5 March 2009: "This Bro in a lil Box Is Me–This Is A Representation of Me [via the Internet] I am the bro in my avatar"

This post is about the dialectic of synchronous and diachronic modes of extension. As his lexical detournements and embrace of slang and technologically induced transformations in grammar and expression indicate, Carles is perpetually attempting to express his philosophy in a nontraditional method in order to overcome limitations in academic exposition. The self-referentiality of his ideas -- his linking to himself, creating false personae, asking rhetorical questions of himself and so on -- are tantamount to a challenge to deductive logic, opting instead for a an almost circular reason which defies reason. In this missive, his strategy is no different, as he takes on his customary theme of self-fashioning in the discursive space afforded by modern communication technologies. "It’s rlly hard to decide who u want 2 b on the internet," he notes, riffing on the infinitely expanding matrix which multiplies with the perpetual addition of more and more servers, a space that makes a paradoxical demand on us to be completely filled. "Like u have this lil box on your profile, and u have to choose an image which ‘represents u.’ U have like 300×300 pixels to show the world what ur all about. Seems like a lot of pressure." The pressure to be authnetic is a ideological inversion of the pressure to always be different actually being imposed upon us. We must make ourselves into replicating content; we need to make ourselves data-producing machines. And moreover, we need to continually revise our identities diachronically to meet the synchronic challenge.

Then to demonstrate, Carles facetiously interprets the "userpics" -- note the terminology; who is the user and who is being used? and how does the image play its role in the instrumental objectification? -- in apparently ad hoc and intentionally demoralizing terms. The efforts of two "users" -- "desiring machines, perhaps -- to assimilate their praxis to the libidinal economy becomes in Carles' words: "Me and my boyfriend (we have mediocre sex but we act like porn stars and talk rlly dirty and do dirty shit)."

These analyses build to the revelation of what is at stake in these efforts at online self-fashioning: "I feel like the internet is sometimes ‘more real’
than ‘real life’–I am confused?" The final statement is at once a command and a question. Our dislocation and decentered subjectivity are demanded of us, yet we feel it is our own inquisitiveness that has brought it about.