24. A Girl is a Gun (w/ Alex Quicho)

This is the Greater Port pass. Hi everyone, it's Helena from Disintegrator. Welcome back to the Port pass. I'm happy to introduce you to today's highly anticipated episode. It's actually been a bit of a long time coming, but I'll tell you a bit more about that in a minute. This is one for the girls, and by that I do actually mean all of you. We're speaking today with a total force to be reckoned with, the writer, artist and girl theorist, Alex Kiccio. But let's not define her by those labels alone. According to her website, Alex is also an agent, director, bot, angel, decoy and demon of girls' guns and gawd. From her viral, wired article entitled "Everyone Is A Gawd Online", published in September 2023, to her book Small Gods, Perspectives on the Drone, released in May 2021, to her deceptively lush and enticing lecture performances and video works. Alex Kiccio has emerged as one of the sharpest voices in theorising what it means to tactically navigate, and to exist as agents in a social reality warped by platforms and emerging technologies. If I were to try to summarise it, which I guess I would never recommend, I would say that her work feels back the shimmering surface of the platform to investigate the mechanisms of its smoothness. Alex dissects the girl as a symbol consumer and inhuman subject. As she describes it, the girl is a technology of self. Assuming overlay decoupled from any deterministic identity, yet tethered to the real. It's a modality of being online that is not, in quotes, fixed to any one body or biological sex. Instead, she is a set of social protocols and psychic operations that construct a legible subject, who just so happens to be the platform's favourite stylisation of the human individual. Of course, the girl online builds on a history and culture that acts as a point of entry to this universal, existential, condition theory. Speaking for myself, I was a Tumblr girlie, through and through, and I remember something shifting after another girl online, Amalia Orman's performance piece, Excellences and Perfections in 2014, where she slowly started to perform a new identity on her social media account and watched as her following grew and changed significantly. Possibilities opened up from that. To be a girl, according to Alex, is to select strategically from a shared database, in order to instrumentalise it for this or that metric. As the theorist, Bogna Cornel writes, "We're experiencing the inhuman or post-human version of cyber feminism, where patriarchy, by relegating women to the status of machines, objects or NPCs, accidentally creates an unpredictable and potent affinity between women and technology." Building on that, Alex Kicciodare has to ask the question, "What would happen if we mutated first?" The girl online can be polarising because people keep trying to project onto her, including myself at times. It's very much a phenomenon that's like the girls that get it, get it. I'm really grateful that we got the chance to talk about this aspect of the reception of Kicciodare theory. You might notice that the episode splits off into a second part about midway through. Well, that was not intentional. On our day of recording, I was completely stuck in a buffer state. I found myself in the lobby of a budget hotel because of some scheduling issues and technical issues. It was totally unplanned and I was totally vigilant to people coming in around me and watching my environment. I logged in from a friend's borrowed laptop to the podcast recording platform but I was unable to connect with more than just my video. And so my presence, my only and entire presence through this recording session, was a blurry moving image. So I was basically trapped in my little rectangular cage with no voice, in total sensing mode, and I was unable to speak and only be spoken for. And I would say the irony of that was not lost on anyone. I'm glad that we got to kind of work out on the remix, so to speak, and get into those kind of questions around girl theory that I was burning to ask. So at this point, a big thank you to Alex, Alex Kiccio, and do you listen to this for sticking around for that? Yeah, it's a girl. It's a girl. Gender reveal, and now just kidding. So yeah, the AuroPoint lecture, I think in the original piece, there's a kind of throwaway comment where I quote my friend, Heart Lock It, who also made the throwaway tweet like all LLMs are girls. And I was like, they were cooking with that because it's true. So in that lecture, I talk a lot about facets of, I call, I play fully say, actually existing AI and actually existing girls, and resonances between the two. And I use K-A lot of MacDowell's, point of view of model as self. So the continued desire in spite of this kind of outer edge of philosophy and philosophers that you guys have interviewed extensively in the more normative circles, they're still anthropocentrism, and the desire to make AI resemble and interact with humans and have an appealing personality. And all these concerns that are wrapped into creating an actually existing human AI interaction that is like productive and fits in with us. And on the other side, MacDowell talks about model as self. So this is a kind of form of how he might conceive of things like self design, self modeling, this kind of belief that interiority is there to be constructed. How that is like accepted, absorbed and iterated by like actually existing girls. I find like completely amazing and in line with how we want to and are wrestling with the kind of idea of like is the AI sapient? Is it not? Does it have an internal world? Does it not? Like all these kind of foundational questions become more interesting if they go away, right? So the center point of aura points is we accept that there's not a presupposed internal spirit. There's no presupposed personality. Everything is there to be written and inscribed. I talk a lot about how like the diary is the first form of self writing and self inscription and how yeah, these kind of resonances between girls and AI and of course the classic cyber feminism line that girls and machines have always had the affinity, a coincidental affinity that grows deeper by the day. And then I kind of end on this note that both girls and AI seemingly at the same time have landed on this idea that it is better to protect the empty, the precious empty interior and project an untouchable exterior. So I guess when we talk about in pop culture, when people talk about aura in the non-economic sense, they are simply just talking about presence, charisma, magnetism and also untouchability. So that's just the very plightfully that I talk about like maintaining the black box of the soul. Well, you heard it yourself from the theorist of girl, AI is a girl. I think something I'm so interested in in your work is this extremely fleshed out concept of girl. But at the same time, such a strong commitment against like a strict apology of gender. And you know, what do you build this like dense, amazing theory around the idea or theory of girl, it comes with some strong statements about what a girl is. But at the same time, like your work doesn't participate in gender essentialism. And it's like incredibly playful with gender, but also like playful with the opportunities of gender as a thing that sediments within the social field. Can you talk to us a little bit about the sedimentation of gender or gender essentialism a little bit in the context of girl theory? Yeah, speaking of I guess we could start with social media, but I was watching a TikTok the other day and it's sort of on the side of like female manipulator TikTok. And this girl he was talking about how everyone thinks the display of anger is a sign of ultimate power, but actually the sign of ultimate power is playfulness. And so I think that with these kind of essentialist discourses, my personal point of view is actually completely the opposite. I'm really into gender synthesis, gender rigging ways that we can kind of like ornament and reconstruct ourselves through this kind of materiality and malleability of both self presentation. But also this kind of inherent emptiness of the self we could call it. I think what is interesting about gender essentialism is that certain codes of gender are so persistent and are always sort of being called up as a kind of not only short hand, but as an effective intensifier. And I think that's what interested me in girl theory is that instead of kind of denying the existence of this and denying its power as well. I think there's a lot of discourse around the girl that focuses on her disempowerment of course I quote to go. a lot and a lot of ways that book was first interpreted and reinterpreted was off from this point of view of Tukun's kind of foundational hatred for the young girl figure and how she's a subject of capitalism that is so empty and she can only be inhabited by the alien force of capital. Therefore she is kind of a negative force in the world that must be dissected and then disassembled. I think it's more interesting to see her as a kind of like, "releaser of extreme feeling" and like I said, "affect" and I guess relentless like, "representation" and I thought it would just be great to kind of use her as I've referred to her before as a kind of mecca, like something we kind of climb into to understand how are these things actually operating and what about gender and self presentation and identity and what have you? Are we actually missing in this conversation because we're kind of focused on always articulating and re-inscribing things like the attention between sameness and difference for example or like the formation of identity, these kind of classical philosophical questions because I have the freedom of not being trained as a philosopher. I just kind of got a bit unhinged with it and I think that resonated with people. Critically approaching philosophy from an outside space is so necessary. It makes me think about your work on platforms, how you describe the most architectures of desire but also as places where soliminality plays a really important role. They don't just shape what we see but also how we think about ourselves, self-food, identity and so on and as you explained in one of your texts and I'm quoting you here subliminals as they permeated the web to the form of DIY brainwashing. So my question is to what extent are platforms modifying us in ways that we can even interrogate and are we in some way fully subliminal already and is their way to engage with these platform realities that moves beyond subliminality maybe even subverted it? Yeah, I love that question. I guess there's like a couple of threads we can pull out from that. Okay, let's do platform and then subliminal. So in a sort of potted history of social media as a kind of mature system of person and machine we of course know it as something that was constructed around principles of behavioral design as a practice and tied to I guess how marketing specifically categorizes and quote unquote understands consumer profiles as a very rudimentary form of a subject and then that kind of was the foundation for platform architecture and kind of grew into the monstrosity that we have now but that is sort of like still a big part of how a lot of these machines develop under a kind of recursive understanding with users and of course these entities meta and Google and spite dance are also always conducting internal research around things like user behavior. These are all kind of like normal industry terms about how the platform is actually constantly constructing and reconstructing itself around how people are both behaving in ways commensurate with the architecture quote-unquote scare quotes of the platform and where they're evading it in a way that is of interest. So this is always happening. I think one point of my interest with the girl theory is also that moment of evasion and how that actually has over time become both a trap and in a in a classical sense and a lever so the trap and a lever this is getting a bit designing but let's stick with it for now so the trap as something the design theorist Benedict Singleton talks about a trap as what's it called I don't remember the exact quote but he talks about the trap as essentially a portrait of its victims behavior like the trap is kind of designed as a caricature of how its ideal victim behaves so there's already this kind of intimacy between trap and prey but I say lever as well because the prey in devising evasions is always looking for tiny little escape routes or tiny little ways to thwart the trap and I think this is a much more useful I guess like metaphorical schema to think about our our relationship to the platform then perhaps one of like extreme dominance and perhaps liberation because you know at this point we're like much too enmeshed and then when we talk about subliminals I think for the subliminal side of things I guess I was looking at users who were actively doing it whether or not it was effective the fact that they were practicing it and in often in full and playful awareness of like the history of subliminal messaging I just wanted to know why they had chosen that chosen to do that and what desires that represented what were the impasses that they were seeking to overcome so this kind of turned towards self-subliminal brainwashing whatever seemed to signal you know coming up against a hard limit of something therefore your there is like a different relation there it's kind of like a kind of brain-to-brain interface instead of I guess when we think about Instagram that's a face-to-machine so the subliminal is like a kind of different relationship but within the same kind of platform system there's there's always like this kind of question of like mutual entanglement right like an interface does go both ways and I'm reminded of like the the traps and levers of Uber for example which like evolved into a kind of cat and mouse game between a platform that's you know modeling its ideal user and then the reappropriation like the intentional reappropriation of that model by a driver class who kind of understands it who can present themselves as an ideal user by doing like a bizarre set of like cheat code behaviors and then they get a little bit more money and then you know Uber fixes it out and then you know this kind of like process is enrolled and it kind of never ends but the cat the cat does tend to win and like the more you like it's kind of like a casino like house rules you get thrown out after some time like the game is rigged but like the cat also has a change and that's that's always really interesting I want to talk about your piece on Gore which will obviously throw in the description as like an essential pre-read you mentioned the blur a bit like the blur on sensitive content for example do you know Dana DeWood that the filmmaker she has the series of films called Monad and there's a lot of like play with blur I feel like blur is kind of like a thing happening on but like Dana plays with this like character of like the master of blur some just like really good at blur as like with camouflage and like something that it's a luring on in your work there's also like these kind of two categories of blur is like the platform blurring something out and then there's like the reciprocal the reciprocal blur like blurring one's legibility to that to the platform I guess like can you introduce us to your world of blur I'm really interested in seeing the film you mentioned actually because I don't I'm not familiar but I think in terms of the blur it I think when I write about it there's a kind of relationship between blurriness and shimmer so there's this I think I think a lot about distraction decoyism and camouflage and blurriness kind of as a package an asset pack of I guess tactics and of course in contemporary theory we would point to Edward Gleesund and the right to opacity I guess earlier modes of both cyber feminism and I just want to call it a view from the bottom stuff I don't want to say I don't want to say identity I don't want to say global sales you know who I am and where I'm from so we can just assume this is the context okay but view from the bottom stuff right so how do you resist if you're already realistic and you accept that everything is looking and sensing and perceiving you I guess early forms of that were all about including one's identity the right to not be captured the right to if you're already opaque to the system instead of I guess the liberal mode was how do I announce myself to a system that doesn't recognize me there is a kind of radical stream of if the system doesn't recognize me that's actually incredible this is a this is an opportunity for me to evade capture for you know the clock is ticking in terms of the platform blur this is something that so I was referring to something called the death report which was edited by Charlie Robin Jens and produced by an architecture firm actually knows all looking at the infrastructure of managing how we confront death but also how we deal with death in our urban environments and a small section of that focused on the Gaussian blur which I found deeply interesting especially in relation to a lot of talk about things like hospital processing or you know how how funerals and things work in cities and I was like it's interesting to consider what the Gaussian blur is actually doing when And we think about older practices of I guess the point that so much of modernity is not actually to minimize the amount of death and suffering or what have you in the world, which is how a lot of people casually like to think about development, for example, like that world. But so much of modernity is actually just cleaning it. It's concealing the realities of death from everyday life, whether that's putting the butcher somewhere separate, putting the morgue somewhere separate, you know, kind of disentangling death from other operations of living. And the Gaussian blur kind of becomes that on the platform in a way. It's called sensitive content. There's something interesting about this choice of words, of course. But it doesn't, there's something strange there where it's a kind of like, there's a consensual action that you do to pass through the blur and see something as it is. And that was like a really potent part of the goal piece because it's like the blur isn't a complete, it's not a gate in that sense. It as in like something that is completely deprioritized and hidden in the way that platforms often can just do, right? Like remove the content or shadow of value or what have you. The blur is kind of like the content is there, but now it's up to you to engage with it. So I think that's a slightly different relationship that ends up happening there. So since we've started talking about core capitalism, I would like to discuss an idea that I find really interesting and that is the creative violence and the decoration of genocide that you discussed or some extent in that piece. Now beyond the discussion of core capitalism per se and curious about how algorithmic media fits into this framework. Do you think that platforms like TikTok or Instagram, for example, amplify the intrinsic core elements of capitalizing by normalizing violence, making it look all polished and smooth, or do they in some ways create opportunities to expose and confront the deeper ethical dimensions of this normalization? How do you see that tension played out? I guess the one thing that strikes me about the discussion is that I guess confronting it through the platform has been the experience for many people who are not in an active conflict zone or not actively around some form of unrest at the moment. However, I think this conversation around how media licenses, amplifies, emphasizes, moralizes, processes, metabolizes. What have you acts of extreme and incomprehensible violence? I think that's always been a big knot in how we think about our relationship to visually experiencing, I guess, representations of violence to put it concisely. I think that algorithmic media is a part of this, but it is not necessarily an outlier. I guess I think of Maggie Nelson's art of cruelty here where she kind of looks. This is an earlier book, I think from the early 2000s, but looks at a variety of media that either valorizes or confuses how we perceive violence in many different ways from sexual violence to consensual BDSM stuff, to school shooter stuff, to really effectively violent gourd and snuff things. She sort of complicates it even further. She kind of presents these case studies to us. I don't know. I was just thinking of that in relation to your question because I think when we talk about it through sci-acvelencia's gourd capitalism, I think what compelled me to use that when I was writing this piece is because, again, I was like, this is a really powerful way of re-skinning, a couple of conversations we've been having for a long time. There's the normalization and the set-asization of ultraviolence. The other is, of course, conversations around extraction and the blood cost of many things, but especially now, like the straight-up existence of a genocide that has kind of signed off in license by very prominent members of the international community. Gourd capitalism presents this incredible framework of looking at that because Valencia outright states that "Gourd is both an aesthetic and a practice." And the practice also is recursively informed by the aesthetic, but she says "Gourd is not the totality of all violence that takes place. It's a kind of style of violence." And I'm very interested in these things as well. It's like, how can we discretize things within something that seems so total that it's incomprehensible, such as unimaginable violence? And we talk about it as a media and a practice. We're talking about both the under and over worlds of crime and conflict. So we're also reconfiguring that, I think, in the piece I mentioned that Gourd is not the kind of exception to a kind of humanistic existence. It is the center of it. So we're kind of actually totally enveloped by violence, like, overworld underworld. And what happens in between and zones of safety are actually the anomalies. I mean, 2024 online was like, I mean, there's a major year of asking, like, what of this is Gourd? What of this is not? Like, what of this should be seen and not seen? Like, what does witnessing mean? What about this is activating like an unbelievably complicated sense of must-watchiness to a situation that's absolutely debased at all levels? At the same time, 2024, like, media theory world was confronting that, and it was also confronting this like, absolutely massive, brilliant contribution from Maya B. Chronic and Amy Ireland in the form of cute accelerationism. 2024 was also a major year for cute and for valences of girl and girl stack as it's sat with cute. So I'm like, what's the relationship between Gourd and ultraviolence and cute? Like, I get the sense that cute is not without its violence and not without its Gourd. In your own text, you talk about cutting or cross-sectioning cute objects, like, almost to see what's inside to like, validate that a cute thing has no organs. Like, can you kind of situate the kind of Gourd piece with respect to cute? So I think that in cuteness, there's quite a few things going on there, like, similarly to how I theorize the girl as like a collection of surfaces and behaviors that are kind of unstuck from a particular body. We could say that cuteness also has this kind of function or operation. And there is elements of cuteness that I find really interesting. I think Maya and Amy do a great job of articulating some of the, I guess, examples from, I guess, philosophically leaning biologists who talk about things like super normality and hypertilia. So this kind of idea that cuteness is, it co-exist in nature alongside violence as a way of, I guess, surviving, but this, I'm saying, surviving in a very non-scientific way, because there's also this element of excess, right? So I think in some of these, in how I understand things like the super normal or the hypertellic, there's a kind of extreme abundance there. So there's a kind of, there's a caricaturing, there's an exaggeration, there's a kind of aesthetic, super abundance that's unleashed by the kind of organizing principles, pursuit of perfection. We also get like a kind of assembly of beauty that is no longer necessarily completely laminated to a function. And cuteness, I think, happens in that space too, where this existence of things that kind of are apart from what we might say are, you know, more traditionally understood strategies of survival, like killing, eating, having sex, reproducing, this kind of cute thing, the kind of existence of cuteness in nature. And again, nature in a totally artificial, cute sense, kind of challenges that, right? And I think that that is the power of my and Amy's work, and also what I fold into my work when I think about the relationship between, I guess, what I really also tongue in cheek, call, like, predator and prey relations. I guess essentially again, re-skimming ideas of like battalion excess and making it like super cute. So for the listener, like we're in this kind of unusual and honestly quite poignant position of, Helena is, like, Helena's also, like we are a huge Alaskan fan and we're all like extremely piled in Alaskan show. And Helena had a number of questions that we really wanted to have asked, but there's like technical problems that are preventing this from happening. And now I'm like, there are like this like at a very least this one question that we really, really want to ask, but it's like going to come through my voice, which is like, laden already in like quite a funny way. Also because like Helena is visible. but cannot speak at the moment in the Riverside application. So I'm going to read this and do my best at that. For some women, like myself, me, Helena, who I'm representing, the girl idea of the girl or the girl stack, girl kind of object in terms of theory brings up discomfort in my case, even internalized misogyny. Who's somebody I never easily identified with or wanted to identify with? It is affirming at the same time to understand that the algorithmic gaze is encouraging this index in my arsenal, yet it's also a disarming experience to understand that girl is still understood in your theory as a foil, gore, horror, ultra-capitalism. Would you be interested in responding to that? Totally. And I'm happy to ask it under friendly fire, let's say, because I think that this is, you know, this is a big criticism of this theory, which I accept, like, wholeheartedly, because the girl as an entity, of course, she is coded by a lot of things about socially constructed gender that have become, I guess we could say, super normal versions of something that already was not associated with whatever the essentialists want to use to reinforce that I don't want to have to go there. So I totally understand and empathize. I think this theory has also taken off in certain ways or has been reflected in a lot of communities that just love the style and aesthetic of femininity, which I would say is actually quite distinct from what we're talking about today. And perhaps could also be seen as simply a selection of appearances, shimmers, my shadow of halots that the girl has. And of course, these, let's say, performances of femininity have these functions that again become intensifiers and releases. So I think what I find, or what I hope people will find liberating about that is seeing where they can, they actually have more agency with these things than might appear. So instead of the girl seeming like something that is compulsory, approaching it from, in Maya's book, Gender Synthesis, she talks a lot about the term gender rigging, which I really love because it has this kind of like old school, like network, cackery vibe to it where you can approach things as quote unquote, girly as ornamentation, like a super frilly Lolita outfit or like whatever you envision in terms of high femme. It's also like classically queer to think about all these things as ornamentation. Maya and Amy also talk about via a selection of animathe theorists actually about database sexuality. And again, I think this is another like lever of release in this discourse where instead of seeing all these things as compulsory and compulsions of your gender instead being like, look at this big interesting database of things that contain certain little powers. So things that people might be attracted to are things that make people want to read in a particular way. But how might those be rigged and configured according to a proliferation of gender presentations? That's the utopian vision for that of course. And I think why also this theory resonates with people who are actively iterating gender rigging in their lives, both like molecularly and in terms of external, like a kutraman, let's say. So I guess that's how I would often answer this question about the discomfort of girl theory for people who don't necessarily identify as femme. And also I always add in conversation with people like the only way I could have written this is as someone who is kind of in and out of feminine all the time. If you are completely inside it, you can never get the view from the outside. So there's always this nice relationship between that as well. Thanks again for coming back onto the podcast. I wanted to find a way to actually be present in it with the questions that I wanted to ask and also kind of revisit a little bit the critical perspective on the girl amongst other questions. I'm really interested in drag and the idea of also gender of course as a performance, as a costume and in everyday life also of these different performances that we engage in not only in terms of gender but socially as well. I think that the theory of like the girl and girl stack or girl strategies is like super interesting because it sort of hits difficult points or like it's very like a, I find it really connects with some of the original debates of like also that happen around drag or like with French feminism. I'm interested in how like this theory of the girl maps around the idea of production and reproduction when agency is reduced to image because you said also the girl has sort of an intensifier or something that is like a releaseer. I find it kind of resonates with the idea of like reproductive labour in the sense of like care work or like restoration and so I'm wondering what your perspective is on that. I think I'm quite careful in talking about the girl in relation to like a material of all like feminism because I think that some of the I guess prickliness around girl's theory is where it brushes up against materialist feminist discourse and I think I find it important to make the distinction between the girl as a kind of well like in a fucadian sense like a technology of subjectivity like a form and structure of representation and power as something that is not inherently or by default connected to someone who might identify as a woman or someone who might see let's say female reproduction as a political cause. I think there's a quite significant distinction between these two things which doesn't mean that they're not closely related but there isn't like inheritance there because I would like to avoid biological essentialism in girl theory for example. But I think where the most interesting part of it coalesces is in this idea of like when we think about Luciana Parisi's like earlier text on abstract sex like this idea that the girl is a kind of form of like there is like an inhuman dimension to its reproduction and production so production in a kind of capitalist and labor sense and reproduction in terms of simply copying and swarming. So there's something there about identity and representation power selections of traits that sort of like coalescent form because they have some form of intensity and activity in the world and that can be very useful for people who are engaged in materialist feminism because of its tactical power. So I think from my point of view it's very important actually for cause I would consider myself like 1000% of feminist obviously but I think that their instances where kind of the forces of girlness are not necessarily aligned with feminism and vice versa there can be a lot of hatred of girlness in the region of feminism as well. I think that there's a lot of potential in seriously bringing these two fields together and considering what is it about girl technology for example that could be used to further the feminist cause and I guess that's the thesis of like Helen Hester's and like liberate humanics collectives like xenopheminism like how to use the tools that we have at hand to kind of accelerate our way into gender liberation. So I don't know if that answers your question exactly but that's how I kind of see the relation between what we might see as like a feminism that is centered on things like workers' rights and reproduction and care and very material ways that we have to think about how our world is still highly gendered in the sense and girl theory which is a bit more abstract and let's say delaminated sometimes from material conditions. I think that it was important for me to kind of restate also in a different way in the sense that there is the lived experience you know this material aspect to the girl that of course is completely decoupled from the girl's representation and especially like in the theory of course it's a it's a way of gaming the platform, a way of being tactical kind of the girl's kind of like a mask in a way but I think there is then also it's really interesting to think about like pure representation and that decoupling. I was thinking also about like you know this emergence of like kind of network spirituality and swarm like being or like you know posting, this phenomenon of like skits are posting and the idea of like this also being a way to deal with like pure representation as a way to like evade capture or like evade um some kind of any kind of connection of like representation with identity. There is this possibility to sort of game dynamic that you know we can't escape from um but then it also functions thereby as like an acceleration of that inescapable dynamic in in my view. Kitty say more about how you see it as like inescapable or like your point of view in that sense. Well I think gaming representation is sort of like um putting more belief and power into the agency of the image itself or like the the operational qualities of it. It's kind of it's a surrender. It's more of a surrender to me than like a tactical I mean surrender is of course I mean one of the most powerful ways to be tactical is to give in or at least to feign surrendering somehow but at the end of the day when when thinking about something like skits are posting or like working with image itself as a currency in the most smooth way possible. Where is the tactic I guess? It is tactical in that it it's like if everything is like if we exist already in uh you know how we theorize the internet for example at this point in time is to see it as inseparable from other planetary forces but also from things like politics representation identity material like access to certain things the network is like highly embedded in that and to be realistic about how image is like a very important currency and a primary form by which many things travel within the network means that to approach it on its own terms and to consider how to use the dynamics inherent to that as opposed to thinking that there is still some kind of idealized analog or a sense of authenticity or sense of authentic image that is still somehow responsible to a material reality that has to operate in the network I think that is working against the force that play so there could just be like a waste of energy there when we consider the connective tissue of politics has fallen out of the middle of it like the sense of the internet being a public square all these things that we used to consider almost like one-to-one relationship between representation in terms of identity political identity and like how the internet amplifies and circulates those kinds of ideas and identities we have deviated so far from that being a condition of what it means to engage with each other on these platforms but it's a kind of like vestigial imprint of like a 2015-2016 era social internet and I think a lot of people still approach how we behave online with those assumptions especially if they're millennial age and above so I think there's something to be said about if the environment of the network of the social network let's say has already shifted and evolved into something heard of for unrecognizable it doesn't make sense to continue to approach things like image and representation in the way that was adapted to a previous form of it and I think I don't really want to get into this because it's not really my area of expertise but like someone who's more of memes and politics online especially in relation to the anglophone internet would say that you know particular elements of what we would have considered online activism or justice or representation especially in terms of things like feminism or queerness or communism or socialism or anything to do with the left as the west recognizes it has essentially lost the rhetorical and symbolic battle online and you can really see that especially in terms of how you when you speak to someone who is you know fresher on earth than me like someone who will use the language and symbolic repertoire of what used to be associated with a political camp before but not necessarily be aligned with them and there is like a lot of kind of disgust and cynicism around the disingenuousness of political representation online so I guess when I talk about what it means to surrender to a kind of smoothness and almost a deceptiveness on the internet it's not as cynical as it might sound it is just a kind of realism around how those previous tactics around representation have already failed um a lot of these causes I guess I'll leave it at that yeah I think I kind of see it as like almost like a co-evolution or you know this symbiotic development where of course you know influencers will notice what carries well on platform using certain codes of authenticity you know revealing particular things about oneself and then you know the rise of identity politics on social media because of that it creates engagement and then of course the sort of recursion and that dynamic that develops out of that where then because algorithm extrapolates based on that we then adapt and try to kind of stay ahead of the curve but to me I kind of see it as this very like accelerated development that seems like something um I don't really have any control over at all I can either like kind of integrate with it and somehow sort of like swim in the sea or I just kind of like stay on land I guess totally um and I think it's interesting as well because like I find that when we have conversations like this like I no longer even know if I'm talking about real people on the internet if that even matters anymore because as we know there's stuff like the dead internet theory or like clear proof that a lot of social engagement is bot driven and of course with AI agents you know it doesn't even matter right like there are many forms of agency that are circulating and activating parts of the network and doing things and a lot of that doing stuff involves communication so I think when I talk about it and theorize it that's kind of the frame that it's in too so when we also consider like what is a living girl doing online and I don't know to de-emptstract if I like what am I doing online for example like and does it matter anymore like I don't really have a very like authentic relationship to what my little self is doing on there like I kind of it's more just like I feel like there's something futile as well at the moment um I used to work and trend forecasting and a lot of that was closely tied to a lot of culture journalism and I used to say it's really interesting that a lot of journalism can be done without getting your ass out of your seat anymore you can kind of do some form of reasoning and see something gathering a kind of momentum online and then have some commentary around that that kind of tethers it back into some drivers in the real world quote unquote and I no longer really see that as like accurate or representative or even like a productive way of what is going on in culture because of the non-human communicative elements of what the social internet is now because of the collapse of the political and also because of the I would say like increasingly like para-fictional and para-social nature of what it means to exist online and I don't think these are negatives at all if everyone is kind of co-writing a big fictional like highly intricate like deep lore fictional like para-reality with each other using perhaps photographs of themselves or photographs of things that they see in the world but the end goal is not a representation one to one of reality but is closer to the like writing of any type of fiction I mean I think that's interesting in itself but it becomes it becomes more interesting to you think about that as a form of generative fiction writing on its own as opposed to like a mirror of what might be happening in terms of whatever like communities or like anything that might be happening like on the ground in the material world not that I'm making like a huge distinction between the two so I think that's also a dimension of it that sometimes is something that comes up when we talk about it's like a distinction that needs to be made when we talk about the girl stuff to you because there's sometimes like there is sometimes a tendency to be like oh all these memes are going on, therefore it must reflect what human girls are up to. And that's sort of antithetical to what girl theory in my particular vein of it, how it's kind of operating. Nevertheless, I think like my initial reaction, like personally, just speaking about myself, was kind of like the sadness towards this idea of a girl that like when I was a girl, when I was a girl, not yet a woman, whatever, that was always something that was lost to me. You know, it was never something that was in my control, it was always something that was projected onto me, and that I can still play with that projection of others onto me all the time. And I find that something kind of feels kind of cheeky, it feels kind of like something that shouldn't be allowed, and there's something quite pleasurable in that somehow. But now I can have that relationship to now because I have the agency to do so kind of. And there is a decoupling, of course, of the image and representation, and I'm not really speaking from a materialist perspective here fully, but I think there is a bit of a blend to that where the representation does even decoupled from relationship maybe to the real. The representation still has like agency in terms of like how it will trigger like engagement. And I think especially, I mean, I'm really interested in the work by this artist called Sayin Majali, who made a work called Propane. There's that level to it, where like in her work, it's a lot about like Western intervention or Anglo-American intervention into the Middle East and sort of the oversaturation of representation and sort of the agency of images in that that exist in a dynamic between projections by kind of, I guess, hegemonic dynamics, which in this case we can see that it's like the platform. And then still this ambivalent relationship of the people being represented. Because there is still I think to me like a dialectic that like the image will still form material reality, but not in the kind of traditional materialist sense that maybe was understood before this like full integration into that form. I think you're totally right in that I guess yeah, I'm not trying to make the argument that the image no longer acts on reality. Like I think I'm quite aligned with what you're saying and that the image will always have a bearing on the real, but the way that it's happening now is quite mutated. But arguably always has been, I think when you were talking earlier about feeling quite sad about what it means to like confront the girl as an entity that you can pilot as opposed to one that used to be projected onto you without any form of knowledge or agency, I think that is also that's the like emotional crux of it I would say, but then I guess I mean this will definitely lose some of your listeners, but I'll say it anyway because like I'm from a particular part of the world and have a I appear in the world as a type of person, right? Like whatever person of color whatever you might want to call it, I don't I never access girlhood like per se. Like I don't think that I ever had a real experience of girlhood and a lot of like theorists like you know like Black feminist from the US, well there's like a long history of talking about who is actually excluded from things like girlhood and childhood and innocence. That's part of a different discourse that might not touch what your listeners are interested in and is not necessarily my specialism either, but it is a big part of the context in which this is appearing too in that I think the girl appears as a theoretical construction from the place of we were never human, the girl category was never actually something that was on-site or it never was actually something that had an inherent benevolence or innocence or an actuality like positivity for the people who might have it attached to them or it might be pursuing it so that you can actively pursue like want to stand in the stream of that projection because of whatever you might call it pretty privilege or whatever you want to say it is like there is a halo effect to appearing girl in that sense that you might pursue it. If it is projected on you against your will then you might want to like flee from that beam of light and lots of people will have personal and emotional experiences of this and a kind of autobiographical relationship to it that I by no means want to discount or dismiss. I think that's an important part of understanding what it is in like you know we live in a society kind of way, but I think the crucial thing to note about this theory is that element of like the girl was never human and also many of us were never categorized as human or girl like it were excluded from these areas so therefore what does it mean to take those to kind of look at it from the outside and see what is useful from it to acknowledge the power of it it's kind of like there's an analog in terms of like you can't be a pacifist you have to believe in armed resistance if you think that anything is going to change so there's the kind of pragmatism there as well that I think is like very crucial to how the girl theory is formed but obviously depending on the audience like I don't want to talk about that because it will sometimes activate certain prejudices around like what type of discourse are we like pursuing here but it is important contextual material for this in terms of the second part of what you were saying like I haven't seen that is it like a film like the propane project yes it's like a film with rendered material but there's also a lot of like content from social media so for example there's like TikTok I mean this kind of connects with with your piece about like the gore layer there's like these kind of videos of female soldiers like posing the TikTok and then there's like there's a scene from Lawrence of Arabia and these different like historical so it's kind of like on the level of content but then there is also this voice from the off who's like a kind of a girl or like you know understood as girl and who speaks from this position of like the girl that's talking to like daddy daddy being sort of the west and the west that sort of gave the rifles and sounds amazing I'd love to see it I guess like a part of that that is like maybe useful to think about is also like the more we can approach the girl as something with ambivalence and a degree of abstraction kind of ironically allows us to see how these things operate properly so like in a work like that there is a kind of pointed use of like the girl as an infantilized position from how you're describing it like kind of describe and critique what it means like a very specific element of arming a country on its way to independence or something and like what does it mean to do that and what does it mean for a colonial power to consider itself as a kind of almost parent figure for what is then categorized as a fledgling or developing nation but it's categorized in that way because of like a historical precedent the girl thing becomes like a shortcut through which you can root a lot of this stuff and I think that's like an important part of like how to consider it as well like I think I am trained like outside of academia and often I guess like how I approach my practice is like sometimes you need to do something that doesn't actually show the work so there's like something quite different about how you would use the figure of the girl in a way that isn't necessarily like traditionally philosophical where you might want to inscribe and think about the particulars of like for example like a dialectical operation you might want to talk about every single step of that that might get you to a particular endpoint that then you're able to kind of deconstruct and analyze whereas I think if you're representing something especially like in a film for example and you need to kind of engage your audience on a level that isn't necessarily analytical in that philosophical sense the girl is in that sense like a representational intensifier it is already weighted with so many ideas of certain you could say like power dynamics especially around things like innocence surrender fragility vulnerability cuteness like there's so many things folded into it that it can become a way to clue your audience into a kind of like like already rendered asset that then helps them get into the headspace that will enable a further step in a shorter amount of time In literature. for example, or when you're making moving image, you kind of need these like pre-rendered elements, whether that is a character setting to kind of get people to an effective state of understanding something that you need to convey. Tactically, that is what the girl does, and we see that used in many ways, like creatively and also in terms of like traditional forms of power too. So I think that's also maybe an element of it that when you talked about like how is it operative? I think even in like the in like regimes of representation, like that's where it becomes useful and important to think about as something that isn't inherent, but is like yeah, to use like video game terms like a pre-rendered asset that helps people understand. It's the kind of abstract flows that circulator in that asset. And I think that's sort of the point where I was intending to speak about like drag because I was thinking about you know Paris's burning the documentary film about the ballroom scene in New York documenting a community that was you know LGBT centered and the whole idea of like the ballroom scene and was to walk in categories and to essentially find through the community categories that might feel disempowering sort of outside of that community. And this went along you know particularly gender but also class and kind of different ways of like costuming class. I think that's kind of interesting to revisit then comparatively when talking about the global scale of like platform dynamics and sort of wearing costume or like avatar or different ways of like operating representation on the platform because because of the planetary scale you know there isn't this sort of there isn't any more this connection to smaller communities although I mean they exist also but it doesn't feel like there is any feedback anymore I suppose. Like analyzing Paris's burning the emancipatory potential in drag in that context is kind of the fact that categories are being worn that people don't get read as like outside of that context and it's kind of emancipatory to be able to perform the category in a way that passes when the symbol connects then with the real was the emancipatory potential in it. When the real is kind of decoupled from that it feels like of course like just it's a very inhuman way of operating then of course. I'm just kind of restating like how I've kind of mapped out things that you've theorized already anyways I guess this is less of a question and more just like a parallel that I saw. I think when I wrote the first essay it really was well received by a lot of people who are outside of what you might call like a gender norm like a gender binary norm. I think it's because of what you talk about in that it is realistic about how gender is broken down into sets of codes and categories and that often when it comes to self-presentation as a particular gender the large majority of it is about performing within those categories and selecting the right codes to match. And I've sort of like playfully written about that when it comes to stuff like I don't know like looks maxing or like when I wrote that pre-mode essay it me and Gunselly just spoke a bit about because Gunselly's where of like an internet folklorist and has a lot more expertise in the finer details of stuff like a femme cell and in cell culture and a lot of the language that has arisen from essentially like straight people taking such an accelerated approach to how gender is represented to them that it also there's like a horseshoe effect with people who might be pursuing for example like gender affirmative procedures or like seriously researching like what it might mean to do like a facial feminization surgery or how to do one's makeup if you are starting to do makeup much later in life because you've selected a gender like a new gender. I think that's like a really interesting dimension to what girl theory is is this kind of like database element of it. And again it's this kind of like it's so so pragmatic and realistic it becomes a proliferation of abstraction and like generative imagination again because of how finally something is broken down you realize there's a lot more to play with than you might consider with something as seemingly fixed in like our social reality as like a dominant cisgender binary. And I think that that is like the really I guess productive element of like what you brought up in regards to drag but I think that the emancipatory dimension of that is still I would say we're still contending with that from Velhux's time of writing right like I think that again there's like new facets to this discourse and again like I said the looks maxing thing is like really interesting because you're seeing straight people kind of like apply the techniques but without the critical foundation but ultimately what it is signifying is this kind of pragmatism around the fact that you're not born with anything when it comes to gender and if you accept that right away then the straight person who's trying to look max because they believe that being more beautiful will grant them more privileges in a capitalist society and therefore a social mobility or someone who is transitioning from a gender they didn't identify with ever to one that they do and one that does affirm them there's something there about it's not emancipation but there's there's something realistic that has to do with a sense of like wanting to control something at an individual and essentially like human scale with a pragmatic acceptance that the construction of gender is something that exists far beyond that individual scale like even the like straightest man doing a looks maxing insult type thing is essentially even if he won't admit it out loud is essentially admitting that gender is like a selection of forces that he felt were imposed on him and projected on him and were out of his control and he's trying to regain that control through a series of highly tailored and almost like molecular experiments so we're in this kind of like Paul Prasiotto space of like like true planetary scale right it's like from the molecular to the like globalized production of like gender technologies and these things as being inherently linked but needing to be considered at every element along the way and it's interesting that it is infiltrated straight culture in a way that I don't think everyone's like entirely aware of yet I don't know I'm curious about the emancipation question I think that's where the acceleration is I think is the most interesting part of it because it's sort of like this stuff is going is going ahead and maybe the kind of like critical understanding of it will catch up I'm like very cynical about emancipation at this point I think because of world events it feels futile to talk about emancipation in academic settings and like what even is that like we haven't stopped lucky Martin what's happening thanks so much to Alex Keecho for joining us for her incredible generosity of mind and time as Helena mentioned this one really was along a long time coming and I mean just speaking for myself I was just in a state of total thrall throughout this conversation as usual we'll post the references in the description thanks so much for listening to this podcast um tell friends about it subscribe to this podcast for more analysis at the intersection of algorithm subjectivity and the arts this is the great podcast