No Sleep in Cyberspace

I boot up my laptop and gingerly dance my fingers across my keyboard, synapses firing, eyes sharp. I take a few deep breaths before hovering the mouse over and clicking [sign-up].

Name / Username / Profile Image / Banner / Driver’s License / W-2 / Routing Number

Two days later, my identity is verified and my account is approved.

I remind myself that I can always change my mind, an attempt to feel a sense of control—an unattainable illusion. I never reach a moment of complete certainty.

Acknowledging the reality that I’ve chosen to share the intimacies of my private life long before starting online sex work helps me feel more at peace with my decision. Though there is still controversy within the industry regarding who should be able to call themselves a sex worker, there are undeniable risks associated with digital sex work. This is difficult for me to weigh while struggling to meet my basic needs, only earning less than $10k a year. Risk is relative.

***

It’s August, and I’ve just arrived in Michigan after abandoning California, the only place I’ve considered home. In a maddening cross-country road trip, my sister and I haul everything to my name across eight state borders before arriving at the place that will house me for the next three years. On the last leg of the trip, we navigate dark country roads in the thick of a thunderstorm like nothing I’ve experienced before. The visibility is reduced to near nothingness. We become too weary to pull over for fear of crashing into the trees lining the road. By some miracle, we arrive at Marquette and are greeted by clear night skies. I don’t know whether to be impressed or uneasy with this discovery.

During the first few weeks as I try to adjust to my new home, I notice a sound that I’m unable to identify.

The thrumming in the air serves as a constant reminder of the unknown. I’d like to think of this as comforting, but my emotions oscillate like a guitar string plucked too forcefully.

One day as we stroll towards Lake Superior, I finally ask my roommates about these noises, a series of multi-synchronous explosions reverberating from the foliage. I click my tongue against my teeth and grind my knuckles together to mimic the sounds. “Oh, you mean the cicadas? You’ve never heard them before?” they respond with surprise. Had I heard them before? I reflect on past summers and cannot seem to remember if I’d ever heard cicadas before. I close my eyes and try to hear my hometown. The sounds of livestock, the smell of manure, the buzz of the heat. My memories come to me as feelings rather than fact. Were the cicadas always there, hidden on the periphery of my inattention?

“I’m not sure; I don’t think so. I would’ve remembered that, right?”

When we return from our lake outing, I peel off to my room and open the hidden folder on my phone. I begin marking potential content from my archives, compiling lists of services and rates, then I set up my phone’s self-timer in the window so the light strikes my body and highlights my silhouette.

“Right?” I repeat to myself, shielded behind a fortress of unpacked boxes.

***

At the start of middle school, I created my first online profile along with some of my friends on a borrowed iPhone we passed from person to person during our lunch period. It was a secret MySpace page I wasn’t allowed to have, like most things at that age. We spent hours curating our pages, using digital code to personalize everything from the hot pink zebra wallpaper to the silver glitter font. We snapped selfies during every free period, edited the photos until they were unrecognizable, and then cluttered the untouched space with blingy digital stickers.

Curating a profile was instinctive at that age, teenagers conditioned to be hyper-aware of outside perceptions in our volatile social environments. There were so many layers of the internet not yet discernible to me in those years, layers soon so undetectable they became skins, no longer indistinguishable from myself. The looking glass of the internet was no longer an instrument expanding my understanding of the world but rather one that constructed my identity in the ever-changing world of digital code. I became interchangeable with my digital interface and, therefore, vanished entirely in the process.

***

My first post is a SFW picture of me in a bikini, white with black polka dots taken in my backyard the previous summer I spent living back in my hometown. I crop out my head for good measure.

I hit [post] to an audience of one, feeling that my digital footprint is still negligible, not yet incriminating. Perhaps I still have a deeply ingrained whorephobia, having been slut-shamed when I was younger to a degree that altered my sense of self. Being labeled a slut as a young girl taught me that the only thing worse than feeling invisible was to be seen. We live in a society that teaches us selling your body is a crime while perpetuating a culture that violently hungers for sex. Sex work is a multi-billion dollar industry, thus highly coveted in our capitalistic American culture while simultaneously a marginalized occupation with little to no protections for workers.

I erase my face from my profile picture and my banner and create an alter-ego. Does this give me the anonymity I believe it gives me?

After my first post, I sit on my account for a month or so with no activity and continue to marvel at the peculiarities of Michigan as the seasons shift far too fast for my comfort. The first snow falls in October. We run home three blocks from my roommates’ poetry reading in a flurry of panic and excitement while they shout about how ridiculous I sound. I pull out my phone and record a low-quality video of the barely visible bits of snow dusting the pavement and flash them my middle finger. And what of it? We grin stupidly at each other.

***

Within a few weeks after beginning my first year at university, I fell into a period of depression and suffered from severe insomnia that interfered with my attendance to my classes. In an attempt to forge friendships with my roommates who had planned to rush all summer, I signed-up for Panhellenic rush right before the deadline.

On day three, Sisterhood Round, a group of about 50 of us PNMs (potential new members) were ushered into the dining room of one of the 12 houses to watch a recruitment video put together by their PR team. The video featured a montage of highlights strung together with an upbeat electronic song in the background—throngs of girls skipping and dancing across the screen on the beach, across campus, beneath the sunshine singing, laughing, bright, and full of joy. I ultimately joined this sorority, partially believing this simple act would transform me into one of the girls on the screen, all the while only further isolating myself by joining these hegemonic spaces that made me feel at odds with myself. Even then, I was critical of this system, but I felt more obligated to be validated by the system than to be in opposition to it.

Social media was the fabric that dictated our identities as houses. Those considered “top houses” had professional-grade pages featuring a disproportionate number of conventionally attractive and overwhelmingly white girls with large followings. “Top houses” had events with the desirable fraternities, the most luxurious houses, and overall the most social perks. I learned the workings of branding, paying close attention to the content, editing, and marketing of these so-called desirable houses, in order to try to replicate the same strategies. I joined the PR and marketing committee of my sorority and eventually managed our Instagram account for a year, tirelessly planning feed aesthetics and curating a meticulously “effortless” presence to improve our social standing in the Greek Life hierarchy. I maneuvered the tools at my fingertips to try and alter the material world around me because if the world could bend to my will, then perhaps I’d finally be able to get some sleep at night. The longer I wrestled within these systems, the more alienated I became from myself.

***

After the summer I moved back in with my parents following graduation, I spent a week at the end of October trying to escape the overwhelming sense of dread that housed itself in my body. I raced six hours straight to Los Angeles, couch surfing and sleeping in my car to distance myself as far as I could manage from my hometown. On the days everyone I knew in the city was busy, I hid in the aisles of bookstores where I didn't have to spend money I didn't have. I picked up Jia Tolentino’s book Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion and stealthily chipped away at it section by section, haphazardly marking my progress by snapping a shot of the page I left off on.

In her book, Tolentino draws on the Goffmanian theoretical framework of the presentation of self and explores the digital self, positing that, while we create the digital, the digital also creates us. Lucie Shelly claims Tolentino’s essays “consider the internet’s refraction of selfhood: the self as ‘the last natural resource of capitalism,’ as something to be weaponized, as a state of constant performance.”

How else to define the self other than to say it is our essence, perhaps even our brand. Perhaps it is as Foucault predicted: a world that relies on biopower, working “to incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize the forces under it: a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them.” In a capitalist society that works to quantify, monitor, and commodify the body, technology must be viewed critically as a tool that promotes this agenda.

I think of this trip to Los Angeles as a symbolic performance. I subscribed to the narrative that returning to a place that did not bend to my will, mindlessly discarding me despite every effort I had made to stay, felt like an act of defiance. Though, in hindsight, I recognize this was my meager attempt to assert control when it seemed everything was just barely out of reach. I cut corners everywhere I could to fuel my fantasy—hardly equipped to cover gas, let alone food. I slept in my car when I had nowhere else to stay. By the end of the trip, I was dehydrated, sleep deprived, and had only a few dollars to my name. My digital record keeping documents the clear blue skies and radiant sunshine, all perfectly edited and every caption meticulously constructed. While both conflicting realities may be true, I recognize the heavy role perception management played. Ultimately, I’m still unsure if the performance was for the benefit of the outside world or myself.

***

As I attempted to claw my way back into decent academic standing and exert a sense of control over my life, I began to rapidly lose weight, food tracking apps totaling my caloric intake until the number dropped to 500. I subscribed to YouTube channels promoting weight loss and productivity hacks, utilized sleep trackers telling me when to sleep and wake, meticulously tracked my habits, recited daily self-affirmations and manifestations, and had an online audience on my social media platforms praising my notably thinner figure. Optimize.

The code infected my body with the desire to become something unrecognizable. Plugged in, my corporeal body began to split under the pressure—a battle of selves. I altered myself in ways that allowed me to access avenues of beauty and privilege that were otherwise unattainable before, conditioned to believe conformity would be rewarded. My digital self paraded a flawless exterior while my physical body deteriorated.

Optimization has become culturally salient, blindly upholding capitalistic values of production in our personal lives without challenging the root of these deeply ingrained impulses. We are in a constant state of upgrading—optimizing by becoming efficient machine-like entities.

***

I lean into the camera and rub my greasy finger across the front-facing camera lens, hoping to transform the image forming on the small handheld screen. My face appears more distorted through the foggy lens than before I attempted to clean it.

I open up my direct messages again to revisit the client’s request one last time to make sure I can deliver the desired product. I had the client pay upfront for their custom to assure I wouldn’t waste my time creating something I couldn’t reuse.

User u198384: say my name and speak spanish to me while playing with yourself

The request seems clear and simple enough. I bite the dry skin off my bottom lip as I set up my camera and scan my eyes across the room for additional props. An off-white straw cowboy hat catches my attention. I plop it firmly on top of my head and take a big gulp of wine before balancing my camera on a mirror leaning against the wall. I stand on my knees, then press the red button to record and begin performing. I become her, the version of a woman I’ve come to learn my clients expect, a shadow of myself. I am both amplified and dimmed down, distorted until I am satisfactorily enthralling but unthreatening, interesting but uncomplicated, sexy but approachable.

I begin whispering, repeating his name every few sentences, tilting the cowboy hat in a way that makes my eyes peek out mysteriously from beneath. “J0hnny, J0hnny, J0hnny.” I drop into the splits and peel off every article of clothing until my bare skin locks eyes with the camera. Though nobody is there, I imagine the eyes that will eventually envelop my naked body and feel something I’m unable to name. Perhaps it is a feeling akin to relief, somebody there to witness my clandestine offering. I want to be seen, need to be seen.

***

In his article “The Digital Self: Through the Looking Glass of Telecopresent Others,” Shanyang Zhao defines the digital self as “more oriented toward one’s inner world, focusing on thoughts, feelings, and personalities, than one’s outer world, focusing on height, weight, and looks.” Further, he explores how the digital self is retractable and multiplied. In this context, we are formless and infinite. Zhao posits the existence of an ethereal and intangible digital self, the bodily disconnect permitting cyberspaces to facilitate salient interactions with real world consequences. A feedback loop that is in constant conversation with itself. What happens when this feedback loop is saturated with so many voices, thoughts, and opinions—exponentially expanding and evolving? Is there a limit to what one can withstand? In this context, is all understanding of the self essentially dissolved by the fluid and porous nature, stable identities moot?

I’ve come to believe the mystery of the cicadas is much like the digital self. It’s not only easy for the buzz of the cicadas to go unnoticed but expected that they, along with most things, will eventually fade into the backdrop of long humid summer days. The rhythmic tics on an endless loop are drowned out by stronger memories. Rollerblading beside the lake, sunscreen that stings, beers on the porch, and spontaneous late night drives. Yet, the cicadas are in constant motion much like the digital self, existing outside of ourselves for the world to view, interpret, and interact with at one’s leisure.

My second summer in Chicago, two distinct broods emerged together for the first time since 1803. Experts called it a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence. I learned with some surprise that cicadas appear in periodical cycles, some every 13 years and some every 17 years. I peered upward into the branches caressing the sky as I tried to locate them above, ears ringing with a familiar music. Riding my bike through the residential streets lined with old trees, I compulsively pulled out my phone to record the sounds—immortalizing them for fear they may one day fade into the deep recesses of my mind. Sometimes, I still play the sounds when the impermanence of time becomes unbearable.

***

My mind is often preoccupied by the symbol of the cyborg, abstract and formless yet coherent. In her controversial essay “The Cyborg Manifesto,” Donna Haraway writes, “The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of historical transformation.” It is a work preoccupied with transgressed boundaries and possibilities, one that aims to disrupt traditional conceptions of gender and identity. In digital form, I am a hyper-constructed projection of myself made for public consumption. When I stare at the camera intently, it is with the purpose of appearing seductive. I twirl and fidget with my lingerie in a way that is both mindless and intentional, my digital audience omnipresent. I am a symbol of myself, which is to say that I both resemble parts of myself while others become distorted, magnified, or altogether obscured. I am a cyborg, bound to have the fantasies and desires of my audience projected onto me for a pretty price.

In many ways, the symbol of the cyborg is at once a stand-in for destruction and even described as “the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism” by Haraway. Simultaneously, the cyborg is subversive, beyond comprehension, and thus has the potential to revolutionize the very structures of society. Haraway asserts, “Illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential.”

To this, my question is what is the fabric that weaves us together . . . or, rather, what is the code that inscribes us?

***

My inbox gleams back at me with several unread messages.

User u227482: “just stay there and let w admire you”

User u374794: “what are you? latinas r so sexy”

User u462873: “goddess, I’d love to worship you”

User u574297: “would like to rub ur cute tiny feet on my face”

I feel immune to these messages after a few months of navigating NSFW feeds, the world of sex and porn relying on a distinct lexicon like any other community, predictable and repetitive words strung together in my inbox.

Am I actively choosing to partake in an industry that is exploiting my body, a carnal cyber disembodiment. A form of annihilation. Or am I actively working to benefit and profit off of a system that has profited off of the trauma and violence against my body? Am I reclaiming my stretched skin I’ve spent so long despising as an act of protest, or has the system simply crafted this narrative too?

To be quite honest, I don’t know.

Do I know where the over-exaggerated, multiplicitous, digitally constructed version of myself ends and I begin?

Am I a cyborg? Haraway writes, “A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.” Perhaps even more maliciously, a cyborg who embodies the capitalist dream of colonization work and production. A machine. Not flesh. Disembodied. Powerless.

Or am I a cyborg? Infinite. Untouchable. A machine. Ever-evolving. Disembodied. Undefinable.

Am I a working archive of myself, mapping memory, temporality, and identity with each online interaction, with each update, with each transaction?

Politics inform our world and our existences; to deny such is to deny reality. My choices are not stripped of meaning within these contexts. But as individuals conforming to systems that are designed to exploit the worker, what is agency? What is choice?

***

animal-machine-machine-animal-machine-machine-machine-animal-animal-animal-machine?

***

I am not me. I have no beginning and no end, dancing infinitely on the glass screen pressed to a stranger's face on the other side of the world. Their hot breath sticks to the echo of me playing on a loop. I have no name, only the one I indiscriminately selected, one I can change at any moment. The pleasure I feel is not necessarily real, though not entirely fiction. I am an inversion, that which once was public now private, that which private glaringly public—our body resisting comprehension while demanding to be seen.

***

The hum of the cicadas is a memory I frequently revisit now that winter has blanketed the landscape with silence. For me, it represents a fiction, or rather a disputable truth. It is a truth to me, as real as memory, however real that may be. But it has no weight, no form, no certainty.

The digital disguises itself as being immutable, set in stone, decisive. We self-monitor, self-optimize, self-deceive. This isn’t something that is unique to the digital age; it is simply not yet familiar.

***

When I go home for Christmas break, I’m tempted to ask my parents about the possibility of cicadas in California, but I abruptly stop myself.

Still, I hear the thrumming, I breathe the August breeze through my unstable lungs, and I cling to the mutable.