2023
In 1989, Andrea Fraser began an artist's talk with a statement from Freud: No one can be slain in absentia, in effigy. The man who began quietly leaking my emails over a private blog in the late summer of 2021 did so until I stopped writing them in the February of 2022. This leaves the question open as to who I'd been communicating with, or attempting to communicate with, throughout that time.
Nearly a year later, the knowledge of having been doxed, degraded, harassed and humiliated on the internet, with the internet and through the internet actively infers intelligence upon the computers I touch. This man had been a colleague, someone whose competency I'd trusted in active inference with the competency of others. We did lockdown together. Who didn't have a drinking problem?
My sister and I complain often about the men whose great love is founded on trustlessness. Names, dates, times and places. Passwords, photos, PIN #'s. Depending on the degree of dick poisoning, there is very little in the degrading game of privilege that has not made us complicit in our understanding that our privacy does not belong to us.
I'm working on this application alongside projects related to digital sovereignty, decentralized networking and the next iterations of the web. At no point in these expansive visions of research and development angled towards the new social possibilities encompassed by "trustless exchange" are the interests of women articulated.
Despite the range of sexual orientations we may also conform to, and despite the pronouns we are given to confuse it, what makes our partnership eligible as straight women is our ability to identify with the control, impassivity, ends above means, emotional possessiveness and will to individuation that makes our complicity look like a sincere commitment. Yet no matter how exceptional we are made as women, we are still asked to embody and provide that which is lacking in a competitive economy that exploits the same traits in both sexes.
The evolutionary process of applied networking was at work in Covid-19. So was the speed of scientific and technological propulsion that conditions symbolic exchange. Critical network theory identifies the "transindividual" as : "the set of significations characteristic of a collective individuation, in which these significations metastabilise, are relatively stabilised, provisionally stabilised, between equilibrium and disequilibrium, just as whirlpools form and disappear in the flow of water." This makes sense in terms of the contraction of the domestic enterprise, with the result of more social conservatism.
I think beyond the explicit appeal I'm making for institutional asylum in a volatile sociopolitical time, I am looking for a way of being through organizational politics that is coherent with the domestic organization of my life as an adult woman. I do not know if a university will solve these problems or accelerate them in a different direction, but my decision to not pursue an undergraduate education in the fine arts was to cause an awareness of the gap between ideal and action.
I have come to value who I become when I can't take certain structures as a given, and in my early thirties the experiments that felt liberating a decade ago no longer do. At the bleeding edge, the gaslighting works.