venue

people tend to want proof that you are who you say you are. people want to know that you are qualified to say the things that they will hear. you must justify yourself. 

online forums present a challenge to these expectations. we are all obscure upon logging in, we re-make ourselves into avatars, influencers and brands. no one asked us to do this. 

we build our digital identities with bricks of compressed trivia and declarations. we rend receipts into virtual flesh. you are only who you have disclosed you were. we are vast surfaces. 

in the physical world, what we don’t say can and will still take up space. we drag around our silences like the hidden mass of icebergs, or the binding gravity of dark matter. our world respires mystery, distance and opacity. 

online what cannot be coded cannot be communicated. opacity is unintegrated with online life, it slips off the surface, it’s blocked at the gates. we want to be certain there are no monsters in the room so we sleep with the lights on. 

but only monsters have real names. for us, whether online or in-world, all names are chosen, guessed at. 

who are you, and how could you ever prove it? 

posts are less like notices, and more like literal posts hammered into the ground, attempting an enclosure around an accumulation of terms that i recognize as mostly me; the aphorisms of self. i declaim, and my surface expands. i acquire new forms of capture: my likes, my shares, who i follow and who follows me. i must tend to each of these amalgamations like i might preen my body, inspecting them for inconsistencies, contradiction or problematic associations. they are my followers, they are who i follow.

i have never before built a full human from wire and spark and i may get some things wrong. we may have become too convinced of the certainty of our syntax. 

there is a danger of exposure inherent in knowingness. facts thrive in deserts. shade is necessary and darkness is healing. spend too much time in the blast of the sun’s radiation and your skin will peel off, revealing vulnerable insides that wither in the open air.