The Computer Room

A couple of weeks ago, I interviewed nabby (@inviteonlycomic on Instagram), a former fiction-kin.

You can listen to it here or on The Computer Room main feed.

Before I explain what a fictionkin is, we first need to understand what an otherkin is.

Otherkin refers to an identity category where one’s soul does not match one’s body. There are human otherkin, like is often the case with fictionkin, mediakin, or otakin/otakukin, who identify with fictional characters, and historykin, who identify with historical figures (you may remember the non-binary TikTok personality who went viral after claiming they “kinned” Hitler, or this iconic Tumblr post). There are also non-human otherkin, who identify with, or in the verbiage of the community, whose kintype is, animals, mythological creatures, aliens, etc.

Otherkin is one of these identity categories that receive unfair treatment. The perfect avatar for social critics foaming at the mouth to critique the excesses of kids online, it has variously been dismissed, conflated with the thematically similar but wholly unrelated furry fandom, or used as a pawn in the ongoing conversation about transgender identity, a “that’s what’s next, folks!”

None of these describe what otherkin are, or how and why they emerged, or even convincingly theorize about what purpose they serve in an individual’s life. I don’t think it’s fair to cast otherkin as a punchline; nor do I think they should be used as pawns in a moral panic about technology.

And to echo Thiel for a moment, while I don’t fault anyone for not taking them literally, I do think we should take them seriously.

Some people have described “otherkin” as a community, but they are only so in the broadest sense. Otherkins exist in a network of related experiences. Like many other online phenomena, including political ones, like the e-right, otherkin exist more in an ecosystem than they do a community. There’s a broad rubric of what it means to be an otherkin, but no single ideology or experience they subscribe to. The religious scholar Danielle Kirby, who’s done some of the most thorough research on otherkin, describes it as a “morass of individual preferences.” 

Like so much of contemporary identity, being an otherkin relies on something called unverified personal gnosis (UPG) or subjective personal gnosis (SPG). UPG, a term you may already be familiar with if you’ve ever been in neo-pagan circles, is exactly what it sounds like: unfalsifiable knowledge that can only be received through personal experience.

But in otherkin world, like the spiritual circles they’re downstream of, UPG isn’t always law.

In some otherkin communities, fictionkin are viewed as “less authentic” than those who kin with animals, angels, aliens, or mythological creatures. This perception stems from the belief that kintypes grounded “in history,” even if inaccurately represented, have a more solid foundation in reality. This idea is similar to trends seen in neo-paganism and various digital communities, where historical or tradition-based practices are valued over those influenced by pop culture or are somehow “newer.” For instance, in neo-paganism, practices with alleged historical roots are considered more legitimate, even if the history is partially or completely revisionist or fabricated, as in the case of Gerald Gardner’s Wicca. Similarly, fandoms centered on political or historical themes are often deemed more credible than those based on pop culture, despite the fact they function in the same ways. 

Ironically, the concept of otherkin as we know it today, is a product of neo-paganism’s collision with Lord of the Rings, that is, Lord of the Rings (LOTR) flavored fictionkin. “Otherkin” originated from the neo-pagan group, The Elf Queen’s Daughters (EQD), which was part of several Tolkien-inspired spirituality movements that emerged during the late 1960s and early 1970s, after LOTR was printed in paperback and, coincidentally, there was a surge of interest in neo-paganism. 

EQD spread their message the way all other nascent fringe identity groups did, through handwritten letters and zines like The Green Egg, eventually—and please fact check me on this, I’m operating from memory—culminating in a 1980s listserv that was run by the Silver Elves, who are the premiere historians of humans-who-identify-as-elves. On the listserv you were either elf kind or other kind: eventually, shortened to otherkin. (BTW, for all the oldheads out there, I’m not forgetting alt.horror.werewolves! Maybe in another newsletter, I’ll dive into the newsgroups that coalesced around these identities.)

Anyway, I digress.

In other communities, contradicting people’s kin-experience is considered poor etiquette. From an otherkin Discord server, one rule states, “Reality checking is not allowed,” and users are encouraged not to argue about people’s identities, “even if they contradict one another.” 

This is partly influenced by personal preferences or the political leanings of each community's administrators, but it’s also significantly affected by the metaphysical beliefs that support the concept of otherkin. There isn’t a single otherkin cosmology, and the metaphysics which support each person’s beliefs are as diverse and complex as the identity itself. While some otherkin individuals do not contemplate this aspects of their identity, others have robust ideas, sometimes culminating in fully-developed New Religious Movements, as is the case with the SIlver Elves and the Tribunal of the Sidhe. 

A few things stand out to me about otherkin metaphysics: 

* Many otherkin believe in the existence of a multiverse, multiple dimensions, or parallel realities. Some believe that the possible number of realities is finite, while others believe they’re infinite. (I can’t help but think of the Mandela Effect here.)

* In some otherkin belief systems, your soul or even your body can travel across the multiverse. Sometimes this happens before you’re born, like with reincarnation, but other times it can happen in the present day. Reality shifting, a term which trended on TikTok during the pandemic, describes the process of “changing realities.”

* Speaking of reincarnation, some otherkin believe that their souls are reincarnated into human bodies. This includes fictionkin. One explanation for kinning a fictional character is that there’s a parallel universe where that character is real. Danielle Kirby describes the role of the author in that worldview: 

“[This] recasts the author as a channel or medium, expressing, perhaps unintentionally, another world or plane of existence. The second possible explanation is that the readers themselves, through their attention and interest, actually create the worlds or creatures of the fantastic. This process seems to be based in an idea of energy transfer, and implicity assumes the validity of psychic powers and magic. The former proposal assumes the alternative world is already existent before the composition of the author, whereas the latter includes the audience in the process of worldmaking.”

Something striking to me about this is that these two ideas are everywhere in the mundane or non-otherkin world. Of course, there are New Age beliefs like manifestation, which is just one way people express the idea that belief = power, that everyone is essentially a chaos magician that can create his or her own reality if they simply want it badly enough. In that vein, there’s also the contentious, but I think related, idea that, “You are X if you say you’re X.”  (In the future, everyone will see you exactly as you want to be seen for 15 minutes.) But there are other ways these ideas manifest, too. For example, our increasing inability to differentiate fiction from non-fiction, as was famously the case with the short story “Cat Person,” may suggest that authors are mediums not inventors. What was described in “Cat Person” is a reality that must be considered within the context of this reality. This thinking also allows you to more easily separate the art from the artist. A problematic artist, like J.K. Rowling, can be irrelevant, because she was only an imperfect channel, not the originator of the idea. Or that social media creates or guides reality, whether it’s journalists writing trends into existence or the meteoric rise of Donald Trump.

In one interpretation, the popular one, we’re willing these outcomes into meatspace via magic or the machinations of “the Cathedral.” A related thought is that groups of people are working together to “reality shift” or manifest their desired outcome.  Another interpretation is that when we post, we’re channeling something that’s always been true. We’re tapping into something. And sometimes? More than one thing can be true at once. Two realities can co-exist, side-by-side. 

The other thing that stands out to me about otherkin is how closely the process of coming to identify as one mirrors other identity groups. Otherkins often describe the process of “awakening,” which can happen in any number of ways. “Awakening” is that moment when finally, you understand why you’ve always felt like a stranger in a strange land (another highly influential book I should write more about later), why your life has been characterized by feeling like an outsider. 

Otherkin awakening, as I’ve seen it described, sounds an awful lot like realizing you’re trans, autistic, BPD, a vampire, queer, POTS or other chronic illnesses, a starseed, a witch, DID (multiple personalities or multiple systems). Unsurprisingly, otherkin identity is often “co-morbid” with many of the identity categories on this list. I say this descriptively, not pejoratively. I’m of the school of thought that all of these identity groups are useful, and tell us something important about the world we live in, and shouldn’t be relegated to clickbait fodder. Again, while they not always be literally true, they are serious. 

Everyone is searching for something—some kind of box to put themselves in—some kind of narrative. 

I’ve noticed, anecdotally, though I don’t have data to back this up, that many of these more fringe identities like otherkin emerge among the white working class. So does neo-paganism. Being a neo-pagan or otherkin or both might be a way of reclaiming a sense of history and identity for these people—it was for the people I’ve personally known. I don’t know much about it, but I would imagine that the revisionist histories of the 1960s and 70s pan-African movements served a similar purpose. These are groups of people whose history and identity have been hollowed out. New narratives and the identities that come with them give them a new opportunity to have a more robust and transcendent sense of who they are. 

There are other ways that the identity categories I listed above mirror one another: they’re deeply contingent on what, today, we call “vibes.” Something that is strongly felt, but can’t be fully articulated. It’s what I imagine ecstatic religious experiences were like, or what love is like (for me, at least). It’s something that moves me, but I don’t know that I have the language to describe it. 

A tendency towards hyper-categorization in the young or Very Online has been criticized—as narcissistic, as a replacement for a personality, as somehow “entitled”—but I think that’s the easy explanation.

We’ve put people in a strange position. We live in a disembodied, text-based world of pure feeling.

We’re simultaneously not experiencing a whole lot in the traditional sense, but we maintain deep affinities. And all of this is in a mostly text-based universe, among people who have been conditioned to navigate a text-based world from birth, with plenty of white space for our imaginations to fill in the blanks. 

So many of these identities that the culture war regularly discredits and individuals struggle to find the language to describe are about something you feel, not something you do.

And so what happens? 

What Substack-favorite Humdog described as “hysterical identification” in her famous essay pandora’s vox, but what I think might more compassionately be called vicarious experience. Everything is a vicarious experience and we don’t know how to talk about it. We don’t know how to write about it.  

So we express it with all sorts of concepts and images. 

Sometimes it’s more complete in an image, or an emoji, or a gender, though that may not be the right word or the way we describe our souls. The same impulse that moves us to say “Literally me” when looking at a picture of Ryan Gosling or Christian Bale undergirds neo-pronouns and otherkin identity. It’s what makes fictosexuality and aegosexuality make sense. I believe it’s a huge motivation in fandom—when you feel it in your heart that the Cowboys lost or somebody said Taylor Swift is fat. 

You look at something or someone and you feel it so strongly that all you can say is “That’s me.”

Some of these ideas were born because of the Internet, but sometimes I wonder if the Internet evolved the way it did because of the way our self-conception changed.

This state of living within one's own mind isn't a result of being so online; rather, we are so online because we're more comfortable in our imaginations. Role-playing games and MUDs didn't cause people to splinter; they exemplified an existing splintering that had nowhere else to go. The same holds true for all the new forms of expression that seemed to flourish and find their own in the late 60s and 70s: Trekkies/Trekkers, elves, furries, neo-pagans, tabletop roleplayers, etc.

When I'm honest with myself, that was the catalyst for me, personally: I wasn’t comfortable in the physical world and made the conscious decision to retreat. The screen became an extension of myself, though it didn’t have to be. I didn’t become Very Online; I was born Very Online, and the internet was there waiting for me.

Gio and Katherine discuss the 2005 film Hard Candy, To Catch A Predator, Lucas' room, and the moral panic around and reality of chatroom pedophiles. 

Katherine is DONE with Zoomers re-writing Internet history and being smug to her about it. It is NOT a girl's world, ladies -- at least online. Gio has some other ideas. She and Gio discuss WIRED's "Everyone Is A Girl Online," miladys, Biggie Slonk, pregnant Megumins, and the myth of the "Girl Internet." They collectively mispronounce Tiqqun at least a dozen times.  

Vers and Lukas  drop by and talk about e-dating, e-girls, e-ating disorders, and secret political Facebook groups. 

Steff and Katherine discuss Lauren Oyler's Fake Accounts and Patricia Lockwood's No One Is Talking About This. Warning, Katherine struggles through a Harper's review. She got a little too big for her britches with the whole "reading quotes out loud" thing.

Is Chat-GPT sentient? What does it think about when you log off? Steff and Katherine explore new developments in AI, as only non-technical people can.

Katherine and Steff are joined by Perry Abbasi, a Chicago-based lawyer whose Twitter presence recently "made headlines" -- in other words, revealed just how reliant on Twitter modern-day journalists are. Katherine has also, once again, fucked with the theme. Someone help her.

Pieces cited:Police district candidate’s social media full of racist and misogynist postsHow the Online Right gave up on reality

A little stroll through the history of the Internet's favorite gossip sites: Pretty Ugly Little Liars, KiwiFarms, The Dirty, lolcow.farm, Perez Hilton, and Lipstick Alley. And of course...honorable mention, the Encyclopedia Dramatica.

This was recorded weeks before Katherine had her moment of enlightenment about random Internet strangers.

Theme: Computer Love, covered by Envelope Generator

Overworked, overpaid, and probably undertaxed: today, we dive into the world of /r/overemployed.

Happy New Year! Steff and Katherine the wonderful world of Internet fad diets: keto, paleo, carnivore, frugivore, Bulletproof Diet, Ana Boot Camp, Ray Peatism, Raw Egg Nationalism, and Whole30.

Correction: At some point, Katherine incorrectly states Susun Weed was pro-raw veganism! Susun Weed merely debated raw vegans. Stuff gets fuzzy that far back.

Link:Salo Forum Archive

Theme: Computer Love by Kraftwerk, covered by Envelope Generator (This is the final, static theme. I promise.)

While Kat is in Colombia having a mental health episode, Steff interviews Alex Perez, "the Iowa Pariah," whose controversial interview with editor and writer Elizabeth Ellen inspired the entire staff of Hobart Magazine to resign. 

Read the interview here. 

Outro: "Guantanamera" by The Sandpipers 

Default Friend is joined by a new cohost, Poetry Grifter, to talk about two digitally native pieces of literature, Finally, Some Good News and Bronze Age Mindset.

As a paying subscriber, you receive this episode a week early. Last week’s episode with Oliver Bateman is now available for free. Listen here:

In this episode, I talk to the YouTube personality and fellow Fan Studies guy, Peter Coffin about YouTube, politics, and the mob.

Check out Peter across the web:

* Twitter

* YouTube

And his books here:

* Cancel Culture: Mob Justice or a Society of Subscriptions?

* Custom Reality and You

Subscribe and receive early podcast releases, a link to my Discord community, movie nights, the advice column, and a whole lot about Internet culture.

As a paying subscriber, you receive this episode a week early. Last week’s episode with Rayne Fisher-Quann is now available for free. Listen here:

Subscribe and receive early podcast releases, a link to my Discord community, movie nights, the advice column, and a whole lot about Internet culture.

This was a wide-ranging conversation.

We talked about mIRC WWE roleplays, the impossibility of creating a genealogy of bodybuilding forums, how trolling evolved from Usenet to Twitter, the implicit similarities between Aimee Terese and Zyzz, why the digital invites body modification, male-to-male transsexuals, and the lasting impact of what the New York Times’ once dubbed “the male fitness internet.”

Read Oliver’s EXCELLENT reporting here:

* The Unheard History of Bodybuilding Forums

* Steroid Solidarity

* Muscle, Smoke, Mirrors

* The Life of a Jacked Guy in 2019

* How Selfies and Social Media Shaped Modern Bodybuilding

* What Could Have Triggered Elliot Rodger?

Books referenced:

* Muscle, Smoke, and Mirrors by Randy Roach

* Muscle: Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder by Sam Fussell

I would love to do a follow-up episode dedicated just on Zyzz. If anyone has any guest recommendations, feel free to let me know below.

I needed to add something below the line to create the paywall. Here’s more Zyzz. Your dollars will go to me getting a fake tan today.

And for the heterosexual gentlemen, of which there are maybe two, here’s Paris Hilton in a bikini:

One of my favorite TikTokers, Rayne Fisher-Quann, joined me to talk about TikTok, cancel culture, the futility of the culture wars, how people talk about casual sex, and a shared favorite topic, the Internet.

You can find Rayne’s reading recs, advice column, and internet culture observations here (and you can follow her on TikTok here).

Theme: You’re Standing On My Neck by Splendora 

Meta-Nomad, the host of another one of my favorite podcasts, Hermitix, and I talk about cyclicacklashes, the frontiersmen of the Metaverse, walking the walk, and the importance of starting a garden. 

I cut this one a little short because towards the end, it got a little inside baseball and we went on a long tangent about a specific book. Initially, I was planning on this being released in written format but was pleasantly surprised that the audio quality wasn't too too bad. 

Theme: Telekon by Gary Numan

Listen to Hermitix here. Listen to The Computer Room on other platforms here.

Part one of a special series about Adam Lanza’s digital footprint.

In episode one, I speak with the author of the essay, “The Ghost of Adam Lanza,” BlitheringGenius.

This is still a work-in-progress— the un-paywalled version may see slight changes (certainly improved audio quality). Please feel free to flag anything in the comments.

I’d also like to add a content warning. We don’t discuss the tragedy at Sandy Hook, but the nature of our discussion may upset some listeners.

Theme: Beehive Days by Locust Toybox

On this episode, I talk to the hostesses my favorite podcast, Nymphet Alumni. We talk about the lolcowification of TikTok, Marshall McLuhan, what would happen if Tavi Gevinson met Curtis Yarvin, incel ascension, digital game, and a hell of a lot more.  One of my favorite episodes yet. 

Also, I quote a hypothetical Russian person at some point. I'm not Russian. The person I made up for my example is!

Listen to Nymphet Alumni here. Find this podcast on other platforms here.

Other relevant links:Biz's writingaliceandfernsnarkThe Inverse of the F**k BoyIncels, incel ascension, incel chasers.

Theme: Lolita Ya-Ya by Nelson Riddle

I have a backlog of episodes! This is a conversation I did with Atoosa Rubenstein, former Editor-in-Chief of Seventeen and founder of Cosmogirl, in January (😅) about her career, the importance of content curation, and her wonderful Substack, Atoosa Unedited.

In this special crossover episode, Emmet returns to discuss Carmen Hermosillo's/humdog's iconic essay about self-commodification on the WELL (Whole Earth 'Letronic Link), "pandora's vox." 

Read it below:

Jack Crum of 404Tales joins me for a conversation about internet ethnographies, the history of Tumblr, and what nobody had the balls to say about #GamerGate.

Theme: The Great Fairy Fountain Etude

You can also listen to this episode on Spotify, Simplecast, and Apple Podcasts.

Happy Wednesday folks.

Audio posts are back, with more of my voice than anyone could realistically ever want to listen to.

But first, I’m promoting this episode of ex.haust. Emmet Penney and I talk about one of my favorite pieces of tech writing of all time, Julian Dibbell's essay, "A Rape in Cyberspace."

There’s just so much to say about “A Rape in Cyberspace.” I think it’s one of those rare pieces I could talk about for hours. In fact, I think this is the third piece of content I’m releasing on it in just a few short months. It was so prescient.

I mean, today, The New York Post ran this headline: Mother opens up about being ‘virtually gang raped’ in metaverse. But this piece is so much more than just the question of, “What is digital rape?”

It poses some very important questions about the nature of the body, how identity is shaped in cyberspace, the myopia-inducing effect of the Internet, how play helps us construct who we are, how we should govern non-physical places, and what the Internet even is.

Here are a few of my favorite quotes:

Where virtual reality and its conventions would have us believe that exu and Moondreamer were brutally raped in their own living room, here was the victim exu scolding Mr. Bungle for a breach of “civility.”  

[…]

MUD-made world is neither exactly real nor exactly make-believe, but nonetheless profoundly, compellingly, and emotionally true. 

[…]

And then there were what I’ll call the techno-libertarians. For them, MUD rapists were of course a******s, but the presence of a******s on the system was a technical inevitability, like noise on a phone line, and best dealt with not through repressive social disciplinary mechanisms but through the timely deployment of defensive software tools. Some a*****e blasting violent, graphic language at you? Don’t whine to the authorities about it — hit the @gag command and said a*****e’s statements will be blocked from your screen (and only yours). It’s simple, it’s effective, and it censors no one.

[…]

Toading, they insisted (almost convincingly), was much more closely analogous to banishment; it was a kind of turning of the communal back on the offending party, a collective action which, if carried out properly, was entirely consistent with anarchist models of community. And carrying it out properly meant first and foremost building a consensus around it — a messy process for which there were no easy technocratic substitutes. It was going to take plenty of good old-fashioned, jawbone-intensive grassroots organizing.

[…]

“Where does the body end and the mind begin?” young Quastro asked, amid recurring attempts to fine-tune the differences between real and virtual violence. “Is not the mind a part of the body?” “In MOO, the body IS the mind.” 

[…]

I have come to hear in them an announcement of the final stages of our decades-long passage into the Information Age, a paradigm shift that the classic liberal firewall between word and deed (itself a product of an earlier paradigm shift commonly known as the Enlightenment) is not likely to survive intact. 

If you’ve been following my work for a while, then you might notice that the groundwork Dibbell laid in “A Rape” has also profoundly informed my thinking about Tumblr: the body IS the mind.

I feel compelled to add, though maybe this is misguided, that it’s been bittersweet to see how some of these conversations have picked up in recent months. Particularly the ones around Tumblr and fandom’s role in shaping the Internet.

But all that’s another conversation for another post.

Like this episode? Subscribe to ex.haust here.

WARNING: This episode's audio quality is exceptionally, exceptionally bad. Special thanks to Will Kraus for cleaning it up. In future episodes, I’ll be using a better mic.

Is a journalist who reports on virtual events that happen in a virtual world still a journalist? If you choose to present yourself as a rabbit online, does that say anything meaningful about who you really are? I spoke with Peter Ludlow, founder of The Alphaville Herald about living your life—fully online.

Referenced articles:

* Raking muck in "The Sims Online" by Farhad Manjoo (Salon, 2003)

* Evangeline: Interview with a Child cyber-Prostitute in TSO by Peter Ludlow (2003)

* A Real-Life Debate On Free Expression In a Cyberspace City by Amy Harmon (2004)

I am an awkward person, and audio conversations aren’t always easy for me. I forget words, I stutter sometimes, I even lose my train of thought. Needless to say, the podcast format can sometimes be challenging, especially when I don’t already know the person I’m speaking to. Are these conversations valuable? Should I keep doing them? Drop me a line below, let me know how you feel anonymously.

Default Friend and friend of the pod and artist Gio Pennacchietti discuss internet-based creoles, the Internet's obsession with the body, the trad thots of yore, 'found footage' e-girls and self-posters, Girl Bosses as a sexual orientation, and why Default Friend wasn't bat mitzvahed.

(If anyone can help me edit audio… I’ll take it… This was my first attempt.)

Theme: Sara perché ti amo by Ricche e Poveri