Unbecoming Online

What do you do when the self that is legible—that is able to be defined by platforms, discourse, and culture—is not who you understand yourself to be?

Yume Murphy

Courtesy of Yume Murphy via MyScene

[Image description: A screenshot of a 2D dress-up game called MyScene shows two women dressed with abundant 2000s flair, standing in a clothing store. Through speech bubbles, the woman on the left says “Welcome to my fave store in the mall!” and one on the right says “This hot shop is a dream for any teen!” On the bottom right are two pink buttons buttons that say “Play again!” and “Print!”’]

My earliest memories of being online took place on MyScene.com. Created by Mattel as a skinnier and trendier alternative to the company's Barbie dolls, and intended to compete with the popularity of Bratz, My Scene dolls represented everything en vogue about the early 2000s to my then eight-year-old self. To be waif-like, popular, and doused in makeup was the preteen dream. On the internet, the My Scene website hosted a number of games that embodied such aspirations–you could spend hours making over your dream bedroom, your makeup, your hair, if not shopping and designing clothes for the My Scene characters. So, like many prepubescent children with a handful of dolls, internet connection, and a proclivity for aesthetic curation, I went online to play house. 

Eager to grow up, and quickly developing an awareness of my body as something imbued with political meaning, I was attracted to the possibility that I could be embodied by something other than the softness of my own flesh, which was increasingly resembling the Michelin Man’s. Among my favorite games on the My Scene website were Barbie MakeOver Studio™ and Shopping Spree™; both of these allowed their intended users to emulate the fashionable and flirty lives of their characters through virtually immersive stand-ins for what could now be described as a “get ready with me” vlog. I imagined what a white, blonde, and skinny life could look like, dressing my avatarial skin up in the sluttiest of miniskirts for a Mall Maniac™ themed Shopping Spree™, or executing a cosmetic transformation on MakeOver Studio™ that only allowed me to further enhance Eurocentric facial features. (I could make my characters’ eyes more blue, if not an unnatural shade of violet.) Though I was eight years old, within a day’s time I could enjoy a complete glam squad experience, before going on a date with whichever boyfriend my My Scene character was paired with, heading off into the proverbial sunset. The effervescent beauty and ease these virtual experiences signaled felt like a tall glass of water, a refreshing allowance for a form of self expression that no IRL game or play-acting fulfilled. 

At this time in my life, I went online to escape, not what’s become colloquially understood as “real life,” but my actual physical body; the internet could provide a second skin. Before I could quite grasp the contours of my own discontent with the real body I inhabited, I knew there was much to be gained, or rather explored, through immaterial embodiment. While I was a brown, chubby, and ostensibly nerdy child, the growing expanse of my desires, my queries, and queerness surpassed the limits of who I was permitted to be based on the seemingly immutable physical body I inhabited. So I stretched myself thin, bending and distorting selves that felt immovable without the world wide web, illegible to anyone but myself. In hindsight, it was maybe the first time I felt like I could experiment with an identity that was not only permitted, but desired. On the internet, I finally arrived at a becoming, even if at the cost of unbecoming myself. 

Courtesy of Yume Murphy via MyScene

[Image description: A screenshot of a 2D dressup game called MyScene shows two women dressed to the nines for a 2000s club night. Through speech bubbles, the woman on the left says “Ooh - I look like a fashion model!” and one on the right says “I’m SO wearing this out tonight” On the bottom right are two pink buttons buttons that say “Play again!” and “Print!”]

legible

leg·i·ble | \ ˈle-jə-bəl

(adjective): clear enough to be read or deciphered; capable of being discovered or understood

Equally aspirational and faulty, legibility has come to operate along the belief that we can liquify our inner worlds into becoming perfectly clear, unclouded. Under this premise, legibility is focused on the logical, signaling a broader investment in Western universalism: the originally Christian belief that the unification of human knowledge—and the advancement of technology and linear "progress"—could eventually liberate humankind, leading to a more peaceful, rational world. In Poetics of Relation, poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant recognizes this tendency to reduce and narrow the complexities inherent in identification and difference as a Western obsession with transparency. He explains:

If we examine the process of “understanding” people and ideas from the perspective of Western thought, we discover that its basis is this requirement for transparency. In order to understand and thus accept you I have to measure your solidity with the ideal scale providing me with grounds to make comparisons and, perhaps, judgments. I have to reduce.

By assuming identifications can be made transparent in order to accept each other, the labels we tend to cling to not only become totalized as monolithes, but also as ostensibly universal commodities–erasing cultural or geographic specificity in favor of assuming a sameness of circumstance that does not exist. Still, the obviousness of transparency is so alluring. It offers someone the semblance of knowing completely, not only the motivations of others, but the motivations of the self. Glissant resolves that, in defense of this totalizing tactic, he ought to recognize his own identity as opaque, as both lucid and impenetrable from the West’s attempts at reduction, because essentially “human behaviors are fractal in nature”: equally random and chaotic. We’re too nuanced, too messy and complicated, for labels and categories meant to blanket our differences under the guise of universalism, especially once we consider an individual’s locales, their cultures, their many contexts. Opacity gives us permission to consider new forms of relation, of intimacy amongst one another untainted by the Western gaze, while universal legibility ultimately projects an impossible fetishization of sameness. We are not the same. 

Amidst the racial turmoil of the US in the 1960s, Audre Lorde recalls frustration with how others were so ready to project expectations and fantasies onto her based on her identities. In a 1982 speech at Harvard University entitled “Learning From the 60s”, she explains how her intersecting identities led others to eclipse her often inherently defiant (queer) personhood in attempts to render her legible to their own understandings of race and gender:

I learned that if I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive. My poetry, my life, my work, my energies for struggle were not acceptable unless I pretended to match somebody else’s norm.

The compounding realities of being a “Black, dyke, feminist, poet, mother” rendered Lorde illegible to contemporary discourse, leaving her to create new language to define herself. She cautions that were it not for the self-identification of her own lived experience and intersecting identities, she would risk having her experience flattened and narrowed by others so that they would deem her more acceptable, but also erased. Becoming legible, acceptable even, is to limit the depth of who you are. It’s to manipulate yourself, especially if that self is considered part of the many-headed Other, into the fantasies of the oppressor. Today’s commodified internet has only made this fantasy more immersive, galvanizing algorithms and fostering networked social spaces that work to encode offline life into digital existence.

Today, as digital embodiments and interactions become increasingly reflexive of the material realm, legibility has taken hold of how we represent ourselves online. As social media theorist Nathan Jurgenson describes, digital space is woven into the fabric of life away from the keyboard (AFK). Now primed by state and corporate surveillance of the internet, we take our physical skins online with us, molding our digital profiles and cyber behaviors to those that correspond with our AFK bodies in order to strive towards an almost universal legibility. 

The technological advancement of the internet and its digital media has also strived toward this kind of fixed universal legibility in representation. Over the course of more than a decade online, I’ve witnessed my smartphone learn to encode my face in the span of seconds, while personal branding has become a buzzy word for being consistently (and profitably) legible to a maximum number of people in online spaces. These developments have quickened and made more convenient how we translate who we are and what we do into the digital realm. But, though the cultural fixation on legible representation has pushed us towards realism, it has ultimately eclipsed the dimensionality of all that can not be captured by defining and sorting. Legibility attempts to enclose us within fixed categories through datafication. 

In the past decade or so, the internet has enabled the attention economy to reach new heights; an emporium of influencers and e-commerce shops have now overtaken our Instagram feeds; TikTok lures in users and content creators alike through algorithms that offer the promise of feeling seen through personalized feeds; and journalists are now becoming influencers to make a living wage. To exist in the modern age is to be seen and engaged with online, not as some avatar, but as your distilled self. Now more than ever, the billionaires who own the websites and apps that we visit daily track every click, every like, and even every scroll, commodifying our attention into quantifiable nuggets and shaping a growing market of content. Datafication, and by extension data mining, have become key to making these nuggets legible to corporations. Once the user’s presence is translated into a form of data, the user’s engagement is made exploitable.

And the proliferation of this datafication has been swift and expansive. 

sara david, 2021 tweet

[Text reads: “hottie with a body” implies the existence of “hottie without a body”……how do i become HER]

I can quite easily recall the first time I became aware of how exactly I, myself, was being datafied and sorted. In 2016, in light of the nearing US presidential election, my high school sociology teacher turned my classmates’ and my attention to how social media classifies our online existences by politics, age, and gender. He explained that, if we were to go into our Facebook settings, we would find a number of categorizing labels assigned to us. Unsurprisingly, there in my Ad Preferences the words “very liberal” sat next to “US politics.” 

More recently, this datafication has proven erroneous and incapable of rendering myself (and my body) as fully legible, even as it expands its reach into the realm of the physical. My iPhone’s facial recognition algorithm is invariably racist. Though I came across 2017 reports of the iPhone X’s failure to differentiate the Asian features of its users in China, where the majority of Apple iPhones are assembled, I naively did not expect to find evidence of this in my own handling of the smartphone when I purchased it in 2019. To this day, the Memoji feature will render my characteristically Asian eyes as sleepy, almost closed; to get my Memoji to look anywhere near “normal” I need to gaze into the lens of my phone with some sort of comedic expression, forcing my eyes to bulge. Memojis, in fact, do not “match your personality and mood.” 

Twitter has recently issued apologies for its racist image cropping algorithm. In September of 2020, a mass of users called attention to, and began collecting evidence to show, how Twitter’s image cropping algorithm consistently focused on white faces (coded as more normative) over Black faces. In my own experience, I’ve also noticed curious trends in how this image cropping algorithm focuses on breasts over the faces of femmes. On Twitter, non-white bodies are largely coded as deviant, and consequently masked by algorithmic violence. Again, the physical body is effectively erased, illegible to the platform which seeks to sort and define it.

ImageNet Roulette, a digital art project developed by artificial intelligence researcher Kate Crawford and artist Trevor Paglen, was created to expose the violences encoded within the facial recognition technologies. Through the project, users could upload an image of themselves to be labeled as one of the 2,833 subcategories programmed into ImageNet’s AI. The labels ranged from terms like “stunner” to the more offensive “offender” and were often imbued with racial and gender biases, essentializing the universalist Western gaze onto the physical and digital skins of individuals. The project is a testament to how legibility seeks to fix our physical bodies, and by extension our entire beings. 

Instead of feeling seen or understood, making myself legible online has felt like a practice in survival, like a game of picking and choosing how I’d wish to tie up the expanse of my personhood into three neat loops. But where does that leave me, and my own desire for digital expressions that feel experimental, queer, and illegible? In an essay describing how astrology can help navigate neoliberalism, Tabitha Prado-Richardson describes writes that “what is able to be seen, measured, and understood within the frame of the West” is actively considered legible, “discrediting that which cannot be fully translated or captured.” For all of the parts of myself that feel discarded in light of the project of legibility, I find myself unequivocally exiled to an online existence that feels fugitive. What do you do when the self that is legible—that is able to be defined by platforms, discourse, and culture—is not who you understand yourself to be?

Courtesy of Yume Murphy via MyScene

[image description: A screenshot of a 2D dressup game called MyScene shows two polaroids of someone marked “Before” and “After.” The first photograph shows a white woman with brown braids, hazel eyes, and purple lips. The second shows someone with blonde hair, blue glasses, and blue eyes. Text is overlaid that reads “I love this look! Can you say ‘SASSY?’” and “Print your Makeover Guide!” On the bottom right are two pink buttons buttons that say “Play again” and “Print!”]

I fucked around and I turned to a meme.

—Tommy Cash, “3D COOL WORLD,” 2018

In Glitch Feminism, writer and curator Legacy Russell discusses how othered bodies are made invisible by their lack of pliability, by their refusal to be read by a normative mainstream that would then categorize them, and are ultimately “erased or misclassified within and outside of an algorithmic designation.” This is true for Black and brown bodies, and it is true for bodies that don't fit under normative “male” and “female” designations, or bodies that simply don’t subscribe to normative shapes and forms and abilities. Here, Russell finds radical potential in exclusion and rejection, affirming that “our unreadable bodies are a necessary disruption” in a system that conflates legibility and humanity. Through this framework, a glitched body is understood as an “opportunity to experiment and try on different selves” that “empowers seizing a more integrated public identity with radical potential.” For Russell (and for me), our bodies are revolutionary glitches that do not need to—and cannot possibly—completely signify who we are in order to have our humanity acknowledged. Legibility goes out the window. 

In this vein, many Black artists and creative thinkers understand themselves as both glitched in nature and multiplicitous in quality, transcending definitions based on the skin of the body. In an interview, artist Jacolby Satterwhite describes how his digital art practice allows for a form of multiplicitous self-actualization:

Social media, technology, the internet, the way that our bodies exist virtually–it’s a paradigm shift for the multiplicity of the body. My body is multiplied several times in my videos not because I’m narcissistic, but it’s because I consider the videos to be similar to an essay. I feel like my body is a form of punctuation. They act as commas, exclamation points, question marks. 

Through the interview, it becomes clear that Satterwhite sees the physical Black body as one of many embodiments of a multiplicitous self; a queering of the self through time, space, and context. I think that the way many people with deviant identities, especially queer Black folks, navigate online space emulates this. In an essay on the Blackness of memes, artist, curator, and writer Aria Dean writes that, “for Blackness, the meme could be a way of further figuring an existence that spills over the bounds of the body, a homecoming into our homelessness.” In “We Real Cool” Lauren Jackson makes similar claims, describing how “the internet allows and requires us each to be many people at the same time,” in effect creating a representation of Blackness that is “multiplicitous” and “unbounded.” For the othered body, unboundedness and transcendence are inevitable in a system that can never grasp the depth, the opacity, of such unreadable embodiment. Ultimately, these more amorphous interpretations of a plural self comfort me, reminding me of my early days on the internet where joy and pleasure were easily found through experiments with playing multiple selves, many facets of who I ought to be.

These days, my most amusing use of the internet is Twitter. The Twitter timeline, once chronological and free of algorithms that do the searching for you, has become increasingly curated–pushing trends and viral tweets that were supposed to be relevant to the top of my timeline, while tweets from favored mutuals disappeared into the abyss. The effect was immense once isolated by the pandemic. I felt like I needed to speak a certain way, be a special kind of self-deprecating funny, to reach the masses I had once shared physical space with. So, I created an alt.

Sporting a memed image of Mariah Carey emblazoned with “I’M HIGH!!!!!!!!” below her face as its profile picture, my alt was created in the summer of 2020, once I began to consider the implications of job recruiters potentially finding my most errant thoughts online. Most of the tweets on this account are retweets of culturally specific memes related to New Jersey, pop culture, astrology, and my own thoughts–trivial complaints, hot takes, and pseudo-intellectual musings that I assume would not fit the “brand” of my more professional, and more public, account. Perspectives and dogmas introduced to me from my own time at a small liberal arts college color my commentary on content mostly originating from Black Twitter in a way that feels unpopular. I make light of the more tragic occurrences in my life, memeing the pain away. I complain about the fear that work will never end, that my life will spill into a never ending stream of 40-hour work weeks, despite my own ambitions. I muse about why all my favorite musical artists are freaky white men. I describe myself through images of other people, quote tweeting, “this is me [insert thing I do].” On my alt, I toy with a number of registers I decide to speak through, picking and choosing selves that seem to match who I wish to be at any given moment. I joke about feeling like a disembodied hottie. On this account, I’m too personal, too messy, too much–nothing here feels legible because I’m just being me. But, on this globalized and capitalizing web, it’s the most human outlet for expression I’ve been able to find for awhile. It’s the closest I’ve come to unbecoming everything I’ve constructed myself into.

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