Autism and Histronia

Anything of the internet is an expression from its oceanic depths, tide pools and sea creatures and coral sprouting from bacterial origins within the abysses of liquid water. Content itself is a body without organs upon which the functional details of the content itself are scratched on or expressed from, brief flashes of form before melting back into the monolithic liquid. In finding the agents of origin of content, Wojack and Pepe emerge (in genealogy with similar memes) to show and describe the agents of content, the face of the human emotive-intelligence behind the keyboard which makes this expression occur.

From Wojack, the Soyface and NPC both emerged as typologies of the internet user after social media began to take hold as the dominant form of bringing individuals to the tools of content-expression. Both in reference to observed phenomena, what’s revealed in them is the formations that individuals take on through full integration with their online platforms, the structures of their worlds molding them into new beings.

The NPC works online as a histrionic node, forever concerned with the contours of their online context. The pronouns in bio show this, as do the endless accounts retweeting the same collection of sentiments and ideas. The NPC has been made into a husk, an empty pipe by which content flows, in the desperate seeking of some community or connection in the lonely abyss of the internet. Flailing in every direction, they eventually find a groove in which to slot themselves which offers solely positive feedback, and begin to drive themselves deeper and deeper into emptiness as they attempt to pursue more and more approval. Such culminates in the histrionics of confessionary art. With the basic driving force of the removing of all internal thought being the desire to have ones soul embraced and accepted by any community, the individual, when they feel so empowered - usually by desperation - to create, do so with the same aim. Pouring out their heart and body through ink, the art reproduces the same forms of its genre in an attempt to do anything to contact another. The long running trend of feminist art being “ugly nudity” (a trend that’s been seen as cutting edge for a longer period of time than most human lifespans) is the climax of this. In alienation, a discourse has been created where its been promised that the true community so-desired will only be achieved by pouring ones passions out in the ugliest and most painful way imaginable. In aggregate, these communities devolve into a dogpile of this histrionic flailing, each attempting to scream louder and thus attain the acceptance of a non-existent crowd, slicing themselves open all over Medium and slam poetry to spill enough blood so as to drown out all the rest.

The Soyface works on the autistic drive. As opposed to only riding through and desperately upon the flows of media and communication as the NPC does, the Soyface moves in total submission and self-opening to media, desiring to melt themselves into slime and perform the final autistic merger of the desiring with their object of desire. All fetishistic desire is inherently masochistic or annihilative, a movement towards total unification with the fetish, either through subsumption or masochism. In the much more common, latter route, autism emerges, as legalistic masochism where desire for being subsumed by the fetish is sublimated through linguistic channels created to hopefully lead to the fetish - cathedral building. In attempting to bring to life what they see as spiritually existing perfection, the Soyface builds their collection-cathedral and remakes their life in service to this collection-cathedral, the bugman being the really observed manifestation of this, the perfect consuming beast, chittering away at silicon valley’s latest complex-sugar slurries.

That these pathologies - both long existent - are increasing in numbers with the internet is no accident. The structure of the internet creates and encourages these behaviors. From the endless soup of consumptive media, comes the Soyface. Growing up in the 1980s and 1990s when every last second of the day was spent marketing to children through sugar and colorful plastic, the Soyface’s addictions are given a vice far more potent than any before in the internet’s infinite variety of content to consume. With the infinite amount of content being vehicles for ad revenue as well as ads in themselves for a premium patreon or merchandise, the capitalist forces behind their favoured products have a vested interest in making this tendency increase and thus structuring the internet around the mindless “faucet tap” model of consumption (though a much more intelligent faucet than the television was, all the better to addict with). From social media, comes the NPC. With non-anonymous boards, even the older styles of BBSs being built around a username who has a miniature fiefdom at their disposal, the histrionic pathology is able to create for themselves a perfect whitespace on which to smear their soul and hopefully attract a filling of their emptiness. Higher plateaus of capital desire this, as the NPCs are the franchise owners, able to create the very content which the Soyface consumes, providing more and more digestible flows to latch onto, through which advertisement or the “platform cut” Teespring or Redbubble can be delivered.