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the World by Jane McGonigal, originally published in 2011, offers a thoughtful framework but ultimately seems to be outdated in its specifics—more on that momentarily.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!

The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On by Franny Choi

The titular poem of Franny Choi’s The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On traces the origins of the apocalypse. The opening line reads, “Before the apocalypse, there was the apocalypse of boats: / boats of prisoners, boats cracking under sky-iron, boats making corpses / bloom like algae on the shore” (1). But there is no beginning. Before that beginning to the apocalypse, there was another beginning: “Before the apocalypse, there was the apocalypse / of the bombed mosque” (1). There is always another beginning—I think of the Hot Water Music album title The New What’s Next (but in reverse—the new what’s first?). A later poem, “Science Fiction Poetry,” takes a similarly anaphoric quality, listing all sorts of contradictory dystopias: “Dystopia of congratulations you were right to be paranoid; / Dystopia of diversity trainings; / Dystopia of the banning of diversity trainings” (19) and so on.

The book evokes Maurice Blanchot’s notion of the disaster: there is no place where the disaster begins. In The Writing of the Disaster, Blanchot writes that “The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact” (1). Hence, there is always a new beginning to the apocalypse. Put another way, “We are on the edge of disaster without being able to situate it in the future: it is rather always already past, and yet we are on the edge or under the threat, all formulations which would imply the future—that which is yet to come—if the disaster were not that which does not come, that which has put a stop to every arrival. To think the disaster [...] is to have no longer any future in which to think it” (1).

I can’t help but feel that Choi’s work is part of the “infinite conversation” to which Blanchot referred, as well. It is her own response, her own iteration of the endless trail of disaster, pain, trauma, oppression, exploitation, and historical injustice. Whereas most associate Blanchot with the writing of the Holocaust, Choi gives voice to a number of other historic travesties—the treatment of the Korean comfort women makes a number of appearances throughout the poems, for instance. 

In fact, the poem “Process Note” knocked me right out in that regard. It’s a poem that begins with a central premise: “Depending on when and through which education system you learned about / so-called world history, you may understand the 1945 atomic bombings of / Hiroshima and Nagasaki to represent two things” (43). I hope not to take away the entire force of the poem by summarizing those two things as the end of WWII and the end of the world, the end of modernity, “the ringing in / of a half-century-plus of annihilation paranoia and very confusing novels” (amazing juxtaposition of those two ideas, incidentally), the end of narrative and God and so on. It seems like more than two things, but then again, Blanchot’s disaster is without limit, so why try to number them? Choi’s poem continues with a blazon of horrific images and implications. The poem offers a kind of drone of lengthy sentences. Then, a short one: “Now.” A snap of a short sentence at the core of a lengthy piece. The back half of the poem is an incredible and uncomfortable turn, given my own education, which I’ll quote at length here:

Now. Depending on whether or not you were

raised by the descendants of the survivors of a former colony of the Japanese

Empire, you might understand the 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and

Nagasaki to, in fact, represent three things: one, the end of World War II; two,

the end of the world itself; and three, the prelude to liberation—the beginning

of the end, that is, of the control, carnage, forced labor, and cultural genocide

that raped, enslaved, and killed millions of Koreans, Indonesians, Taiwanese,

and others. Depending on when and in which geopolitical context you learned

“world history,” the moment in which you encounter this third association (at

the dinner table with your parents, home for some holiday) might sharpen

the room around you into sick bloom, as the terrible line appears—not drawn

by anything like righteousness, or grim duty, or God, or even causation,

really; just the flat time signature of sequence; terrible, indifferent sequence,

which leads from the detonations, to carnage, to freedom(?), to carnage, to

an airplane in the sky carrying a woman carrying a clumsy gathering of cells

that will one day look backwards and see, in that line, only endings, endings,

endings---

Sliced from bone, my life

hung like a jaw---faultless. And

unforgiveable. (43-44)

Choi exposes the uncomfortable position of the colonized in response to the atomic bomb, which seems so obviously wrong it’s hard to see those that might cheer without flinching—the politics of an eye for an eye, and all that. It’s a poem that lingers, potentially the most memorable and troubling in the collection. Also the recurrence of an “indifferent sequence” here again recalls the idea of an interminable disaster. I also like the touch that the prose poem collapses into more fragmentary lines for the final three, a formal reflection on the idea that the atomic bomb destroyed narrative.

The kind of repetition and interminable sequence of disasters is given another form, beautifully done in three poems that all share the same title: “Upon Learning That Some Korean War Refugees Used Partially Detonated Napalm Canisters As Cooking Fuel.” To be clear, this is not a poem in three parts. This is three poems with the same title—and what a striking title! That image is a haunting symbol of the disaster in general. I think my favourite version of the poem is the one that appears on page 62. Choi’s speaker recounts that “Somewhere in a prior world, a woman with [her] face / is scraping the seeds from an unborn hell” (62). The poem positions the global-scale violence alongside the daily work of this woman she has introduced: “All night, doom rang from the sky. And in the morning, / there are mouths to feed” (62). The juxtaposition of those two spheres of influence is interesting, as is the parallel at the level of the line: night at the start, “and in the morning” at the end — the implication being that doom rings across all time. The poem also juxtaposes the early frost and ruined crops with a neighbor’s daughter “strung up in the square” (62). A series of questions without answers follow; in fact, the questions are so unanswerable they are not even provided with interrogation marks: “What else to do / when the unspeakable comes. What to burn / when it doesn’t” (62). The characterization of the woman at the end of the poem is an incredible reflection on history, identity, and trauma. Just look at this:

Somewhere in a world that didn’t quite

end, a woman like me is foraging for that which failed to kill her.

She is cranking open modernity’s throat, wrenching

her arc from its scat. She is a woman who can hack

an impossible morning into water, bean paste, bitter leaves,

another chance to fumble toward the next chance, and the next-

Every day of my life has been something other than my last.

Every day, an extinction misfires, and I put it to work.

First of all: “she is cranking open modernity’s throat”? —Stunning. Second, I wonder if the Seamus Heaney reference is explicit or something of my own imagining, but I remember being knocked out by the premise of his poem “Digging” of a man not being able to do the farming his father could and he ends on the following: “Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests. / I’ll dig with it.” Here I see a kind of inverse, a mirror-image between the women: farming a “misfired” extinction at something more meaningful than writing—what is writing in the face of genocide? To put it in Choi’s own words from “Poem with an End in Sight,” “If I write, there’s nothing / to be done, it’s a bird in the hand, i.e., // worth its weight in dead bird. It’s so corny / to call for the tyrant’s head again, and yet” (10). “Worth its weight in dead bird” is a gorgeous turn of phrase and I love the way the poem ends on the idea of “and yet.” Sure, it’s corny to “call for the tyrant’s head again” — how many times must we have a revolution? As many times as we have an apocalypse?

I’ve focused up until now on some of the more historical and political layers to The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On, but there are distinctly personal poems peppered throughout the work, often dealing with grief and trauma. In a longer poem, “Disaster Means ‘Without a Star’, Choi’s speaker reflects on disaster and then notes, “Meanwhile, I’m merely gorging / on the butterfly effects of ashes, ashes; reaching for the oat milk” (6) — I’m doing a little injustice to the sentence structure here, but I think it’s put beautifully there as is. The poem continues on in a mix of the personal and political and seemingly grappling with an individual’s role in human history. Once again, juxtaposition is a highlight of Choi’s craft: “Sixty-six million years after the last great extinction, six to eight business days before the next one, I whispered / Speak to a fucking agent into the hold music to trigger the system into connecting // me with a ‘real person’” (7). The whole idea of just trying to make a phone call and speak to an agent is very relatable and the course language evokes the sense of frustration and despair in making a phone call, which seems so much more important than the frustration and despair of the Covid pandemic, which is the key force of the poem. I’d quote this poem more at length, but you should likely simply read it. There are too many good lines to reference. Those of a certain generation (i.e. my own) will find a lot of small moments of the everyday elevated to the level of global calamity.

I think Choi touches on grief, both collective and personal, beautifully. For instance, Choi writes, “I sit on the train toward Chicago and mourn the avocado softening in my / kitchen. This, too, is practice, avocado being the smallest unit of grief. It’s rock / and ripe and gone; rock and ripe and gone. Which should be a lesson” (32). There’s a beautifully philosophical line that ends that same poem, “the fruit is another imagination that passes through me on / its way to unknowing” (“Grief Is a Thing with Tense Issues” 32). Choi’s recounting of the funeral in “Danez says they want to lose themselves in bops they can’t sing along to” is similarly mournful. “I Learned That I Was Beautiful” is a troubling kind of romance-turned-sinister poem that addresses grief as well. In that piece, there are two linguistic mysteries that linger to me. The first: what people say about Asian women. The second: what happened that rhymes with what was already inside her? The poem is somewhat of a puzzle—I have a guess, but the way the poem evades an answer is similar to, again, how disaster (however personal) evades conclusion. 

Reading through Choi’s work, I found a lot that I liked and a few things that blew me away. A sign of a good book, I think, is that it becomes richer the more time you spend with it. That is the case with The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On. The more time I’ve spent thinking about it and responding to it in writing here, the more thoroughly I’ve appreciated it and found more to discuss. For dramatic effect, I’d like to end by quoting the final stanza of one of the final poems in the collection. I find it such a tragic tone, and it sometimes becomes so hard to go on, and yet. From “Waste” on page 122:

    And in the swath between them, loneliness. Just that: loneliness.     I thought that was all love could give me. I'm sorry. I thought I'd seen     the future. I thought I knew the words to our one wild     and unfathomable life. Forgive me; I see it now. I wasted     so much time being wrong.