“Don’t respond”: sexting and scrolling in First Nations’ queer literature

This article engages with the form of ficto-criticism, an experimental and “motivated” academic writing practice that “confound[s], and thereby problematise[s], the generic distinctions between fiction and criticism, between fiction and non-fiction, between philosophy and literature” (Haas, 2017, p. 7). Gerritt Haas (2017, p. 7) argues that “ficto-critical texts are usually playful in tone and experimental in attitude.” Ficto-criticism was initially described by White American anthropologist Michael Taussig during a moment when anthropology had, as Emily Eakin (2001, para. 9) writes, “caught what seemed like a terminal case of self- doubt” regarding its abilities to represent truthful accounts of culture. Ficto-criticism proposed to apply fictional techniques in research and theory and blended storytelling, history writing, and literary analysis to challenge the authority of the anthropologist and to muddy the truth-claims of anthropological writing while introducing new and experiential ways of articulating certain environments, times, and places.

In this article, written as a letter addressing an anonymous brotherboy character called Benny, an activist, artist, and disc jockey (DJ), who cannot stop catfishing their friends online using stolen photographs, I adopt a ficto-critical voice to examine three Indigenous texts that talk about the internet, deception, harassment, racism, and creativity as experienced by queer and trans Indigenous peoples. In this piece, I freely interchange terms like First Nations, Indigenous, and Aboriginal—and Torres Strait Islander, when appropriate—with nation- and clan-specific names. I also use the Australian term Blak, referring to Erub and Mer islands and K’ua K’ua (an Indigenous clan group, North Queensland, Australia) artist Destiny Deacon’s adoption of the term in the 1990s which is now widely used in casual speech by Aboriginal people, particularly in urban areas of the east coast. Further context is provided in Kate Munro’s (2022) piece about Deacon in SBS News.

An explanation of the term brotherboy, an Indigenous-specific term used to describe transmasculine people in Australia, and its common usage, can be found in the writing of scholars such as Corrinne Tayce Sullivan and Madi Day (2019) and Stephen Kerry (2015). Two of these works, IRL by Tommy Pico (2016b) and Throat by Ellen Van Neerven (2020), describe a tense disillusionment and discomfort with online life and its impact on Indigenous queerness. The third text, Jonny Appleseed by Joshua Whitehead (2018), describes a Two-Spirit Indigiqueer character who adopts a wide range of online identities, of multiple races, and genders to secure income and find connection, social mobility, and sexual agency in a hostile world. Alongside this, I talk about my experience of being deceived by Benny, who I know well, who habitually and compulsively poses as a cisgender White man online. I use our interactions to explore my own feelings of insecurity and self-doubt about my online personas as a queer and trans Yugambeh (an Indigenous language group, southeast coast, Queensland, Australia) internet user, as well as the feelings of suspicion, numbness, and pleasure I’ve experienced through consumption of social media. Many details have been fictionalised and obscured to protect the people involved, and in this work, Taussig’s contribution of the ficto-critical form has been useful.

Academic critiques and analyses of the rise of digital and social media are still grappling with a deepening field of digital communication and its impacts on popular culture, identities, academic professions, and activist movements. Theoretical explorations have ranged from celebratory and nuanced optimism for the possibilities offered by social media as a form of leisure, activism, and fun. Alternatively, it also explores moral panic and flustered, doom-laden paranoia about surveillance, online cancellations, and the decline of opportunities for healthy social life and successful, sustained political movements. Mark Fisher’s (2009) Capitalist Realism features one such criticism. Fisher describes attempting to teach group after group of disaffected undergraduate students who attend university voluntarily but remain disengaged in discussion and even leave their headphones on in class. Attributing this to the attention-limiting effect of smartphones, he complains

the consequence of being hooked into the entertainment matrix is twitchy, agitated interpassivity, an inability to concentrate or focus . . .. What we in the classroom are now facing is a generation born into that ahistorical, anti-mnemonic blip culture—a generation, that is to say, for whom time has always come ready-cut into digital micro-slices. (Fisher, 2009, pp. 24–25)

Fisher’s (2009, p. 24) grumbling rhetoric about the too-bored, “post-literate ‘New Flesh’ that is ‘too wired to concentrate’” and his resentment towards their lust for “sugary on-demand” entertainment can sound limiting and reactionary. However, he does astutely point out in his critique of the young people he teaches that they are a group whom leftist social movements have miserably failed to engage. This is innately tied to his experience as a worker in the modern neoliberal academy in relation to an increasingly dejected student body. Exhausted and disappointed, he remarks elsewhere that otherwise exciting and radical communities, once on Twitter, too often descend into “open savagery” and “snarky resentment” (Fisher, 2013, para. 3). Melbourne-based philosopher Justin Clemens’ (2019) essay Attachment Theory begins with the author describing his deep-seated “fear and confusion” and a feeling of “humiliation” as his emails relentlessly ping at him and he tries to gain the courage to walk into a campus library he has never been to in person (p. 17). The essay devolves into a doom-laden and deliriously anxious discussion of cancel culture and two-factor authentication complete with a vision of a technological “smart city,” where Clemens (2019) fears being subject to “total surveillance sites” where the fascist “net of informers” becomes an:

internet of informers that mercilessly tracks every thumb-swipe and finger-jab, from the quote-unquote smartphones we carry everywhere with us and which we cannot help “gazing lovingly at and fondling” (as they say in the classics) even while driving on the freeway or in peak-hour inner-urban traffic, to the drones and surveillance cameras every moment tracking every fraction of the ground and the air. (p. 19)

While also concerned with the changing nature of surveillance technology, Indigenous discourse on social media does not tend to indulge in the same panicked reflections as those offered by non-Indigenous scholars on the so-called age of surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2018). Instead, Indigenous scholars have focussed on social media’s uses and complexities, looking at the ways in which it both enables and restricts.

On social media, a matrix of racist violence pervades. As Carlson and Frazer (2021) have noted, platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are complex spaces for Indigenous people but are experienced often by First Nations peoples, as “platforms for hate, violence and a myriad form of Indigenous elimination” (p. 121). Tristen Kennedy’s (2020) enquiry into Indigenous peoples’ experiences of harmful content online sought a diverse range of perspectives on the benefits of social media engagement along with its examination of the changing nature of hate speech, cyberbullying, and racist harassment for First Nations users. Even in the earliest days of Facebook, Carlson and Frazer (2021, p. 1) note that Aboriginal people “experienced a high level of surveillance around their identity.” Despite these consistent experiences of surveillance and harassment, Carlson and Frazer (2021) argue social media enables Indigenous people to “share their love, creatively express themselves through memes, reaction GIFs and jokes . . . make fun of each other and, most importantly, make fun of the colony” (pp. 121–122). Digital space, for them, is therefore a site of activism, agency, intense and often productive discussion, and resistance to deficit discourses of Indigeneity. It has also introduced new articulations of activist thinking, action, and self-expression, as explored by Theresa Lynn Petray (2022).

The following letter that I’ve written attempts to unpack some of these conflicting discourses of social media use for Indigenous people through reading paperback literature by First Nations people. Through reading these three books, I discuss how our experiences of social media can enable as well as discourage us from fully integrating our multiple selves as First Nations queer and trans people, how harassment or the threat of harassment can interrupt our online acts of agency and self-empowerment, and how the internet impacts our creativity as artists and writers.

Dear Benny,

In late 2020, under a lockdown in Narrm/Melbourne, you and I both read Ellen Van Neerven’s long-awaited sophomore poetry collection Throat. Throat, as you would remember, deals in part with the emotional aftermath of an episode of mass online bullying and racist, homophobic abuse Van Neerven experienced in 2017, when a poem from their collection Comfort Food (2016) appeared in the New South Wales Higher School Certificate (HSC) English exam and was read by thousands of year-12 students.

Online, many social media commentators and news outlets alike remarked on Van Neerven’s silence in response to the abuse. They never responded on Twitter or Facebook, only in paperback. After 3 years, Van Neerven (2020) recounts the off-screen experience of the online hate speech in the opening pages of Throat:

Memories sometimes come backwards. They haunt-walk in. Haunting, walking, and sugar from the chocolates my friends give me after “the incident.” “We are in great admiration of how you handled yourself.” . . . I did nothing but lie in my bed. As I search for the card in the chocolate box, something tells me I’m not meant to hear about what people think of me . . . until I’m dead . . . my inbox is full of sympathy and unsympathetic requests . . .. After “the incident”’ my gf spends time weeding my emails, we are e-entwined. If I get a +ve one I promise to respond in 2–30 days. If I get a -ve one I promise to screenshot (pp. 3–4).

The poems were brave, wrote to me via email. I remembered the online storm about the HSC exam really well, even though in digital terms, it had evaporated and been replaced with hundreds more. I had been teaching a group of third-year literature students online, including you, for months when the book came out, and I read it in one sitting. I was struck by the way they wrote about social media because I was still online myself, spending hours and hours a day on Instagram, but I was feeling unhappy. I was still dependent on digital media for much of my social contact at the time, feeling trapped, paranoid, targeted, and increasingly panicked by the unrestrained facilitation of racist White supremacist groups and behaviours in online spaces.

The online world had also quickly started to feel all-consuming as the primary platform for Blak queer creative and personal expression. So, when Van Neerven had quit, it felt like a challenge to me—or maybe like permission—to quit as well. It proved that while cyberspace and cybernetics offered us something, we didn’t need it to continue culture. Van Neerven (2020, p. 21) remarks ironically in their poem The Only Blak Queer in the World; “I got trolled, deleted my social media accounts and the only known evidence of Blak Queer existence was destroyed,” signalling, I thought, that of course there are other spaces where this “evidence” exists, and what we consider the known has its limits. In this poem, they begin and then abandon several blogs, read Lisa Bellear on the floor of a library and cry with recognition, and they march in Mardi Gras, always feeling the streets they walk on as a site of “multi-time” (Van Neerven, 2020, p. 21). Social media is a part of the experience of gaining insights and exploring their ideas, but there are many other layers of culture being presented here as necessary to the development of their First Nations Blak queer consciousness. If another Blak queer writer could maintain an offline persona and be ok, what was stopping me? I was now convinced it was a good idea to log off—so, like Van Neerven, I did.

Another reason why I felt I needed to get off social media is because I was worried about my online safety on sex apps. Alongside Throat’s release, another turning point had occurred. Despite the increasing suspicion and scepticism of the online world that I was feeling on a conscious level, I got scammed by a fake account on Grindr one afternoon while I was scrolling and sexting—an aimless leisure activity that I would perform numbly for hours at a time and usually forget quickly. I was in one of those states, detached, tapped out, and unguarded, telling myself I was just decompressing online after work and laying on the couch in a daze while also messaging about 10 people at once. The week prior, my close friend, another Blak queer, had been scammed by an online store advertising on Instagram claiming that they sold vegan donuts and also had to cancel their credit card. They facetimed me laugh-crying when a box of greasy, inedible donuts—stale bread rolls covered in pizza sauce and an unidentifiable cheese imitation and placed on a paper doily—bizarrely arrived on their doorstep at midnight and they had to cancel their credit card. “This was supposed to be my treat to myself,” they wailed on the phone. COVID lockdown had been in place for 8 weeks then.

The account scamming me had constructed a profile of a hot, White, cisgender guy, bearded, masc in flannel, with sculpted eyebrows and a huge dick. He sent me heaps of nudes, which were of course stolen, and demanded we meet that day. Before we could meet up, he needed to know that I wasn’t a violent homophobe so could I please click the following link and add my details to a register—kind of like a police check for filtering out people with histories of hate crimes against gay people. I didn’t know or care what he was talking about, and I was becoming more and more horny and invested in the idea that we’d hook up that afternoon—so much so that I totally forgot my usual scepticism, fear of the police, and of being watched. I clicked on the link and then by the time I realized, it was a scam, I had already had my details stolen.

Part of what upset me on reflection was my thought that there would have had to be a real person on the other end who was targeting Grindr users. The chats seemed to be typed in a way that was responsive and personalised to me—answering my questions in specifics with answers that didn’t seem to be pre-formulated. He also presented himself as bisexual, my target demographic. Or, maybe, this is my naivety at it again, and I was talking to a really smart robot the whole time. I felt it was weird that I could be so paranoid but so willing to believe these complete strangers at the same time, and repeating this story is bringing back all the feelings of embarrassment. But it’s also not because we are all right now experiencing the feeling of being the mark of thousands of bots every day, plus isn’t hook up culture ultimately about trust? Isn’t the transcendent experience you get to have sometimes in a back room, in a park, or someone’s car the result of letting your guard down a little bit and pushing past the fear? This is part of what the scammer was drawing on in our conversation—the fact that fear of being hate-crimed while trying to fuck is a part of the tension in the dialogues we have with potential partners online, part of the erotic charge we experience when we leave the house to see a new guy and we’re not sure what we’re going to find.

Anyway, I feel fairly confident that it wasn’t you who scammed me out of $50 that time. But I realised that you had catfished me on another occasion, which really isn’t saying much, because again, I’ve been catfished out of handing over my nudes many times. I believe this because you told me when we were hanging out in real life once that you were in the habit of catfishing, and it felt like you’d been wanting to tell me for a while. It had the feeling of a confession, and an apology. So, I did some digging and got my confirmation.

You are a performer, a dancer, a DJ, a brotherboy, and a costume artist. You had only begun working on stage a year prior to us having this conversation, and you had also started openly identifying as trans online, as a brotherboy, and started using he/him pronouns. You told me that during lockdown, when we had transitioned our class from in-person to online, and I only ever saw you on Zoom, you had made a fake profile on Tinder where you had a hot cisgender male persona. Tinder never clocked you, so you were able to keep it up for a while—with a fake email, a burner phone, the whole lot. I looked at you, and you said “I know . . . it was really bad. I would text message people I knew in real life, and we’d exchange nudes.” And your own nudes were also stolen—of course. You called it “really shit behaviour” and alluded to your present self as healed. “I would never do that again.” Wouldn’t you? What interested me was that it sounded like you felt out of control, like you couldn’t help it and like you hadn’t really known why you were doing it. I didn’t get the impression it made you feel hot. I didn’t even feel the lust for revenge in you—this wasn’t intended to punish someone.

It got under my skin that you would deceive me in this way. I felt betrayed and irritated. I saw you out in the community often—at shows, clubs, parties, banner paintings, and rallies—and kept my distance. Like I do with all my students, I blocked your accounts when semester was in swing, and the algorithm would inevitably bring your profile to my attention. This was a habit for me and my co-workers. Many of my queer students, I noticed, would become visibly excited when they saw me out at a club or bar. I knew that the Blak queer students in our classes were looking out for us on Instagram and that they were dead curious about us, their Blak queer educators, and we knew that was ok, knew they wanted some signal from us that we were queer or trans as well, that they were looking for affirmation and leadership from us. I had this feeling like I should be making more of an effort to be readable, out, and declarative, for the benefit of the younger brotherboys if nothing else. But I felt more comfortable being stealth. I had ridden a wave of using personal they/them pronouns in my social circle for a while, but I didn’t really come out as a trans man until later, after I left social media. I kept using Grindr, starting conversations with a few men each week, letting the conversation progress to a certain point, then leaving them hanging. I remained distant with queer and trans young people in my own life, my cousins, my friends, and co-workers. I didn’t discuss my life with you, and I rejected your attempts to be inappropriately personable in a work context just because we shared an identity as transgender Aboriginal men. So, I could believe—and I can forgive—that you would want to subvert the power relationship between us, cross a boundary, get some prohibited information or intimacy from me or my friends at work, something you could gossip about. But it really didn’t occur to me that catfishing me would be your way in.

Joshua Whitehead’s (2018) Jonny Appleseed details the vivid internal experiences of a Two-Spirit Indigiqueer chronic, career catfisher. Like Van Neerven, the eponymous narrator experiences their identity and libidinous sexuality through multi-time—travelling through memory and place, always “in transit” between physical and digital worlds (Cooper, 2019, p. 492). The wonder of Whitehead’s innovative use of digital media as a tool for Indigenous queer agency, survival, creativity, and becoming has been remarked on by many scholars already. Lydia R. Cooper (2019, p. 492) writes that Whitehead’s work contributes broadly to discourse on queer and feminist cybernetics, that it presents us with a new “understanding of embodiment in the digital age, with a specific focus on online digital communication through social media networks, the creation of online avatars, and web-based interpersonal communication.” She connects the use of these technologies and the construction of a “cyborg trickster” created through their use with the augmentation of Whitehead’s characters as “sovereign people, not despite their technological identities and locations, but because of them” (Cooper, 2019, p. 493). This idea—that Indigenous queer use of digital gender and sex play is connected to sovereignty—is evidenced for Cooper by the fact that the narrators of Whitehead’s novels are able to use digital media to fully affirm their queer selfhood, to adapt to their conditions, and to construct new possibilities. The acts of digital self-imagination contained in the book have also been described in terms of the “sovereign erotic,” drawing on the work of Cherokee (Indigenous peoples, Southeastern Woodlands, USA) scholar and poet Qwo-Li Driskill, as Julia Siepak (2020) writes;

Indigiqueer storytelling is, in turn, a part of sovereign erotic in that it reclaims, reinvents, and reimagines Indigenous Two-Spirit identities both by constituting the voice of the silenced and addressing their experiences (Driskill et al., 2012). Hence, Two-Spirit storytelling is an act of resistance towards the colonial gender limitations and attempts of gendercide and, from a broader perspective, an act of resistance towards settler colonial structures, power relations, and geographical impositions. (p. 504)

I think, aside from the clear generation gap between you and Whitehead, who grows up watching Queer as Folk (2000–2005) via satellite TV, you might relate to this character. Whitehead describes how Jonny begins experimenting with sexting boys on Pogo, an old gaming platform with a chat feature which launched in 1998 and has been far surpassed many times over. This in itself is a nostalgic detail that anyone who started their sexting career on something like LiveJournal or Myspace will relate to. Jonny describes how this experience, conducted from a safe distance with anonymous avatars online, educates them on sex, power, and how fantasy can be used to secure it:

I went by the name Lucia and pretended to be a girl to flirt with other boys. Often we’d play virtual pool or checkers and just dabble in small talk. Then I’d start putting ideas of sex into their heads by playing naïve and directing the conversation toward dirty subjects. I always liked to let them think they were the ones in control. I’m a sadist like that, I guess. I may be the sexual fantasy but I’m also the one in the driver’s seat. Once the image of sweaty, naked bodies got in their heads, there was no going back. Sex does strange things to people—it’s like blacking out or going on cruise control. Your body knows what it wants and goes for it. This can be dangerous, as I’d learn later, but if you can manipulate the urge, you can control a person. (Whitehead, 2018, p. 9)

Ringing any bells?

At first, Jonny’s online behaviour is a creative escape from the rigidly and heartbreakingly gendered and sexual reality of their school life on the rez, an opportunity for affirming and erotic self-construction outside of the brutal behaviours and attitudes they are subjected to at school and at home. Eventually, cybering, camming, and sexting also become a conduit to mobility and subsistence. Camming is Jonny’s source of income through which they are able to move through the world and get their needs met—their primary need through the book being to get home for a funeral to see their mother. It’s also a route to real, deeply felt connection with lovers as well as clients. Jonny meets his lover, Tias, online while in digital costume as Lucia, and they begin a relationship which lasts years—but Jonny never confesses their beginning to Tias. Tias is also lying online, about his age. But this is positioned differently to the way Jonny is using their avatar;

Tias isn’t a hustler like me, no, he is a different kind of hustler, maybe more a prisoner than anything, but he has to live with his momma until he ages out of foster care because she needs the child-tax and he needs the roof. And between you and me? Tias is twenty, but since his original birth certificate has been sealed and rewritten, his documents say he’s still seventeen. There’s funding for him until he’s nineteen when he’ll age out and be left to his own devices. His momma is no Susan Sarandon type of mom, no, she is more like Halle Berry in Monsters Ball, but Tias, he’s a tough kid, knows how to play the game. I like to think I helped coach him on the art of performance when he first fell in love with Lucia, the Russian princess. (Whitehead, 2018, p. 22)

Certain types of deception and scamming the settler colonial bureaucracies that oppressively govern First Nations life are presented here as an essential element of Indigenous survival under colonial circumstances; something which is importantly done on paper, and has been done for generations, rather than being exclusively a new form of scamming made possible by the online world.

Jonny’s initial act of subterfuge and costume play is a motif across their relationship. Tias and Jonny keep fucking and loving each other on and off for years, even as Tias begins a heterosexual partnership with Jordan, a girl from their rez who frightens Jonny. While Tias and Jordan get serious, fall pregnant, and commit, Jonny’s involvement remains a secret. Jonny does not resent their relationship, and also has their own hot encounter with Jordan after they dine and dash at a fancy restaurant while Tias is out of town; playing with both sides of the relationship without ever revealing Jonny’s role. Jonny, who has never had sex with a woman before, immerses fully in the moment, embracing the full flexibility of their character in Whitehead’s telling. Maybe this is another way of maintaining a feeling of power and freedom in the scenario for Jonny, while Tias falls deeper into a proscribed hetero life with Jordan.

I want to pause here and ask you something, between us. You have a lot of freedoms compared to the life that Jonny and Tias live. You have an amazing diversity of digital platforms to express your Blak queerness and brotherboy identity, publicly and honestly. Now that we are really friends and have moved past the limitations of our former teacher/student relationship in the institution, I can see you posting fluently and defiantly about who you are, all the time. I see you expressing yourself in beautiful, curated Instagram portraits, screenshotting offensive White people in your private messages and publicly shaming them for their ignorant questions, laughing at the expense of racists—I see you celebrating yourself. Why were you desperate for that kind of escape, when you’re always talking about the Blak queer renaissance? Is there a part of us both that actually requires anonymity—privacy—for true creativity? Is that what you were seeking in your own fucked up way? Maybe now, I’m realising, I really don’t forgive you at all.

Privacy is one of the central concerns for Tommy Pico (2016b) in the epic poem IRL. I could predict what you’re about to say, but Tommy is not blanketly anti-social media in the way Clemens and Fisher seem to be. He is a digitally fluent writer, a Tumblr poet, and one of his earlier works was specifically designed for tablet and iPhone. IRL is written as a text message and draws heavily on the stylistic and emotive elements of scrolling, posting, and texting. But the work uses this format to call attention to the importance of privacy and logging off, especially for poets. Pico outlines in IRL a relationship between the protagonist, Teebs, and a multi-faced character called Muse and describes how, as he wrote, Muse “became Privacy, and Privacy has four states: Solitude, Intimacy, Anonymity, and Reserve” (Pico, 2016a, para. 2). Through the work, Teebs struggles with what Brian Clifton (n.d., para. 2) calls an “inability . . . to connect with Muse,” and this “separated-ness guides the book both through the labyrinthine corridors our physical bodies use to connect with our digital personae and how we ourselves connect with others around us.” The book is, for Clifton, a portrait of a separated and unintegrated experience of self which is emblematic of how queer people experience digital life; distracted and fragmented between multiple platforms and the physical world.

I wonder if the point of Pico’s work is to warn us to not allow our smartphones to become our total experience of life. When Van Neerven (2020) asked in Throat:

If facebook is poetry

who will step out of the dying web

(p. 10)

It felt like an invitation to consider the afterlife of social media. Remember how the opening lines invited us to consider their body, numbly lying in bed, with their girlfriend checking their emails for them when they can’t bear to look. Here, they are offered to the reader as a person after or away from the internet. Pico’s IRL also wrestles with the idea of “turn[ing] off the internet” (Pico, 2016a, para. 2). Teebs is uncomfortable and disorganised, speaking in a register that is inscrutably referential, emotionally dysregulated, enraged, unfocussed, judgemental, and demanding of attention;

Regret is a gift

that keeps on giving I

think it was Sontag

or Sonic the Hedgehog

who said just dash dodge

weave faster than you

can think n there’s no

time to shame spiral (Pico, 2016b, p. 7)

For Teebs, the internet seems to stymie creativity, rather than enable it. His kaleidoscopic and overwhelming online media consumption feels a world away from Whitehead’s internet, which Siepak (2020, p. 499) names as a life-giving creative tool and a part of First Nations narrative “survivance.” Survivance, a concept from Gerald Vizenor, is described by Grace Dillon (2012) as “more than survival, more than endurance or mere response . . . survivance is an active repudiation of dominance, tragedy, and victimry” (p. 6). For Teebs, the internet is instead a cage, a dead end, it’s “how you catch the vapours”;

Stop

fucking posting about how

you want soup, or what’s in

your bath water, or what color

are your toenails Just

watch a porn and take a nap

like an adult sit and scroll

and fume and sit and scroll

and fume and sit and scroll

and fume (Pico, 2016b, pp. 15–16)

That pattern of “fume and sit and scroll” is something we can both relate to. As a creative person yourself, do you think social media has made you better at what you do or has the proximity of the audience perverted the work before it can be properly made? Pico (2016a, para. 2) has mentioned that the process of writing this book made him realise he had to be “totally alone” to make something good. Teebs is disturbed by his own chaotic and out-of-control online behaviours as much as he is disturbed, angry, and confused by the online behaviours of his friends who are, among other things, “posting about suicide . . . no, like actually committing suicide” (Pico, 2016b, pp. 11–12). He compares his scrolling to an addiction:

I sit scooped

shoulders at the computer. Jess

walks in again or doesn’t

I can’t tell bc I’m horrified

at the Internet, like alcoholism—

oppressive and consuming (Pico, 2016b, p. 11)

Van Neerven’s (2020) work, living in the aftermath of that episode of online harassment, has the same warning tone, gently reminding an unnamed friend in one poem that the internet is not a neutral space:

Babe, you’re not gonna find good sex tips in the search bar

it’s a colonised capitalist space

all the first hits are white

you’re just giving them your data

(p. 57)

Van Neerven’s nuanced but cautionary tone in Throat, like Teebs’ inner voice, uses text message as a poetic form but maintains critical distance from the smartphone, refusing to celebrate digital life as liberatory. In a poem titled Offline, Van Neerven (2020, p. 117) says “there is power in information/though data can be manipulated,” questioning whether a memory “was politically planted/fed to my body?” This distrust, self-doubt, and troubled understanding of the erosion of the memory and the sense of self being experienced in the face of a cacophonous digital information and memory economy reflect my own feelings of vulnerability and uncertainty in relation to you.

In ending this letter, this reprimand to you, I want to circle back to privacy, and one of its four faces, as Pico writes, that of anonymity. Anonymity is something increasingly out of reach, but it’s also a vital enabler of so much of what’s good about being online. Jinghua Qian (2020, para. 4) writes about the pleasures and benefits of anonymous sexting for gender fluid people, noting their nostalgia for the time “before the real-name internet, when dial-up speeds were too slow to send videos, photos, and even emojis.” For them, the time before traceable names and locations, before doxxing was possible unless you were legit a hacker, before the proliferation of the inescapable visual-ness of online culture, sexting was way more creative and fulfilling. This is the same digital playground as adolescent Jonny Appleseed’s Two-Spirit “cyborg trickster,” a text-only space which writers are naturally drawn to (Cooper, 2019, p. 493). I admire your trickery, and your honesty as well, in confessing this problem to me. Anonymity provides us privacy, as well as, Qian (2020) notes, the ability to be candid and, to an extent, free. At the same time, I am also concerned that our online interactions have, even more than the professional and institutionalised relationships we have offline, corrupted the possibility for us to be good friends or community relations to each other, and I don’t know where we can go from there.