love in the time of Apple Vision Pro
i'm learning to be vulnerable on the internet and maybe you're watching me?
Talyssa are you just going to talk about love forever? No… but it’s love month and I love love month so I’m taking advantage of it. But also, love is a stubborn parasite— it’s hard to talk about anything with gusto while avoiding any mention of love. But I digress.
I believe my most earnest self is the one that exists on the internet, but I sometimes wonder if this is a contradiction.
As soon as I learned how to exist online, I became obsessed with existing online. But it was always separate. I existed online in addition to Existing. I’d say it was shame (the segregation of self); the same kind you feel when a friend reads their birthday card in front of you (I speak to you directly here in this card, I gave you the card, but I never imagined you reading it).
Dividing myself between online and offline caused friction in every instance of identity. Now I see how the online one was always the version that served my self rather than another… but because of the way I thought the internet had to operate, I figured that assumption had to be wrong. I believed her less. There were cataclysmic events that I can talk about another time… but they ultimately led to me here now; my self, online in earnest (trying, at least).
I can only know this in hindsight:
Parallel processes in which I stopped taking both myself and the internet seriously. Now both places feel like home.
There is so much privacy when everything is public. I can release something into this infinite ether and it will feel intimate because no one is watching me right now, yet I relinquish the responsibility of carrying it all in confidence.
The internet might be a sacred space (if you carry yourself with integrity and treat it as one)— I am still thinking about this.
Find: my fragility. Pieces of closure. Pieces of love. Confessions. I scatter them around the world wide web.
Now love. Bear with me.
There is a familiar sadness at the interface between love and computer
I suppose part of it is because we are meant to believe what I mentioned before; the virtual self is not a true one. It must always be operating with ulterior motive (dictated directly or indirectly by another). It is the manipulator. And love? It requires reality.
There are all the dystopic tropes too; hopeless digital romance, robot sex, Smart House. They bank on irony that we’ve assumed is true but on the premise of the irony itself. Did that make sense? I’m trying to say that we made it that way. No one actually said we cannot practice love on the internet. We just assumed we couldn’t and now doing so is a punchline.
Understand that the popular ways we use the internet do not readily lend themselves to love. I fear that technology now is all about homogenization. Its ambition is in becoming the best version of something that already is. It’s iterative which works for the sake of the market; it requires little risk. To us, it looks like this: all of our devices are the same, our profiles are rigid containers, the algorithm keeps us in the echo chamber. In depersonalization, where do we feel?
Which makes the feeling radical. Which makes an expression of love on the internet feel more true than a bouquet of roses and a box of chocolates. I said expression, not display. There’s #love and then there’s something that has the feeling; it was born out of loving practice.
I started being able to tie words to this observation after discovering Chia Amisola’s work. They’re a creative coder who explores topics of love in the virtual landscape and they did a really good interview about it all on another substack.
There is a different strain of intimacy experienced with web-based art. I think it’s because you’re not standing in a gallery with a handful of others bearing witness… you’re more likely alone, in the comfort of your own space, actively engaging with another. The internet’s flaw (we are socialized to believe) is that it is hyper-isolating. The internet’s strength (in translating intimacy) is that it’s hyper-isolating. Is this what gives virtual love volume? The fact that you can act upon it without immediate perception? That visceral feeling has the freedom to materialize without hesitation. I get a nice little text in the privacy of my home and I giggle out loud and then I call myself pathetic (also out loud). If someone tries flirting with me in public, I deflect it (how dare you invite me to feel?).
And that’s kind of something I’m trying to synthesize; I hope that forging space for my loving self on the internet will make me more comfortable being vulnerable offline. I am here on behalf of a feeling but aren’t I the feeling, too?
Ritual: in the wake of my breakup, I built a website.
It’s here, if you want to see it. I don’t remember if it works right on mobile.
The whole thing is built on a simple spreadsheet I populated with 5 years of journal entries following the course of the entire relationship and then some. Nothing new was created except the html that houses it all… so then, why was this my closure and not the mere act of reading the original pages? It was the release of it. The fact that it exists now on a public domain. I own it, but the experience is now common goods.
Observed or not, I made myself present and in that ritual of virtual preservation, I declared that I cannot lose something that belongs to me unconditionally. (The hardest part about leaving the thing I called love was trying to prove that there was (is) Love at all. I proved it to myself (it is mine) and I put it on public display and now it can’t be forgotten: Love happens so Love returns (it is mine)).
Anyways, can you see me? I am LED and fleeting, but perhaps I sat here long enough to make it all matter.
I’m talking to you now but by the time you hear me I will not be talking to you. You’re experiencing my past and I am addressing you in the future. Yet we are sharing something that is tender and if I took it further, we could experience love. I love you, you see? It’s tangible— matter now.
Technology is a complicated thing because we made it, and we also decided how to fear it. Is god in heaven because he too fears—yeah. Yes, probably. I am spending all this time thinking about love sitting alone at my desk in my empty apartment. Absolute silence. The cynic would demand I touch grass. But where else if not here? Is this not a testament to what I have at all times? A feeling that I do not rely on others for. A self-replenishing resource and a primal desire to infect; in Love, I am the best virus. There are so many people on the other side of this screen that I do not have access to. Should mutual experiences only be shared with those I can touch now? If my identity is true, and so is yours, does it matter through which medium we arrive at our confluence? What counts is the visibility. Here, on the internet, I have made the conscious decision to become visible. It is slow and challenging and vulnerable, but I want to be seen and when I am seen, I am received only as myself. Should we not practice here what we want to practice in the real world too? Back to the desire path again.
A magic trick: Here at the end of an email, we are together but in a new definition of the word (the internet seemed to make everything figurative; together here is more like a symbol of togetherness). Yet, we are together because I am more with you than I might ever be. Isn’t that weird? I will go out, I will see sun, I will breathe real air, and in all those moments I will hold myself in my hand and know her more. You will be doing other things in that time and you are definitely not thinking about how I am happening. You are aware that our togetherness is something we get to (not have to) indulge in on our own terms. I am not offended if you choose not to, because I am still here without you. Here, I am still speaking to you without you. Here, I am visible without you witnessing me. But you’re here now because you arrived. Suddenly I am speaking to you, you are witnessing me, but are we more our selves than we were? No. Together is separate from You and I, but we matter within it. Here, we are, and if you told me you loved me here, I would probably believe you.
Sometime, I will talk more about intimate web. It’s a good topic but it will demand a lot of rambling. As a precursor, you can look at the notes I keep in my digital garden.
I have also built another website about love (more like a house for current and future projects about love) that you can look at unofficially. Again, it’s something I want to talk more about in a different space… so expect it to come up again.