Personnel File

"A year here and she still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly… the dreams came on in the Japanese night like livewire voodoo, and she'd cry for it, cry in her sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in her capsule in some coffin hotel, hands clawed into the bedslab, temper foam bunched between her fingers, trying to reach the console that wasn't there." — William Gibson, Neuromancer

In the crowded loneliness of the 'net's neon lattice, there is a silent, cold place for everyone somewhere. A place to scream into a personal digital abyss. Sometimes, those places are found, and they get a bit less silent, a bit less cold. If you're queer, antifacist, transhumanist, cyberpunk — then I'm glad the dataflow brought you here.

I'm a anarcho-cyberpunk. I survive the all-powerful, techno-omnipotent mega-corporation-state complex and the rising blood-red tide of fascism with my cyberdeck in hand and the 'net's electric lifeblood singing in my veins. I know that all is probably lost, but that's no reason to stop fighting, because some fights are worth fighting for their own sake, just to know that you did fight. I know that there's little one disabled, antisocial cyberpunk can do, but I do what I can when I can, which means loving and protecting the people closest to me, spreading compassion and solving problems where I can, and never letting loss of hope stop me from building small beautiful things in the interstices of the system, even though I know they'll be crushed eventually, or reconciled with capitalism (or already were); not in spite of their ephemerality and pointlessness, but because of it.

In other words, I'm a cyberpunk — not just a punk that likes Ministry, but a punk anarchist for the 21st century: that fights a war she knows is probably hopeless against a technologically enhanced system with her own technologically enhanced strength, because giving up any tool we can use, especially one that brings as much freedom and power and as many new (cyber)spaces to exist in and free as computers, is a crime. I teach others how to hide from the lidless eye of the megacorporate-state panopticon because what's more beautiful than real freedom, in the software world or outside of it? We should all kill our heroes, especially the creeps, but Stallman was right about one thing.

To back me up and motivate me in this struggle, I analyze the anti-authority, anti-capitalist, anti-absolutist, anti-hierarchical concepts that can free my mind from the system's propaganda and maybe, one day, help us build a rhizomatic, stigmergic, autonomous society. In the process, I shamelessly shoplift ideas from Nietzsche, Novatore, Sartre, Camus, Stirner, Benjamin Tucker, Proudhon, Shawn P. Wilbur, Mark Fisher, and Kevin Carson, to name a few. It's not just philosophers that deeply influence me, though — aesthetics, in its ability to produce new visions of the present and the future, and new subjectivities, is a kind of philosophy, a kind of praxis, and so I'm just as deeply influenced by Lovecraft's facination with the other and the outside; with Alastair Reynolds and Bruce Sterling's explorations of a rapidly accelerating far future posthuman non-utopia, by Ursula K. Le Guin and Ada Palmer's ambiguous utopias, by William Gibsons visions of surviving, and being hacked, by all encompassing technocapitalism, and more.

I'm a hacker in the old sense of the word: I build things in cyberspace, code and writing are my artforms, I bleed words and opcodes. I construct perpetually-incomplete digital structures for their own challenge and beauty, just for the sake of stretching myself and exploring the inside of this lightning trapped in silicon.

I am a butch trans woman, a transhumanist, an accelerationist, a xenofeminist, a queer in all senses. I analyze the concepts, finding beauty in the fluidity and diversity of human experiences, deconstructing social constructs and reified notions of nature, but also reconstructing new ways of understanding them to share the results.

I reject the body that "nature" has given me and the societal norms that came with it and change myself to suit my will. I modify myself to become more myself.

I am ever-changing, and this page is always out of date. There is no fixed self, only the creative nothing.

This blog exists as a cybernetic extension of myself, because sometimes an idea, a conceptual problem, grabs hold of me and won't let go, and I need to bleed it out into unicode bytes and streamed pixels before it drives me insane. This blog exists on the datasphere because I want people to find it.

My writing straddles the line between poetic continental philosophy and rigid academic philosophy. It varies from long-form investigations of subjects to short and punchy car-crashes of conceptual material designed to jack information into your brain as efficiently as possible. Most of it isn't written like this… yet.

Right now, my neural pathways are significantly dampened by my failed recovery from a concussion, probably due to the prior ones I've received and pre-existing conditions, resulting in aa functional neurological disorder that prevents me from doing anything requiring focus, thinking, or visual processing for extended periods of time. So I write and program when I can, and in the quiet chasms of the months between I silently weep for what I lost, like Case and his Japanese nights. I'd make a deal with the devil to get out, but I still haven't found Wintermute. So I'm lost in limbo, life in perpetual cryogenic hybernation — but it's slowly speeding up.

I have a page dedicated to many of the things that have influenced me, with my comments on them as well as cliff's notes of them here.