Compromised Speech

Contemporary platforms for mass mediated communication can feel hard to escape. With continued use, they can eclipse other forms of sociality. They might appear to facilitate community or a partial approximation of it. They can seem necessary for networking and publicity. They foster polished, but at times tragic or pathetic, selves that may dominate our inner world, skewing our sense of who we are.​     ​ 

On social media, making choices about how you communicate can seem inexplicably arduous. Your options appear severely limited – either jubilation at a personal success, or sharp condemnation of the morality of someone’s actions. But to speak with ambivalence, or to speak reflexively about the conditions of your speech, are tedious because these are not dramatic, newsworthy expressions; there’s no sense of anything being ‘changed’ by them. You might then try bombastic or circuitous ways to convey these things, or feel that they’re impossible to convey.  

As a child in the late nineties and noughties, I grew up with forms of mediated communication that were exciting because they seemed amenable to being shaped by ‘the user’, that is, you. As a technology, the internet was relatively new, and the kinds of social connection it enabled felt – to the younger me – entirely new in history. Only in my twenties did I learn of precedents, such as amateur or ‘ham’ radio operators in the 1920s, who would tune in to ‘the ether’, tingling in anticipation of who or what they might encounter, searching for a voice through the sinuous hiss and crackle of static. Hands on radio dials, sharing momentary connections with distant cities, continents, or even (was it possible?) spiritual worlds.  

After school I spent hours on the private messaging program ICQ – ‘I Seek You’ – and in IRC channels (Internet Relay Chat: a protocol for text-based instant messaging, as HTTP is for websites). I have no idea whom I sought on ICQ, or why. A couple of tech-savvy schoolmates – those who commandeered the school computers to play Sim City – must have told me about the program. At home I recall making random connections and communicating in clipped sentences until my or my interlocutor’s internet connection dropped out, a frequent occurrence on dial-up. I remember ICQ only hazily, and go looking for accounts of it. They’re instantly recognisable. People mention the nine-digit UIN (User Identification Number) you were assigned, used to log in, and consequently memorised (for some, this would have been pre-mobile phone); the strangely pleasing, squeaky ‘uh-oh!’ sound when you received a message; the red-green flower icon that revolved when it was connecting; and (as a user on the Hacker News forum wrote this year, in response to ICQ’s closure), ‘being able to randomly connect to people you would filter. Yes, I want to talk to someone more or less my age but in Iceland. Or any other country’.  

I shared this transnational yearning, without the age requirement. On the internet, my being sixteen or seventeen wasn’t often a barrier to getting to know a thirty, forty or sixty-year-old, which I liked.  

On the more group-oriented IRC, much of what I talked about was music. As a child of migrant parents who had no knowledge of Western music, I was obsessed with it as a teenager: hungry for styles and traditions beyond what my classmates listened to, and beyond the aesthetic limitations of local radio. I used IRC to meet those, often older than myself (I would’ve been seventeen during the peak of my IRC socialising), who knew about such things. I’d talk with them almost daily; our conversation would extend into email, where we’d swap recommendations or describe at greater length the gigs we’d been to. Sitting in my home in outer suburban Adelaide, I had muso or music-loving friends in Dortmund, San Diego, Singapore, Gosford, and elsewhere. The interface of my IRC client was set to white on black, with colour reserved for chatters’ names and the architecture of the platform. In the busier channels, new posts appeared at the bottom of a gigantic column of text, and you’d scroll back five or six screens to track a conversational thread in the cacophony. A kitschy refrain was ‘A/S/L?’ (‘age/sex/location?’). Witnessing this, regulars would wish someone happy cybersex with the middle-aged man who had just declared himself to be ‘18/F’. Earnestness alternated with play or cynicism regarding online identity. The prevailing sense was that what you saw was what you got of someone’s mind: no guarantees about the rest.  

While the focus of the music channels was aesthetic pleasure, politics was also present. I recall @Sparra, my middle-aged friend in Gosford, protesting against someone’s rant about welfare payment recipients in Australia, particularly Indigenous recipients. The person might’ve gotten away with it – Australians were in the minority on the main channel and many would have believed anything said by an Australian about their own country. I learned by watching Sparra’s questioning of this person, who eventually fell silent: ‘@[Username] – are you SERIOUSLY saying that Aboriginal people are at an advantage in this country?’ By email, my friend in Germany (@Yak, a.k.a Martin) once remarked on Australian uglinesses, offering the place name ‘Woomera’ as an example. He would write to me playfully (on the 1980s: ‘everything smelled like hashish and hairspray’); in this case he was actually remarking on the immigration detention facility at Woomera, South Australia, though I knew nothing of it at the time. 

The woman in San Diego, then in her late twenties, was among my closest friends: we often swapped recs and she’d write to me about unusual gigs she’d been to. (We’re still in touch decades later; we’ve never met in person.) But it was usually my male friends in their thirties or older who would share – via private message, or email – the troubles in their lives: being entirely housebound because of severe anxiety, or long-term relationships that didn’t work out. (They also shared with me the joys.) I don’t think age gaps of several decades mattered to any of my virtual cohort. While we might divulge details about ourselves, we were nothing more than the text we chose to type out, day after day, which slowly accrued into a personality. Relative anonymity facilitated frankness – and, if you connected with the right people, trust.  

At this time, I’d taught myself basic HTML and JavaScript coding in order to set up an earnest website listing my favourite films, books, and albums. It was reassuring to see this coding language replicated in our chatter (‘<sarcasm>I absolutely <i>love</i> x</sarcasm>’), as though we were acknowledging the structures of our new virtual environments, marking our place within them. I think to many of us, it seemed as if we were tenuously perched on the very edge of the internet. 

My body was lifted away, and I felt no constraints on how I could express myself. (Of course there were social codes, and the technical limitations of keyboards and screen sizes, etc., but I didn’t feel the heavy hand of the computer on my neck.) There was no intervention, except for moderators occasionally booting someone out for violating rules (e.g. no abuse) that a chat bot fired at you when you entered. We were otherwise free to say what we liked, and to speak to whomever we liked, with behavioural correction happening after the fact. Here was my first experience of the anonymous online self, of people saying outrageous things – usually to be perceived as outrageous – that they would likely never say in person (this was a truism that came up regularly, among the regulars). Sincerity competed with artifice or confection, as it does today, but there seemed to be more of the former. Any confected shock-speech also seemed relatively ‘authentic’, because it was squarely chosen as a mode by its speaker, rather than being a product of algorithmic encouragement, at least partly contrived for the gain of a platform’s corporate masters. 

But the most incredible feeling that these earlier forms of communication gave rise to was that of intimacy with someone you might never meet, whose messages meant something important to you (free of ambivalence about the medium through which it occurred). This is a phenomenon that predates modern communication, going back to the sending and receiving of letters with ‘pen pals’. But instantaneous text conversation that dispelled the gloom of the individual self in a room, leading to an immaterial kind of friendship – this felt, and was, new.   

Such were my early experiences of the internet. A few years prior to this, Steve Jones had published an edited collection of essays, CyberSociety 2.0: Revisiting Computer Mediated Communication and Community (1998); this was a follow-up to the first CyberSociety (1995). In these, ‘Computer Mediated Communication’, or CMC, is used to distinguish online from in-person sociality. With the advent of this new medium, scholars were thinking carefully about what defines community, and whether the connections people were forming in text-only ‘spaces’ (as opposed to places) like Usenet, IRC, and Bulletin Boards could be said to constitute it. There was also an ongoing discussion about the effect of the digital environment on what and how people could communicate. Nancy Baym noted in the first volume that ‘too much of the work on CMC assumes that the computer itself is the sole influence on communicative outcomes’; she argued that it is ‘a mistake to view patterns in CMC as direct effects of the medium.’ Jones takes a firm stance on this: ‘computer mediated communication is, in essence, socially produced space’. 

​​​A decade before I joined IRC, listservs had begun to enable rapid discussion online, including among poets – a literary cohort I would join as an adult (though I didn’t then know it). ‘Listserv’ is based on the name of the first automated electronic mailing list software, devised in 1986. Without direct experience of this technology, I have to turn to historical accounts, and web archives, which give a somewhat faded sense of the excitement felt by early users. 

In 1993, Charles Bernstein created the Poetics List on servers at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He claimed it was ‘a radically new format’ for poetry discussion: ‘you didn’t have to be at a bar in New York or a cafe in San Francisco, or to know anybody on a scene, or to be enrolled in a program: all you needed to participate was an active interest’. It was unmoderated for its first six years (with a few hundred active participants), kept relatively private, and focused on innovative and experimental poetics. Bernstein recounts explaining the mechanism to fellow poets: ‘you send out one message to the list address and everyone subscribed gets the message almost instantaneously. And to reply, you simply hit “R” on the keypad and write your message. My friends listened in something [...] close to astonishment [...] It was as if I were explaining the marvels of xerography to letterpress printers.’   

Several poetry listservs were established in the 1990s, including British-Irish-Poets and Pussipo, the latter founded by Anne Boyer for experimental women poets. Alison Croggon notes others: ‘Subsubpoetics, the woman-only list WOMPO, the Slam listserv’. For Lesley Wheeler, WOMPO (founded in 1997 by Annie Finch) fostered sisterly camaraderie and spirited conversation. She also remarks on its disorderliness, which would apply to listservs more broadly:  

In Australia in 1997, John Kinsella created Poetryetc; this is still in operation, and now resides on the same UK servers as British-Irish-Poets. While Kinsella hoped that Poetryetc would internationalise poetry by ‘enriching respect and intra-cultural understanding’, he acknowledged the influence of poetic regionalisms. He was sceptical of views of the internet as promoting a kind of social globalisation, claiming instead that boundaries ‘exist on the net as much as anywhere else’; virtual sociality was ‘subject to the conditions of social relations that operate in the outside world’.   

Croggon was one of three to take over Poetryetc in 2001. She ran it with Randolph Healy for several years, and like Kinsella before her, initiated a number of collaborative poetry projects through the list. She wrote about the waning of the listserv phenomenon in the early 2000s: ‘after a number of prominent lists imploded in flame wars, the intellectual energy moved to blogs. Cyber-collectivism was replaced by bloggish individualism, a privatisation that some saw as the failure of the original utopian vision and others took as an inevitable evolution.’ For Ali Jane Smith, literary blogs ‘allowed a kind of broadcast communication, with an author or authors, but lively conversation could run on in the comments, and connections could be made by linking from blog to blog.’ In the late 2000s, social media began to eclipse these forums – for poets as well as many others – encompassing a participant size, and a range of demographics, unthinkable to listservs, blogs and other digital communications media around the turn of the new millennium.  

Taina Bucher has characterised the relationships that contemporary social media foster as a kind of ‘programmed sociality’; she writes that this ‘transduces’ social relations like friendship onto platforms, rather than simply transposing them. Drawing on the work of Adrian Mackenzie and Gilbert Simondon, Bucher explains: 

The ‘something else’ shaping social relations is computational process: the extensive quantifying, sorting and sequencing that now constitutes the work of algorithms on most contemporary social media platforms. If these algorithms may be said to ‘program’ (if not to outright engineer) sociality, how do they frame the human agents who provide them their material?  

​​​William Davies argues in ‘The Reaction Economy’ that social media platforms are underpinned by behaviourist and cybernetic understandings of human beings, which skew our use of them. In the 1913 manifesto ‘Psychology as a Behaviorist Sees It’, the founder of behaviourism John B. Watson stated: ‘the behavior of man and the behavior of animals must be considered on the same plane; as being equally essential to a general understanding of behavior’. The equivalence between humans and animals was based on the idea that physical responses to stimuli illuminate mental states, irrespective of species. Davies persuasively traces the development of these ideas through to contemporary social media, arguing that behaviourism was ‘established with the explicit aim of rendering human responses predictable and thereby controllable’; it imagined ‘a wholly conditioned, programmable person’. This accords with Shoshana Zuboff’s view of today’s digital platforms. She argues that in aspiring to know how humans will behave in various networked conditions, companies discovered: 

In this mechanistic logic: the animal is thought of merely as a response mechanism, and the human as (only) animal, meaning that human behaviour is manipulable by machine intelligence. As Davies notes with regard to behaviourist psychology, what has been abandoned here is ‘any theory of mind in favour of data on observable behaviour’ (my emphasis).  

Cybernetics is another important link to contemporary platforms. An interdisciplinary practice combining computer science, biology and psychology, cybernetics applies ‘control theory’ to complex systems. Yuk Hui is careful to emphasise that cybernetics is in fact a reaction against mechanism ‘as a fundamental ontological understanding’. He states that cybernetics ‘mobilizes two key concepts, feedback and information’, the interrelations between which are too various and too complex for a mechanistic view to encompass. Davies elaborates that, from a cybernetic perspective, humans and all complex systems pursue their goals by continually adjusting their behaviour in response to ‘feedback’: 

There was once much less computational curation of what people communicated. Facebook’s News Feed used to display posts from your social network in chronological order. In 2011 it switched to algorithmic sorting to maximise user engagement; this led to massive profits. Every other competitor followed suit. The Economist reviewed the same change – from chronological to algorithmically curated feeds – on Twitter in 2016 using ‘sentiment analysis’, itself an algorithmic process, ‘to extract feelings from text’. The Economist’s interpretation of this algorithmic analysis of the algorithm was that ‘the average curated tweet was more emotive, on every scale, than its chronological equivalent’, with ‘the recommendation engine appear[ing] to reward inflammatory and outlandish claims’ with much greater visibility. In The Chaos Machine, Max Fisher cites a study led by social psychologist William Brady, that confirms this thesis: 

Brady et al. call this ‘moral contagion’. Given the human bias (as these researchers note in a recent article) towards learning from morally and emotionally charged information in a group setting, ‘it is not surprising that algorithms trained on human preferences end up amplifying PRIME [prestigious, ingroup, moralized and emotional] information’. However, the over-saturation of PRIME information ‘in specific contexts, such as morality and politics’ can ‘lead to social misperceptions’ that ‘promote [inter-group] conflict and misinformation.’  

The hyper-visibility of PRIME communication inevitably shapes what we say, mimetic social creatures that we are. As Kai Riemer and Sandra Peter put it: ‘Those who speak to the algorithm achieve the widest circulation of their ideas. This is akin to large-scale social engineering’. Note the sense here, of an engineered rather than a programmed sociality: that the platform does not merely ‘organise’ human social relations, but wholly dictates it. Fisher offers a descriptive account of this when he reflects on Twitter’s shift to algorithmic curation: 

The effect of our ongoing exposure to such curation of expression is a collective shift in behaviour, as the sociologist of law Håkan Hydén has argued. While algorithms do not aim to produce ‘their own set of norms’ (their aims are ultimately geared towards profit), they have ‘hidden effects’ on society. Hydén coins the term ‘algo norms’ for those ‘societal consequences, which follow from the use of algorithms in different respects’. But since algorithms ‘are made by people with technical expertise […] engineers become our new norm setters’.  

I recall an enduring feeling I had about the presence of writers on Twitter. I was bewildered that there were intelligent and sensitive writers on this platform, but that their posts were often totally unlike their written work, or their presence in person; it also didn’t map on to the discrepancy between online selves and in-person selves I grew up knowing. I’m not much different in this respect: my social media self became progressively more abrasive, rigid, and blunter than I was in person, on the phone, in messaging, or on email. The final line of the quote from Fisher above, which I hesitated to include as it seemed to take my trajectory too far, is: ‘Users seemed to absorb these cues, growing meaner and angrier, intent on humiliating out-group members, punishing social transgressors, and validating one another’s worldviews.’ But this is what Twitter was like to me. Even people I respected in other contexts were like this there. 

Such behaviour often seemed to be beyond their control, like they’d been pushed downhill and were unable to stop rolling. Occasionally I wondered if someone was ‘gaming’ the algorithm, making their presence ubiquitous through emotionally-charged utterance, which would lead to greater publicity for anything they were promoting – books, for instance. (It’s worth noting that embedding visual and participatory forms, like images/videos and quizzes, in your posts is also known to make them travel farther on social media, but I’m thinking about the dynamics of written communication, with writers in mind.) If you’ve been provoked into continually showing and marshalling outrage, why not convert this into cultural capital? 

The archive of my tweets is discomfiting. It shows a marked decline in mood over the years, and boringly repetitive complaints about the platform’s machinations, as well as our willing subjection to them. As the time we spent online increased through the pandemic, there was a concurrent ramping up of emotive utterance, combativeness, and controversy, all of which appeared contrived. Twitter’s dramatic ‘events’ mirrored the way news broke: they were rapid, cyclical, and seemed to fade almost as soon as they’d occurred.    

I detected in my twittering archive a vague but persistent persecution complex, as though those in my literary circle might be against me, or even out to get me (as indeed others had been gotten, with varying levels of justification – sometimes none). In his review of Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger, James Ley leavens this realisation with humour: ‘A mode of suspicious thinking has become essential to navigate the internet’s boundless oceans of unreliable, fragmented, decontextualised, and conflicting information […] [it] has the form of an old joke. Sure, you’re paranoid, but are you paranoid enough?’ ​​I suspected that the platform was insistently showing me what was really a minority of snide remarks from my strained literary cohort – those aimed (obliquely) at peers; that it had recorded that I spent more time ‘engaged’ in this way; and that with enough exposure I might myself respond sharply, which would then elicit more eyeball-time from others. I’d occasionally try to articulate this hunch about being coerced into response, while worrying that it showed an intolerance of all my peers. When there was a factional flare-up over a particular subject, I avoided direct participation, not trusting my own responses. 

Judging by Mark Fisher’s account of left politics on Facebook and especially Twitter in 2013, such behavioural changes were already underway then. Fisher uses the metaphor of a vampires’ castle to describe this virtual milieu: ‘The Vampires’ Castle specialises in propagating guilt. It is driven by a priest’s desire to excommunicate and condemn, an academic-pedant’s desire to be the first to be seen to spot a mistake, and a hipster’s desire to be one of the in-crowd.’ Acknowledging that ‘pious moralising’ was not new to sections of the left, Fisher argued that it was no longer possible to avoid ‘the psychic pathologies propagated by these discourses’; through the ubiquity of social media, ‘the paralysing feeling of guilt and suspicion’ hung over everyone ‘like an acrid, stifling fog’. What Fisher advocates for is the ‘creat[ion of] conditions where disagreement can take place without fear of exclusion and excommunication’. While he doesn’t mention algorithms, the group dynamics he describes suggests their influence in this overtly moral-political domain. Literary discourse is not always moral, but where left politics and the literary community share space on social media, the impulses Fisher observes in the former also inflect the latter. 

I rejoined Twitter in 2017, having been off all social media for several years. Like many others, I’d been drawn (back) to them by the prospect of human connection. My own situation was that, having completed postgraduate research and immediately sought work outside the university (I still work in customer service), Twitter was my only regular forum for ‘conversations’ with academic writers. I would receive replies to my published work there, and reply in turn, all the while becoming unlike any other version of myself – and feeling a creeping sense of isolation.

Writers are not immune from using such platforms compulsively. ​​For as former Facebook president Sean Parker revealed in an interview: ‘The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them, [was]: “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?”’ The answer was to feed us ‘a little dopamine hit every once in a while’ in the form of likes and comments. Parker adds that this is ‘a social-validation feedback loop […] exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology’. As Max Fisher puts it: ‘Posting on Twitter might yield a big social payoff, in the form of likes, retweets, and replies. Or it might yield no reward at all. Never knowing the outcome makes it harder to stop pulling the lever.’ The metaphor of the slot machine lever is apt, as Zuboff observes: ‘The hand-and-glove relationship of technology addiction was not invented by Facebook, but rather it was pioneered, tested, and perfected with outstanding success in the gaming industry, another setting where addiction is formally recognized as a boundless source of profit’. She notes that the young are especially susceptible to capture, through corporations’ use of ‘behavioral science and high-stakes design that is precision-tooled to bite hard on the felt needs of this age and stage’: 

Twitter/X, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and other commercial social media platforms are great levellers. They take an incredible variety of people, with different sensibilities and values and kinds of intelligences, and relentlessly tweak their behaviour, encouraging them to perform in repetitive ways. On Twitter, the medium for much of this is text. For writers, this ought to make the experience intolerable – intolerable to see one’s artistic medium used so callously, because it has traction with an algorithm; intolerable to catch yourself using it this way. Tweets used to have a limit of 140 characters, based on an SMS limit of 160 characters; in 2017 it went up to 280. Given the short form, you may think it suits poets especially well. Not all poets aim to extend what language can do, but concision and a certain self-consciousness about expression are recognisable features of poetry. ​​It can thus be strange to read poets using words in the same loose and chaotic ways as others (it’s true that this is a social, and not by default an artistic, context, but since the medium is text let me at least dream of poetic ruptures). My complaint returns us to the vexed status of ‘informal’ written communication on the internet: is it merely conversational, or could, or ought, it also be a form of literary publication? As Wheeler observed regarding reflexivity on the Wom-Po listserv: ‘Wompos deploy a range of metaphors in characterizing the list [“archive”, “salon”, “kitchen”, “sorority”], suggesting uncertainty about its nature rooted in how Internet communication conjoins writing and talking’. 

But character limits are not the only constraint: there are also strong pressures – techno-social rather than strictly formal – to speak about trending topics, to add to the noise about the latest moral issue, and to inflate one’s speech so that it travels far; succeeding in all three can result in virality. And while receiving little to no money for poetry is standard, doing it for someone else’s commercial gain could be a bridge too far for poets. Still, with many skilled writers inhabiting such platforms, the lack of rhetorical range demonstrates the homogeneity inherent to these platforms’ versions of programmed sociality. (I’m not exempt from this diagnosis.) 

I’m aware that these reflections might make me sound purist and prissy. They could also make me sound conservative, if we recall poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s criticisms of leftist defeatism regarding new electronic media. In ‘Constituents of a Theory of Media’ (1970), Enzensberger lists the rapid accumulation of electronic media (from colour television and video tape recorders to news satellites and data banks) in the twenty years prior, and posits: ‘All these new forms of media are constantly forming new connections both with each other and with older media like printing, radio, film, television, telephone, teletype, radar and so on. They are clearly coming together to form a universal system.’ He sees an emancipatory potential, the realisation of ‘mass participation in a social and socialized productive process, the practical means of which are in the hands of the masses themselves.’ But while he believes ‘the new media are egalitarian in structure’, he criticises the left for its paranoia about being manipulated by the state’s use of them:  

Rather, for Enzensberger, the ‘productive power’ of electronic media lies in its ‘dirtiness’. In a prefiguration of Byung Chul Han’s statement that ‘the shitstorm represents an authentic phenomenon of digital communication’, Enzensberger states bluntly, ‘fear of handling shit is a luxury a sewer-man cannot necessarily afford’.  

A couple of decades after Enzensberger, Pierre Bourdieu characterised television as a ‘fast’ medium, where journalists have to think at rates ‘faster than a speeding bullet’. But because ‘you can’t think when you’re in a hurry’, the TV pundits ‘think in clichés, in the “received ideas” that Flaubert talks about: banal, conventional, common ideas […] Communication is instantaneous because, in a sense, it has not occurred’. Waleed Aly applies Bourdieu’s critique to the ‘warp speed’ of online journalism: ‘Even Bourdieu’s fast-thinkers aren’t fast enough anymore. We’re now after instant thinkers.’ The references to speed and movement here evoke for me a popular metaphor for the internet in its early decades: ‘the information superhighway’. As Davies points out in Nervous States, ‘the emphasis on “real time” knowledge [in discourse about the internet] was originally privileged in war’.  

John Durham Peters noted in 1999 that ‘“communication” is a registry of modern longings’. In one sense – that the reality of communication with other people often falls short of our ideal for it – the frustrations I’m articulating aren’t at all new. And with respect to the internet, Jones had already identified the new normal a year before Durham Peters: ‘The internet has what seems now long ago become less of a public works program and more of a worldwide experiment in organization for commercial gain’. A particularly challenging aspect of contemporary platforms is that they erase boundaries between public and private, and between work and play; for writers, at least, they have come to seem spaces for our private-public selves to work while pretending to play. But true play is impossible in such spaces of control, where the dominance of moral contagion helps suppress many human forms of expression. ​​(Consider by contrast the communicative freedoms afforded by the psychoanalyst’s couch – where, as Philip Rieff writes, ‘Talk is therapeutic in itself […] talk-language is the essential medium of consciousness, and therefore the essential means of liberation’.) 

But are these platforms irredeemable? Simon Lindgren laments the fact that such discussions of participatory digital media are ‘often undermined by the black-or-white stereotyping and distortions of arguments that run in both directions between unreflected techno-optimists […] and technophobic cultural pessimists’. In order to avoid this ‘double trap’, Geert Lovink, Ippolita, and Ned Rossiter counsel ‘develop[ing] complex identities’ – ones that are contradictory or multitudinous. (But the fact that I cannot imagine how this would be currently possible, without damaging one’s singular ‘brand’, is telling of the commercial conditions – constraints – of literary discussion online.) They recommend anonymity as ‘a good alternative to the pressures of the control society […] if you must participate in the accumulation economy for those in control of the data mines, then the least you can do is Fake Your Persona.’ (See also Cher Tan’s ‘Reclaiming Anonymity in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism’.)  

Could commercial social media platforms be improved, as Brady et al. suggest, through ‘algorithm transparency’, where the precise nature of amplification is made known to users, to ‘mitigate [the] conflict of interest’ between the profit motive and ‘human cooperation and problem-solving’? Australian lawyer and digital rights activist Lizzie O’Shea has advocated for ‘functional communal spaces’ (as she recently put it in an article co-authored with Lilly Ryan) that are democratic and free of insidious corporate interests. Human moderation of social media seems advisable, though the amount of work involved may necessitate individual networks that are smaller in size. On this point, Bernstein charts the deterioration of the Poetics List through abusive posts, but states that following the introduction of moderation in 1999, ‘the list had become a rare open forum for the discussion of, and exchange of information about, unconventional poetry and poetics’.  

What might an ideal virtual space be and feel like? Imagine an arena quarantined from work where anonymity (not only for trolls) is common, if not the norm; an arena that does not arbitrarily pit us against each other; that is not relentlessly fast; that does not extract reactions; that does not promote overheated expressions; that allows both happenstance connections and the formation of enduring bonds; that accommodates our contradictory selves; that meets our urge to interact socially, textually, and intellectually with abandon; and that does not profit (grotesquely) by exploiting and harvesting our behavioural data. This might seem a wild dream of a common space. But until something that even remotely resembles this exists (that is, as O’Shea and Ryan emphasise, until the time that we create it), the options for the throng seem exceedingly poor: retreat entirely from mediated sociality and seek other methods for participating in news, politics, and literary and other discussion; retreat partially to hospitable niches of the internet, with a fraction of your peers; or stay put in the giant rat wheel, and feel your relationships, your sense of a community, and your sanity progressively corrode. 

What I have especially longed for on the internet, and have yet to find, is a conversational space where writers can exist as writers: where there is hardly a boundary between language as communication and language as art. 

As we grow out of childhood, we are taught to reform our use and experience of language. Language ceases to be pure sound, ripe for verbal play, an exploratory channel for that which is difficult to know; we are increasingly encouraged to use language in utilitarian ways. In adulthood, the latter abounds: in our resumes, in public announcements, in template letters, in the news, in the saturating language of the office which we carry home with us. A writer seeks a pliable and capacious medium – one that can stretch to the shape of our imaginative desires and hold many nuances of sense. We may each cultivate this language alone, on the page or screen. But such a language – a companionable, literary language – should also exist between writers, in some online space.