Disorientation: Being Black in the World

        When I reflect on my life, I often linger on those small moments of embarrassment and shame that have disrupted my sense of self. Ian Williams’ Disorientation: Being Black in the World is somewhat of a memoir that lingers on similar moments, but specifically with a racial layer that my being White shields me from. That is the sense of disorientation: moments when race makes itself visible and distorts a racialized person’s sense of themselves in the world.

One of the most explicit examples of this, in both senses, is when Williams recounts his niece being called the n-word by a young White girl. The first time she is called the word, she feels herself at a disconnect from the world around her, disoriented from her usual experiences and reduced to her race. Other moments seem more innocuous (generally what are described as microaggressions), but nonetheless create a profound impact on the person experiencing them. For example, Williams discusses being in middle school and having to select instruments for music class. He initially wants to play the trumpet and is told that his lips are too big. He switches to the French horn and flounders at it. The narrative seems like it ought not matter much (I was told I couldn’t play the trumpet in grade 7 because I was going to get braces), but the exchange with his teacher lingers. He considers the comment about his lips as a form of biological determinism that is pervasive and causes him to question his own place based on his racialized features.

The book is replete with personal stories, and therein lies its strength. If you’re looking to read about race from a more theoretical framework, there are other texts that serve that purpose more effectively. If you’re looking for a more personal connection to issues, Disorientation is the way to go, since it gives the personal touch with a hint of the wider systemic issues. Consider, for example, his brief commentary about how racialized professors are routinely ranked lower on University course evaluations—which he ties to the moment when he had to leave the room for evaluations and when he returned a student announced that his green card was ready. In the context of being a Black academic in the United States, Williams also discusses the use of African American as a general term for anyone Black, regardless of citizenship status (American) or place of origin (Africa vs. Jamaica, for instance).

One of the highlights of the book, in my mind, is a chapter that uses traffic stops as an anchor. Williams recounts driving with his friend and the chapter drifts in and out of anecdotes of being stopped by police. Williams’ friend’s disorientation is poignant because there’s an element of self-doubt. Everything he describes, as Williams notes, is racially motivated. The police officer keeps his hand on his gun, approaches the car from the passenger side window, repeatedly asks if the driver is the owner of the car, and so on. Yet, the driver was going over the speed limit. It’s a rich chapter for exploring the standards of perfection that Black people need to achieve in order to feel totally guiltless in situations where their race is leveraged against them. The pathos of the chapter is beautifully wrought and presented in such a literary mode that it’s hard to ignore William’s strengths as a writer.

Something I need to question in myself, or at least continually keep in check, is that the sections of  Williams’ book that I find most engaging are the pieces that also appeal to my White sensibilities. For instance, Williams has an excellent section about his troubled relationship with David Foster Wallace. The famed writer has an essay about the dictionary in which he talks about how he teaches standard White English to Black students, essentially out of a kind of tough love—they need to learn how to write White because that’s the standard of the Academy. Williams offers a beautiful commentary on how he imagines DFW might treat that Black student today, given DFW’s sense of curiosity and willingness to engage with others. It’s a loving consideration of an author, flawed perhaps, and a generous reimagining of how the same author might address racism in the institution today. Williams adds dimension to the argument that I find particularly resonant.

I’m going to quote a section of the chapter at length here, since it offers so many wonderful insights and dispositions towards writing that I find valuable. Williams writes the following, nearly a eulogy, about David Foster Wallace:

Why must the work fall on the Black student to close the breach between groups? [...] Would it be any more work to appreciate SBE than it would be to appreciate Black music? But the fear of contamination keeps White people from engaging with Black expression until it becomes profitable economically or culturally. I’d like to believe that if David Foster Wallace were alive today, and paying attention to the current racial conversations in America, he’d have a significantly revised version of this speech: that it would have become a conversation, not a speech. Instead of expecting the student to step towards Whiteness, he would step towards Blackness. I see in him [...] over the course of his work, the potential of White people to become less casual about the psychic violence they do to Black people. I know he’s dead, and I know there’s no way to confirm his trajectory, yet the evidence of his thoughtfulness and humility indicates a White man with capacity for growth. His curiosity and self-analysis prevent him from being willfully ignorant. Can we forgive a person their ignorance? Can we take heart that dead White people might yet change their minds?

This passage is the culmination of the discussion and identifies some central problems with Academia—that systemic change relies on the system’s victims to reshape it. It is strange, after all, that we have an appreciation of Black arts and yet insist that White English is the standard. I also appreciate the generous reading of figures from the past, which gives us the opportunity to select what is valuable and dismiss that which is not. I fear that when clearly influential personages are dismissed wholesale that it leads to a culture of conflict, so to be willing to give DFW the benefit of the doubt, that he would switch from a speech to a conversation, seems to be the most productive way of having the conversation. I also really love that question at the end: “Can we take heart that dead White people might yet change their minds?” I find that such a rich question, contrary to nature and yet at some level it resonates.

Disorientation is a short work that offers a number of specific moments that are worth discussing at greater length, especially in conversation with others. Williams offers his perspectives in an approachable, personable tone which I think appeals to many potential audiences, including ones who may hold more overtly racist views. Since Williams is less dense theoretically than some other texts in the same field, it’s much harder to feel that the argument is controversial. It’s another person’s experience, which has a universal quality while remaining effectively focused on its particulars.

It’s a good book. A short book that is a great introduction to conversations about race—and one that is more personable than controversial. Like moments of Disorientation, perhaps the book will stick with you—but this time in a positive and productive way.

Happy reading!

It Ended Badly: Thirteen of the Worst Breakups in History by Jennifer Wright

If you’re looking to start your summer early, It Ended Badly by Jennifer Wright is about as close as I come to a beach read and I’d recommend it as a fun, light read where a bunch of people get murdered. Subtitled Thirteen of the Worst Breakups in History, Wright narrates the termination of relationships of historical figures and their often surprising or amusing fallouts. She presents history in an accessible and entertaining mode, with her writing style taking on a breezy quality that would welcome even the most history-averse folks.

Wright’s research has uncovered all kinds of amusing anecdotes—sometimes darkly comic—and her writing style makes use of short sentences and casual tone to enhance the comedic effect. For instance, when writing about Nero murdering Poppaea, she writes, “Finally, one night, after Nero had been at the races, Poppaea, who was pregnant at the time, began yelling at him. And so, he jumped up and down on her belly until she was dead. Nero felt bad about this.” The simplicity and directness of that last sentence gives the passage a great comedic punch, despite the grisly death it describes. 

Actually, if you want just a taste of the book but don’t want to commit to a full-length text, Wright’s first chapter, covering Nero and Poppaea, is the one most likely to grip you. In describing the historical context for Nero’s relationship and breakup, Wright really paints a picture of Rome that counteracts the romanticism it is generally imbued with. It is a place of grisly deaths, endless plotting, and arbitrary slaughter. She shows how wildly violent ancient Rome was, including how in gladiatorial matches (which often ended in death anyhow), audience members would be pulled into the arena and thrown to the animals. In her words, “Romans loved finding creative and unexpected ways of killing people.”

Wright relies on historical accounts to help build her narratives. For instance, she draws from Tacitus’ accounts of Claudius’ death. Some of the details are speculative. When Wright talks about Aggrippina poisoning Claudius, she explains: “Claudius attempted to use a feather to induce vomiting. Remember: Claudius was a smart man and doubtless thought if he had been truly poisoned, he could tickle his throat and vomit up the poison. Great planning, right? Really clever. Agrippina poisoned the feather. At least, that’s my favourite version of this story about how Claudius died. There’s some dispute.” When in doubt, Wright makes sure to offer the most amusing and sensational versions of the tale. 

Nero is by far the weirdest of the figures she examines. After murdering Poppaea, for instance, Nero “ordered that rather than being consumed by fire, her body should be stuffed with fragrances and embalmed. [...] Later, when performing in classical dramas, Nero would wear a mask depicting his dead wife for all female roles. He also grieved the end of their relationship by murdering her son.” See what I mean about these short sentences juxtaposed at the end? The comic bent is always present. Wright also describes how Nero would dress as an animal, be confined to a cage, be released, and then attack the genitals of prisoners. One unfortunate boy seemed to have a resemblance to Poppaea and Nero made a eunuch of him, married him, and then after Nero’s death he was passed around among other wealthy weirdos. Poor guy.

Speaking of wealthy weirdos, Wright traces the lineage of a number of figures throughout history, like the third marquess of Queensbury who was discovered eating a servant that he’d been roasting on a spit. He was a ten year old cannibal. Meanwhile an 11th century Venetian princess was put to death for eating with a fork because “there was a lot of talk around that time whether or not forks were tools of Satan.”

Alas, you likely want to know who is discussed in this book of historical oddities and breakups. Taking a chronological approach, Wright addresses Nero and Poppaea, Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry II, Lucrezia Borgia and Giovanni Sforza, Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, Anna Ivanovna, Timothy Dexter, Caroline Lamb and Lord Byron, John Ruskin and Effie Gray, Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, Edith Wharton and Morton Fullerton, Oskar Kokoschkla and Alma Mahler, Norman Mailer and Adele Morales Mailer, and finally Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher and Elizabeth Taylor.

As with a lot of nonfiction, I found myself most drawn to the subjects with whom I was already familiar. That said, each chapter had some interesting historical note or offered some deeper insight into the time. For example, Wright really challenges my perception of Henry VIII. Apparently he was very talented and very attractive? Who knew! It was also compelling to hear about the last words his executed wives had to say, particularly because there was such a difference between them. I had no idea that Lord Byron was so intensely cruel, either.

Other literary figures took on a prominent place in my imagination for this book. Edith Wharton is painted with particular compassion. Wright documents Wharton’s inexperience of life, offering some slight literary commentary, as well. The story shows Wharton as being naive and unable to find information about married life. She comes across as incredibly sheltered, with an even malicious tone from her mother when she asked about bedroom matters. With her mother telling her she was being inappropriate, Wharton gets married having little idea of the facts of life. It’s kind of a tragic tale, especially because her husband was kind of a boring dope devoted to her while the rakish Morton Fullerton seduced her and opened her eyes to a world of passion she was never able to quite recover after their breakup.

Wright preserves particular malice for Norman Mailer. In the introduction to the book and in several other chapters, Wright references Mailer as being just the worst. Admittedly, his story is pretty wild. The fact that he is still at least somewhat revered as a novelist is pretty unbelievable, given that he stabbed his wife twice at a party and told everyone not to touch her and “let the bitch die.” Granted, he doesn’t even come close to Nero’s level of weirdness or cruelty, but given that this happened so recently in history gives the whole thing a much more sordid quality. I already had a bad taste in my mouth after reading his 1300 page novel Harlot’s Ghost, which has no ending and has sequels that were never written, but this truly clinches it.

Beyond those people with whom I was already familiar, there were some new figures who warranted a place in the history books for their oddities. Timothy Dexter stands out as a peculiarly eccentric fellow. He seemed to have an incredibly lucky track record with starting businesses that were by all accounts doomed to fail. He then faked his death and his wife wasn’t sad enough, so he just…pretended she was a ghost. He would refer to her as a ghost, talk about her death, and act as if she didn’t exist while in conversation with others. And others seemed to kind of go along with it? It’s a very peculiar homelife. He also fancied himself a philosopher and published a number of volumes with no punctuation (postmodern before his time, maybe?). He referred to himself as the greatest philosopher in the Western world and when someone suggested he could “probably use at least some punctuation,” Dexter made an alteration to the book’s second edition. He “added a page of punctuation at the end so readers could insert marks wherever they liked, or, as he claimed, ‘I put in enough here and they may be pepper and salt it as they please.’” What a strange fellow.

All things considered, It Ended Badly is an informative history book—it’s not the hard facts and dates you might expect of a historian, but it’s an entertaining and engaging way to delve into the past. The humorous tone of the book is inviting, if maybe a little over reliant on eating icecream breakup stereotypes. It’s a nice light read if you want to take a bit of a break from all the heaviness of the world. Sure, things are heavy in this book too, but with time and distance even forcing people to sleep in an ice palace to punish them comes across as more funny than malicious.

Hope your reading—and your relationships—are happy as ever!

Tell by Jonathan Buckley

The title of Jonathan Buckley’s book Tell is a cruel joke: the book’s title promises disclosure but only delivers such a thin, ghostly thread of a narrative that it begs the question: just what is being told here?

The premise of the book is as follows: Curtis, an unspeakably wealthy entrepreneur, has a large staff tending to his home. The whole book is an interview with his gardener that reads somewhat like a deposition, but is presumably for a film adaptation of the rich man’s life. The gardener delves into the intimate dramas of Curtis’ love life, the conflict between members of the staff, an accident that seems to damage Curtis’ memory, the bad habits and suspicious behaviours of Curtis’ children and their partners, and so on. There are a few key events that seem to be important: the death of Lily, Curtis’ first wife, Curtis’ art-buying habits under Karolina’s guidance, the journalist Lara writing a book about Curtis, Curtis finding his birth mother, and a strange series of dinners.

The entire book is presented as an extended monologue and its format poses a number of questions. First, why is the gardener being interviewed? Second, why is the gardener telling these particular stories that lack a cohesive throughline? Then, there are the sections in the transcript that are listed as inaudible or incomprehensible. How was this interview conducted? How could there be gaps like this?

Buckley’s novel is one where the central issues are relegated to the background. We do not know until the book is very nearly over (think: 15 pages left), the reason for the investigation. While I was initially drawn in by the voice of the novel, which feels so natural and authentic, around the halfway mark I started wondering just where this story was going. I felt something was amiss, but wanted to know more and that desire to know did produce a certain kind of frustration. In a way, Tell is a mystery in the same way that Patrick Modiano’s books are mysteries: there is a mystery, but you’re not quite sure what the mystery actually is. It’s like a secret’s secret why it matters.

Ultimately, it is revealed that Curtis went missing. Prior to his disappearance, the gardener notes some strange behaviours, like Curtis hosting two dinners framed as The Last Supper (but twice). She also notes that the employees all received five-figure bonuses at Christmas time, which was highly unusual. Then, in January, Curtis has mysterious phone calls where he seems angry. His son drives to the estate in the middle of a snow storm. Curtis spends the night in an on-property cabin, but then disappears without a trace, either into the ocean or disappearing by electric car to (maybe) be spotted in various countries around the world (maybe) on the verge of suicide. The gardener holds out hope for Curtis’ return throughout, making statements about what he might do later with his artwork (a gallery? A big sale?). The gardener keeps noting that “we’ll see” what might happen.

Admittedly, after finishing the book I wanted to see what the prevailing theories were—unfortunately there’s not much out there. Of course, I suspect that I’ve fallen into Buckley’s trap of wanting to know. Buckley offers incisive commentary about storytelling here about what stories resonate and why. For instance, Curtis tells a story that clearly resonated with him, lest he wouldn’t tell it at a dinner with his staff. An adopted girl grows into a woman and tries to make her biological father, who could not cope with having a baby on his own (her mom died a few days after she was born). The gardener summarizes their emotional reunion and how they got along so well together. They start looking over photos of her growing up and spend a few hours going through pictures. The gardener notes how “they come to this one photo, taken at a funfair, of herself with the adoptive father, both of them holding candyfloss. Her father, the biological father, is looking at this picture, and suddenly he turns white. There are tears in his eyes, and she thinks it must be because it upsets him, seeing his daughter with this man who had taken his place. It must be hard” (135). The daughter misinterprets the significance of the piece, “But that’s not it. That’s not what’s going on” (135). I’ll pause briefly here to note that Buckley shows how the significance of stories varies from person to person and that when we tell a story we don’t know why it might resonate. As it turns out, the two of them were in the same photo. Her biological father is in the background waiting for a ride and lighting a cigarette: “Fifteen years ago, they’d been standing just a few feet from each other, at exactly that moment, when the shutter was pressed. Exactly the same spot, exactly the same time” (135). The gardener says she teared up, and so did Curtis. The gardener’s question is our own: “Why has he told us this? Because I knew he’d been fostered, and Lara had told us about his mother, so I really didn’t know what to make of it. You couldn’t help thinking that there were connections to be made” (135).

Yes, connections. What is the thread that brings everything together? This is much harder to identify due to the frailty of the human mind and our powers of perception.

Just past the halfway mark of the book, the gardener describes a crime that took place to illustrate how weak our powers of perception are. In her words, “Eyewitness often doesn’t mean much. My son-in-law, Jack, one time, he stepped in to stop this chap beating up another chap” (99). The story goes on about the conflict and “All Jack could say when the police asked him about it was that the man was about his height and had dark hair. Turned out he had half an ear missing and a huge blue star tattooed on his neck, but Jack hadn’t noticed. Shock, that is. It messes the brain up” (99). The anecdote undermines, in some ways, the whole story the gardener is telling. The gardener is giving a firsthand account of the events leading up to Curtis’ disappearance—but if we acknowledge the frailty of human memory, how can we trust the gardener any more? She notes the following:

you remember someone doing something, years back, and you know it happened more or less as you recall, that it was this person who did this thing in this way, but can you describe them, like you can describe someone who was in front of you an hour ago? You can’t. Your mind’s eye is seeing them, but you can’t describe them. The mind’s eye isn’t an eye. It’s not that kind of picture you’re getting. Not really a picture at all. Even the person you saw an hour ago. You can’t see them like someone who’s there. The fade-out happens right away. It’s what the police always say. (99)

Thus, we have a paradox here. The person we most rely on to describe events as they were admits outright that it’s impossible to describe someone from even an hour ago. Thus, the underlying assumptions of a story—that it is ordered, that it has a logic based on relevant details—are called into question, since even the relevant details cannot be recalled precisely by any measure. 

Tell, then, seems to suggest that stories a kind of curatorial process and that the narrative is always implied. I think it’s significant that Curtis is a kind of gallerist who accumulates unrelated artworks: “the pictures were just there, like family photos on the mantelpiece. Once in a while you might give them a glance, but you don’t really look. You know them. You take them for granted” (125). Curtis’ collections stand on their own rather than being in direct conversation or systematized. The gardener describes one particular artwork of a small town somewhere in America. Notably, it’s a work that has an implied narrative. There’s a car in the road with its doors open and its bonnet all smashed up. Someone is walking behind it, not paying attention. If we consider this a kind of story, it’s interesting that the gardener says “At first glance you’d think it was a real scene, but then you realize it’s all staged” (125).There are all kinds of details and “the more you looked, the more you saw. It made you think of a whodunnit, but you couldn’t even work out what exactly had been done” (125). To me, this is exactly the project of Tell. It’s a whodunnit, but also a whatsdunn. None of it is brought into a cohesive, unproblematic story. And that which is presented is curated to such an extent that even accidents seem staged.

The curation of stories is central to the text. As we’ve already discussed, the stories people tell gain significance based on who is telling, who the audience is, and so on. Yet, the lack of systematization of these vignettes, combined with the failings of human faculties, creates a context where the curatorial project of stories falls apart, which is most evident in Curtis’ dissatisfaction with how his life story is being told. The gardener notes towards the end of the novel that some conflicts may have been emerging with the novelization of Curtis’ life: “And there was a bigger issue, which was that she had him saying things he was adamant he hadn’t actually said. Putting words into his mouth. That was the main complaint” (138). Further, “Curtis wasn’t happy with Lara’s methods [...] We know she didn’t record every conversation. She recorded a few, but often she just took notes and wrote them up afterwards. Sometimes there weren’t even notes” (138). These areas create a kind of slippage in telling stories. The lack of documentation makes replication and systematization nearly impossible. The gardener challenges their driver (Asil) a few times throughout the novel, painting him in a bad light for quitting and possibly having an affair with Lara. Yet, Asil says Lara “could have jotted down the notes a week after the chat and they would still have been spot-on, because she had an amazing memory for speech. [...] Like a photographic memory, but for words” (138). The gardener says she “can’t remember exactly what [she] said five minutes ago” (again the whole account is dubious) but that Lara “could remember things [Asil had] said when he picked her up from the airport for the very first time, before the accident, as if it had happened the day before, not a couple of years back” (138). Inconsistent memory is in and of itself reason enough to call accounts into question, but Buckley takes it one step further. Asil says that Lara has an infallible memory, “but if we’re going to take that as the truth, it has to mean that Asil has a superhuman memory too, because if he couldn’t remember it himself, how could he know that she was remembering it properly? See what I mean? I suppose he could say that he remembered it when she told him what she remembered. It brought it all back. But that still begs the question, no?” (138). It’s a worthwhile exploration of what it means to remember. Is memory something that can be immediately recalled? How much of what we remember is implanted in us by someone else’s account?

Let’s assume for a moment that we can remember everything flawlessly. Let’s also assume that we have curated stories for the correct context. Other issues still remain: namely, that we cannot choose what to hear. There’s a lengthy passage where the gardener talks about dreams. The passage begins with a discussion of how when people first researched peoples’ dreams they reported seeing them in black and white. Fifty years later, they asked people and a vast majority said they dreamt in colour. The theory was that colour television influenced people to switch but according to the gardener now things have switched back and people are dreaming in black and white. When attempting to explain the phenomenon, the gardener says, “What’s going on? It’s not possible that we used to dream in black and white, then switched to colour, then switched back. What’s the explanation? It has to be a problem with the way we report on what’s happening inside our own heads, doesn’t it?” (73). She continues to note that dreams can never be described fully: “Somebody speaks to you in a dream. It’s someone you knew years ago. You recognize her face. But what was she wearing in the dream? What colour was her hair. You don’t know. A face appeared, that’s all. Or something that felt like a face” (73). The gardener then contrasts this hazy phenomenon with reality, suggesting that if someone in real life had the same interaction with you, you would be able to say something about how things were: “you’d know, because you saw it” (73). But is this really the case? The gardener has noted that memory fades even moments after an interaction, particularly intense ones. In turn, our whole realities turn into a kind of dream, which explains why we can’t explain what happened to Curtis.

Where does that leave us? Something like intuition. In that same passage, the gardener says, “It’s like if someone tells you to picture a triangle. You can imagine a triangle, but it’s not a triangle you can measure. You can’t measure the sides or the angles. It’s just a vague idea of a triangle. You ‘see’ it, but you don’t see it. Same when you think of someone’s face” (73-74). All of Tell is like seeing without seeing. You know there’s a narrative there and you can intuit it, but can you actually describe what the reality is? After all, “It’s not a crisp image. More like an afterimage, or a dream. You’re not really seeing. It has a kind of reality, but it’s not a reality with any substance” (74).

Perhaps we’d be able to create a narrative for ourselves—but we don’t even understand ourselves. The gardener reflects on the phrase “Love thy neighbour as thyself” and complicates the idea. Trying to parse the meaning, she reflects, “Is it saying we have to love everyone? And what if you don’t love yourself? Does that mean it’s OK not to love other people? But how can you love yourself?” (121). She posits that this idea of loving thyself is impossible because we can’t even have a sense of ourselves. She asks, “How can you even see yourself, never mind love yourself? You can examine an object, because the object isn’t you. But how can you examine yourself? What’s doing the looking? It’s you, yourself. So what examines the thing that’s doing the looking? It’s like asking an eyeball to look at itself without a mirror. There’s no mirror. And so on” (121). There’s a kind of process where we need to exteriorize our own experiences in order to make sense of them, but the reality is that we’re never separate from ourselves. We don’t have the capacity for introspection that telling, for example, a life story, would require.

This harkens back to the idea that Curtis is not pleased when he sees the externalized version of himself, the version created for his biography. A vignette in the novel reinforces the idea. Curtis is touring Lara around places that hold supposedly special memories. He takes her to his adoptive parents’ childhood home and makes a false display of reverence towards it. As they drove away, “Nothing more was said about the Coopers. The conversation was mostly about Lara’s life. As if to redress the balance. Like he was saying: ‘I’ve talked about me. Now it’s your go’” (102). He deflects the storytelling process to an external body. She goes on so much about herself that she became bored by herself and then she wonders whether that is what wisdom feels like: “Achieving indifference to the past” (121). This is a problem for Curtis, though; the idea that “so much of it had become flat and monochrome. No texture, no flavour. Fossilized, almost. What he was remembering, in many cases, was just the facts of what had happened. If that. The externals, not the interior” (102). While the gardener suggests that we can never truly see ourselves or observe ourselves from the outside, Curtis seems to have achieved it and finds himself dissatisfied. He is purely external to himself and starts to see memories “Like a stack of empty boxes [...] Incidents that he’d talked about before had become boxes, many of them neatly labelled, but with nothing inside” (102).

I have to apologize here, as well, because there was a passage in the book about how we can train our eyes to look at something, but we can’t train our ears to listen. I feel like that ineptitude is critical to the project of the book, as well.

If I were to summarize the central conceit of the book, I would suggest it’s a kind of impossibility of forming a cohesive narrative. To reconstruct the argument, we can never really know ourselves. In turn, we can’t know why certain stories resonate or why we recount particular vignettes, much less predict what others’ responses will do to give them meaning. Even if this were possible, we would not know how to focus our attention or have enough memory for the details to transform isolated experiences into meaningful narratives, and even if we could do that, Buckley seems to suggest a kind of emptiness to complete narratives, as reflected in Curtis’ failures to curate meaningful stories.

Tell mimics these frustrations. In reading the gardener’s meandering narrative, you are immersed in these very contradictions in storytelling. As much as is disclosed, more remains behind. I think there’s a great conceptual project here, but you’ll need to be prepared for a lack of resolution.

Now, all that said, if you want to read this book and tell me what happened I would be very curious to know your thoughts.

Happy reading!

Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World by Jane McGonigal

       Comedians say that comedy is not meant to last forever. Humour presses up against its own boundaries, expands them, and then ceases to be relevant. I wonder if something similar is true in the realm of video games. It wouldn’t be surprising, exactly. Pretty much any game genre I can think of has evolved over time to new heights of complexity. Even something like Mario Kart serves as an example here: in the original Mario Kart, you selected a character, but not a kart or tires or flying mechanics. In terms of storytelling, the boundary between video game and animated film sometimes becomes unclear through cutscenes or even mechanics (specifically: Quick Time Events have come and hopefully gone, it would seem). All this to say that Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World by Jane McGonigal, originally published in 2011, offers a thoughtful framework but ultimately seems to be outdated in its specifics—more on that momentarily.

The passage below outlines McGonigal’s central thesis, so I think it’s worth it for me to quote it at length:

"In today’s society, computer and video games are fulfilling genuine human needs that the real world is currently unable to satisfy. Games are providing rewards that reality is not. They are teaching and inspiring and engaging us in ways that reality is not. They are bringing us together in ways that reality is not. And unless something dramatic happens to reverse the resulting exodus, we are fast on our way to becoming a society in which a substantial portion of our population devotes its greatest efforts to playing games,

creates its best memories in game environments, and experiences its biggest successes in game worlds."

McGonigal’s framing of the problem is an interesting inversion that places games above reality. Games offer what reality cannot and we need to reshape our reality more along the lines of games. She offers a number of supporting claims throughout the book, and restates them all in the conclusion as a reminder. Reasons that games are outpacing reality are for reasons like how they offer meaningful work, connecting with strangers, sense of pride, and so on. 

I would like to believe that all the hours I’ve spent playing video games is somehow meaningful in my real life and in the world at large. I’d also like to believe that we can elevate games into a meaningful artform and leverage them to promote social and environmental injustice in the world. I’d like to be an optimist, but I haven’t cultivated the radical belief that all of what McGonigal has outlined is possible—and the fact that a number of projects she discusses are defunct or inaccessible is not encouraging. (But then again, a lot can change in the world of technology and society in the span of 13 years…)

I do think that the principles of gaming can be applied in other domains productively. McGonigal’s section on education gives me a great deal to think about. She describes the Quest to Learn school in New York that has switched to an entirely gamified model and I find it really interesting. Students are encouraged towards group projects where they’re doing “quests.” Students are encouraged to form teams based on particular skill sets—your quest might require someone who is a good verbal communicator, someone who is a good artist, and someone who likes music, for example. Students gain experience points and level up (I really wonder if they’ve been able to escape grading…). Students can even obtain secret quests, like discovering a note in a book that tells them to do something before anyone else. I find all of this amazing. I’ve already started having students group up based on a particular realm of expertise, but I’m trying to envision all of the different branching paths students might take in studying English, like pursuing particular areas of expertise and leveling up in that area. If I could make a network of skills and have paths that cross over with different assignments for different skillsets, I would completely revolutionize my classroom. I’m wondering how I might create a platform that allows students that kind of exploration where they could save their progress in a particular path and a skill tree that they can unlock. Man that would be amazing.

Ultimately, I want to know how we can leverage games to create social change. I believe that that starts at the level of education, but I would like to see some more practical impacts. McGonigal documents projects like FreeRice, with which I was already familiar and very much enjoy. If you’re not familiar with it, you answer questions and for every question you get right it donates rice to the UN. The questions are adaptive and get harder and easier based on what you get right or wrong and advertisers pay for placement on the FreeRice website. I love the project, but it my struggle with where it fits into the broader narrative is that it is not the game itself that changes reality; it still relies on capital to finance it. Essentially, the game is not self-sufficient in changing the world and so the questions are: 1) how revolutionary can it be if we’re still at the mercy of capitalism and 2) how can we scale something like this — it really relies on people playing the same games and that each of those games are potentially financed by more profitable companies. The companies themselves need to have a social conscience, which, as we know, is not something we can likely take on trust.

McGonigal does outline some other projects that sounded very interesting and meaningful, though they did not necessarily stand the test of time. To give you an example, McGonigal described a game where the whole purpose was to do favours for people and create little miracles. You got points for doing good deeds in the real world and getting recommendations and so on. When I went to investigate, it seems that the game no longer exists, which was something that repeated a few more times when I was looking for the games being described. I’m not saying that games have to last forever, but it’s a little bit of a downer.

A lot of the projects in the back half of the book are McGonigal’s own projects, which are generally fueled by psychological principles and geared towards social participation. She describes, for instance, orchestrating a game for the Olympics that was done around the world and was a mix of online activity and real-world activity researching a supposedly lost Olympic game that players constructed together based on artifacts and reenacted in the real world. She describes the Graveyard Hold’em game she developed for people to play poker in graveyards using information on tombstones. She links the ideas to happiness research and it comes across as a little bit cheesy (cf. the “secret dance battle” game). The games seem like amazing projects, but they seem to lack the appeal for other types of games that I think people are more drawn to that are less intellectually demanding.

I think that McGonigal gets a couple of things wrong, actually, and I would argue that it’s the result of time. I think one of the questions is the question of scale. McGonigal outlines a game with a social conscience that had a measurable effect. Players would make their energy consumption public; you would set goals for reducing your consumption and then your friends would either bet on or against you and earn points. There were some measurable improvements for the reduction of energy consumption and I love that. The question to me is how can we do this for more things and how is it sustainable? I’m thinking of myself here: if I gamify my energy consumption and my water and I gamify picking up trash and donating to charities and helping strangers— at some point I am going to burn out. I can hardly deal with notifications for one game let alone a whole array of games. I think we have the capacity for certain types of activities, but we can’t do it all. I suppose every difference is beneficial, but can we scale to something truly revolutionary?

McGonigal also really values the collaborative nature of games and aims to have people do 10, 000 hours of collaboration in games (under the theory that 10, 000 hours doing any one thing creates experts in that thing). While it seems that gaming is more collaborative, I would make the case that gaming is becoming more and more individuated. It seems counterintuitive given the massively multiplayer games like Fortnite where you’re forced onto a team. My question would be how much collaboration games like this really need. It seems to me that everyone has their own role to play, but do they talk? Do they strategize together? Even the fact that people select their own avatars with particular abilities suggests a particular role to play, rather than everyone having similar abilities. I also think that playing with strangers for a match and never seeing them again does not contribute to long-term community. Also, people don’t openly talk about games and what they’ve learned from them; I think there’s still some stigma there that prevents us from actually engaging meaningfully in a more broad sense.

In short, I’m not entirely convinced that our current framework for mass gaming is going to mobilize us towards mass change. Perhaps it will lead us there eventually, but making change is hard—even in gaming. While McGonigal notes that gamers actually like failure, it is still questionable of how much novel failure we can take if we’re striving for real-world outcomes. McGonigal writes, for example, “within the limits of our own endurance, we would rather work hard than be entertained. Perhaps that’s why gamers spend less time watching television than anyone else on the planet. [...] We’re much happier enlivening time, rather than killing time.” I find that claim particularly interesting and persuasive. I do think there’s a propensity of feeling good by taking action and that gaming provides more of a means of doing so. 

One of the strengths of McGonigal’s work is proving the value of games. Whether it’s the discussion of providing meaningful, purposeful work, for example, or the discussion of fiero, an emotional high from overcoming adversity, McGonigal identifies that games have the capacity for these qualities. Some of the statistics that she draws from are particularly incredible in this respect. While some of the games she has talked about have fallen out of favour and some of these statistics would need to be updated, you can imagine how these have gotten even more dramatic. For instance, in gathering the posts on Halo wikis and forums, there are almost as many petrabytes or more of data than the written word from ancient times to now. And, McGonigal notes,

"If you add up all the hours that gamers across the globe have spent playing World of Warcraft since the massively multiplayer online (MMO) role playing game (RPG) first launched in 2004, you get grand total of just over 50 billion collective hours, or, 5.93 million years. To put that number in perspective, 5.93 million years ago is almost exactly the moment in history that our earliest human ancestors first stood upright. By that measure, we’ve spent as much time playing World of Warcraft as we’ve spent evolving as a species." 

That is incredible to me. Just imagine how much we could do if we spent the same amount of time on real-world problems. It’s a matter of figuring out how to incentivize taking action in a similar way. McGonigal addresses that, as well, in talking about the rates at which players game. She talks about how “many of the most addictive online games have implemented a ‘fatigue system’”. She notes that “these systems are most commonly used in online games in South Korea and China, where the rates of online gaming for men can average up to 40 hours a week.” To combat this gamer fatigue, these games will take measures like this: “After 3 hours of consecutive online play, gamers receive 50% fewer rewards and half the fiero for accomplishing the same amount of work. After 5 hours, it becomes impossible to earn any rewards. In the United States, a softer touch is most commonly employed. World of Warcraft players, for example, accumulate resting bonuses for every hour they spend not playing the game. When they log back in, their avatar can earn up to double rewards until it’s time to rest again.” I find these attempts to engineer human behaviour to keep everyone focused on their own well-being and balance are fascinating. These kinds of details really help to illustrate just how impactful games are on our lives.

McGonigal’s writing is clear and sufficient for conveying information. The focus of the book is not on artfulness, but rather providing an outline of an argument for how to fix reality. I still think there needs to be some more real-world proof of how games can be leveraged into real-world action beyond a general suggestion that we have more collaboration towards climate change. To me, it’s the scale. It always comes back to scale. How do we make the massive numbers of players on Fortnite and get them to stop real-world war? How is it that we can get all of the Counterstrike players to collaborate to solve climate change? We still need a roadmap for making that leap—or perhaps the entire structure of where and when people are able to make leaps needs to be revised.

Ultimately, it’s time to level up. Happy reading!

The Digital Closet: How the Internet Became Straight by Alexander Monea

      Technology accelerates. Concerns accumulate. Alexander Monea’s The Digital Closet: How the Internet Became Straight explores the foundations of the internet as a whole to make the case that heteronormativity is a core component of the technology, rather than a glitch or coincidence. Where Monea’s work excels is in documenting different ways in which heteronormativity has served to police the internet and set policy and practice. That said, I find that The Digital Closet fails somewhat in its promise to document “how the internet became straight.” Some of the argumentation needs to be taken on trust, and Monea admits in the conclusion that he has not offered the smoking gun that would close the case.

Usually when we talk about nonfiction, we focus on the ideas in the book while brushing the style aside, unless, of course, it stands out as particularly exemplary (consider A Mind Spread Out on the Ground by Alicia Elliott or The Skin We’re In by Desmond Cole). I find the style of Monea’s work to be disorienting. At the level of the book, there are some organizational issues. The purported focus of each chapter meanders, which leads to some repetitions—the manosphere gaining significant focus in the first chapter and the fourth, for example, and, as much as Monea professes to avoid an overemphasis on pornography, it certainly pops up quite a bit. At the level of the paragraph, sometimes the paragraph begins with a topic before taking a turn and ending on a different idea, which leads to an unclear focus. The book also reads like a doctoral thesis—not a bad thing, per se, but phrases like “as I shall explore in chapter four” take me out of my own immersion and at times it felt like there was far more prefatory commentary than was necessary: just say the thing!

I’ll do my best to reorganize some of the text’s key topics into a way that I find more comprehensible.

If we’re thinking about the key question of the book, how the internet became straight, one of the core pieces to Monea’s argument is that employees in the tech industry have programmed their homophobic and heteronormative biases into the code itself. What I found most compelling in this particular section was the idea of the culture surrounding tech. Monea talks about the frat-like culture of “mommy’s basement” (65). The reframing of tech companies like Google as “mommy’s basement” really altered my perspective. He talks about how tech campuses are like living in your mother’s basement because there are always fun activities around, you have “free high-end food within fifty yards [...] at all times” and “offer free dinners for employees who stay after 5 p.m.” (65). Monea explains how there are all kinds of services on these tech campuses: gyms, doctors, laundry, pet care, and so on. Notably, very few of them have child services… Additionally, “open floor plans [...] make it notably difficult for employees to avoid coworkers who ight harass them” (65). Monea notes that the entire design of tech companies tends to skew design toward the interests of young and single men at the expense of women. The book also refers to the disproportionate number of men in the field, the high propensity for sexual assaults at conferences and off-sites, and the low rates of reporting. The case for a misogynistic and largely straight is pretty clear.

Further, Moneo outlines the backlash towards “diversity hiring” in the industry and its failure to promote significant change. Monea suggests that “the number of women in technical positions at technology companies has remained rather stagnant despite the past decade of attempts at fairer hiring practices” (69). He notes that there are a number of companies that use unconscious bias training about race and gender. He notes, though, that there is a problem with “how unconscious bias training actually plays out” (69). He writes that unconscious bias training rests on the premise that everyone holds biases. “that there is nothing wrong with having biases, and all one is responsible for is curbing them as much as possible” (69). He explains that studies suggest the practice normalizes bias by removing the stigma around it and that people “accept these biases as unavoidable and make them more likely to exhibit these types of biases in the workplace” (69). That’s a pretty wild revelation in its own right. Even the creator of the Implicit Association Test is concerned about it because “understanding implicit bias does not actually provide you with the tools to do something about it” (69).

I digress.

Monea gives some background into the toxic work culture of tech, though not without sympathy toward programmers, who are an “increasingly precarious class because of their replaceability and are easily controlled by the corporate officers of their companies because of their desire to maintain the perks of their positions” (78). Capitalism, again—actually, in the recommendations Monea gives in the conclusion, ending capitalism is of course a key pillar. Due to the competitive nature of the industry, “those programmers who might develop an interest in the purposes of their work or find themselves critical of the social impacts of their research might have on the world are left with little room to voice these qualms” (78). As we’ve seen before in any number of tech-related books, the “ruling ideology is one in which ‘progress’ [...] is inevitable, and all one can do is try to capitalize on being the first to meet the bleeding edge of the future” (78). Monea then connects the ideology of progress to heteronormativity. I find the rationale here a little less fleshed out.

Certainly, the programmers have certain kinds of biases—but how those biases are made manifest in technology are less clear. The piece that is perhaps most clear is how programmers have a direct effect on the types of words that get tagged for censorship or search engine optimization. There are certain biases that come up here, including the use of English as the foundation for algorithms. So, when images are tagged in particular ways it may replicate the internal biases of the programmers. Monea outlines a situation wherein multiple people labeled the same images and then only those that the majority agreed on were accepted (87). People are only paid if their labels are consistent with the majority (87). You can see why the outsourcing of ideas and relying on the popular vote might lead to particular kinds of oversights. There is a section in which Monea explains the way information sorting works, but I have to admit it’s a little unclear. I feel like it wasn’t the most accessible explanation for a professed luddite like myself.

In any case, the practices in programming and sorting the internet leads to a great deal of censorship, and Monea makes the case that 2SLGBTQ+ content gets censored at higher rates. There’s some other industry explanations for this. Take Facebook for example. I’ve witnessed their censorship practices first hand. When I reported about 30 comments that encouraged a trans person to kill herself, all of the comments I reported were left up. When I requested that the band Talk Show Host play the song I Hate Men (I Hate All Men), I was automatically flagged for hate speech. How mysterious. In any case, the algorithms automatically report certain types of content. The remaining 10% is outsourced to call centers. Monea’s use of statistics shows the flaws in censorship practice. In particular, in 2012 Facebook had only 50 moderators for the entire platform. The employees are mostly from Asia, Africa, and Central America. They get paid between $1-$4 per hour while Facebook is worth billions and billions (99). While the number of content moderators may have changed, the process remains a challenge. Laborers “receive two weeks of training and a set of prescriptive manuals for assessing content” and they “act like human algorithms” (99). The entire model forces laborers into particular time constraints where they can look at each piece of content for about eight to ten seconds and have to review around a thousand pieces of content per day. There’s a linguistic barrier (all the training manuals that have been released are in English), which means that those not fluent in English have to use Google Translate and also have difficulty moderating content (99). There are a number of challenges in decontextualizing content, as well. Innocuous images may be perceived differently, of course, which leads to overblocking.

For instance, consider how nipples get censored online. There’s the assumption that “female nipples” are linked to female genitalia. However, the correlation between sex and gender is not at all obvious. Monea gives the example of Courtney Demone’s #DoIHaveBoobsNow? Project. Demone is a trans woman and posted her exposed chest during hormone replacement therapy. She was asking a simple question: “At what point in my breast development do I need to start covering my nipples?” (108). Monea says that “platforms cannot answer this question based on their cisnormative community standards” (108). Platforms block nipples without context of the actual sex or gender of those posting them and end up regulating visibility of gender fluid, nonbinary, and trans bodies. Monea gives the solution to overblocking by just having a filter on top of images as is done with violence and sums up the issue as follows: “Heteronormativity on a platform like Facebook is essentially this: to see biased filtering as the default, most practical solution to the problem of content moderation rather than recognizing the ease with which less normative filtering could be achieved across the platform” (108).

What I find really interesting, too, about the content guidelines on Facebook, is the level of depth and contingencies it provides for. Monea identifies what constitutes sexual content: “Implied sexual intercourse, defined as mouth or genitals entering or in contact with another person’s genitals or anus, even when the contact is not directly visible, except  in cases of a sexual health context, advertisements, and recognized fictional images or with indicators of fiction” (105). Monea doesn’t comment on this, but I find it fascinating that among the exceptions are “advertisements” (capitalism gets a pass), and “recognized fictional images or with indicators of fiction.” I think there’s a lot to unpack there about what it implies about reality. While I’m working towards Monea’s studies about pornography, I would offer the question of whether pornography is allowed as something recognized as fictional? Beyond simply policing sexuality and gender, it seems content filters give themselves a means for policing reality as a whole.

There is resistance to the censorship, of course, and The Digital Closet includes a few images and stories of resistance. There are projects that consider what computer vision is able to see and what it recognizes as nudity and then manipulates its expectations. Tom White, for instance, uses “a generative adversarial network (GAN) to produce what the tech industry calls ‘adversarial examples’ based on ImageNet classifiers” (120). The program feeds abstract shapes, patterns, or amalgamations of images into the network and then adjusts the image iteratively “until it outputs an image that will trigger a classifier despite looking nothing like what a human would recognize as an example of that particular classification” (120). Monea also outlines artist Tom White’s projects Synthetic Abstractions and Perception Engines. He creates images that will draw the attention of Amazon, Google, and Yahoo for being against policies, but the images look absurd to humans. The abstract forms are designed to be seen as NSFW while to human it’s just form and colour. I find that the “challenge [to] the efficacy of image recognition systems, probing [of] their boundaries to demonstrate the different ways in which they perceive the world” (120) could be a valuable full-length book in its own right, especially because as things have developed, most of Tom White’s artwork would become censored and he would have to appeal each automatic flag so that people would be able to see it (120).

All of this is related to the idea of overblocking. The Digital Closet gives an overview of how censorship operates to make the case that censorship goes too far. He gives examples like how something is tagged as being bisexual, for example, it is most often used on the internet in association with pornography. So, when content is being censored, all information and resources related to bisexuality—pornographic or not—would not be available. Monea documents a number of legitimate resources that were taken down as a result of overblocking. For example, The Keep A Breast Foundation is a youth-based organization that promotes breast cancer awareness. It is an educational service that was “banned from using Google AdWords because of their sling, ‘I Love Boobies’” (125). Information about things like birth control, safe sex, and access to abortion were also rendered unavailable or demonetized. Monea cites the director of Bedsider, Lawrence Swiader, as saying, “We need to be able to talk about sex in a real way: that it’s fun, funny, sexy, awkward … all the things that the entertainment industry gets so well. How can we possibly compete with all of the not-so-healthy messages about sex if we have to speak like doctors and show stale pictures of people who look like they’re shopping for insurance?” (125). Essentially, Monea notes how overblocking unfairly renders LGBTQIA+ identities as pornographic and thus disproportionately affects youth and adults looking for legitimate resources.

Monea also explains how the scale of the producer is relevant to accessing information. For instance, the Supreme Court enforced “obscenity doctrine against LGBTQIA+ and sex education materials but not against Playboy magazine; Playboy has been allowed to advertise its content through its Twitter account and has even posted photos of bare breasts” (125). Monea documents the monopoly of the company MindGeek in owning the porn“tube” sites. It owns all of the major ones and has even worked at buying up the major producers of pornography, which is essentially a heteronormative industry. Smaller producers are unable to compete, first of all, and queer producers don’t have the resources to challenge them for online attention, including when the tube sites steal their content and they need to go through a rigorous process for pursuing copyright claims. There’s a great passage about the homogenization of the adult entertainment industry: “the porn industry’s deepest, darkest secret isn’t that porn is exploitative, socially corrosive, or a catalyst for misogynistic violence—though these can all be true. It’s that porn is boring” (8). Monea continues, “the entire logic of the industry is built around combating this fact. The industry’s worst nightmare is that we might all come to this realization when cycling through the thousand or more professional gonzo POV anal videos and amateur incest role-play videos uploaded to porn tube sites every day. Porn is boring because it’s caught in a heteronormative filter bubble” (8). 

Of course, there is significant resistance to pornography in all its forms. Monea describes the unlikely alliance between Christian conservatives and antiporn feminists in creating a context that is actually harmful to the LGBTQIA+ community, whether pornographic or not. He describes the impetus of “protecting children, preserving the family, and combating sexual deviance” that intermingles with “more contemporary feminist critiques of pornography” (55). Among their critiques is that pornography “harms children’s brains, renders them more susceptible to addictions of all kinds as adults, weakens their emotional bonds with their parents, makes them more likely to engage in risky sexual behaviours, increases their chances of reporting being victims of physical and sexual violence, makes them more likely to commit crimes, lessens their sexual satisfaction, makes them more likely to have sex with younger adolescents, and increases their sexual uncertainty and casual sexual exploration” (55). What I find interesting about this passage is that it tends to read as intuitive, but there’s a detail that stands out to me as being unlike the rest. Did you catch it? Among this list of negative outcomes, there’s the comment that it “increases their chances of reporting being victims of physical and sexual violence.” Odd that that is couched in there in a list of all the negatives. 

In any case, this alliance led to changes in law and policy. The antiporn mentality led to the creation of FOSTA and SESTA (the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act). This seems to be the closest Monea gets to a smoking gun on the straightification of the internet. These laws made it so that the culpability for things like sex trafficking is also placed upon services that host related information. One issue is that the bill makes no distinction between people being sex trafficked, consensual porn creators, cam girls, and so on. The other is that it targets hosts rather than creators. In terms of law enforcement cracking down on trafficking, “the new law incentivizes law enforcement to focus on intermediaries that facilitate prostitution rather than sex traffickers themselves. It thus shifts focus away from real criminals, and in shuttering these intermediaries, it cuts law enforcement off from essential tools that were previously used to locate and rescue victims. It similarly cuts law enforcement off from easily tracked evidence that can be used in criminal cases against sex traffickers” (129-130). Even anti-trafficking groups and sex work organizations opposed the bill almost universally (130). Meanwhile, safe places for exploration stopped hosting legitimate content in order to maintain support from advertisers.

The change in law also makes for some surprising turns of events and unintended consequences. For example, PayPal changed its policy so that online sex workers could not use their service. Patreon had said sex workers could continue to use their service as normal and then froze funds and shut out producers without warning. Monea documents a number of queer producers who were impacted, though I would not say this is exclusively a heteronormative pattern.

Where all of this gets really scary is its connection to the Manosphere. While of course homophobic, the online manosphere is especially misogynistic. Roosh V., for example, encouraged his followers to mass-report online sex workers to the IRS to try to expose them for tax fraud under the belief that they would get a cut. Given that this was too difficult and too much paperwork for an arguably illiterate group, they then changed their tactic to just doxxing women. They would make phone calls to their workplaces and families, telling everyone and showing them what the women were doing online. While this outline comes closer towards the end of the book, Monea also documents the origins and beliefs of Manosphere groups early in the text and demonstrates their power at the political level (like Trump shouting out the proud boys, for example). Monea’s analysis of the NoFap movement is pretty interesting, also. Citing Jesse Signal, Monea writes that it’s “a version of anti-masturbation worries that has been tailored for an age in which productivity is the sort of buzzword that piety and purity were back when this panic first emerged” (43). I find that a fruitful avenue to explore, looking at the biopolitics Foucault outlined decades ago in a modern context where capital is production and sex is non-productive sex is anti-capital. Meanwhile, Sarah Sharma “has critiqued the manosphere’s emphasis on using technology for a sexodus in which feminist critiques and demands can be ignored because sex robots, toys, and pornography now prevent women from withholding sexual gratification from frustrated men—which to many in the manosphere is the only reason feminist demands might otherwise be negotiable” (43-44). It leads to “sexual conservativism” and “the maintenance of traditional gender roles, as well as technocapitalism” (44). It’s a way of avoiding investing “time and energy into addressing feminist concerns” (44).

I think I’ve given a pretty thorough outline here of the central pillars of Monea’s argumentation. While the details are all interesting on their own, I don’t think Monea quite tells the story enough to solidify the case that 2SLGBTQIA+ people are systematically removed from the internet. There are a number of factors that are there, for sure. A lot of the issue is that 2SLGBTQIA+ are already subordinate in our culture and that the internet exacerbates this problem with its other focus on puritanism. I think the connection between the different threads of the argument could be presented more clearly and directly, rather than hopping around.

Ultimately, though, the effect is pretty well-stated. Monea describes “the closet” as a “mechanism through which a space—a silent or invisible space, and thus a partial or nonspace—is produced at the myriad sites of [...] contradictions in heteronormativity that can capture, contain, alleviate, and thus nullify the threat of deviance and abberation” (18). Monea cites Eve Sedgwick: “‘Closetedness’ itself is a performance initiated as such by the speech act of a silence—not a particular silence, but a silence that accrues particularly by fits and starts, in relation to the discourse that surrounds and differentially constitutes it” (18). Monea describes how these “silent and invisible spaces are just as essential to the structure of heteronormativity as are its more vocal and visible portions” (18). This framework is established in the introductory chapter and Monea effectively follows it up in the conclusion of the book. The argument is structured fairly logically: Premise 1: 2SLGBTQIA+ identities have been rendered pornographic and obscene. Premise 2: Pornographic and obscene material is scrubbed from the internet. Conclusion: 2SLGBTQIA+ identities are scrubbed from the internet. Monea outlines how the internet is structured to increasingly render sexuality a private phenomenon. He describes it as a bedroom and that, because of the way the internet is structured, 2SLGBTQIA+ sexuality becomes the closet in that bedroom.

Overall, I would say the book was okay. Some of the research was particularly interesting, as I’ve tried to outline above. The ‘storytelling’ of the book leaves something to be desired and my hope is that I’ve put it into more comprehensible terms to help see the connections between ideas a little further. Monea’s conclusion offers a list of action-items we can take to resist the hetereonormativity of the internet, though the action items seem a little larger than any one person is able to complete.

Ultimately, The Digital Closet is part of a network of texts that work together to let us challenge the filter bubbles of the internet and to try to see the broad picture. On its own, its interesting enough, but its real force will likely only emerge in connection with the broader network of internet-deconstructing books.

Happy reading!