Greetings. The topic for this first post on Metaviews has metastasized; every route feels like a new cancerous growth. What is happening?

Here’s an introduction in lieu of an expanding field of potential routes this blog may take. My only other experience in blog writing has been in the form of an auto-destructive web-text that was already written but open to the process of ‘automatic writing’ according to the mood of the moment: an experiment in techno-affectivity. Its content wasn’t identifiably reportage, polemic, or diaristic—common forms for noncommercial blogs. And it wasn’t quite art or blog, though I was aiming for a participatory hyperfiction. It didn’t set up a dialogue—and this is why I ended it.

I went into blogging then too with a tentativeness that makes me question fear and consequent immobility in totality. My brain shuts off. My body aches. All effort culminates in dull pain. Among my few sources of relief is that Raoul Vaneigem once said his main shortcoming was his “lack of self-confidence.” I feel better already. But I am also aware that I may be cultivating some bad habits towards new experiences, or to experience in general. And possibly—albeit I am reluctant to admit it—an aversion to being visible.

The omnipresent visibility the Internet makes possible is oppressive for me. The Internet as the default option for communicating is something I struggle to “like” on a daily basis. On the other side of the coin is people’s happy willingness to participate in this orgy of information, which sometimes appears to me like a large portion of the world is simultaneously jacking off with their personal computers or their mobile devices ready-to-hand. And, this huge demographic is too caught up in the moment to care that their movements are being tracked and their Customer Proprietary Network Information (CPNI) is being re-routed to pervy marketers. It is undeniably a symptom of an obscene narcissism, a celebrity obsession, this drive to broadcast every molecular moment via social media, for example. When I ‘appear’ on the Web—in terms of things I willingly put online—I am mostly anonymous, under pseudonym, or otherwise invisible. I have come to find it a more heuristic method than monitoring multiple selves in my own name. And however unlikely it is that anyone is actually able to accomplish such a feat, I feel out of range of Google’s powers as everyone’s personal satellite. Obviously this self-alienating practice is unsustainable, or I would have never agreed to write this blog.

My work is generally critical of how the possibility for connection offered by the Internet is instrumentalized and recoded as instantly attainable self-pleasure; how the text-byte self-expression made possible by social media is rarely more complex than the level of detail provided by the Japanese smart toilets that analyze human waste and send the results to your cell phone (thereby making it easier to Twitter the information); how with most forms of social networking, personality is tautly stretched across a two-dimensional electronic screen with limited possibilities for connection. For those who don’t like to engage with power, are distrustful of authority, and are acutely disturbed by the compulsory participation in self-surveillance that the Internet inexorably demands, I am still not sure what are the degrees of possibility for people to simply be off or on—or even some non-binary alternative—at their will in the network society. The Internet radiates the perverse violence of its history, and I don’t know what I’m looking at: a controlling apparatus or a multitude of ways out. Is the computer not a spectacle machine masquerading as a home appliance? Am I a victim of technological Stockholm syndrome if I admit that I work on (or with?) a computer many hours every day? That I have the privilege of being a technomasochist is not something that escapes my attention, nor am I unaware that not all participation online is entropic and exploitative.

I even realize that I’m aestheticizing my own lack of participation and trying to nullify it. Rather than self-criminalizing this blog-writing process by relating it to masturbating in public—which as a practice I don’t condemn but would never Foursquare my coordinates—is the possibility that self-expression on the Web, in the public, for perpetuity is not always apocalyptic and not always consumptive. Perhaps in my current frazzled state I’ve conjured up a vortex of horrors of self-administration. By next week, I may be extolling some new form of digital frottage. So now that I’ve poured my shiny silver microtechnoheart out, this is likely the last “I” you will read in my posts. I can’t think of anything more odious, in this context, than being my own sounding board. But this is also why this blog is posted on a Friday afternoon on a holiday weekend. I get to preserve the vestige of my invisibility.