#social dysfunction

Me when someone talks to me:

This convergence of bots, scammers, brand-funnels and soft‑core marketing underpins what might be called the bot-girl economy, a parasocial marketplace fueled in a large part by economic precarity. At its core is a transactional logic: Attention is scarce, intimacy is monetizable and platforms generally won’t intervene so long as engagement stays high. As more women now turn to online sex work, lots of men are eager to pay them for their services. And as these workers try to cope with the precarity imposed by platform metrics and competition, some can spiral, forever downward, into a transactional attention-to-intimacy logic that eventually turns them into more bot than human. To hold attention, some creators increasingly opt to behave like algorithms themselves, automating replies, optimizing content for engagement, or mimicking affection at scale. The distinction between performance and intention must surely erode as real people perform as synthetic avatars and synthetic avatars mimic real women.

Whiteness is hypersensitive to its own value, which means that whiteness is hypersensitive to the presence of anything which threatens the value of its particularity. Whiteness is sensitive and vigilant because it must constantly survey the landscape for anything that threatens the myth that organizes its being and its activity. Whiteness is a project of devaluation—the devaluation of everything that threatens its specifically ‘white’ sense of value. To create its own particular value and sense of worth, whiteness must devalue the very thing that gives it shape and meaning. The activity of maintaining a specifically ‘white’ identity is the activity of devaluing everything that is not ‘white,’ as the presence of the not-‘white’ threatens ‘white’ value. This is why people scream and get out of the pool, why they grouse and frown and move to a ‘better’ neighborhood, why they wanted ‘whites’ and ‘coloreds’ to use separate water fountains. To use the same water fountain, the same swimming pool, or to send their kids to the same public school to be educated alongside alleged inferiors threatens the value of so-called ‘white’ identity.

Whiteness is a social convention, and ‘white’ is the name of a conventional relation between human beings that adheres to a standard that transcends them. Because it is above them, it cannot be found within them or among them.

Whiteness conditions perception around a myth of human being that cannot be realized in human experience, and specifically ‘white’ activity exists in resolving the gap between the myth of whiteness and the idea of a ‘white’ human being on one hand, and a concrete experience of human embodiment that lacks a final, knowable, internal ‘racial’ designator.

No one is ‘white’ because no one is ‘raced,’ but whiteness strives to achieve an imaginary status that it is not possible for a human being to have in any tangible, concrete way. Whiteness must compensate for the fact that the supposedly ‘white’ individual can provide no evidence of their own difference, but must still believe in it in order to have their particular value in a ‘white’-centered world. Whiteness must prove that ‘race’ exists, while already living as though ‘race’ has been proven.

The breach or division that whiteness claims is natural, inherent, or given is only a breach in its own self-apprehension. Because whiteness strives to see that others are not both merely and fully human, it cannot perceive itself as merely or fully human. It tries to launch itself into a beyond that it cannot reach because it is imaginary, a fantasy, and so it must subject others to the imaginary rules to justify this breach that cannot be located. The infinite quest for what does not exist leaves the ‘white’ (who is always bereft of their whiteness) in a state of anxiety, hostility, and resentment, as the promise of a specifically ‘white’ being goes eternally unfulfilled—and the ‘other’ becomes the cause of discomfort.

Whiteness is like a language insofar as the limits of one’s language are the limits of one’s world (Wittgenstein).

Whiteness is like money, and operates as the subterranean, barely concealed language of finance, of a speculation and abstract wealth that realize themselves as material impoverishment.

Whiteness is a concept, a paradigm according to which the world is ordered. Whiteness is a gestalt that alters and organizes perception around a superstition branded as ‘racial’ fact.

Whiteness is not biological, but must present itself as such in order to reliably function. It is a pretense that strives to order a reality that is retroactively named “racial.”