sex after the techno-feudalists
will it exist?
I just read and really enjoyed “Among the Reality Entrepreneurs,” James Duesterberg’s piece in The Point on Dimes Square, web3, and the funny characters involved in both. Duesterberg’s account of the scene, its strivings and fallacies, is rich and flecked with nice detail—he also keeps the editorializing light, which comes as a relief since editorializing about Dimes Square is now its own national (international?) pastime. People should go read the article themselves, as I don’t think I can summarize it with any justice, but for now, some hypotheses—inspired by Duesterberg’s account—about what parts of Dimes Square are trying to do and why:
The main topic of Duesterberg’s essay is Urbit, a web3ish initiative masterminded by famous reactionary guy Curtis Yarvin; Urbit is a peer-to-peer network that supposedly allows users to run their own virtual servers while purchasing space on the Urbit network. I’m likely fucking up the cybernetics of this, but it seems that buying a space on Urbit would be like owning a part of today’s internet. The size of your part, called a “star” or “galaxy,” depends on how much you pay (like so much of web3, Urbit is pay to play). On Urbit, all your online activity—principally generating content and “influencing,” I’m guessing—gets routed through your personal server. Somehow in this process you are being paid for all this, probably by monetizing the content you produce and host. Another possible analogy is that owning a part of Urbit would be like owning a hype-house, except you’re all alone in the hype-house, marketing and selling pieces of yourself, and also the hype-house is not a real home you could ever live in.
As Duesterberg notes, in some ways Urbit’s premise is continuous with our usage of the internet today. Unlike industrial capitalism, which siphons value from the labor we perform, contemporary tech capitalism mines aspects of our selves: our data, identities and desires. It is the self, as opposed to the self’s labor power, that gets “vampirized.” A project like Urbit essentially embraces this approach while, in a feudal twist that doubles as bribe, offers to users the ability to own small parcels of the virtual landscape in which they’re churning out all that data. You have an inviolable piece of digital estate, your own fiefdom where you host your content and, maybe one day, get currency in return. Duesterberg sums it up thus: “whoever builds the best, most seductive world wins … reality itself is the ultimate and only commodity.”
So far, so Baudrillardian—yet the key paradox Duesterberg gestures to is that Urbit, while subsuming you into the frictionless, postmodern flux of virtual living, holds out two very traditional liberal promises as stuffy bulwarks against the chaos. The first is property ownership. The second is sovereign selfhood. Your space on Urbit, because you own it, makes you a proprietor and a self. No one can take that away from you, even if they take everything else. Furthermore, because you have complete control over your “planet,” you can shape it to all your desires; there will be little need for contributions from other people, much less for obeying other people’s rules. Under Urbit, the internet is transformed from a space almost irrevocably defined by exchange (the utopian ‘90s-era internet as a democratic ecstasy of sharing—obviously unsuccessfully at work today) into a space that promises to rescue you from exchange. You lack for nothing, so what could be gained from others? It’s just you and your little hype-house, hyping away! The apex of this escape from exchange is the escape from politics; as Duesterberg describes, the neoreactionaries of Urbit’s ilk are disdainful of politics and all the rank communication it involves. Their dream is a dream of power and efficiency somehow detached from political process.
This is interesting because of course a third tenet of liberal political philosophy is free trade, and beyond that, the belief in not just the desirability but inevitability of exchange with others. Adam Smith wrote of a world of nations which, each specializing in their own industries, receive what they lack from one another (I trade you my wine for your cloth, or whatever). Urbit people shrink from this kind of vision—hence their anti-social ethos. Ironically, however, they are now in the unenviable position of having to proselytize for Urbit and convert new users.1 So they must enter into the real world of exchange and networking (and even politics) that has convened on Dimes Square; from there they get what they can of clout and attention. This horrid combination of anti-sociality and clout-chasing is not new. It is actually a too-perfect summation of the worst kind of contemporary American character: the character who pursues an every-man-for-himself individualism while jealously hiding an alienated core, an emptiness of the self that, in fact, is the precursor to a fear and lust for others.
Techno-feudalists’ attachment to the socializing and rather old-school values of Dimes Square (attention, fame, access, etc) makes me wonder how serious they are about their political philosophy. In general, I also think such a political philosophy must fail, or at least fail to be largely applicable, because no matter how much crypto you get or how many stars you own, you still need to live (and I mean physically live) in a world that fulfills your material needs. web3 will either figure out a way to hitch itself to agricultural production and bodily management, somehow negating the virtual/reality divide so that its users won’t ever have to take breaks to eat, drink, sleep, piss or shit,2 or it will be limited to the small elite who can afford to pursue their literal self-valorization online while parasitically having their physical needs met by workers toiling outside the web. (And where there is production and the distribution of resources, there will always be politics.) Maybe all of that gets voided if we can one day upload our consciousnesses to the cloud. Maybe not. This has always been the problematic uncertainty with Baudrillard, whose line was about hyperreality replacing and overtaking everyday reality. Economic production—and the human needs it serves—is a reality that as of now just won’t go away. You can’t actually have the map without the territory, because a set of co-ordinates is not enough to survive on.
It seems obvious that motivating a lot of Urbit’s fantastical ideas are desires first stoked and then thwarted by postwar capitalism. People can no longer own actual property, so why not own it online? And: people don’t want to work, because work no longer guarantees the good life and is happening under increasingly unfair conditions. So why not, instead of working, just let yourself, your identity and your understanding of the world, be packaged and commodified? It’s less effort—probably. For a certain class of intellectual and creative workers, this proposition makes natural sense, because since the advent of the gig economy it has felt like writers and artists are already selling their full selves rather than their output anyway.3
The big joke is that even as the incels and the Urbit users imagine a life blessedly free from exchange, they are still, for now, dependent on a society marked by exchange: of funding, of recognition, of conversation. Having to quest through Dimes Square to sell their idea, the Urbit people end up becoming rather enraptured by the very real-world temptations that Dimes Square has to offer. One of these is sex, which is of course the ultimate symbol of, act of, exchange. Duesterberg ends the piece with an anecdote about the Urbit people trying and failing to get into a party run by a modeling agency. I was very much struck by this, because I have always suspected that so much of the rhetoric, rage and otherwise showboaty intellectualizing that engage people in Dimes Square are mostly shoddy strategems, guises behind which exist the usual desires that draw people to big scenes: the desire for sex and the desire to be desired. That’s my cynical and subjective view, cultivated from my experience as a woman and a lifetime’s worth of occasional encounters with hostile nerds. But I do think it’s notable that the one thing Urbit’s vision can’t offer right now is anything approximating the fulfillment of a sexual encounter between two people. The internet today is perhaps actually more innovative in that respect, in that it can at least mediate sexual encounters or increase their likelihood. But if the next version of the web is all about self-autonomy and living life online as much as possible, thereby avoiding the physical issue of other people and the metaphysical hell that other people represent, then where is the sex? Is it happening? Or is all this shit just peripheral to a void that is also a desire no one can get away from, no matter how hard they try (or think)?
New York, especially downtown Manhattan, has always been a place where sex enters into myriad equations of exchange: sex for money, sex for success, sex for love, sex for art, sex for access. In New York if you have one of half of the equation you can usually get the other, and it rarely matters which side you start on, which offering you’re born or trading with: You can fuck your way to the top, or you can use whatever proportions of money, talent and raw charisma you have to barter for love. The beauty is that, in this city, neither of those options is understood to be pathetic or unseemly; people accept and enjoy the game. To me, tech edgelords seem so allergic to the criss-crossing and unmanageability of such flows; they have been trying for a while, now, to control them, either by quantifying such exchanges (via the assignation of points, scores, credit); finding some master unit of currency that can purchase all things, even access, and thereby render the exchanges safely unidirectional; or negating the need for exchange in the first place.
So why are they here, in New York? They could be creating their techno-communities anywhere else (that’s the beauty of virtuality), and there are plenty of cities in America with capital and conspiracy theories sloshing around. Am I being too cruelly reductive in thinking the answer is so simple? At least this answer, if true, is somewhat universalizing, or I should say humanizing. Almost everyone seeks love, and almost everyone wants to party with a model.
not to mention the irony (impossibility?) of cultivating a reality without input from others even as you’re trying to make that reality as attractive to others as possible. can a reality be reality if it’s not shared with or verified by anyone else?
à la the apparatus that accompanies the infinite jest movie in infinite jest, a kind of chair (if I’m remembering correctly?) which meets people’s bodily needs so completely that they become free to watch the movie until they die. this image—zombified people hooked up to sinister machino-umbilical cords of sustenance—also occurs in the matrix. what about the 90s/00s made this image so potent? why were we so swayed by this belief that humans would soon be freed from physical need, only to use this freedom for the dystopian purposes of mindless cultural consumption?
it’s notable that what has replaced this image, which many neoreactionaries and tech edgelords find so horrifying (take the red pill!), is the sublime and peaceful image of the consciousness in the cloud. what makes the latter so desirable to those same neoreactionaries and techies is the absence of the body, an absence those guys (often guys) are always chasing. the horror of the infinite jest image is not the usurpation of mind it represents, but the body’s stubborn existence regardless, its disgusting vulnerability. the goal is never to fulfill physical needs. it’s to have none in the first place.
it is actually really interesting how within this distinction between value from labor and the existing value of the self, the artist exists as the liminal test-case, the figure caught in the middle. there have been centuries of debate about what kind of labor creative labor actually is and if it’s labor at all. how do artists produce value? from where does the value originate—the artist’s brain, their unique genius, or the toil (much of it physical!) that the artist undergoes to actually produce their art? we know what side of the debate urbit falls on—under urbit we are all reality artists, which is a better way of saying content creators, and artistic pursuit is indivisible from the optimization of our personal worlds, the molding of our digital property to our impulses and aims. the value we create is just an added bonus. contra duesterberg’s title, you’re an artist first and an entrepreneur second—and then only unwittingly.