Roisin Kiberd - The Disconnect: A Personal Journey Through the Internet

The Disconnect

A Personal Journey Through the Internet

Roisin Kiberd

First published in Great Britain in 2021 by Serpents Tail,

an imprint of PROFILE BOOKS LTD

29 Cloth Fair

London

EC 1 A 7 JQ

www.serpentstail.com

Copyright Roisin Kiberd, 2021

Some of the essays collected in this book draw on previous published works Roisin Kiberd, 20152020. See .

Lines from Reboot 11 speech ( ) reproduced by kind permission of Bruce Sterling.

Lines from You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine( ) reproduced by kind permission of Alexandra Kleeman.

While care has been taken to ensure that the web links in the Notes section of this book are accurate at the time of publication, the publisher cannot guarantee that these links remain viable. The author and publisher assume no responsibility for the content of websites that are not their own.

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

A CIP record for this book can be obtained from the British Library

ISBN: 9781788165778

eISBN: 9781782837312

For my family, and for Rob

Dark Euphoria is what the twenty-teens feels like. Things are just falling apart, you cant believe the possibilities, its like anything is possible, but you never realized youre going to have to dread it so much. Its like a leap into the unknown. Youre falling toward earth at nine hundred kilometres an hour and then you realize theres no earth there.

Bruce Sterling, Reboot 11 speech, 2009

I AM THE NEW FLESH. I live under technology, and technology is part of me.

I have stolen this term, the new flesh, from Videodrome, David Cronenbergs 1983 horror film, because it best describes how I feel. In it, people are altered by the media they consume. They mutate, shifting between euphoria and dread. The screen is so addictive, so hypnotic, that they return to it again and again, until it distorts their thoughts and threatens their humanity.

I too am addicted to the screen. Sometimes I think I have spent so much of my life online that I was raised by the internet. Ive forgotten where the borders are, where technology ends, and where I begin. Am I a mutant? A cyborg? Or just an ordinary human?

A cyborg is a person whose physical abilities have been extended by technology. My extensions are not physical; my body looks much the same as that of someone alive in the pre-internet age. But I am an emotional cyborg. I outsource my opinions, my memories and my identity to the internet, and I have spent more time with my laptop than with any living being on earth.

This state is not unusual. Im certain that the several billion other people in the world who use the internet experience it too. Our use of technology is changing us, in ways we have yet to understand.

It was once claimed that the internet would liberate us. Techno-utopians claimed online life would allow us to transcend gender, age, class and race, and to construct our own identities. It hasnt turned out this way. Instead, weve been led into fixed identities, each person given a biography, a Timeline, and a filter bubble of their own.

Perhaps I am a techno-dystopian. Over the years, Ive experienced a slow depersonalisation; cut off from reality, from sincerity and sensation, Ive felt urged to compete in a scrolling world.