The rainbow as a symbol of gay pride dates to 1978, when a flag made by Gilbert Baker was flown at a march in San Francisco and was widely adopted as a symbol of solidarity after the assassination of Harvey Milk later that year. The band Rainbow dates to 1975, when guitarist Ritchie Blackmore became fed up with the image and musical direction new members David Coverdale and Glenn Hughes had brought to his band Deep Purple — lumbering hard rock-funk fusion; cliched, cocaine-fueled macho posturing — and broke away to form a new group with vocalist Ronnie James Dio.

One might have expected Blackmore to be chagrined when “rainbow” began to be associated with a different sort of audience than what is usually thought of for his music. But let’s not forget that Deep Purple’s crowning achievement was an album called Machine Head. Rather than shy away from the rising connotations of the rainbow as a marker of gay culture and affiliation, Blackmore responded in 1979 by releasing Down to Earth, one of the gayest albums in the hard rock canon, rivaling even Judas Priest’s Hell Bent for Leather in its willingness to explore homosexual desire within the deeply homosocial context of metal music. A tour de force of innuendo, coded language, frustrated desire, and orgasmic musical release, Down to Earth is not merely promiscuously available to the ministrations and interpretations of queer theoretical analysis; it is so dense with gay textuality that it might profitably be considered a work of queer theory in its own right.

For Down to Earth, Blackmore decided to replace Dio with Graham Bonnet, who was something of a departure from the swords-and-sorcery, rock-and-roll-wizard image Dio had cultivated. Bonnet, an R&B singer who had achieved limited success covering songs written by the Bee Gees, had a look that was a cross between a Halfordesque leather boy with a penchant for aviator sunglasses and a softer, feminized male model out of International Male. Faith-era George Michael seems to owe a bit of a debt to Bonnet.

The startling conceptual departure that Bonnet marked merely through his physical appearance should have been sufficient to alert Rainbow fans to a shift in the band’s intellectual concerns — there would be no songs about tarot cards or warlocks here — but if that wasn’t enough, a song like “Love’s No Friend” left no room for doubt. As the song’s title suggests, “Love’s No Friend” is an interrogation of  heteronormative narratives in the culture and the pervasive damage they inflict by forbidding the expression of alternative forms of desire, whether they are same-sex or outside the couple form. The lyrics make plain their intentional queerness: “I’ve learned to live with a cloud above my head,” the singer declares, and then evokes two key concepts in the enunication of gay struggle: “Got no shame, got no pride.”

The pain of exclusion presents gay subjectivity with a paradox: being cast to the margins allows one to act without shame, though without cultural recognition or validation. The tension between these two poles suspend the gay subject in a detrimental equilibrium. “Got no feelings left inside,” Bonnet moans, with a passion that obviously belies the meaning of the words. The song preaches defiance — ”Ain’t gonna fall for no line,” the singer cries — but Blackmore’s melancholy, minor-key soloing undercuts it, suggesting it is at best a partial solution. One cannot reject heteronormativity at the level of the individual; its hegemony deforms the subject beyond the reach of the conscious will. To correct the deformity would require a change in the entire drift of society.

The other tracks on Down to Earth take up various facets of that challenge, exploding the tropes and anxieties of straight masculinity and positing challenging alternatives to it, as in “Danger Zone.” Again, the lyrical intent of this tough cruising anthem is not exactly obscure:

Love don’t make it on those pin-striped nights
When you’re looking through someone’s disguise
You can’t make it alone, so you gotta make a move
But you’re looking at nobody’s eyes

The chorus then ambiguously asserts that “love don’t go begging in the danger zone.” The idea here is that “love” in the sense of sexual activity can easily be found in the cruising “danger zones” of the pre-HIV 1970s, but at the same time it would be a mistake to name it “love” — love doesn’t go there, and its ideologized comforts won’t be found. You will not find a self-stabilizing relation; instead it is a place where normative gender relations and the straitjacket of sexual orientation evaporate (your own eyes become “nobody’s”), and you will learn that, as the song states, “faking has no return.”

Here, then, we are deep in the “danger zone” of jouissance, as Leo Bersani would later describe in “Is the Rectum a Grave?“

Male homosexuality advertises the risk of the sexual itself as the risk of self- dismissal, of losing sight of the self, and in so doing it proposes and dangerously represents jouissance as a mode of ascesis.

So the danger zone — really a sexual counterpublic, in Michael Warner’s sense — is dangerous only to the extent one is attached to the self as such and that which anchors it in patriarchal society, the gendered power relations that hinge on viewing passivity and penetration as sexualized violence. The danger zone is as dangerous to social control as it is supposed to be to self-control.

The other tracks on Down to Earth are not as overt in their queer themes, but they are unmistakable once one begins to listen for them. The album’s opening song, “All Night Long” at first blush seems full of standard numbskull cock-rock bluster. But it turns out that this exaggerated parody of straight desire is displaced aggression, a response to how that desire always threatens to dissolve into a puddle of anxiety. The singer keeps insisting, “I want to love you all night long!” but the very insistence of the demand transforms it into a plea: Give me the sexual capacity to go all night long, let me escape the trajectory of straight male desire and its deadening refractory periods, let me become like a “girl who can keep her head, all night long.”

Such capacity is theoretically available with a willingness to be penetrated, but as Bersani notes, “To be penetrated is to abdicate power.” Thus that furtive desire to become feminized, with an insatiable capacity for pleasure, must be buried under derogatory sexist comments: “I don’t know about your mind but you look all right”; “Your mouth is open but I don’t wanna hear you say goodnight.” This sexism is the price for maintaining the heterosexual couple, as Warner and Berlant put it in “Sex in Public,”the referent or the privileged example of sexual culture.” It is a gender-inflected expression of what Bersani calls “sex as self-hyperbole,” a self-aggrandizement to stave off the way desire threatens to shatter identity.

If “All Night Long” is about the trap of masculine phallocentrism, the album’s hit, “Since You Been Gone,” is about homosexual panic, about a fear of, and desire for, the closet.

Its bridge address the closet directly (“These four walls are closing in, look at the fix you’ve put me in”), which clues listeners in to how “you” stands for both his gay desire, alienated as a invading entity, and for debilitating protection the closet affords. Without its protection, the singer admits he has “been out of my head, can’t take it.” But there is no alternative; desire has already fractured his pretense to hetero identity:  ”I get  the same old dreams same time every night, fall to the ground and I wake up.” The dream of becoming a “bottom” hinted at in “falling to the ground” is not something the singer can elude. “You cast a spell, so break it,” he implores, looking for a release, but there is no escape.

So in the night I stand beneath the backstreet light
I read the words that you sent to me
I can take the afternoon, the nighttime comes around too soon

When night comes, disruptive desire reasserts itself and language is useless for dismantling it. Incapable of coming out, yet incapable of not acting on this desire, caught between homo/hetero, the singer is driven beyond epistemology (his conflicted desires render him “out of my head”) and representation.

But the album’s centerpiece is “Makin’ Love,” which not coincidentally would become the name of a groundbreaking American film about a married man having a homosexual affair. The song’s lyrics tie together the disparate theoretical ideas of the album in one tightly wrought chorus.

How can I deny my heart
When my love is blind
I got no choice
I’ve gone too far
I lose my mind
When we’re makin’ love

Here, the singer admits to a “blind” passion beyond sociocultural categories that carries him “too far,” past the will to normativity. This desire, he confesses, will cause him to lose his mind, forgo subjectivity and admit the “internalized phallic male as an infinitely loved object of sacrifice,” to borrow Bersani’s phrase. “When I look into your magic eyes, the mirror of my love,” he sings, openly acknowledging mimetic desire rendered sexual, and the urge to shatter that mirror in an act that’s equally transgressive and unnervingly familiar.

Though Down to Earth was among the band’s higher-charting records, overt queer theorizing at this level of sophistication was somewhat over the Rainbow. Bonnet would leave the band after this album, to be replaced by Joe Lynn Turner, an anodyne Lou Gramm clone, as Blackmore would try to steer his band toward conventional MOR success. Instead of continuing to chart the course of radical intervention in the name of queer culture building, gay fans of the band were abandoned, left to walk the Street of Dreams.

An essay by Randall Stross in Sunday’s New York Times examines the current state of machine-gambling technology. He cites Kevin A. Harrigan, part of the Gambling Research Team at the University of Waterloo, on the phenomenon of “false wins,” payouts that are less the amount wagered, on multi-line slots. As Stross explains:

In a typical multi-line slot setup, a player can bet on up to 20 different pay lines in a single game. If a player wins on 9 of the 20 lines, resulting in a net loss, the machine still celebrates the occasion with sound and video effects.

Congratulations! You’re a loser. Perhaps nothing better captures the affect of consumer capitalism than this idea of a “false win.” At the moment of purchase, maybe after waiting in line for a few hours outside an Apple store, we hear all the bells and whistles advertising and socialization into conusmerism has prepared us for, but only for a moment. We can take to social media to try to extend the noise of celebration, but this is only fleeting at best, even if we are able to capture the attention of any other users, who have their own consumer experiences to desperately broadcast. (“Look at my breakfast. Please! Please!”) Once the noise dies down, we realize we are still on the hedonic treadmill, trudging to nowhere.

I also love the Latourian wording in Stross’s description that depicts the machine as “celebrating,” as if it experiences some sort of coercive joy that the human user, fused to the machine in a cyborg assemblage, must then also experience. Indeed, Harrigan tells Stross, “I’m not a gambler myself, but I was playing ‘Money Storm’ in our lab and ‘won’ — nine lines were flashing — and it was cognitively difficult to appreciate that I had actually lost.” Wow, just imagine how helpless the degenerate dummies who actually play these machines at their leisure must be in the face of this devious technology!

Paternalism aside, the technology of gaming is extremely sinister. Stross also cites Natasha Dow Schüll, who details in her recent book Addiction by Design (a pdf of the introduction here) how slot-machine technology is optimized for addiction. Schüll argues that familiarity with electronic screens made video “gaming” seem more approachable, unlike table gaming, which requires some social navigation and the mastery of certain protocols and lingo. Privately tapping the screen at a video slot machine allegedly resembles harmless entertainment in a way that shouting cryptic commands at a craps dealer while the chips fly never would. Because the gambling machines are networked in ways table games never could be, the playing conditions they facilitate can be readily manipulated in response to user behavior to enhance the “entertainment” they provide. This makes the gamblers into unwitting test subjects, whose apparently direct confrontation with the whims of fortune is actually carefully manipulated, a manufactured experience.

Schüll notes how Las Vegas has long been regarded as the laboratory of capitalism:

Running alongside the debate over whether Las Vegas is a mirror or a model for America is the question of whether to view the city as a shape-shifting marvel of human inventiveness and technological sophistication or as a dystopic instantiation of consumer capitalism. Whatever its relationship to the culture at large, it is clear that Las Vegas “has become a vast laboratory,” as urban historians Hal Rothman and Mike Davis wrote in 2002, “where giant corporations, themselves changing amalgams of capital from different sectors, are experimenting with every possible combination of entertainment, gaming, mass media, and leisure.” In the Las
Vegas laboratory, machine gambling figures both as a means and an end of experimentation.

The experiment is meant to find the perfect, pure experiential commodity, which, if Schüll is right, turns out to be the nonexperience of playing machines. The machines are designed to expedite the speed of wagering, to provide a steady stream of bet-resolutions that seem to hinge on choices the user made but in reality are random. “Some machines allow players to choose the exact moment when the reels stop spinning, but a sense of control is illusory,” Stross writes. “The outcome is determined when the reels start spinning and has absolutely nothing to do with what the player does or does not do.”

The helplessness we experience in the face of modernity’s “expert systems” upon which we inevitably rely, as well as the relentless celebration of consumer choice as the highest expression of freedom, leads us to a willingness to consume a parody of choice in the form of slot machines. What can be more redolent of freedom than choosing to choose choice, over and over? Moments of having our fate decided masquerade as moments of decision, and the machines are designed to remove any friction between those moments, which might give a player an opportunity to consider the only decision that really does have an impact on gaming outcomes: whether or not to continue playing. So slot players consume speed as a form of ersatz decision making; momentum substitutes itself for rational choice. Consuming speed as such offers the illusion of mastering risk by plummeting right past it.

In the last section of America, Baudrillard offers this gnomic definition of gambling:

Gambling itself is a desert form, inhuman, uncultured, initiatory, a challenge to the natural economy of value, a crazed activity on the fringes of exchange. But it too has a strict limit and stops abruptly; its boundaries are exact, its passion knows no confusion.

I take that to mean that gambling is rationalized irrationality — that it is more rational than rational, to ape one of Baudrillard’s trademark phrasings. Gambling is where consumerism transcends the banal pursuit of a fair exchange without transcending capitalism altogether. Baudrillard suggests that

Death Valley and Las Vegas are inseparable; you have to accept everything at once, an unchanging timelessness and the wildest instantaneity. There is a mysterious affinity between the sterility of wide open spaces and that of gambling, between the sterility of speed and that of expenditure.

It seems to me that Baudrillard is evoking, in his inscrutable fashion, the same idea that the gamblers Schüll interviewed for her book described: the quiet calm in the midst of the most frenetic gambling, the flattening of time into a featureless expanse by the relentless pace of the machine. The details of the money lost or won, the details of the game being played, don’t matter. As Stross notes, the machines provide the “most immersive, distraction-free gambling experience,” which ushers users into what Schüll, following a gambler named Mollie she interviewed, calls “the machine zone”:

Why, then, does she play? “To keep playing — to stay in that machine zone where nothing else matters.” I ask Mollie to describe the machine zone. She looks out the window at the colorful movement of lights, her fingers playing on the tabletop between us. “It’s like being in the eye of a storm, is how I’d describe it. Your vision is clear on the machine in front of you but the whole world is spinning around you, and you can’t really hear anything. You aren’t really there — you’re with the machine and that’s all you’re with.”

Sounds terrible, right? What an addict. Or maybe not. Given the intensity of focus and the clarity of purpose she describes, it sounds a lot like being in the “zone” in the Michael Jordan sense — where decisions are automatic and feel intuitively right — or what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes in Flow (1990) as “optimal experience”:

We have all experienced times when, instead of being buffeted by anonymous forces, we do feel in control of our actions, masters of our own fate. On the rare occasions that it happens, we feel a sense of exhilaration, a deep sense of enjoyment that is long cherished and that becomes a landmark in memory for what life should be like. This is what we mean by optimal experience.

It seems counterintuitive to regard slot-machine players as masters of their own fate, but what they are doing is choosing to confront the inescapability of fate on their own terms, to select the terms of engagement (“this Megabucks machine, in this 7-11″), which may be the only choice we have.

What machine gaming suggests is that optimal experience can be commodified, then purchased instead of earned, as Csikszentmihalyi insists it must be. It turns out that what “life should be like” can be an empty simulacrum of the satisfaction derived from mastery, a dilettantism pursued through shortcuts and through meaningless choices regarding random outcomes that are arbitrarily invested with significance. Gambling is one way of giving empty choices meaning. Fashion is another.

Csikszentmihalyi writes that flow states stem from “when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.” Optimal experiences “add up to a sense of mastery—or perhaps better a sense of participation in determining the content of life,” he adds.”Only direct control of experience, the ability to derive moment-by-moment enjoyment from everything we do, can overcome the obstacles to fulfillment.”

Logging 15 hours on a video-poker machine is probably not most people’s idea of “difficult and worthwhile,” though maybe we shouldn’t judge. It’s as moment-to-moment as enjoyment gets. We’re prone to label such extremity “addiction” rather than “participation” because the social worth in it is hard to fathom (though if you like capitalism, you should like the support such behavior gives to its corporations). Gambling machines simulate the ideal of “direct control” and they accelerate users beyond the point of conscious risk assessment into the experience of pure stimulus response. How many repetitions does Malcolm Gladwell say we need before we achieve genius?

Gambling teaches that “optimal experience” as a reward for diligent practicing is just a lie; actually, it’s just another experiential good for sale — maybe the ultimate one, as Schüll suggests. Nothing prevents dilettantes (or addicts) from having optimal experience, from being in the flow. Mastery and “meaningfulness” — or at least socially sanctioned “meaningfulness”  — is not inherent in the experience of flow, despite what Csikszentmihalyi seems to suggest in promoting flow as an end in itself. Flow is just the escapism of control fantasies, imposed on the experience of losing control of our ability to shift our focus anywhere else.

Would you date a robot? It seems pretty safe. The existence of pickup-artist systems like the ones described in Neil Strauss’s The Game  suggests that there is a prevalent fantasy of removing the risks from dating encounters by implementing the equivalent of computer code. The haphazardness of interpersonal chemistry and the daunting asymmetries of personal revelation are replaced with a program (“the game”) that seems to comfort the pickup artist and the picked-up target alike. If you execute certain subroutines, you can rely on the calculable probability of certain tasks being completed according to established protocols and within established parameters.

Basically you treat the person being picked up like a blinking cursor on a command line, awaiting lines of programming, and that person in turn can enjoy the comforting experience of being programmed, of surrendering safely to a familiar script — the same semi-passive thrills we experience when we surrender to a movie or a book, when we let it “program” us. We let serial TV shows, for example, put us in suspense about what are after all nonexistent characters whose fate is not autonomous  but entirely sealed in advance. I don’t remember exactly when this dawned me — far too late, definitely — but I started enjoying sad/sappy movies a lot more when I let myself cry when the movie seemed to expect it of me instead thinking I was somehow beating the system or proving my superiority by resisting it.

Fictions are engines for suspending our disbelief. If fictions are well-contrived, they let us reach that captivating state of surrendering skepticism. And if you don’t want to suspend your disbelief, there is little point in consuming fiction. Suspending disbelief isn’t merely the prerequisite for reaching some other affective destination; it is the destination, the pleasure itself.

Pickup artists are basically fiction writers working with the dating milieu as a medium. They provide genre entertainment. It’s not for everyone, by any means, but it’s a standard format that some people respond to and enjoy.

But I don’t think many people mistake that sort of entertainment programming for a way to create love. Love is in many ways defined by escaping systematization. It registers in spontaneous moments, unexpected connections between people that neither ever would have thought to try to program that form the ineffable substance of intimacy. Love, as most people seem to see it, is supposed to individuate the partners, capture and reveal their personal uniqueness to the other, and the unfolding of love is the pursuit of more and more of those occasions that allow that uniqueness to express itself.

A real-life love story has to be as unique and unpredictable as the people involved imagine themselves to be. It’s not about suspending disbelief and permitting for self-forgetting, but building belief and allowing for self-discovery, finding the wherewithal to believe  that we have a “real” self and that it is valuable and compelling enough that someone else would want to know all about it. No one is “authentic” in isolation; you have to be authentic for someone else, who can confirm your genuineness. If you are alone being authentic, you are just being.

The practice of love, then, is a matter of attuning to these unique, “authentic” aspects of the other (or fabricating them collaboratively and positing them in each other’s pasts as things that you are now discovering about each other’s character — give the relationship a “I have always been here before” feeling ). This practice has all sorts of sideshows to it, different kinds of pleasure coupledom can generate along the way, but  this being recognized as the one irreplaceable and totally unique being for the other seems to be the essence of love as it’s currently constituted ideologically.

But if you are ideologically committed to the postulate of artificial intelligence and insist that robots will be able to do anything humans can do, as David Levy does in his 2007 popular-science tract Love and Sex With Robots, this conception of love presents problems. Robots might be equipped to recognize your uniqueness, but there will never be anything irreplaceable and nonreplicatable about the robot.

What’s required to make human-robot love conceivable is a redefinition of love to suit the model of programming. So, drawing on psychological research, Levy reduces love to an object of science that can then be analyzed at the level of abstraction and generalities suitable for transformation into code. He identifies what he deems the universal causes of love (there are 10 of them, including “desirable characteristics of the other” and “filling needs”), presents some survey data that purports to reveal what people get out of being in love and what traits they like in partners, and then concludes that all of this data can be used to program robots that can love us according to this scientifically certified checklist.

This whole method seems incredibly obtuse. The way science is used to frame love as a problem to solve constructs love as something no humans would recognize as such. The method assumes that humans are already robots themselves, not merely susceptible to being programmed but also articulate about precisely what programs they want to run. Love is not dynamic, not something discovered in a unique relation’s unfolding, but a static object lodged in each individual’s consciousness. Unlike Lou Gramm, I already know what love is, and I want only for someone or, as Levy would have it, something to elicit those set responses in me.

But no one breaks out hierarchical rankings for the qualities they appreciate in their beloved, no one simply stacks their partner up against a checklist of desirable duties performed; the sort of scorekeeping that goes on in a relationship is far more complicated than that. But Levy blunders along, insisting that if humans say they want x, y, and z from a relationship, and robots can do x, y, and z, then humans will love robots — and vice versa, since by his logic, if a human thinks a robot loves him, than that robotic love is a fact and that establishes what the robot “feels”. It’s akin to thinking that since reading about Anna Karenina made you feel something, that Anna Karenina is therefore a real person and intended to make you feel that way. (Presumably this is precisely what some OOO partisans argue? I think I am too ignorant to understand what they are talking about.)

Levy’s insistent anthropomorphizing of robots based on how humans see them was incredibly frustrating to read, but it seemed to stem from his dogmatic intention of granting  robots of the future genuine agency.

It makes no sense to imagine robots with the agency to choose to love us. But if we stop thinking of robots as potential human surrogates and start thinking of them as something more akin to an engrossing novel or TV show — a medium — then it’s easy to imagine people dating robots. People read alone, they watch TV alone, they play games alone — why wouldn’t they enjoy the immersive experience a robot could be programmed to provide alone? Especially if the experience prompts us to forget our aloneness.

Being with a robot wouldn’t make us any less alone, but that is not really relevant, unless you believe that people are not to be trusted in choosing what sort of entertainment they want and that when they suspend disbelief, they are in danger of suspending it for good. People may fall in love with robots in the future, but this will be no different from falling in love with characters in books, or with books themselves.

Rather than regard them as not quite adequate humans, robots can be seen as immersive, 3-D novels. We are not convinced of their genuine emotionality so much as we suspend disbelief about their fundamental lack of it, and this itself is satisfying, this brings pleasure we might call love if it lasts long enough.

When novels first became a commercial product, there was a fairly prevalent fear that they were addictive, and the weak-minded (typically women) would be vulnerable to losing themselves completely to them, as though they had no control over their ability to invest themselves imaginatively. For some critics, every act of vicarious identification was seen as morally corrupting. Thus such critics would argue that women needed to be protected from vicarious experience for their own safety.

Something similar seems to be going on when researchers like Sherry Turkle fret about people forgoing their own humanity and choosing robotic affection. This seems to stem from the same revulsion at other people’s imaginative investments. I fall into this trap a lot; I’ll believe myself capable of all sorts of imaginative acrobatics and vicarious projections and simultaneous identifications and resistant readings for pleasure, whereas other people are only capable of the most literal sort of engagement with entertainment. In my mind, I turn them into robots who are programmed by the text.

Suspending disbelief sometimes can mean becoming an emotional robot. You put up a dating profile to attract search traffic, you imagine it could be a code that expresses precisely what you want from a dating experience and will somehow bring it into fruition: the algorithms will work their constitutive magic and produce this person who is precisely what you ordered, someone who fits the genre. And you can conduct the entire relation with that someone within those generic boundaries, according to the script you put out there, or the script that exists for first dates, or whatever seems most comfortable or expedient. If we perfect online dating, we won’t need robot lovers because the dating platform will roboticize us.

But there’s another way to suspend disbelief as well that’s not about passive obedience and surrendering to a script. Entertainment gets us to pursue the suspension of disbelief as a pleasurable end in itself, because we trust that the scripted, produced nature of the entertainment product will protect us from the radical vulnerability of dropping our guard.

If we suspend disbelief outside the script, however, if we resist the temptation (the defense mechanism, really) of repackaging our experiences in terms of entertainment, then suspending disbelief can become not an end but a means. It can open us unconditionally and carry us toward something terrifyingly unpredictable, something beyond what’s expected or what we planned for, something  that’s much more like love — the realization that another person is not like a robot at all and can’t be programmed and that they are there with you in an ineffable moment of presence for reasons that will forever remain uncoded, maybe for no reason at all.

At Cyborgology, Nathan Jurgenson wrote a post questioning whether people should express relief that Facebook didn’t exist at some time in their past.

Behind many of the “thank God I didn’t have Facebook back then!” statements is the worry that a less-refined past-self would be exposed to current, different, perhaps hipper or more professional networks. Silly music tastes, less-informed political statements, embarrassing photos of the 15-year-old you: digital dirt from long ago would threaten to debase today’s impeccably curated identity project. The sentiment is almost common enough to be a truism within some groups, but I wonder if we should continue saying it so nonchalantly?

I don’t know whether this is a truism, at least not in my demographic. Maybe since people know I write critically about Facebook, I tend to be told the opposite: that people wish they had Facebook as teenagers so they could have gotten more out of the high school experience and not felt so isolated and trapped in exurbia (a sentiment Jurgenson is afraid often gets overlooked). I also can’t understand how anyone who would say “I’m glad Facebook didn’t exist when I was in high school” would rationalize having a Facebook page now. The stakes are much higher for adults in having their pages stalked or strip-mined for incriminating detail; presumably the people who say this have anodyne Facebook profiles that show them going through the motions of politeness and social conformity. (Ooh, sign me up for that!)

If we accept Jurgenson’s contention that the relief of no-Facebook-in-high-school stems from the urgently felt need to suppress the anomalies of earlier versions of oneself, it may be that these people truly believe that their identity has reached stasis, and there is nothing to be risked now by having Facebook. But it seems more likely that they believe that adulthood has equipped them with the tools for properly strategizing their sharing so that their identity won’t ever slip out of their control, despite the aggressive way Facebook repurposes the content users provide, dictating how it is presented in a timeline and deciding whether other friends will get to see it in their newsfeeds. And then there is the threat of other users wrenching shared material out of context to draw unforeseen conclusions from it, to make a case against the way someone might seem to be otherwise representing themselves. Everything one shares can become fodder for someone else who wants to reveal the sharer as a phony. And everyone is a phony from some point of view.

Judging by the image of Joan Didion with a quote from “On Self-Respect” imposed over it that accompanies the post, the remedy for this is a stiff dose of personal responsibility and getting over yourself. If someone is trying to use something you once volunteered freely to humiliate or undermine you, then, well, you had it coming, and you should show some “character” and not take it so hard. It was and is your life, and what makes you think you get to always dictate how you will be perceived? Didion writes,

People who respect themselves are willing to accept the risk that the Indians will be hostile, that the venture will go bankrupt, that the liaison may not turn out to be one in which every day is a holiday because you’re married to me. They are willing to invest something of themselves; they may not play at all, but when they do play, they know the odds.

That’s all well and good and “realistic” — life is a game full of risks, no one promised you a rose garden, etc. — but social media have changed the odds in ways that can’t yet be figured. It’s as though you think you’re playing Texas Hold ‘Em, but suddenly you learn in the midst of a hand that deuces and suicide kings are wild. The loss of control over what exactly you are risking, and for how long, is what makes social media use so potentially unsettling and what makes people happy that social media didn’t exist for long stretches when they were playing the game of life most recklessly.

Jurgenson argues that the relief we feel at not having our earlier selves documented in social media threatens to perpetuate the stigma that he suggests is attached to “identity change” — to experimenting with recklessness, perhaps. Of course, Facebook would like us to think there is stigma to having “two identities,” and it is structured to support that ideology. Not only does Facebook encourage us to become a stable, consistent target for marketers, but everything it prompts us to share is attached to a single profile, whose framework is essentially identical to all others. Everything about ourselves on Facebook is reified into the same data form and is subject to the same sorts of response and judgment. (Like!) There is no richer sort of affect captured; instead identity is just a pile of information and a particular network configuration. It can be dynamic only along those two metrics.

So using Facebook runs counter to our lived experience of identity fluidity, code switching, on and offstage separation. Its emphasis on information over presence as the essence of identity muddles the way we are in the world, the sense of control we want to have over adapting to circumstances. It fucks with the degree of autonomy we expect to have over our self-presentation from situation to situation.

People want to have control over that narrative of how they grew up; they want to shape what Didion calls “character” through that story that allows them to stand by what they did. So they are probably relieved that Facebook wasn’t around before so it can’t serve as a repository now for others to construct an alternative narrative about them or undermine the one they are peddling. We want to tell the story of our own reformation, not stand trial before a jury of our peers, Pink Floyd The Wall–style, and have our defenses torn down. Those defenses shouldn’t be stigmatized anymore than the idea of “identity fluidity” should be. (N.B.: I don’t think I understand the concept of The Wall. What do the worms represent?)

The problem is not that Facebook exposes how we’ve changed or that identity is performative in general; the problem is the searchable archive. It’s that Facebook stores details about our identity performance as decontextualized information. It encourages the idea that identity isn’t embedded in context but is strictly a matter of data. This makes us vulnerable to having our identities “remixed” by anyone who can access the identity information about us and verify we are connected to it somehow. It’s as though social media lets people rewrite your diary, forcing you to correct the record with further additions, which can be further remixed — possibly by enemies, possibly by bots or algorithms — until the undermining becomes virtually instantaneous. Then identity becomes a matter of continually shouting your current version of yourself in every possible medium to counter the competing versions.

This is the “alienation from self” Didion warns about at the end of “On Self-Respect,” only it is not entirely a matter of being a weak-willed whiner — it’s because social media run on self-alienation (turning our identity into information that can circulate) and deny us the ability to put things in the perspective we deem proper. Any given item from our digital record can go viral, can demand from us a different perspective. Didion writes: “To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves – there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect.” Yet social media are nothing but the “expectations of others” brought to bear on us in a way that sometimes rewards us, sometimes punishes us, and often does both at the same time. Didion’s conclusion would perhaps be that no self-respecting person would use social media in the first place. But of course, opting out for most of us is untenable.

The persistence of material shared in social media opens the possibility for a much broader range of doxxing as entertainment — exposing people for their embarrassing earlier moves, when the necessary strategies for gaming life and self-branding seemed different. Everyday schadenfreude for everyone. This is a large part of the reason social media thrive: they are a vector for gossip and drama. They bank on and intensify our impulses toward voyeurism and judgment passing and clique formation; they have little invested in reversing those tendencies.

Maybe it will require only some additional character to deal with the bonus harassment and drama social media by default encourage. Maybe the idea that everyone can blackmail everyone else will make us all more tolerant and somehow more loving of our fellow blackmailers. Maybe it’s as easy as telling people, Hey, buck up and be prouder and own what you’ve done. But collectively, we have a lot invested in the ability to shame other people, often under the flimsiest of pretexts. And no matter how rigorous you are about going Galt and ignoring the approbation of others, social rejection still circumscribes the opportunities one has in life. Doxxing can work no matter how much character you show about it.

It would be great if we all stopped taking the sorts of things that end up on Facebook and Twitter as definitive expressions of identity, of character — if we rejected the idea that user profiles are anything other than places to build equity in the self-brand, which is a managed property very separate from the self. It would be very nice if we did away with the bogus consumerist ideal of personal authenticity that has us trying to curate a personality. But it seems more plausible that people will continue to enjoy the social-media-abetted form of shame entertainment for the same reasons they enjoy it now: It shows other people being punished for having the temerity to try to become something self-willed. If we let them succeed unhindered, then what becomes of our excuse for not making what we want of our lives?

Could we have kippers for breakfast,
mummy dear, mummy dear?
They got to have ‘em in Texas,
’cause everyone’s a millionaire
—Supertramp, “Breakfast in America”

I haven’t spent much time in Texas, but I’m pretty sure that everyone there is not a millionaire. I never saw anyone in Texas or anywhere else in America eat kippers for breakfast. I’m not entirely sure what a kipper is.

Yet because I was at a vulnerable and impressionable age in 1979 when the English group Supertramp’s “Breakfast in America” dominated FM radio, part of my mind has always clung to the idea that in Texas, there are millionaires eating kippers for breakfast. The very fact that I had no idea what that meant was exactly what made it alluring, aspirational. I wasn’t sure if I would like to have kippers for breakfast myself (I could be finicky), but I definitely wanted to be the sort of person who knew why that was desirable. I wanted people to think I was eating them.

In my youthful naiveté, I saw secret and powerful knowledge in a line that was meant to convey Supertramp songwriter Roger Hodgson’s own naiveté about America when he was young. Eating kippers for breakfast was something that happened in England, not America. Hodgson was trying to evoke what it was like to try to imagine the unimaginable — what life was like where I already lived. I was already living the unimaginable. Or perhaps it’s better to adopt the terminology of another naivé interpreter of America, Jean Baudrillard, and say I was already deeply immersed in the hyperreal, in “simulations of simulations” that were “more real than real.” There are no “real” kippers to have for breakfast, yet “kippers for breakfast” as an concrete idea, as something to sing and wonder about, is endlessly reproducible and served for me at least as a constitutive fantasy.

Baudrillard writes in America (1986): “There is a sort of miracle in the insipidity of artificial paradises, so long as they achieve the greatness of an entire (un)culture.” Kippers for breakfast is that sort of miracle. An entirely implausible fantasy that is nonetheless perfectly characteristic. In America we want what we want when we want it, even if “we” never would consider eating a kipper. As Americans, we still expect to be seen as having anything anyone else could imagine wanting.

The point of being an American, as it is refracted back to Americans, is that you live in the most thoroughly stocked marketplace in the world, an efficient engine for realizing desires, imagination, experiences as products available to anyone who chooses to afford them. As Baudrillard contemplates the desert — perhaps a desert not unlike the rugged high plains of vast, sparse West Texas — Baudrillard comments that it is “a miracle of obscenity that is genuinely American: a miracle of total availability.” In “Breakfast in America,” Hodgson captures this same fantasy about American plenitude in the song’s opening verse:

Take a look at my girlfriend,
she’s the only one I got
Not much of a girlfriend,
never seem to get a lot
Take a jumbo across the water,
like to see America.
See the girls in California
I’m hoping it’s going to come true
but there’s not a lot I can do

In America, there is an overflow of eagerly available California gurls and an apparent promise of sexual abundance for every dismal, passive man bogged down in monogamy, even though there is “not a lot” he can do about it. The singer’s dream of America seems to be that he will deplane from the jumbo and the women will throw themselves at him. That is what it means to him to “see America”: consequence- and effort-free libidinous indulgence. He will become a perfect consumer who “gets a lot,” who derives pure pleasure from sheer quantity of generic offerings, uncompromised by any specific appeals to him as a particular subject, as such hailings would also bring specific responsibilities. And in America, who wants that?

In other words, the fantasy of touring America, of conquering America, of becoming American, is a fantasy of losing oneself and being perfected in the hopeful consumerist melting pot as an exquisitely receptive pleasure sensor.  Baudrillard writes, “The only question in this journey is: how far can we go in the extermination of meaning, how far can we go in the non-referential desert form without cracking up and, of course, still keep alive the esoteric charm of disappearance?”

This fantasy stems not only from America’s colonial history as a catch-all for Europe’s dissidents, heretics, and hustlers. It has more to do with its post-World War II climb toward global hegemony, as the Cold War exporter of freedom in the form of consumer choice and glamorized commodities — its movie stars and its blue jeans, inspiring the “children of Marx and Coca Cola.”

But as the U.S. was beginning to send its McDonaldized way of life around the world with the rise of economic globalization, life within America was becoming ever more vertiginous, as American culture was situated at the vanishing point reflected in two mirrors pointed at each other. Growing up as an American meant trying to master that infinite regress, to take cultural hegemony in stride even as it spawned ambiguous forms of resistance in the zeitgeist, like Supertramp’s homage. In part, it meant discovering one’s own privilege in the distorting, mocking, and envying representations of it in entertainment products from abroad — products that Americans feel unabashedly entitled to appropriate. And in part it meant coming to terms with building an identity in line with America’s apparent competitive advantage, which is in making seductive images and then quickly rendering them obsolete.

So Americans learn to know themselves in relation to ephemeral signifiers that tenuously have value attached to them, that can come and go like Supertramp did over the course of the summer of 1979. As the chorus of “The Logical Song,” the other massive hit from Breakfast in America, put it, “I know it sounds absurd, but please tell me who I am.”

On its face, “The Logical Song” is a pretty straightforward song about the disillusionment of coming adulthood, as one is forced to accept the reality principle and the “logic” of society’s repressions and compromises. Wrenched from the childhood idyll in which “all the birds in the trees, they’d be singing so happily, joyfully, playfully, watching me,” the singer is instead thrust into “a world where I could be so dependable, clinical, intellectual, cynical.” This is the corollary of America as the land of libidinal plenitude: America as land of hyperrational calculation and alienated consciousness. Kippers for breakfast turn out to be a very different sort of pleasure than the jouissance of being at one with the birds who are watching you and singing to you, the pleasure of being assured of your belonging within the natural world. Banished to the desert of the hyperreal, one must banquet on ultimately empty signifiers, strategizing all the while how to consume more of them before it becomes meaningless in the eyes of others to do so.

I have lived in that desert, with its many mirages, and I’ve become too disoriented to find my way out of it. I still want kippers for breakfast, and if I didn’t, I’d want something else impossible to nourish me. I don’t think the birds were ever watching me, and if they were, I would have thought they were just jealous. I had the new Supertramp album on 8-track, and what the hell did they have?