to a wild spring river.
 A fluid being, that exists simultaneously inside and
 outside normative constructions. It channels deviant
 feelings and transcendental opinions about the
 collective’s physical form genuinely as people use it to
 navigate their physicality.
 Both virtual and queer intimacies highlight the
 constructed nature of identity and desire. They disrupt
 the notion of a fixed, essential self, instead embracing
 the multiplicity and complexity inherent in human
 experience. This destabilization of identity opens up
 possibilities for self-expression and connection,
 creating spaces where individuals can redefine
 themselves beyond the constraints of societal
 expectations while still technically under its watchful
 eye.
 In essence, the parallels between virtual and queer
 intimacies underscore the radical potential of both to
 disrupt and reimagine the norms that govern our
 understanding of relationships, bodies, and identity.
 They invite us to question the rigid binaries and
 hierarchies that structure our society and to embrace
 the fluidity and possibility inherent in the human
 experience.
 ## 1.DIGITAL COMFORT
 The only laws:
 Be radiant.
 Be heavy.
 Be green.
 Tonight, the dead light up your mind
 like an image of your mind on a scientist’s screen.
 ‘The scientists don’t know – and too much.’
 In the town square, in the heart of night (a delicacy
 like the heart of an artichoke), a man dances
 cheek-to-cheek with the infinite blue.
 (Schwartz, 2022)
 ### a. comfort care
 Let’s care for this digital body.
 I’ll feed it virtual vegetables while you wipe away the
 wear of battery fatigue.
 And why not encourage it to take strolls through the
 network, it might be good for it.
 But what if it falls ill?
 What if its sickness is inherent, designed to echo like
 the distorted reflection of rippling water a corrupted,
 isolated, and repulsive physical form?
 Then we must comfort care for it.
 Comfort care is a key concept in healthcare, described
 as an art. It is the simple but not easy art of
 performing comforting actions by a nurse for a patient
 (Kolcaba, 1995). The nurse is in this story an artist full
 of intention, using the medium of comforting actions to
 produce the artwork of comfort for the uncomfortable.
 Subtle, subjective, and thorough. However, achieving
 comfort for another is far from straightforward. It
 demands addressing not only the physical but also the
 psychospiritual, environmental, and socio-cultural
 dimensions of distress, each requiring its blend of
 relief, ease, and transcendence (Kolcaba, 1995).
 In moments of need, digital comfort may become the
 only care certain digressive bodies receive. When the
 distress a body is in becomes too culturally
 uncomfortable, no nurse will come to check on it.
 If care is offered, it's often only with a desire to
 assimilate the divergent body back into expected
 standards of normalcy and ability. This leaves those
 with non-conforming bodies isolated, ashamed, and
 yearning for connection and acceptance (7)
 In the depths of isolation and confusion, marginalized
 bodies often look for belonging and understanding
 online. Gravitating towards one another with a hunger
 born of desperation, forming intimate bonds through
 shared pain. Through a shared sense of unwillingness,
 a lack of desire, and a desperate need for physical
 assimilation with the norm.
 The healthy body, the normal body, the loved body.
 On the internet, these digital bodies claw onto each
 other, holding each other close and comfort-caring for
 one another. The spaces where this happens are
 rooms, or corners of the internet that I’ll call back
 places. Back places were initially defined by the
 sociologist Goffman as symbolic spaces where
 stigmatized people did not need to hide their
 stigma(1963). In our story, backplaces are small rooms
 online, tender soft spaces reserved by those in terrible
 psychological pain themselves, where they can find
 relief, ease, and transcendence.
 Of course, when we speak of digital bodies, their
 physicality is not relevant. To comfort care for a digital
 body one would thus need to provide relief, ease, and
 transcendence for the mental, emotional, and spiritual;
 through the digital environment of the body and the
 interpersonal cultural relations of the individual.
 As with any place of healing, however, it is a transient
 place. It is an achy place, for the last step of the
 journey will see them leave the community and
 compassion that saw and sustained them.
 There is no other way for divergent people.
 ### b. uncomfortable comfort
 In the past and the present, social scientists have
 studied the people in the corners of the internet,
 characterizing these spaces between people as
 deviant. Like children lifting stones to look at the bugs
 underneath— simultaneously repulsed and fascinated
 by the coherence discovered where once was
 separation. A partition that was then reinforced by the
 scientists themselves as they began documenting the
 bugs’ behavior. They eavesdropped on conversations,
 captured intimate moments, and asked again and again
 what made them so different. The more they probed,
 the more they made sure to separate their behavior
 from the norm to place the deviants against (Adler and
 Adler, 2005, 2008; Smith, Wickes & Underwood,
 2013).
 The concept of deviance, particularly concerning what
 people do with their bodies and how their bodies
 behave, I find inherently flawed. Observing from an
 artificial external standpoint only serves to further
 alienate those already marginalized. I like to approach
 my research into the intimacy and comfort care
 expressed in marginalized digital communities without
 the alienation of social science. There are many
 approaches one can take if one wishes to avoid this,
 and the one I am choosing to borrow is a mathematical
 approach to anthropology.
 I would like to borrow from mathematician Jörn
 Dunkel’s work in pattern formation. It’s a conscious
 choice to approach divergences in bodily behavior
 through their similarities, not differences. This includes
 specificities in atypicality, of course, but also the
 distinctions between me as the writer and them as the
 writer. You as the reader and you as the community.
 Me and you, as a whole. Both exist, both separate but
 in what is not of such importance.
 Though many of these systems are different,
 fundamentally, we can see similarities in the structure
 of their data. It’s very easy to find differences. What’s
 more interesting is to find out what’s similar.
 (Chu & Dunkel , 2021)
 Individuals who forge and inhabit these communities,
 fostering tender, intimate connections amongst
 themselves, are not deviant but rather divergent.
 Deviance involves bifurcation, a split estuary from the
 river of appropriate cultural behavior. (8)
 Divergence can be so much more than that.
 In mathematics, a divergent series extends infinitely
 without converging to a finite limit. A repetition of
 partial sums with no clear ending, never reaching zero.
 Mathematician Niels Abel once said that "divergent
 series are in general something fatal and it is a shame
 to base any proof on them. [..] The most essential part
 of mathematics has no foundation”(1826). Drawing a
 parallel to social relations would then imply that there
 is no end to divergence, too many paradoxes in the
 foundation of normativeness to base anything on it.
 Harmonic series are, on the other hand, also divergent
 series. They are infinite series formed by the
 summation of all positive unit fractions, named after
 music harmonics. The wavelengths of a vibrating string
 are a harmonic series. These series also find
 application in architecture, establishing harmonious
 relationships. Despite their integral role in human
 aesthetics, all harmonic series diverge, perpetually
 expanding without ever concluding. They embody a
 richness that transcends conventional boundaries,
 blending into one another infinitely.
 [Figure 1 - Harmonic Series to 32 (Hyacint,2017).]
 By likening digital bodies to divergent series, we
 embrace the complexity and infinite possibilities
 arising from their interconnectedness and deviation
 from the norm. However, it's crucial to note that the
 divergence I'm discussing here carries a halo of pain,
 accompanied by the requirement of bodily discomfort.
 There are other forms of divergence, ways to have
 different bodies that necessitate creating spaciousness
 around normativity to allow them grace to grow.
 The divergent digital bodies we are dancing with and
 caring for, however, are of a particular type. If we were
 to go back to our water stories, we’d see that the
 digital bodies we are following are painful ones. Cold,
 deep streams, hard to follow, hard to swim in. Their
 divergence from the norm makes them so.
 They have intricate relationships with themselves,
 existing in unstainable forms devoid of comfort,
 nourishment, or thriving. What does comfort mean for
 a body whose whole existence is uncomfortable?
 Moreover, what if the comfort care performed for
 these divergent bodies makes them too comfortable
 being in their pained state of self? Could they be? (9)
 Caring for a digital body involves providing it with
 space to live, giving its experimental bot-feelings
 tender attention, and revealing your own vulnerable
 digital body in response. It’s about giving it an
 audience, hands to hold, eyes that meet theirs in
 understanding. A rehearsal room, a pillow, a mirror.
 These rooms, backplaces scattered across the internet,
 are hidden enough to allow the divergent to comfort-
 care for one another, sometimes to the point where it is
 only the same type of divergent digital bodies reflecting
 back at each other.
 So far I have talked fondly of divergence and the
 harmony of divergent series, and the need to have no
 finite ending. I’d like to tell you a different story now.
 Divergent digital bodies are, by this point in our text,
 built and alive as they can be. They are many, they are
 together and seeing each other, producing harmonic
 waves. They are in backplaces on the internet, but they
 are less safe than they seem. They are themselves
 resonant echo chambers, with an ongoing risk of
 catastrophic acoustic resonance.
 Acoustic resonance is what happens when an acoustic
 system amplifies sound waves whose frequency
 matches one of its natural frequencies of vibration.
 The instrument of amplification is important for the
 harmonic series, for the music must not match exactly.
 An exact match will break it for the object seeks out its
 resonance. Resonating at the precise resonant
 frequency of a glass will shatter it. Digital bodies meet
 in these rooms, amplifying their own waves seeking
 resonance but the risk of an exact match is that it may
 shatter them. These spaces full of divergent digital
 bodies quickly grow unstable, tethering echo
 chambers. Rooms full of reflections, transforming what
 was once individual pain into a mirrored loop of
 anguish. Caring for your own and others’ bodies
 becomes increasingly difficult, making permanent
 residence in the mirror room unbearable. You all know
 you must leave before you meet your exact resonance.
 ### c. unbearable intimacy
 This is the end of the story.
 Our digital bodies have a shape, a sense of life and
 death, and someone to care for us and to care for. We
 are alive and have found intimacy with each other.
 We live in the backplaces, hiding and being hidden
 online as we have been for years. We used to be on
 invitation-only forums, password-protected bulletin
 boards, or encrypted hashtags. Now we are alive in the
 glitches between pixels, in a shared language of
 numbers and acronyms and misdirection. Avoiding a
 content moderation algorithm, always hunting the
 dashboards of social media websites for visible pain it
 can cure by erasure. We cannot tell you where to find
 you or it might too. We try to stay alive, to hold each
 other, hiding behind code words, fake names, and
 photos. We care for each other as best we can, the
 blind leading the blind, the sick caring for the sick. We
 have brought our unseemliness, our gory gross bodies
 to each other and found tender intimacy and
 understanding.
 On good days, dashboards are full of goodbyes and my
 heart swells with hope, for those of us who make it and
 for the small bright light telling us that we may be one
 of them. At the same time, some of us leave only to
 come back ghosts of ourselves, hunting threads with
 the empty hope of missionaries.
 Don’t give up, it’s worth it!
 Most of us scoff at this. The idea of leaving only to
 come back and tell people you left is uncomfortable,
 the failed progress that washes away hope. A healed
 patient who regularly comes back to the hospital to
 encourage the sick, who wish to be anywhere but
 there. The genuine love and care within these
 communities transpire better under goodbye posts.
 When people do heal and shed their accounts’ skin,
 they often leave it surrounded by all those who once
 cared for the digital body within it.
 I’m so proud of you! Never come back,
 we love you so much.
 Recover, don’t come back.
 Recover, don’t come back.
 Recover, never come back.
 I had a conversation with a friend who once lived in
 these spaces between letters but has since moved
 outside them. When asked, he mentioned he could
 only find recovery by leaving that community. His body
 has changed since now it is the spitting image of a
 standard, healthy body. I didn’t ask, but he knew I’d
 wonder. He told me he didn’t like his new body and
 preferred the divergent one he once built himself.
 Why leave then? Why did you stop?
 Because that was no life.
 Now life sparkles, everything feels brighter
 and more exciting. I got my will to live
 back. Before, there was nothing but my
 body. I was willing to die for it.
 He pulls up the sleeve of his shirt to show me his
 shoulder, where he has tattooed a symbol for a
 community friend who died.
 I hope I never go back.
 I miss them every day.
 This is the last dichotomy. For the divergent digital
 body can’t stay in a Backplace for very long, the
 intimacy of it is unbearable. It is an intimacy that
 floods, and overruns.
 In their definition of intimacy in the context of a public
 surrounding a cultural phenomenon, the author Lauren
 Berlant denotes that intimacy itself always requires
 hopeful imagination. It requires belief in the existence
 of an ideal other who is emotionally attuned to one's
 own experiences and fantasies, conditioned by the
 same longings and with willing reciprocity (2008). (10)
 In the context of the intimacy of a Backplace, where
 divergent digital bodies have formed a community
 around existing outside the healthy and standard,
 longing and hopeful intimacy becomes a heavy-
 hearted and cardinal concept.
 Being in these rooms and finding care and love for
 others like you can be so uncomfortable when the
 longings, experiences, and fantasies you are sharing
 are centered around pain. The shared cultural
 experience of existing as a collective divergent digital
 body promises a fantasy of belonging, a collective
 hope, and commitment that is extremely fragile.
 There is a duality then, if not a dichotomy. As a
 divergent body, there is nothing you crave more than to
 be seen and to be loved in a space where you are safe,
 where the faces looking at you are not repulsed but
 warm with familiarity. Yet, it is this very warmth that
 becomes unbearable and an inherently traumatic
 intimacy. Being loved at your worst, at your most
 embarrassing, cultural borderline self is an agonizing
 duality to deal with. McGlotten, who was referenced
 earlier concerning the potential of bot-feelings of a
 digital body, now comes back to remind us of their
 impossibility. In his book, he talks of a digital intimacy
 that inundates us and is both a source of connection
 and disconnection (McGlotten, 2013). We are looking
 at a smaller scale than he does, but intimacy in the
 context of shared vulnerability can be a need just as
 intolerable.
 Certain kinds of witnessing can become curses, shivers
 of resonance so close to an explosion of glass if only
 you strike the cord that will keep me going.
 Certain kinds of divergence can only end with leaving
 or death, truth be told.
 People in these bodies know this, even if the digital
 bodies behave as if there is hope in a future where the
 divergence brings joy to one’s life consistently. The
 shared vulnerability itself then, is unbearable. I need
 you to see me, I need you, who are just like me at my
 worst, to love me. When you do, I can’t stand it. It
 ruins both of us to be seen this way and we need it so
 desperately. It has to exist and yet it can’t for long.
 I leave even though I love all of your digital bodies.
 I leave because I love you, little digital body and you
 are me.
 ## 2. A LIFE TO BE HAD 11
 ## sidenotes
 1. You’re dreaming
 again, good.
 Would you feel
 closer to me if you
 could hear my
 voice?
 Is my voice a sound?
 Could it be a
 feeling?
 2. I will be honest
 with you, I have little
 patience for this
 recurring line of
 thought that seeks to
 distinguish people’s
 noses from their
 hearts, as if there
 was a physical love
 that is the valuable
 one and a virtual
 imaginary one that is
 feeble and
 unworthy.
 3. Initially, when a
 member he often
 argued with o ered
 to pray for him
 Mandel had
 replied: “You can
 shovel your self-
 aggrandizing
 sentiments up you
 wide ass sideways
 for the duration as
 far as I'm
 concerned." Later,
 as the cancer
 progressed: “I ain't
 nearly as brave as
 you all think. I am
 scared silly of the
 pain of dying this
 way. I am not very
 good at playing
 saint. Pray for me,
 please.
 4. It’s out of care
 and not lack of
 relevance that I am
 not showing you
 Mandel’s goodbye
 message. It’s enough
 to know he was deep
 in the grief of having
 to leave a
 community he loved
 and cared for and
 that pain was felt in
 every word.
 5. The first bot
 communities on the
 internet are now
 born, half-
 mistakenly. They are
 always spiritual
 communities posting
 religious images
 created by artificial
 intelligence, all the
 comments echoing
 choirs of bots
 praising. Amen,
 amen, amen. I am
 not naive, I know
 they are built by
 humans but it is this
 performance of
 religiosity that I am
 interested in, and
 how little humanity
 is shown in it. It is
 something else.
 6. A step in a step in
 a step, sorry.
 7. I am talking here
 about the distress
 caused by mental
 health issues that
 have direct
 connections to
 physicality—self-
 injuring in any direct
 form; food, drugs,
 pain. The culturally
 uncomfortable
 diseases, the it’s-
 personal-
 responsibility, and
 just-stop disorders.
 This is a hidden
 topic of this text
 because I cared
 more about the pain
 surrounding them
 and the reasons to
 hide rather than the
 grim physicality of
 them all.
 8. Of course, the
 river itself is not a
 river; it’s many
 confused streams
 that believe
 themselves both the
 same and separate. I
 don’t know where
 I’m going with this, I
 just don’t love the
 river of normativity
 and I’d rather go
 swim in the ocean of
 dreams with you.
 9. I heard the idea of
 living questions for
 the first time in
 “Letters to A Young
 Poet” by Rainer
 Maria Rilke and then
 again on the podcast
 On Being with Krista
 Tippet. It may be a
 bit transparent but
 this entire text is
 informed by the
 concept of keeping
 the unsolved in your
 heart and learning to
 love it. Not
 searching for the
 answers for we
 cannot live them yet.
 The point is to live it
 all. It could be that
 at some point we will
 live our way to an
 answer but it is
 feeling the questions
 alive within us that is
 important. Do you?
 10. If we were to be
 honest, the entire
 exercise of writing
 this for you requires
 this very faith.
 11. Was this the end of this story?
 In the epilogue, you sit your body down and enter your
 computer. The air coming in from the window smells wet and
 earthy, new. The sun shines low on the horizon.
 You log in to the internet and realize you are being told a story.
 You start to listen, carefully and, full of love, touch the story to
 let it know you are there. Delicate-fingered, curious like a child
 holding a fallen bird. I hold you and the story tentatively.
 I don’t know if I am touching you, to tell you the truth. Digital
 bodies are stories, like physical bodies are, like dreams are,
 and like water is.
 Stories that are hard to tell and hard to hear and even more,
 maybe, hard to understand. I have loved these stories and I
 have loved telling them to you. I hope you understand that my
 goal was for you to live these questions, to feel these stories in
 their confusion. My digital body, my bot-feelings, my divergent
 communities. I have given them to you, so they may live longer,
 like an obsolete but beloved cyborg shown in a museum.
 Look: I was here, Look: I was loved, Look: I was saved.
 The digital bodies that kept me alive, kept me from becoming
 fully a machine are no longer around in these online rooms.
 They are in different places, being touched by tentative hands,
 being loved for more than their divergence.
 I am too.
 The rooms, the backplaces, however, are still full of others, divergent
 digital bodies who did not leave, who keep caring for each other at the
 bottom of the whirlpool. There is no happy ending because there is no
 ending. They keep typing and hoping, writing their collective pain
 down on keyboards that transmit love letters to each other. I am not
 embarrassed by my care for you, but you may be so if it helps. I know
 how overwhelming intimacy can be.
 Telling you these stories was important for me, so much so that I will
 tell you so many more in a different place if you wish to listen to me
 longer. With this story, I dreamt of a digital body for you. It came from
 an ocean of dreams, into a primordial soup that gave it enough shape
 to become wild rivers, deep streams, sound waves. It flooded and
 now, it leaves. A digital body that grew its own feelings, looked for
 others like it, and realized its divergence and the need to leave. A
 dream body, a primordial body, a disruptive body, a divergent body,
 and now, a leaving body. This last story, however, of the leaving and
 loving body, is yet to be told.
 The sun is now almost up, and the birds are alive and awake, telling
 each other stories just outside the room. We don’t have so much time
 left. I have made you something, to tell your digital body the stories of
 the leaving and loving body. It is a webpage, the address is
 adadesign.nl/backplaces.
 You open the page, and you are asked to write the characters you see
 in a captcha. E5qr7.
 eSq9p.
 8oc8y.
 Fuck.
 You try not to panic, but you know you have been detected.
 You pack up your things: the pie I made you, a love letter, two
 hands made out of felt, a star, a door, a stuffed animal; and
 you leave again.
 ## references
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 self-injurers: Deviant communities, relationships, and
 selves’, Symbolic Interaction, 31(1), pp. 33–56.
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 unfinished business of sentimentality in American
 culture. Durham: Duke University Press.
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