Glitching the Binary

When you’re learning to code, a Hello World program gives you the necessary syntax to display the ‘Hello, World!’ message on-screen and demonstrate the functionality of a programming language. The various avatars in Anna Poletti’s hello, world? propel their hopeful hellos out into the wilderness that we know as the internet, submitting their curated selves to algorithmic-matchmaking and the promise of connection. In joining the dating apps, protagonist Seasonal is searching for an entirely new language that will take them outside the ‘People’s Republic of Gender’, a land of internalised patriarchal biases, structural inequalities and gender-based violence.  

It’s hard not to read hello, world? as autofiction, tracing the outlines of Seasonal’s and Poletti’s profiles. At the time of writing the novel, Poletti was Associate Professor of English Language and Culture at Utrecht University; Seasonal teaches a graduate course on digital life writing at a Dutch university. Each wears a uniform of black t-shirt and jeans, is slim and long-limbed with ‘deep brown eyes’ and closely cropped hair. Poletti’s narrator introduces a ‘chorus of witnesses’ from around the world as Seasonal’s support network. Immediately, I read Q – ‘transmasc poet, scholar, writer’ from Melbourne – as Quinn Eades, an author whose work influenced my Honours thesis. There are lines from Eades’ autobiographical All the Beginnings which echo the themes in Poletti’s novel. Eades, whose ‘body cannot bear to live in a world where its corporeal self is only about the power structures in which it finds itself’, writes: ‘This body is hologram, prism, a proliferation of material meaning.’ And: ‘This body is, always, transformation (transfiguration, even).’ Poletti thanks Eades ‘for the love’ in the acknowledgements of hello, world?, and I imagine these two bright scholars theorising ways to represent alternate dimensions of sexuality. After submitting a draft of this review, I met Eades for the first time at ‘The Art of Cultural Exchange’ symposium hosted by RMIT’s non/fictionLab. We commiserated over the challenges of balancing personal and professional life with single parenting. I asked Eades whether he was Q in Poletti’s novel; he acknowledged his real-world role in thinking and writing through and beyond gender with Poletti. Weeks later, author Chris Kraus’s conversation with Poletti revealed ‘Seasonal’ as the pseudonym they used when they first joined dating apps. Poletti’s construction of an online avatar offered a way to explore a more fluid identity, while simultaneously gaining insight into the attention economy where people live out sexual fantasises and romantic projections in public online spaces. 

Poletti’s hello, world? haunts me for months because it does not fit into my readerly expectations around genre. My initial impulse was to read the relationship between the budding dom Seasonal and their poorly behaved submissive László either as burgeoning romance or fodder for masturbatory fantasy, although it is neither. The complicated characters are so stuck in their own heads that even the double dildo Seasonal brings into the bedroom serves less as instrument for pleasure than as fulcrum for power relations. Every thrust carries with it the weight of trauma which compelled Seasonal to escape the violences experienced growing up as a child – and socialised as a woman – in Australia. Meanwhile, as László begrudgingly learns to submit to Seasonal’s desires, he remains haunted by the violences which precipitated his exile from dictatorial Hungary. These characters are each hopelessly, painfully wounded, and even as we read them trying to heal themselves through the trust and consideration of the other, the consistent undercurrent of the relationship is one of annihilation.  

Hoping to understand why I’m not turned on by Poletti’s frequent graphic sex scenes in the same way that I am by porn or erotica, I turn to Susan Sontag’s classic essay ‘The Pornographic Imagination’. Here Sontag makes a case that when pornography is overly prescribed and emotional, readers have difficulty placing themselves in the work and are less likely to find it sexually arousing than if the work is emotionally flat. I think back to Anne Rice’s Sleeping Beauty trilogy – published under her pen name Roquelaure (literally: cloak) – which I read in the nineties, holding a beaded bunny vibrator in one hand. In a reissue of The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, Rice explicates the sensual pull of these erotic fairy tales, in which sadomasochism ‘is presented as a glorified game played out in luxurious rooms and with very attractive people, and involving very attractive slaves’. There is never any threat of lasting harm posed by or aimed at these two-dimensional characters, whose model-like faces are blank slates upon which we can project our own fantasies. Conversely, Poletti’s roman à clef is highly specific and complex. I would argue that for Seasonal, sex sets the stage for ‘performative philosophy’, a term coined by Kraus in I Love Dick which suggests a mode of embodied and inscribed theory-making. Sontag reasons that pornographic literature, as opposed to pornography, is not designed to titillate so much as to exemplify ‘extreme forms of human consciousness’. Within Poletti’s sex-saturated novel we encounter wounded individuals experimenting at the precipitous edge of known intimate relations. Sontag would maintain that Seasonal and László are two humans trying ‘to satisfy the appetite for exalted self-transcending modes of concentration and seriousness’. By separating romance from sexual fulfilment – László is married and Seasonal prevents catching feelings by compartmentalising him as submissive – each aims to glitch the systems and structures that imprison them within specific, nonfluid identities. 

For twelve years Seasonal has been boxed within a heteronormative relationship with H, which was satisfying enough until the sexlessness of their coupling became its own sort of imprisonment. Eighteen months after their emigration from Australia to Utrecht, Seasonal asks whether they might start having sex again. Seasonal’s desire is met with H’s lack: he is asexual now. H proposes nonmonogamy as a stop-gap measure to conceal his complete disinterest in their relationship. Throughout this scene of heartache, Seasonal’s pronouns shift from she/her to they/them and back as they seek to redefine themselves in the absence of the love which fuelled them. For months Seasonal sleeps on the couch in the apartment they share with H, hoping that by giving him space he will come around to meet their longing. As Seasonal navigates this devastating abandonment – in which ‘Seasonal’s vulnerability, her hunger and need, does not interest H anymore’ – Seasonal’s pronouns shift definitively to nonbinary. Set adrift in a foreign country without a relational anchor, Seasonal constructs profiles on a hook-up app involving image-based swipes and a dating app with considered questions. Different lures, different fish. ‘Online’, writes artist and cultural producer Legacy Russell, ‘we magnify our avatars, our vast and varied selves’.   

Seasonal’s bio reads: ‘feminist. writer. likes to walk.’ They post photos in which their closely cropped hair ‘shows enough grey to make anyone think twice before complimenting Seasonal for looking young for their age’. To refuse to code oneself for heteronormative appeal – to opt out of reinscribing the visual canon which equates beauty with youth – glitches the self-improvement industry which manufactures insecurity to increase demand for product. For Seasonal, connection arrives with demands like ‘dominate me, fuck me, give me a sense of novelty, confirm to me that I exist and that you see me’. It is within this virtual, boundless space that Seasonal finds themselves free to imagine and perform their sexuality outside the gaze of heteropatriarchy. In experimenting with and enacting sexuality that resists normative modes, Seasonal glitches the culture machine both in theory and in practice.   

Seasonal is neither looking to replace their blue-eyed beau nor seeking to replicate their known experiences, but rather to rewrite the rules of pleasure. Memories intrude from the past: Seasonal thinks, I know what I do not want and then moves toward something that exists only in a feeling-sense. What does sexual fulfillment look like in a vacuum space? Where nothing exists, there is potential for everything: an unlanguageable set of relations beyond prescribed roles and mimetics. Judith Butler’s theory of performativity comes to mind – how gender is iteratively constructed and enacted under conditions of taboo, restraint and prohibition. Once we recognise the social conditioning that demands gender be performed according to rules reinscribed by heteropatriarchy – rules that profit the capitalist machinery – what then? For Poletti, using they/them pronouns in their professional life is a way of fighting queer-phobia in the academy and beyond; their novelised avatar Seasonal similarly disrupts the ritualised performance of gender, recognising themselves as androgynous rather than masc or femme. In detouring from the gender by which they were socialised, Seasonal remains cautious of a reversal that would result in an (entitled, potentially cruel) mirror-image – one which resembles, for example, their abusive father. When we crave the opposite of what we have known, we don’t necessarily desire the opposite which is also known.  

Poletti presents us with a list of the eleven potential sexual playmates who slide into Seasonal’s DMs. Although we are told that Seasonal has become ‘accomplished at crying in public’ post-breakup, the narrative doesn’t linger on the emotional impact of H’s leaving. I find myself craving introspection from the protagonist which is not related to sex, and yet I recognise that the character is surviving their loss by looking the other way. Seasonal diverts their energy into the erotic, playing a numbers game which keeps their phone buzzing. The first of the men in their menagerie is the ‘Slut’, a Belgian merger expert and dom whose girlfriend won’t nurture his submissive side. When the Slut messages how hungry he is for Seasonal to own him – ‘Make me your puppy / your slut boy’ – this awakens within Seasonal a ‘newfound will to power’ that speaks to a previously undiscovered sexual drive to dominate. Seasonal uses him for orgasm via oral sex, ignores his erection and treats him as cuck – all within a consensual set of rules. When another of Seasonal’s matches, the Parisian, sends Seasonal a photo of a double dildo, Seasonal orders the sleek silicone model from a feminist sex shop in Amsterdam. Technology thus acquired, Seasonal begins experimenting with what cultural theorist Mackenzie Wark calls ‘differential fuck mechanics’, ‘dick-technics’ or ‘pirate sex’. Early in the novel, Seasonal reflects: ‘Chatting with strangers on the internet is like having a Tamagotchi’. These initial flirtations allow Seasonal to test the language of ethical BDSM – both syntactical and embodied. The mood is playful at first, joyous even, as Seasonal toys with stepping into the power of domination, a move which promises freedom from a lifetime spent anticipating other people’s needs. 

Glitching a famous Simone de Beauvoir aphorism, Legacy Russell writes: ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a body’. The glitch in Russell’s Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto acknowledges the in-betweenness of the gender spectrum which opens a world of manifest possibility. Russell condemns the gender binary as ‘an immaterial invention’ whose ‘toxic virality has infected our social and cultural narratives’. Russell suggests nonperformance of gender as a way to glitch the information capitalism that appropriates subjecthood for profit. The body is an abstract assemblage that cannot be given form, reasons Russell, and so to gender the body is to weaponise the body against itself. I am reminded of how cultural researcher Douglas Rushkoff likens a media virus to a biological virus: one has a viral shell and is wrapped in protein; the other has a media shell and is wrapped in memes. The aim of each shell is to allow its contents to pass from body to body, to replicate. Extending that analogy, I envision a gender virus, wrapped in performativity, using ideological code to nest and replicate, dictating how the body should be performed and read. Where the body is a site for limitless potential, the gender binary imposes constraints upon it that are tied to socio-politico-cultural assumptions. Russell calls for us to recognise the damaging relationship status ‘between the idea of the body and gender as a construct’, to claim agency over our right to refuse this status, and finally, to embrace all facets of self: the feminine, masculine and the in-between. By rejecting binary gender we can challenge how our data is harvested, potentially rendering it useless. Defying categorisation is one way to resist being turned into a profitable chunk of data by the technocrats. Russell writes: 

Growing up as a self-identified Black queer femme, Russell longed to see a representation of herself in mainstream media and found none. It was through online experimentations with virtual avatars that she was able to ‘come of age at night on the Internet’. The virtual world acts as theatrical stage for improvisation; here an iterative performance of self might meet a response of ‘Yes, and …’ from a community who accepts one’s truth. It was in this amorphous space of possibility that Russell felt able to push back against pronouns: ‘I cloaked myself in the skin of the digital, politicking via my baby gender play, traveling without a passport, taking up space, amplifying my queer blackness’.  

My own coming of age at night on the internet provided other affordances: losing my virginity was first on the list. My first love story, back in 1995, was mediated through the relatively archaic media technologies of AOL and Prodigy chat rooms, landline phone calls, and mix tapes posted through snail mail. Josh was a kid from Utah who went by the handle Scytale, named after a face dancer in Frank Herbert’s Dune universe. I was ready to fall in love in those chat rooms, which permitted me to communicate in a way that felt inaccessible to my neurodivergent self IRL. While my very first e-romance was with a predatory older man who got cold feet before we could meet, Josh was my age and through our private chats I was able to experience myself as a sexual being – without dying of the social anxiety disorder that plagued me. I projected onto his faceless face the identity of my one true love – something out of a fairy tale – and we accepted our roles in order to achieve our shared goal of not being virgins any more. I was certain that one day we’d tell people the story of how we met and how we were meant to be. Just after my sixteenth birthday I conned my mother into letting me join a school trip from Southern California to Salt Lake City with a bunch of jocks whose names I never learned so that I could fuck Josh in his Grateful Dead–adorned lair. Our clumsy sex lasted the entire three-hour director’s cut of Dune before I returned to the school group. My cunt was happily raw, bloody and sore. I got what I wanted: an escape from my choir-practice, straight-A, good-girl identity; temporary obliteration of self. When I got home Josh told me that he needed to keep fucking and since I couldn’t be there, dot dot dot. I was heartbroken by what was only ever a phantasm of my own projection, temporarily embodied. I fell deeper into depression and rejected my childish idols. Fuck you monogamy, fuck you Wakefield sisters and Nancy Drew. I would be a S-L-U-T. I started to cultivate a roster of lovers as varied and edgy as Seasonal’s, including those who liked to be cuckolded, bound or otherwise dominated; some I begged to punish me. I had chosen to separate sex from love so that, in theory, I would not get hurt. There is a part of me that balks at reading Seasonal’s list of men, laid out like a menu. When I marinate in this discomfort, I understand that I am transferring onto Seasonal my frustration with the younger iterations of self who, reeling from pain, treated lovers as disposable.

Seasonal’s main submissive is László, an internet researcher who ‘advertises his bisexuality and interest in BDSM on his dating profile alongside a picture of Michel Foucault’. Seasonal wants to know whether his interest in kink is merely erotic or if it is about ‘exploring or engaging power as a political/social force’. László messages: 

At their first meeting, at a café in the film museum in Amsterdam, Seasonal aims to stand in their power in order to actualise fantasy: ‘To punish, to instruct, to immobilize, to make the other wait, to hold their reality within yours’. Where László resists Seasonal’s gentle training, refusing in most circumstances to express his assent as a yes, Seasonal probes his  fear of total surrender: 

Indeed, László fears his desire to submit will seep into his everyday life. Through a series of WhatsApp messages, they negotiate the terms of László’s surrender. In return, Seasonal promises that despite growing up in an emotionally and physically abusive household, they won’t repeat the cycle of abuse. Their attempts at D/s relations are darkly comical: Seasonal’s tendency to self-sacrifice – even their habitual use of the lower-case vertical pronoun – makes for a tentative Bambi-like approach to being a dom, whereas László confidently conveys assent in every way except the yes that pleases Seasonal. They are the perfect flailing, pathetically human non-couple – welcome contrast to the shiny veneer of pop culture doms like Christian Grey – through which Poletti stages a melodrama of sexual domination and submission. Seasonal and László work around László’s failures as sub to develop a code language: black heart emojis plus black kohl eyeliner on the body are marks of submission. Seasonal aims ‘to discover which forms of pain i like to give’ and László guides Seasonal’s hands to squeeze his testicles harder than they ever imagined; László’s grips Seasonal’s labia in return. In their quest to ‘relearn the association between pain and pleasure’, Seasonal senses ‘the trust, the exposure, the extremely delicate balance of respect that makes pain a tool for learning and not for punishment’. The roles of dom and sub are fluid as we witness this exchange of pain-pleasure.

Much of the sex in this novel – and there is a lot of it – is non penetrative, except where it involves Seasonal’s double dildo. What is key here is the decentring of the phallus as instrument of power. Philosopher Paul B. Preciado likens the dildo to ‘a virus that corrupts the truth of sex and the genitals’, arguing that it betrays the master by ‘proposing itself as an alternative route to pleasure’, making a mockery of the master’s authority. No sex escapes theoretical inquiry as Seasonal probes at whether these power exchanges will help them stop being so infuriatingly accommodating to everyone else, in the way that people socialised as women are taught to do. Seasonal’s steady interrogation of sex acts, which are described in an explicit, stark manner – can feel suffocating rather than transcendent, although there are moments where sex takes them to the precipice of bliss. It’s not just my frustration with how Seasonal continually allows their will to be bent by men – and here I see how my irritation is more to do with my own programmed tendency to people-please – there is a deeper layer to the frustrations of the text, which I suspect is purposeful. When I question the affective quality of Seasonal’s sustained inquiry into power and submission, I gauge that the novel purposefully mimics how stifling the experience of prescribed gender can be.

Seasonal knows that László is trying to find a way ‘over the enormous wall of entitlement and egocentrism that sequesters him from the world’, that they must ‘be patient as he fumbles his way around the escape room that has been built for him by the patriarchy’. Seasonal sends this message from their notes app to László:

This passage illustrates the unembellished sexual language and fixation on instruments of power that recur throughout the novel. László responds to Seasonal’s message, begging to be sodomised. We learn that behind László’s longing there is shame – from the time he went to a bathhouse and was touched without consent. He intuits that Seasonal will provide the masculine energy he seeks, but will do so with tenderness and care. László returns to Seasonal’s apartment, where Seasonal makes a cyborg of their desiring body, inserting the bulbous end of the double dildo into their cunt and securing the harness around hips and buttocks. The instrument becomes implement for enacting mind- and body-fuck relations. Entering László, Seasonal appreciates his transformation: ‘He is an entirely different beauty in this moment’. Preciado separates realists/genitalists from countersexualists in his Countersexual Manifesto. Seasonal and László are the latter. Preciado explains how genitalists concern themselves with sexual activity that adheres to the so-called proper functions of their organs and bodies, whereas countersexualists use the organ as interface to access ‘pleasure or affects that can’t be represented by sexual difference, gender or sexual identity’. What does it mean to stop obsessing over penises and vaginas, to step outside the Freudian condition? Preciado’s countersexuality invites us to take up dildonics – ‘the sexuality of the postgender and post-sexually identified subject’ – and get lost in sexual translation, leaving the genitalists to ‘fuck within the assembly line of the biopenis/biovagina world’.

Seasonal doesn’t want to repeat the violences of the men who have caused hurt, and yet, their persistent desire is to make a man beholden to them in order to devastate him. In discovering their will to power, they encounter the high that comes from obliterating the other; they use the language of permissions and consent, and yet what they truly seek transgresses their moral concern for ethical BDSM. I remember putting on my mother’s high heels to stomp all over a cute neighbour boy when I was little – an act of vengeance for the destruction of my pillow fort; I felt both powerful and aroused. As one who has both been paid to be cruel to men or to be the object of their punishment, I am not convinced that we can ever have an ethical relationship to cruelty. Humans transgress, we cannot help ourselves. Poletti’s novel locates me at a place of tension where I must confront my own relationship to violence, as someone who grew up witnessing violence and then spent decades subconsciously reenacting victimisation. Like Seasonal, I have struggled to find a way to enact relationality outside of preprogrammed scripts.

A body is always in the process of becoming or unbecoming, is unpindownable. It’s impossible to say whether a body is this or that when the concept of the body contains multitudes. Life is characterised by change right down to the basic building blocks of matter, as physicist Karen Barad demonstrates. In quantum field theory an electron can exchange a virtual photon with itself – in a way, Barad suggests, touching itself. This self-touching – self-pleasuring? – virtual photon can then change identity, morphing into a virtual electron-positron pair that causes each other’s annihilation before transforming back into a single virtual photon which is reabsorbed by the electron. Barad’s writing on queer/trans intimacies illustrates the perversity and monstrosity which are at the core of all being: ‘Matter is an enfolding, an involution, it cannot help touching itself, and in this self-touching it comes in contact with the infinite alterity that it is.’ Matter touches itself and meets the infinite other which is also itself. Although Seasonal does not identify as trans, I am drawn to the ways that trans theory opens new ways of thinking about gender. As I read and reread Poletti’s novel, I see Barad’s writing as metaphor for Seasonal’s impulse to achieve transformative potential by annihilating László. A self-pleasuring body might generate a force that creates the condition for its own destruction, a force that is also self-sustaining. Sometimes pleasure looks like annihilation of self or other, a passion consummated via poles of magnetic attraction or repulsion. Observing Seasonal’s fixation on destruction, one might suggest that what they are really seeking is to obliterate the part of self which produces their repetition compulsion. Seasonal is learning what it means to step outside the role of femme, to privilege their needs above those of men. Yet, in spite of their commitment to deliver to László his annihilation, Seasonal’s reflexive people-pleasing remains the extra party in the room, adding to the frustration or tension of the narrative.

Seasonal’s visit to Australia activates memories of two stalkers and a rapist from their past. Even as they attempt to free their friend Y from an abusive heterosexual relationship, Seasonal understands the high of being in a position of power, primed to enact abuse. Seasonal speaks to Y with assurance about the pleasure of ‘being an asshole’ – how cruelty itself becomes an object of pursuit. They come to realise that ‘the fear of obliteration that Y is trying to outmaneuver is the fear they are trying to create’ in László, and yet they do not intend to bring this knowledge to him. Seasonal’s goal is for László to feel joy only if they are the one giving it to him; they want László to ‘feel crushing abyssal sadness’ when they are apart; they will permit László to be connected ‘to the outside world only so that he can know the shallowness’ of the world in comparison. Seasonal remains fixated on the male body, as this is the body they have been socialised to believe will put them at risk. As Barad reminds us: ‘Repulsion is at the core of attraction’. When we read Seasonal’s will to annihilate, the signs are evident that they who were once victim are now drawn to the role of coercive controller.  

Here I grow exasperated, not with the text so much as by the limited options that women (cis and trans) and non-binary people have for navigating a world rife with gender-based violence. We will learn from Poletti’s performative philosophy that flipping the script to occupy the role of aggressor is not the solution, and yet, what can be done to elude male violence? Preciado suspected that abandoning femininity could be a key feminist strategy when living under the threat of male violence – which is the undercurrent of heteropatriarchy. Facing the existential crisis of how to survive systemic violence, Preciado decided to ‘stop being a woman’. By then Preciado had read enough queer and feminist theory – physicist Karen Barad included – to imagine a way forward. To envision a body that transcends, which is trans, non-binary. Delivering his lecture ‘Can the Monster Speak?’ at the École de la Cause Freudienne conference in Paris in 2019, Preciado challenged the audience of 3,500 psychoanalysts to see him as a monster created by their psychoanalytic discourse and their clinical practices – a monster risen from prone analysand, speaking as their ‘monstrous equal’. Crushed by the social paradox that sees brutal violences acted upon women by the oppressors they are meant to love and serve, Preciado explained how he began taking testosterone ‘as an ally in the task of inventing an elsewhere’. So, too, does Poletti’s novel attempt to imagine this elsewhere. As for escaping gender-based violence, Preciado reflects that now in public spaces, provided he does not announce his transness, he experiences the ‘privilege of universality’ that renders men invisible. Here I am mindful to reflect on the current climate of hatred and violence that demands trans people remain hidden – and how the trans community experiences disproportionately higher rates of violence than the general population. To that effect, rather than disappear into the privilege of so-called universality, Preciado wields transness as a politics in the hope that monstrous hybridity and multiplicity might enable us to imagine a world beyond this broken one. 

To stage a third sexual encounter with László, Seasonal is forced by his scheduling excuses to track him down in Brussels. To Seasonal’s utter dismay, László’s needs still dictate the terms of their sexual relationship. Not only does László still refuse Seasonal the pleasure of his yes, he has also misplaced the kohl liner with which he is to mark consent on his body. The power struggle ignites. Seasonal feels their body fill with rage and decides to stew in that anger rather than subdue it to reassure László that they will forgive his carelessness. Seasonal eventually acquiesces – as they always do when faced with men’s failures. But before they do, Seasonal makes a conscious, embodied effort to resist binary programming – one of my favourite scenes in the book. Seasonal modulates their body language, leaning away from László rather than allowing him to make them a party to his dilemma: ‘They try to embrace the cold detachment that is crystalizing their usually open and amenable personality into something else, something new.’ As much as I want Seasonal to stay the mission of deprogramming socialised niceties, they cannot: ‘rather than feeling agile’ in their rage, they feel frozen by it. To save face, they give in to László’s sexual needs.

As the novel careens toward the scene of annihilation, Seasonal finally realises that it has been easier to let László occupy their mind space ‘than to ponder the murky, wide waters of their own desire and fear’. Already, in one of the most tender erotic scenes in the book, they have recognised the ways that ‘they are refracting in, through, by, with László’ – as in, they recognise their own eagerness and gratefulness in László as he prostrates himself before them. Even as Seasonal experiences a sense of ‘completeness, of openness, of unashamed curiosity and pleasure’ in this encounter wherein László puts his trust completely in them, they redouble their efforts at seeking his ultimate humiliation. This obsession comes to a head when Seasonal takes László from behind without consideration, compelling him to push through the pain to meet their desire; Seasonal then pulls the ‘male’ end of the dildo out with total detachment. Immediately after, László sobs in shock and with a sort of dazed gratitude; later, he names for Seasonal the boundaries which were breached: ‘Rape, sexual assault, disregard for the other, disinterest in consent.’ László terms these acts the essential conditions of male sexuality and remarks upon Seasonal’s ‘identity as a rapist’. Having reached this obliterating moment, Seasonal now feels completely lost. For all of their talk of ethical practice, they had not allowed themselves to know that their secret mission to devastate László would give him what he needed to overcome internalised trauma, but at the price of their own complete disorientation. They had sought to create an entirely new programming language by issuing forth a hello to the world, but their attempts to glitch the binary took them to the exact place they feared: mimicry of the violent masculine. As much as glitching the binaries was Seasonal’s attempt to force an operating system reset, the glitch opened them up to infection by the cultural gender virus, which carries with it codes for sexual performativity, scripted and reiterated by normative gender constraints. The book’s epilogue further deflates our lost protagonist, to whom László returns the favour, fucking Seasonal without care, in the very way they were always hoping to escape. The epilogue is subtitled ‘Keep Looking’ and so I take this miserable scene as a reminder that we must continue imagining alternate futures. Poletti’s performative philosophy guides us to a space where it is possible to glitch the binary, but we still need to learn to debug the code.

At her recent RMIT-hosted reading group ‘A Hacker Manifesto at 20’ – still wearing the fly ring gifted to her by Kathy Acker – McKenzie Wark asked us to question the specific language that we have inherited around capitalism. She asked questions like: What if capital isn’t an essence whose appearance changes throughout history but has morphed into something else? What does capital (e.g., Apple) make? When did Fortune 500 companies stop making anything and become something else (e.g., trading in information, branding, loans, patents)? How does information become property? How can we find value outside of extractivity? In Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse?, Wark explores how we cling to capitalism as a comfortable term for a difficult reality. Capitalism, she proposes, is just a trap designed to limit our thinking, so that we cannot imagine anything outside it. And what is the negation of capitalism? Is it communism? Wark describes how in the postbroadcast-era, the old culture industries discovered how to commodify work and leisure time without even providing entertainment: ‘We have to entertain each other, while they collect the rent, and they collect it on all social media time, public or private, work or leisure, and (if you keep your FitBit on) even when you sleep.’ Commodifying our sociability, argues Wark, is not so much a utopian communism as an everyday communism based on our need for connection. The dominant, vectorialist class exploits this desire for relationality, tagging and sorting us by target demographics.

Capitalism and gender – both hyperobjects obscure our ability to imagine alternate worlds. Gender is the monster that hides in plain sight, almost too big for us to see. Gender is a collective illusion which, Preciado tells us, may once have served the survival of a select group of humans but which is now ‘an unwieldly armour’ that leads to oppression, death. Throughout written history, in scientific studies and algorithmic trainings, the assigned-male sex has been the alpha and omega, the locus of all inquiry. Those who come to knowledge through reason or lived experience understand the brokenness of a capitalist order whose consumer logic relies on placing us into categories so as to market more of the same bullshit that keeps us miserable. As we continue our wholesale consumption of the lie of the good life, we are caught in a cycle that Lauren Berlant calls cruel optimism, a time of treading water just to survive, all the while grasping for a happiness that is structurally out of reach. Meanwhile, the dominant exploiting class – what McKenzie Wark names in her cult classic A Hacker Manifesto the ‘vectors of communication’ – profits by hoarding the data of the underclasses, to sell or feed into machine learning to profit their businesses. The productivity tools that we are given for free, for now, we will have to pay for as our dependence grows. Our longing for connection ensnares us. If we are looking for love, we will be sure to find it – else a flawed approximation of love will make us their mark. If we are looking for seduction, opportunities for climax are virtually unlimited at any price. A rhythm develops between fingertips and silica screens as we grasp at opportunities for reciprocated longing, reflected desire, or just a RedTube-induced orgasm that lasts longer than the ad if you’re lucky. From one server farm to another, the cloud is a highway to desire in all of its tentacular manifestations.