PSA: You should try and discover yourself!

Comic by Peter Steiner, 1993, The New Yorker

In 1993, Peter Steiner would famously coin the adage, “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog!” It might seem reminiscent of the old warning parents would give their children about how anyone can pretend to be anyone on the internet (mostly, of course, too young vulnerable girls about male predators).

However, the adage was never meant to be a warning about stranger danger, and in fact, early audiences took it in a wonderfully optimistic way. In response to the comic, Lisa Nakamura writes that the internet offers, “… unprecedented possibilities for communicating with each other in real-time, and for controlling the conditions of their own self-representations…”. what she called a form of “computer cross-dressing”. The idea of using the internet as a way to escape the confines of our bodies – or rather, the societal norms enforced on our bodies – seems a wondrous ideal.

Legacy Russel’s ‘Glitch Feminism’, as both an essay and a concept, take this ideal and interprets it through the lens of gender. Russel speaks of the binary-gender system as ‘a set of rules and requirements that her body is forced to play out, and that to refuse this performance – this compliance – she inhabits a sort of glitch in the system. By using the internet and its anonymity, she is capable of embodying this non-performance and discovering herself beyond the enforced boundaries of her body.

Does this mean we’re running away?

This should sound like a familiar tune to many people who grew up alongside the internet, using it as a platform to become someone else during times when being you was too difficult. I too, felt the need to craft a different persona so I would not have to confront myself. However, Russel does not speak of ‘escape’ – and this might be confusing. After all, are we not escaping our ‘real’ life when on the internet?

To suggest that what occurs on the internet is not ‘real’ is a fallacy – half our world runs on streams of data that most of us will never see, hear, taste, smell, or feel. The internet is not full of empty voices and faceless algorithms, but rather a living breathing thing comprised of millions of people just being people. Russel’s relationship with the internet is acknowledging it as a place of connection, a place of being, and recognizing how one can change who they are and be who one wants to be in the digital world. Our world is more than the physical bodies we inhabit.

What is good about this?

The important lesson to learn from Glitch Feminism is recognizing the power of an in-between space – because the internet does not bind a person to their physical body, a person can explore many avenues of existence, being something that is in between the binary spectrum of the physical world. This is not about creating a great leveling field, where a person can pass as belonging to more privileged groups. Glitch Feminism has no interest in passing or equalizing, and instead works on finding new ideas, new ways of ‘becoming’ one’s self. It knows that the gendered binary is ‘imaginary, manufactured, and commodified’, and rejects it in its totality.

What do you do with it?

To young readers discovering themselves, the ideals of Glitch Feminism offer you the digital space as a way to discover yourself and amplify your identity. By this act of self-definition, we create a stepping stone, an internal realization that we can move forward to a world free from the gender binary. We inject ‘positive irregularities’ into a world filled with carefully tailored ways of being, and create malfunctions within the system that make spaces for new forms of gender experience. Ultimately, we become this Glitch, throwing the current system absolutely off, and continue to play, experiment, and try, all through the internet.

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(PSA – The internet awaits, but always be responsible)