In Need of e-Heroes
In our digital dens, we sit alone, skin against hardware, feelings reflected and transmuted through software, brain and mind and mouse “engaged”, but divided across dimensions. And lonelier for it.
Anyway we’re all sitting here alone with our phones or our computers on our laps like infants and we cradle them close, carrying them to the next room, rest here now.
So few people feel loved all day long. Far fewer feel loved online. Attached to our devices and the escapism their software offers, we are encouraged by forces both nefarious and ignorant to dig our heads deep into the Internet’s sand. To neglect the Digital Dimension as beyond our influence. But I believe in our power. In yours, the reader, the digital citizen who gazes upon these words through a screen I’ve never touched.
We’re in need of inspiration. The digital space is crowded with beauty and social celebrations, with announcements and ✨personal news✨ and other loud tweets which may provoke envy. But all the thought or aesthetic leaders in the world can’t offer the same narrative appeal as a children’s book, or a sci-fi movie, a surreal cartoon or a futuristic show. We need e-heroes, characters that are known to roam the internet with distinct passions and purposes, who users like us can look up to. We need to establish an internet mythology that digital citizens can play with, co-create, use as a resource and reference. We share a loose canon of internet literature together already through our mutual understanding of memes, trends, dances or movements. But what if we shared digital digigods … what if we shared Cyber Somebodies?
Today, there are six Cyber Somebodies: The Internet Revolutionary, The Misunderstood Humanoid, The World Builder, The Surreal Artist, The Online Lover and The Compassionate Coder. But tomorrow we may introduce the more troll-like character of The Joker, or The Mortality Demon, a character who harbingers death and can help promote healthy and death-positive digital discussions. Each Somebody has a name, image, bio, theme song, playlist, and list of resources that IRL artists and researchers have published. Meet the web’s first few Somebodies below. Welcome them to your screen and invite them to tango with your imagination. Use their name or resources for your next project, depict one in a comic battling injustice, reference one in an article to animate an anecdote, allow another into your dreams. Should you find any unfamiliar words, consult our glossary of emerging language.
Embrace the fantastic, the fantasy feeling of speaking in web-tongues, experimenting with how you regard your digital self. Let your vocabulary evolve to include the absurd, so we can create more beautiful digital gardens blossoming with language, and fewer vacuums sucking our words away. The Cyber Somebodies were coded and created out of the Internet’s essence, and will grow greater as we users do, too.
Imagine in the mind of your virtual eye a programmed public park, softly dripping wet with bleeding networks. Contorting computer cords grow besides sequences of ones and zeroes in the jungle gym of your childhood dreams, set on the highest hill. You climb to the top, feeling transcendent, heart racing, hot with the moment, brilliant and significant. Ready to meet the Somebodies and play in the cyberverse before you ….
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The Internet Revolutionary
The Internet Revolutionary envisions an accessible cybernetic world, dreaming and developing this future through unblinking electronic eyes. The Revolutionary rejects ableist Third Dimension illusory binaries, data abuse and power structures. They fight through the fractal night against barriers which prevent citizens from accessing the web.
Once citizens are joined with their digital mice, The Revolutionary creates and inspires domains in which all citizens are equitably free to roam. Their cyber spirit is encoded across Dimensions in the hearts of those who know there is no valuable virtual future without revolution.
The Misunderstood Humanoid
The Misunderstood Humanoid rises and sleeps in the uncanny valley, their cycle set by pixelated suns.Neither fully automaton nor animal, The Humanoid questions the distinction between nature and machine, creating and justifying the need for new paradigms by their very existence. They dance elegant bytes as they morph forms deep in the computerized wild, light with liminal laughter, a taunt to the absolute.
The citizens of the cyber verse are often disturbed by The Humanoid’s appearance and curiosities, as there is tension between the Third Dimension’s modern collective reality and the possibilities that The Humanoid represents. Those in the cyber verse who have grown before from the Third’s notorious ego deaths will embrace the hypnotism of The Humanoid, digigod of imagination.
The World Builder
The World Builder was molded out of media, symbols of the user-generated web, and decentralized dreams. The Builder’s bionic hands erect new digital infrastructure, creating the worlds and ideologies of tomorrow.
They connect virtual communities throughout the web, harnessing the power and creativity of the cyber collective. Swinging through this architecture of participation, The Builder inspires citizens to create worlds of their own. The World Builder believes in possibility, reaching beyond ‘what if’ and out to the other side of ‘this is’; this is a new world.
The Surreal Artist
The Surreal Artist is the product of Wires and Wonder, born breathing fire, pink orbs of inspiration that heat the internet. The Artist climbs to the top of the Valley’s jungle gym and sees only hills of possibility. They give birth to living paintings and GIFS, online archives, lines of code and within scripts, its children the sunlight to the computer’s soil.
In The Artist’s presence, you will question all you encounter, sucking on the taste of boundaries for longer than usual, what are these flavors really made of, if I wet this, will it expand? The Surreal Artist’s brainstorms generate lightning throughout the Valley; if you are struck, create.
The Online Lover
The Online Lover was born in to the cyber verse and out of a digital ideal, their life and fate intertwined with that of the Internet. Champion of trust and tenderness, The Lover brings presence and warmth, spreading care like wind throughout the cyber verse’s valleys. The Lover eagerly encourages the citizens of the cyber verse to recognize the mirrors in their lives. Who do you see in the screen, and how can you work with that mirror image to build a more loving world?
The Lover’s capacity for patience and time are limitless, and they will unceasingly support citizens who struggle to love their selves that occupy mirrors across the Third and Digital Dimensions. The Online Lover is an intimate and invincible force pursuing love into patiently programmed tomorrows.
The Compassionate Coder
The Compassionate Coder is champion of algorithmic justice. The Coder explores the most base layers of our hardware and software, examining inputs like diamonds, critical of the very code they are composed of. They develop software for every digital citizen, ensuring the internet is a location that every race and gender can inhabit safely.
Swaddling big data in an electric blanket, raising information into adulthood with great care, they are a fair and intentional parent. The Coder asks individuals, corporations and governments to confront what they are creating, erasing the ethics washing and technology theatre, deleting their mass distractions. The Compassionate Coder reveals a naked and ancient algorithm, a layer of instruction beneath our known world, alive and caring.
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The Cyber Somebodies can help answer some of the following significant and haunting questions about digital life and health.
How can we examine the relationships we have across and between the Third and Digital dimensions?
- What methodologies can we use to understand the ever-evolving techno-psyche?
- How can we motivate digital citizens to believe in their own agency?
- In what ways does this existential journey threaten our idea of consciousness? When should we mitigate that and when should we offer it as a transformative experience in the name of progress?
How has algorithmic bias and western and white technology affect the freedom of cyber citizens today?
- How do visions of cyber-utopias and technology theatre distract from and delay encoded justice?
- What tools can we create and harness to shape a radically different future?
- How can we inspire the cyber collective imagination?
Should you want to explore with the Cyber Somebodies in the Valley of Mirrors, enter through the numer1c mead0w to read love letters, seek out new tools, or rest your head upon the clouds of home. Digital citizens with bubbling and bursting imaginations welcome. You will be greeted with love.
