Deep Lines

The Deep Lines of Social Media.

Lived lines and identity in social media follow paths well trodden by machines first. They are the masters of moving through this a-epidermal, this surface which has a depth and width ungraspable by any sense. These paths are identities, yours and mine, and they form in the brake residing in the cybernetic brainwaves that are us.

We are these paths in so much as we live by the desire to follow our objectives to become, even to figure as. In this we need time to figure out how we can fit in the small flat surface containing the unrevealing and un-tarvelable in its fast rhythmic pulsation of un-numberable microchips. These electricities follow the paths we cannot, they switch the paths our brains cannot, and in them we find ourselves.

It is here that a suggestive power resides, here that the deception of identity on-line resides. This identity, now constructed in feedback where concentrating constricting the powerful serpent thins out into its tail before swallowing our head in its mouth thus connecting us to ourselves by a touch un-imagined, only figured.

But in this spiral of re-learning ourselves we are not free to roam, we do not have free access, or even free use, neither in practice or conceptually. Use and UX is guided by rules imposed by machinic logic and legal fittings of Ideals as guided by the pressure for profit.

The bodies that find their lives on-line are in-line with the most powerful machine ever created to create and consume identities, and it functions because there is no difference, no distiction when one is attached to the machine between what one is and what path one takes.

The paths traveled by us on-line are always in-line, they powerfully align us with power and rule precisely because what travels has no path to diverge from. And because if it is diverged or distinct, un-attached to its self it is presented as broken: 404. And this accumulation of distiction from itself can be presented as broken up until the very surface on which it presents itself as broken.

Here is what matters: there is no line on-line you can diverge from, there is no path that is untrodden, there is no path way where a machine has not already established a secure connection in which you can travel.