R U LIKE IN LUV W THE INTERNET?!
Internet Intimacy and Digital Sobriety
Now published in print in Booker Magazine Issue 006!
Dear Reader [netizen],
This article begins to unpack the idea of going digitally S.O.B.E.R. [Son Of a Bitch Everything's Real] by personifying the internet as a ‘partner', in order to let us reflect on our relationship with it and analogies for us to see ourselves in. It asks us to imagine our devices as if they hold the character of or something close to 'human' - bodiless but something. The article proposes our relationships as either one of a Dog, Co-worker, Obedient Wife or Father Figure with each relationship used to symbolise the varying degrees we care for and spend time with our devices in order to realise it is an intimate relationship in itself. Suggesting the idea of ‘digital intimacy' and internet intimacies as grounds to analyse how much we afford devices and have much they overwrite the aspects of humanity that we often long for.
Sometimes I imagine smashing my laptop on the ground and jumping up on it. Hard. Feeling my heel hit that silver hardware repeatedly as it splinters with each jump. Burying under heavy foot that hunk of metal that holds so much of my merit and has sucked me into its web of capitalist cooperation. God, I love when we succeed. Each tread of resistance sends a sense of anger and torment straight up my heel for robbing me of so many years of my life, and yet… I can’t get enough. Hours upon hours spent looking at it longingly, as if there were something within it I could mine. Be mine? That hit of validation after fingering methodically and laboriously, when they finally came to give me what I wanted—that after-glow that only they could provide. How I loathed all they had. Pandora’s box. I hate how much time I spent with them, so many intimate hours with no assemblage of words to describe all that we had experienced. Our dirty little secret. The isolation of it all swindled me out of any hope I had for further connection. My heel cracks the con-soul just as its final breath pierces mine, destroying the very thing that made all I am. I seep into it as it leaks, losing all that I was. As I pick up the dented shell, I smirk with satisfaction in knowing that I have destroyed the very thing I owe my life to. Without it I am nothing.
Restart.
A distant aunt of mine, at the ripe old age of 80, got her first smartphone or, as she called it, streichel gerät, which from German translates to ‘stroking device’. She named it so because that’s all she saw it as: a device that she had to stroke in order to access the information that she needed. The lack of buttons and the unfamiliarity of this “stroking” motion left her confused. Such a tender gesture, usually reserved for the coat of an animal or someone’s hair, amongst other things, was now the same motion she was required to perform on a lifeless piece of glass. Its practical nature felt unnatural to her gentle, aged hands.
The physicality of technology is often an afterthought when considering the digital realm because the virtual world/s is often perceived as separate from the natural world. However, the repeated actions we perform with and through technology every day reshape how we interact with our physical bodies and the interfaces around us. Ultimately, the most significant impact of technology lies in its capacity to change people. As highlighted by The Website is a Room “Our dwelling within these web spaces is no less physical than our presence in actual rooms.We invest time and physical, mental, and emotional energy”.
A missing phone signal, slow internet connection or low battery can make us feel lost and disoriented, even give us the impression of having lost a hand or being naked... They also reveal how easily we mistake the agency technological objects lend us for our own. — Christopher John Müller
Given the frequency with which we engage with the internet through our various technologies, we have become accustomed to its Protean nature, meaning its ability to assume different forms. Unlike anything in our physical world, the ease and consistency to the internet’s growth represents a type of infinitude, and we find morbid excitement in the fact that we will never know how it exists in its entirety, as it is not and will never be confined to a finite space. The internet provides us with new ways to connect, communicate, and alter our finite existence, and has grown to become a space for performance and intimacy.
The internet is awesome but you can’t download love.
As our desire for intimacy and connection grows, many of us become trapped in the ‘promise of the web’ [Olivia Liang], a space in which no one needs ever suffer through pangs of loneliness. The social web offers the illusion of an immediate network, when in reality these exchanges and this type of exposure can only mimic relationships and lack the authenticity of connection. Our presence in online spaces is no longer supplementary to facilitating and enriching connection. Rather, it often replaces healthy relationship dynamics, crafting virtual identities which function as performances aimed at making the self more consumable. ‘Online, almost everyone has an audience almost all the time,’ but we are often left lonely, as performers that return to our unaltered, unaffected selves once the curtains draw closed—or we turn off our phones. The online rendezvous we incessantly engage with is a catch 22: we lack intimacy and authentic connection, so we turn to our devices, yet our devices are why we lack intimacy and authentic connection. We replace real-life intimacy with digital intimacy, falling in love with images, clicks, and the landslide of dopamine that follows, engaged in a parasocial relationship we have created with ourselves. We engage in artificial forms of intimacy within the third-space of the internet, where the blended nature of our micro, meso, and macro worlds lets us feel close to those 17,000kms away from us whilst never daring to utter a word to the person sitting next to us. We can maintain relationships with those who will never breathe the same air we will, and hold confidence that the algorithms which facilitate these relationships will allow us to feel the things that make us human, love, joy, lust, anger, sadness, without ever having to physically engage with one.
Digital Intercourse, as defined by Melanie Leung, refers to the translation of physical actions into virtual realms and digital feeling, exhibiting through examples how “emotional connections with technology is the norm– not an anomaly”. The term ‘Digital Feeling’ surmises the impressions left by technological experiences that blur reality and virtuality, and is a manifestation of digital intimacy that accounts for the newfound language of internet emotions and actions which often replace or overwrite organic feeling. The intimacy we have with our devices begins with the very physicality of their casing or skin. Technologies in raw form, from build alone, are fetishized, with a sleek, high-tech sex appeal that has real people calling the iPhone “sexy”. Sex sells, and it appears our devices are not exempt. We love the curvature to our phone’s smooth metal bodies, the way it feels in our hands. Vessels of our imagination and self-expression, our phones possess an inherent divinity that is reflected in how we proudly wear them like an accessory, exhibiting them like arm candy or a trophy wife. By association, we become sexier. Our devices have a sensuality that teases at the hidden portals of intimacy found within them. They satisfy our desire for attention and companionship, and they possess a type of unblemished beauty that no human could ever attain. Extending to virtual systems such as Alexa, Siri, Cortana, and other female AI subordinates to which we speak to as assistants, friends, and informants, and spend extended periods of time within the most intimate setting of all; the home.
‘Ultimately it’s not that you desire the phone but that you fantasise the phone desires you.’ — Timothy Secret
Many of us find ourselves feeling so controlled by our devices, and by extension, the internet, that the dynamic becomes a form of intimate relationship. One that knows no boundaries and can never be pined after as the internet is always with us. The dynamic and responsive "user-friendly" symbiosis fosters a relationship built on compulsions. In his essay On the Internet, We’re Always Famous, Chris Hayes articulates that through the internet, we channel “our most basic impulses—toward loving and being loved, caring for and being cared for—into…a project that cannot sate our desires but feels close enough to real human connection that we cannot but pursue it". Our device becomes a ‘partner’ that we have personified with human disposition and emotional capacities, reinvented to not feel so alone.
Imagine your device as something close to 'human'—bodiless, but something. Would you say you HAVE a relationship with your device/s? Would you say you are IN a relationship with your device/s?
To evaluate consider the following:
How often do you check in with your device (think notifications)?
Do you personalise your device/s to reflect an extension of yourself (think backgrounds, modifications, etc)?
Would you say your device knows more about you than your closest friend?
If you have a partner, does your device/s know more about you than they do?
Would you say your device/s knows more about you than you do?
Have you ever been with a partner for longer than you’ve had any of the device/s you currently own?
To expand on these questions, imagine your relationship as one of the following;
DOG; Your device is a pet that you look after and in exchange it adds pleasure to your life and small affordances. You are in control of when you feed, exercise, and maintain it. The device is used regularly but does not take up more than 20% of your day.
CO-WORKER; You interact with your device for significant portions of the day, but have a balanced and practical relationship at all times. Despite these limits, your interactions take up to 45% of your day.
OBEDIENT WIFE; Your device is there to feed, fuck, and have fun with. You use her at your leisure and frequently engage with her, dictating how many hours you will spend with her and on what terms. You are fond of her and use her all that she is worth.You even bring her to bed with you where she falls asleep in your arms. Your interaction takes up to 75% of your day.
“You sleep next to Trojan horses…you want to welcome the stranger directly to your bed” - C. Dullaart
FATHER FIGURE; Be it a supreme leader or the voice of the Fatherland, your life has been designed by him; ultimately, he has the upper-hand. He has a role in when and what you eat, what you do on the shitter, how you get to work, who you interact with, what you watch, what you say, when you sleep, and how healthy you are. You look up to him for constant reassurance that you made the right choice, and panic when he suggests otherwise. You have no room to miss him, he is always there, yet you constantly yearn for his guiding presence. Your interaction takes up more than 90% of your day.
How do you feel about your partner? Are you proud of the relationship you two have? They are yours forever and always; forever available, and always slightly unattainable. You like them, don’t lie. Or would you say you’re more in love? How many times a day do you tend to and care for them, even more so than yourself. Isn’t this the relationship, above all else? Do you look at them instead of at your partner at the dinner table, or do you give them all your attention like you would a needy child when your own was in the room next to you? You feed them, tend to them, carry them around in your hand where the hand of another would go. As unaffected as you might aim to seem, your digital partner is the best toxic, gaslighting partner you’ve ever had; attention-seeking, privileged, loud, ego-fuelled know-it-alls, but by God, they are good in bed, fulfilling your every desire before you drift off to sleep.
As partners, our devices serve as daily reminders of what it means to perform humanity. They act as externalised memory banks, containing fragments of ourselves to such an extent that we might question whether we exist alongside or within the “skin” of our devices. These tools have become extensions of our beings, so integral that many of us would be lost without them, having outsourced much of our functional responsibilities and human intuition to their intelligence.
As stated by Karina Vold, a postdoctoral research associate at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge, our smartphones “can tell a more intimate story about you than your best friend.” Not even our brains possess the quantity of information held on our smart devices. This reliance has led us to the point where people are being increasingly shaped by objects and, in turn, have become more like objects themselves—replicable, replaceable, and disposable.
This phenomenon reflects Technogenesis—the co-evolution of humans with technology—as the web we navigate simultaneously navigates us. We celebrate our devices for all they can give us without accounting for everything they are taking away. As we commodify ourselves to mimic the tech we hold in the highest regard, the value of humanity diminishes.
No one feels connected, present, alive, embodied, or sexy when they’re on their phone all day. - Catherine Shannon
To click is to show up, to like is to love, and to share is to create community—the networked social realm offers us mutations of things that are close to human, and yet, something feels out of our control and beyond our reach. Our agency cannot be exercised to the extent we had hoped and we find it increasingly difficult to log-off in pursuit of the real thing. Despite never being alone, we remain isolated and unfulfilled by our devices; digital intimacy is not enough. As eloquently stated by J.Bridle in Has the Internet Become a Human or a Thing, or Have We Become the Internet?, “the worldwide network of machines we have constructed…are active participants in the world, and are increasingly capable of acting without human intervention or even intention”. Our digital partners cannot care for us as we do for them; our exchanges are one sided and parasitic, we give and they take, the human is robbed of the agency which they thought held them at the centre of this relationship. The internet is not a home or a friend, it is a tool, like a hammer, that is currently beating us to death.
It is one thing if your computer crashes, it is another thing if your soul crashes.
As we become de-centred by our devices, we should seek to de-centre them. Your partner should never be the centre of your own world, but going offline becomes a luxury few can afford, and going “digitally S.O.B.E.R. (Son Of a Bitch Everything's Real)” is an addiction antidote that needs to be addressed. Defriending the web or seeking apps with business hours is an offering as fickle as saying that paper straws or reusable cups will stop the climate crisis, but it is the start to personal reclamation in the most influential relationship in your life. As aptly stated by culture and sex journalist Magdalene J. Taylor, “a better world is not going to be built by increasing our screen time,” but thanks to the internet, that is easy to forget when busy distracting oneself every waking minute.
Remember this the next time you fall asleep to a TikTok playing on an endless loop: one day your heart will stop beating. The only thing that’s eternal is love.
Artificially yours x
