While researching the link between ableist New Age woo and the technofascist nightmare all around us, I found this wonderful essay: “Pandora’s Vox Redux” by humdog. This bitch knew EVERYTHING happening today on the internet back in 1994. It’s literally all the thoughts and words and essays I’ve been marinating in my brain about digital spaces, all perfectly preserved in a concise, expertly written time capsule. Internet on internet is a big part of what dorybot is going to be going forward, as it’s not tenable to be a fully available flesh and blood human on here. Finding this essay felt life affirming — yeah, time is a flat circle and everything has already been said and done, but how good it feels to find someone else who saw all this so deeply.
This quote in particular touched me:
i have seen many people spill their guts on–line, and i did so myself until, at last, i began to see that i had commodified myself. commodification means that you turn something into a product which has a money–value. in the nineteenth century, commodities were made in factories, which karl marx called ‘the means of production.’ capitalists were people who owned the means of production, and the commodities were made by workers who were mostly exploited. i created my interior thoughts as a means of production for the corporation that owned the board i was posting to, and that commodity was being sold to other commodity/consumer entities as entertainment. that means that i sold my soul like a tennis shoe and i derived no profit from the sale of my soul.
Damn…I’ve really been feeling that lately.
Anyway let’s take a moment to appreciate humdog, a visionary ahead of her era. If her writing intrigues you, this page has all the links to her works and related stories. Her time on this earth didn’t end so greatly, but I hope in the seas of space and time, she can see how much we appreciate her existence. The Internet is very much corporate and whitebread, yes, but that doesn’t mean we can’t make it a place full of color and flavor and LIFE!