Cyborg Memoirs 2012~2019: An exercise in printing cyberspace

This was a project I intended to bust out quick like an errand, something to encapsulate all these essays and rants and reposts from my tumblr, materialize them on paper before too much time passed and another internet archive vanished to censorship or bankruptcy or new owners trashing the place.

It took me like, months and maybe a couple years to get this thing from notes to a printed book. Looking thru one’s own archive and choosing what to print and in what order and tapestry takes time, I chronically forget this. And I knew I needed to give the collection context. And I work too much. And it just took time.

So putting this book together taught me to embrace work at a Saturnian pace. In a Saturn-ruled profection year—for my astro heads—I made myself plans. Set deadlines and produced things. Got into my planner shit. Got myself pharmaceutically juiced a few months ago and so I’m feeling capable, reflecting on what is and what was. I’m sitting. The run-away is reintegrating. Come together. We’re cyberpunk. Rising inflection?

Cyborg Memoirs has been my domain name since 2003, and before that was the title of maaaaaany mid and late 90s internet free-bandwidth diary sites. In all this time of making bags and zines and books and planners and stickers and all this shit, I don’t think I used the CM name for any of it. I don’t know why, I kept making new titles instead, making separate entities. I used literary pen names and legible monikers for “real life” projects. Maybe I was keeping that name safe in cyberspace. I mean, Cyborg Memoirs has always had my poetry and prose and fanfiction and smut and ranting on it, has always been a network and a node, MY CYBER SPACE. It’s where I’ve hosted my stories, long before and since becoming an awarded artist and published sci-fi author official—I started doing this shit in 1995!!!! I was a pre-teen. I’ve spoken about this before, right?

For those of us who started out on the 1990s internet, I think it’s important to chronicle our experiences of those times, as well as the ones that followed. Nostalgia, sure. But for me, it’s remembering what life felt like—————the orientation of the senses, what the machine interface design and flow was like, who were the other people there and why, how big and how small and ethereal and almost taboo it was to be “online”, and the promises vs the realities vs the academic accounts and state legislation and commerce that followed—————before the amazon web services driven spectacle of internet shopping slash social media conglomeration infoflood livestream genocide times of today. In those nascent years online, what were we physically going through.(i don’t trust words can express it all either)

Record scratch—This book is the first time I’ve ever physically printed anything under the name Cyborg Memoirs. I think now it’s time. It contains a handful of interviews and a whole lotta posts from an era of tumblr begun nearly a decade ago. As part of my Cyborg Memoirs Revival plan, it heralds the closing of a chapter and the beginning of a new one. Cross the threshold for the imperial calendar year 2024 and dissolve the primacy of a singular pen name for a network handle instead. Recount some of what was and we enter what is.

As usual, I did layout design and copyediting of my own work, asked a few homies for feedback throughout the process, and got the books printed at my faves, 48hrbooks.com out in Ohio.

what was tumblr like?

It took me till 2023 to realize that I was a diarist as much as a sci-fi smut writer. I was taking a look back on the past ten years, finding myself in an altered reality from December 2019, before the pandemic. Some people made hella art during the covid-19 lockdown times, but I grew angry and distracted and secluded, and MOST OF ALL ― GRIEVOUS.

Writers of dystopian tales don’t particularly enjoy seeing foretold horrors come to fruition. I had been writing my book manuscript when lockdown hit and to date haven’t finished it. So much in my life was severed from its previous trajectory, as I’m sure you may have experienced for yourself.
So I have been reviewing what it was I was on about in the years fresh after Occupy Wall Street and into the Trump era. This era began in the midst of my Saturn return and encompassed my time as a very minor queer internet celebrity, primarily cemented in the nascent Tumblr networks of 2013~2016… Basically until Trump was elected and the anti sex worker SESTA/FOSTA bills were passed, completely shuttering longtime bastions of the internet and ushering in an era of content censorship and surveillance on every fucking digital platform.

I experienced my time on Tumblr as delicious learning, vortex, discourse, new lingering and underground aesthetics finally having a place to go hard. No other websites or platforms up till then allowed you to upload so many free images, text, links, all in a mish-mash tableaux that you could then customize the appearance of. You didn’t need to know a LICK of code. Me, a web 1.0 denizen original surfer of the web head, took to it like a fish to water.

Tumblr was the place I felt like I finally got visual confirmation of the overlaps between chronically online anime nerds, city kids, club kids, fashion queers, rural freaks, disabled hotties, gender non-conforming thinkers of all stripes (shout out GHE20G0TH1K, House of Ladosha, howtobeafuckinglady, Mark Aguhar RIP, etc etc etc)…liiiike the aesthetics of people’s ~/archive page!!! The usernames! The endless pagination scroll of mental visual audio stimulation, the hella fucking intellectual long reading to be had and riffed on, a rigorous and jaunty education better than college. You could slap it (being anything) all together, and a CORPUS would emerge that richly textured an individual’s inner worlds OUTWARD into something perceptible beyond the mortal flesh. Not to mention the untold creative scenes and artistic and political movements that emanated from our glass screens and into the streets.

So it was different than its predecessor LiveJournal, where I dwelled throughout the 00s, for going beyond the boundaries (and bandwidth limitations) of text-only posts and images one had to hard-code into the not-rich-text editor (which one had to also first host on 3rd party sites like imgur or flickr).

It was different. A riveting time, before the turn of clandestine world events and warmonger strategies churned us towards this current era of once-obscure-now-proliferating-fascism, the Internet-as-censored-marketplace and online-presence-as-personal-brand-broadcast, of “please upload a picture of your government issued ID to verify your identity”, of one-sided FOLLOWING (akin to how “citizens” became “consumers” and “users”, online we used to have FRIENDS).

What a timeline. After Tumblr made its disastrous purge of “adult content” in 2018, which in the SESTA/FOSTA name of ‘protecting the children’ went so far as removing posts of anything vaguely erotic or just gay (transgirls wearing clothes, fat queers in crop tops having their back rolls somehow flagged as nudity) and censoring images of shit like Renaissance nudes (imagine you’re a niche art history tumblr), so many people left and never posted again or left and then came back a few years later (after some of the censorship lightened up) to make a couple more posts, only to realize that the old networks had been dried up.

This volume is but a paltry slice of that time, maybe not even a sliver. Tumblr called itself a microblogging platform, but it was certainly a glorious anonymous rhizomatic cyberspace, perhaps the last one that someone of my generation would freely enjoy.

May we all find the welcome places to explore ourselves and be.

start: 21 september 2023

end: 22 november 2023