gradshow24/ada/thesis.md

---
title: &lt?water bodies&gt  A narrative exploration of divergent digital intimacies
author: Ada

---

# &lt?water bodies&gt : A narrative exploration of divergent digital intimacies

Water, stories, the body,
all the things we do, are
mediums
that hide and show what’s
hidden.
(Rumi, 1995 translation)

## ꙳for you

All intimacy is about bodies.
Is this true? Does it matter? I doubt it. Do you know?
Let’s find out, maybe.

Once, I thought that everything in the world was either
one or zero and that there was a harsh straight line
between them. Then I found out you could step or hop
across the line, back and forth, if others showed you
how. Today, I am no less binary, no less interested in
dichotomies, but I am willing to dance through them if
you are too. Can we dance these dichotomies together,
embracing the contradictions of the virtual and
physical, the comfortable and uncomfortable, intimate
and non-intimate? I can’t do it alone, the subject is too
heavy and the binary is too 1011000. I won’t ask you
to resolve these contradictions, I have no desire to.
Instead, I hope we can cultivate the tension and
tenderness inherent in holding together incompatible
truths because both prove necessary.

To dance through these dichotomies I will start in a
specific position, growing from Donna Haraway’s in ‘A
Cyborg Manifesto”. In her essay, Haraway explores the
concept of a cyborg as a rejection of boundaries
between humans, animals, and machines. A symbol for
a feminist posthuman theory that embraces the
plasticity of identity. Before she does all this dancing,
however, she takes a strong stance of blasphemy. She
engages seriously with traditional notions of feminism
and identity but with irony, not apostasy, which is to say without full rejection—without unbelief.
My position as I jump will be the same as hers, ironic
faith. My mocking is grave but caring and my primary
aim is for us only to spin fast enough not to see the line
anymore, while still being able to see the binaries. It
won’t be an easy dance for us but I will do my best to
keep softening for you, I promise.

I will show you a digital body, make it comfortable and
then uncomfortable, lightly intimate, and richly
intimate. I have my own story, my own digital body, of
course. This is where I take my second stance,
however. This time, the position is Lauren Berlant’s,
from ‘The Female Complaint’. The book places
individual stories as inescapable autobiographies of a
collective experience and uses the personal to explain
an intimate general experience. In our story, the
difference between my body and the collective digital
body is unimportant, I hope you see that. I will tell you
my story if you know how to look, but I will tell you
through the stories of many others who shared them
with me. I have no other choice, every time I have tried
to tell this story a chorus of voices has come out.

Some of the stories I will tell you will carry memories
of pain; physical and emotional. I will keep holding you
while you hear this, but your limbs may still feel too
heavy to dance. In that case, I give you my full
permission to skip, jump, or lay down completely. This
is not choreographed and I care deeply for you.

I love you and hope you see what I saw in these stories.

Safe dreams now, I will talk to you soon.

## 0. DIGITAL BODIES

I think the worst must be finished.
Whether I am right, don’t tell me.
Don’t tell me.
No ringlet of bruise,
no animal face, the waters salt me
and I leave it barefoot. I leave you, season
of still tongues, of roses on nightstands
beside crushed beer cans. I leave you
white sand and scraped knees. I leave
this myth in which I am pig, whose
death is empty allegory. I leave, I leave—
At the end of this story,
I walk into the sea
and it chooses
not to drown me.
(Yun, 2020)

### a. what is a digital body?

A digital body is a body on the Internet.
A body outside the internet is simply a body. On the
internet, discussions about corporeality transcend the
limitations of physicality, shaping and reshaping
narratives surrounding the self. This text explores the
intricate dynamics within these conversations, dancing
at the interplay between tangible bodies and their
digital counterparts. The construction of a digital body
is intricately intertwined with these online dialogues,
necessitating engaged reconstructions of the narratives
surrounding physical existence. Yet, the resulting
digital body is a complex and contradictory entity,
embodying the nuances of both its virtual and tangible
origins.

There is a specific metaphor that would allow us to
better carry these contradictions as we further explore
digital bodies. Do you remember that dream you had
about deep ocean pie? Allow me to remind you.

You were walking on the shore, slowly, during a
summer that happened a long time ago. Your skin was
warm and you could feel the wet cool sand sticking to
your feet. The gentle lapping of the waves washed the
sand away as you walked towards the ocean. You
stepped, stepped. Then dove. Underwater, the sea
unfolded deeper than you remembered. It was a
vibrant display of life: bright schools of small fish, and
tall colorful, waving corals. It looked like that
aquarium you saw once as a kid. Your arms moved
confusingly through the water as if you were wading through a soup or were terribly tired. On the sandy
ocean floor, you saw a dining table.
It had a floating white tablecloth, one plate, a fork, and
a pie in the center of it, on a serving dish. You sat on a
chair but could not feel it underneath you. You ate a
heaping slice of pie. It had a buttery-cooked carrots
filling. You woke up.
In the world, the sun was still timid and your bedroom
thick with sleep. What a weird dream. You rubbed your
face, sat up on your bed, and drank the glass of water
next to you. You felt full, as if you just ate a plateful of
carrot pie.

There were two bodies in this story. An awake one and
a dream one, an ocean one. In dreams, bodies have
their own set of rules, often blurring the boundaries
between waking and sleeping, wanting and fearing.
Digital bodies are very similar to dream bodies. They
exhibit a similar fluidity and abstraction, a defiance of
traditional notions of physicality. They share the
blurring and inherent potential nature of dream bodies.
They are slower, stronger, and different. They switch
and change and melt into each other, they lose and
regrow limbs, they run sluggishly and fly smoothly. If
we scream in our dreams, we sometimes wake up still
screaming. Our waking bodies react to our dream
bodies, they have the same tears, the same orgasms,
the same drives.

This is a story of two bodies, same but different,
influenced but not driven.
A tangible body, full of fluids and organs, emotions and
feelings. Cartilage, bacteria, bones, and nerve
endings. A digital body, cable-veined and loud-vented,
shiny and loading.

The digital body is ethereal and abstracted,
embarrassing, graphic, and real but not physical.

This is the beginning.

### b. body vs. computer

Framing the discourse around bodies on the internet as
a clear-cut dichotomy feels clunky in today’s internet
landscape. The web is today available by body, cyborg
dimensions of the internet of bodies, or virtual and
augmented realities, creating a complex interplay
between having a body and existing online.

As intricate as this dance is now, it certainly did not
begin that way. It started with what felt like a very
serious and tangible line drawn by very serious
tangible people; this is real life and this is virtual life.
Even people like Howard Rheingold, pioneers who
approached early virtual life with enthusiasm and care,
couldn’t escape characterizing it as a “bloodless
technological ritual” (1993). Rheingold was an early
member of The Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link (Well), a
seminal virtual community built in the 1980s that was
renowned for its impact on digital culture and played a
pivotal role in shaping what would become the
landscape of the Internet. Rheingold’s reflections on
his experience on this primordial soup of the Internet
offer insight into the initial conceptualizations of online
life by those joyfully participating.

In “The Virtual Community”, Rheingold offers a
heartfelt tribute to intimacy and affection through web-
based interactions which, at the time, were unheard of.
He struggles in his efforts to highlight the legitimacy of
his connections, finding no way to do so except by
emphasizing their tangible bodily experiences.
The community’s claim to authenticity thus had to lie in the physical experiences of its members— the visible
bodies and hearable voices, the weddings, births, and
funerals (1993).<sup><span class="margin-note">  You’re dreaming again, good. <br>Would you feel closer to me if you could hear my voice?<br> Is my voice a sound? Could it be a feeling?</span></sup>.

Even then, and even by people with no interest in
undermining the value of the virtual, the distinction
between physical and virtual was confusing. Rheingold
himself reinforces the boundary of body relations and
computer relations by referring to his family as a
“flesh-and-blood family’ and his close online friends as
“unfamiliar faces” (1993). Constantly interplaying
digital connections with the physical characteristics of
the kind of connections people valued before the
internet. (2)

In any case, his primary interest seemed to be to
emphasize computer relations as valid forms of
connection between bodies, not to talk of any
distinction quite yet. It’s the eighties, the internet is
still fresh and new and the possibility to form close
relations with strangers online seems fragile and
concerning yet exciting. This is the clearest the
distinction between in-real-life and online has ever
been and it’s still fuzzy and unclear.

At the same time and in the same digital space as
Rheingold, there was another man, a digital body being
formed. This is our second story, the ocean body we
dreamt of earlier is now in a digital primordial soup,
questioning itself and stuck between staying and
leaving. In this story, its name is Tom Mandel and
when he died, he did so on the Well.

Mandel was a controversial and popular figure in this
pioneering virtual community. According to many other members, 
Tom Mandel embodied the essence of the Well—its history, 
its voice, its attitude. Mandel's snarky and verbose 
provocations started heated discussions, earning him 
warnings such as "Don't Feed The Mandel!” (Leonard, 1995). 
His sharp comments often stirred emotions that reminded 
people of family arguments, fuelling an intimacy that 
was characteristic of the Well: 
both public and solitary (Hafner, 1997).

Until 1995, Mandel had done a quite rigorous job of
keeping his body separate from The Well and had
never attended any of the physical in-person meetings
from the community. His only references to being a
body had been on the “health” online conference,
where he often talked about his illnesses.
One day, after nearly a decade of daily interaction, he
posted he had got the flu and that he felt quite ill.
When people wished for him to get well soon, he
replied he had gone to get tested and was waiting for a
diagnosis. This way, when cancer was found in his
lungs, the community was first to know. In the
following six months, as his illness progressed, the
community followed closely (Hafner, 1997).
They were first to know when Nana, a community
member with whom he had had a publicly turbulent
relationship, flew to California to marry him. The
community was a witness and is now an archive of his
declining wit as cancer spread to his brain and his
famously articulate and scathing comments got
shorter, fearful, and more tender. (3)

Before he posted his final goodbye, he chose to do one
last thing. Together with another member, they
programmed a bot that posted randomly characteristic
comments from Mandel on The Well—the Mandelbot. 
In the topic he had opened to say goodbye, he posted
this message about the bot:

I had another motive in opening this topic to tell the
truth, one that winds its way through almost everything
I've done online in the five months since my cancer was
diagnosed. I figured that, like everyone else, my
physical self wasn't going to survive forever and I guess
I was going to have less time than actuarials allocateus
[actually allocated]. But if I could reach out and touch
everyone I knew on-line... I could toss out bits and
pieces of my virtual self and the memes that make up
Tom Mandel, and then when my body died, I wouldn't
really have to leave... Large chunks of me would also
be here, part of this new space.
(Hafner, 1997)

With the Mandelbot, Mandel found a way to deal with
what he later called his grieving for the community,
with which he could not play anymore once his own
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).](Harmonic_series.png)

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

Adler, P.A. and Adler, P. (2008) ‘The Cyber Worlds of
self-injurers: Deviant communities, relationships, and
selves’, Symbolic Interaction, 31(1), pp. 33–56.
doi:10.1525/si.2008.31.1.33.

Berlant, L.G. (2008) The female complaint the
unfinished business of sentimentality in American
culture. Durham: Duke University Press.

Chu, J. (2021) Looking for similarities across Complex
Systems, MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. Available at:
https://news.mit.edu/2021/jorn-dunkel-complex-
systems-0627 (Accessed: 08 March 2024).

Deleuze, G., Boyman, A. and Rajchman, J. (2001) Pure
immanence: Essays on a life. New York: Zone Books.

Goffman, E. (2022) Stigma: Notes on the management
of spoiled identity. London: Penguin Classics.
Hafner, K. (1997) The epic saga of the well, Wired.
Available at: https://www.wired.com/1997/05/ff-well/
(Accessed: 01 February 2024).

Haraway, D.J. (2000) ‘A cyborg manifesto: Science,
technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth
century’, Posthumanism, pp. 69–84. doi:10.1007/978-
1-137-05194-3_10.

Hyacint (2017) Harmonic series to 32,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Harmonic_series_to_32.svg.

Kolcaba, K.Y. and Kolcaba, R.J. (1991) ‘An analysis of
the concept of comfort’, Journal of Advanced Nursing,
16(11), pp. 1301–1310. doi:10.1111/j.1365-
2648.1991.tb01558.x.

Leonard, A. (no date) All Too Real,
https://people.well.com/. Available at:
https://people.well.com/user/cynsa/tom/tom14.html
(Accessed: 01 April 2024).

McGlotten, S. (2013) Virtual intimacies: Media, affect,
and queer sociality [Preprint]. doi:10.1353
book27643.

Rumi, J. al-Din and Barks, C. (1995) ‘Story Water’, in
The Essential Rumi. New

Schwartz, C. (2022) Lecture on Loneliness, Granta.
Available at: https://granta.com/lecture-on-loneliness/
(Accessed: 08 March 2024).

Smith, N., Wickes, R. and Underwood, M. (2013)
‘Managing a marginalised identity in pro-anorexia and
fat acceptance cybercommunities’, Journal of
Sociology, 51(4), pp. 950–967.
doi:10.1177/1440783313486220.

Yun, J. (2020) ‘The Leaving Season’, in Some Are
Always Hungry. University of Nebraska Press.


&lt?/water bodies&gt