(ESSAY) 'train[of.thought]spotting' by Cristina Diamant and Francis Gene-Rowe

Take a breath and tune into the static. Cristina Diamant and Francis Gene-Rowe take you deep into the self-spiralling online swamp in this latest piece for Digital Dreamland. Slopped from attention-parched minds, this work navigates the impossible waking dream that is chronically online/precarious IRL subjecthood. Expect digital selfhood, consumerism, desire, corporeal anxiety, glitch, dreamscape.

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away. -- Philip K. Dick, VALIS

The more things change, the more they stay the same. At first, your eyes size up the train window carefully, learning its shape to better ignore its afterimage. You zoom in on the landscape unfurling like a scroll thrown down the stairs. Your timeline speaks less and less of who you were and more and more of what you could buy. When did you last see your neighbour? I think you live in a simulation: you are always [watched!] struggling to bring groceries in but your neighbour never does. Remember the milkman of yesteryear? He could be your father. You should replace your father. Your father would be proud of you if you worked in tech. Here’s an automated delivery service for all your essentials. How much milk do you have left and what kind? Let us talk to your fridge. One day, you, too, could be locked out of your phone and your tablet and your Kindle, let us talk to your fridge. The fridge that talks to us won’t hurt you. Your Roomba won’t be selling Amazon the blueprint of your studio anymore, but we cannot disclose who will buy it or why. Alexa already told us everything we needed to know, so what’s the harm in letting us talk to your fridge? It won’t chase you around, like in Requiem for a Dream. No, nightmares, much like the internet, are all about repressed desire. After all, as Slavoj Žižek muses, ‘[c]inema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn't give you what you desire - it tells you how to desire’. But you don’t want food, you need fuel. Have you logged your protein intake today? You need to optimise. You’re not craving the taste of coffee, you need to lock in, rise and grind, power up. In the uncanny valley of plenty, self-imposed constraints are a marker of social capital: the postfeminist subject, willing itself to perform living in a post-ideological perpetual present, is a hyperdisciplined consumer of superfood. The only acceptable negative affect in this brave new world? Corporeal anxiety, of course! Body image this, somatic healing that, but what if sometimes you just wish you didn’t have a body that is always to be seen but must still, somehow, scream? It’s so easy to forget you’re not just a blabbering voice: even if you’re too young for body horror, terror will tingle just beneath the skin. Meanwhile, the internet serves both a tantalising taste of disembodied subjectivity and endless options of “clean” or “dirty” foods at your fingertips. If comparison is the thief of joy, the Internet does not believe in limiting your options to Dunbar’s Number. Very nice social signature, now let’s see Paul Allen’s.

The frame melts into the contours of your vision and now the train itself looks less real than the floating world you may or may not catch a proper – or improper – glimpse of. Was that a chicken or a small dog? When Humbert Humbert peeped at a window across the street, fantasizing about the shadow of a young girl ‘undressing before a co-operative mirror’ in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, only to be shocked by the reveal of a half-clad man reading his newspaper, did his guilt stay intact despite missing its intended target? I never felt safe on the internet growing up. After all, everyone knew that There Are No Girls on the Internet. The secret ingredient necessary to render us visible was crime. Now, growing old[er], ads for Viagra clog up the newsfeed while a public healthcare educator is shadowbanned for mentioning condoms because a child might see it. You have to tell me in algospeak to check the blink in your lio if I want to help someone not be unalived but the dog whistles are getting so much louder, I think I can hear them now, buzzing like neon lights. Snap out of it and think, Pig! No time to wait. What makes more sense? What makes for a better story? And yet, what makes more money?

Your reflection watches you back unblinking. Superflat. I see you see[ing] me. I can’t turn to face you - my compartment is not your compartment, but my reflection is on the same screen as yours. I have to choreograph my movements carefully, reverse-engineering what I hope to see mirrored back. I blink. I assume you must have, as well, but I cannot see my spectral avatar closing its eyes. Closing my eyes? Am I dead? Is this a vision of the afterlife, through a scanner darkly?

This train is crossing the English Channel. This train is crossing time zones, timelines, state lines. In cyberspace, we are all unblinking avatars who can breathe underwater. Siren song, swan song. Did you ever log out to sleep while I was away? Sometimes I think you only exist when I can perceive you. I am not your God. I cannot astral project, I cannot access the Akashic records. I am merely a lucid dreamer cursed with muscle memory of reality tests. I have to check the light switches, I have to count your fingers today as I did yesterday. You could still glitch gothic tomorrow. Who is [f]AI, who is human, and what slips in or out when you give your name to the wrong one? Can you name five things you can see, four things you can hear, three things you can feel, two things you can smell - why are you coming closer? Step away. Stand on the marked binary code. We’re not supposed to meet outside of meatspace. We’re only supposed to connect. Connect the dots and make data beautiful. Welcome to the desert of the real, says Slavoj Žižek, before adding bitterly that

[I]n late-capitalist consumerist society, 'real social life' itself somehow acquires the features of a staged fake, with our neighbours behaving in 'real' life like stage actors and extras... Again, the ultimate truth of the capitalist utilitarian despiritualized universe is the dematerialization of 'real life' itself, its reversal into a spectral show. 

Do not follow the yellow brick road, those who promise to make it bloom or wear the poppy. They will raze your community to the ground and plant market-ready content on top of it to hide that you ever took up space. Reduce, recycle, reuse. Girlboss, gatekeep, gaslight. Everyone is a Girl on the Internet now that “girl” is an inhuman consumer category. Greenwash, bluewash, pinkwash. The Internet is fleeting, the Internet lives forever, long live the dreamers and the shapeshifters.

Modernity is liquid and so is my identity: I’m not me when I’m hungry, the unskippable ad taunts me, but I’m also not me when buttoned up to the top roleplaying my worksona on LinkedIn when I used to eat dead doves hunched over in a dark corner on AO3. Very well, I contradict myself very well. I contain multitudes, living archives crawling around with parts falling off at random. A photo that meant a lot to my 2012 version, scrubbed off every platform. The filesharing link lies inert. For far too long, I assumed Google Cache would always be there to fill in the gaps of my memory [drive] with gold. The more I see digital decay all around me, the less I believe in a digital afterlife. I don’t want my loved ones to speak to my reflection after I’m gone, no matter how interesting they could make it. I want to be there to see them wanting to speak to me. When I first encountered William Gibson’s Neuromancer, "the sky above the port was the color of television tuned to a dead channel", a speckled grey. Salt and pepper, a memory you can’t quite shake like a Polaroid. I am told it is now a bright blue. This little piggy went to the market and so did blue-sky research, now available with dual use! Please clap. Please don’t blink. If you blink, the reflection looks like it’s now suddenly closer, staring up at you with glossy/glassy eyes beneath the surface of a dusty dark screen, like a lake frozen over and freckled with stars, cracks visible but nowhere near as new as we’d like to think. After all, as Punya Mishra points out,  

it is not as if AI fractured our world. It was fractured long ago. The splinters were already in our eyes. The mirror cracked long before. AI is just ensuring that these fractures deepen.

Connect the stars and tell me what constellation you were born under. Your superhero name is your favourite cereal and [insert security question]. I used to be able to make my own mistakes without my shadow catching up with me, breathlessly whispering to me barely coherent autocomplete attempts in [D]Elvish. Commit to a plan or commit a crime? Wherever I go, it follows, growing ever larger still the more I pretend not to hear it. I cannot whistle back, no matter how strong the urge to connect my notes with theirs. Answer it and it’ll start eating itself, throwing up half-digested references and half-remembered facts. Geodata places you or your device at this location a year ago. Would you recommend this business to a friend? What about to a stranger walking past? Do you consent to our use of cookies? Can we share them with your neighbour? Sharing is caring. You desire nothing, lack and leak nothing: you are hard, shiny plastic. An action figure stalked by a persistence predator, your own digital footprint in quicksand chaining your ankles together. You can’t jump over your own shadow and why would you try? You can no longer disappear completely. Count your toes. Were they always webbed, like a belligerent goose or a warty frog? Were you always able to walk on water as readily as on ice? You Are the Main Character, you close your eyes and the world ceases to exist. You are an NPC who can be spoofed: I close my eyes and you never existed at all. I think I made you up inside my head in a dream within a dream. You used to expand greedily in so many directions at once, curling your gangling tentacles around an essay, a poem, a comment, a review, a gloriously indulgent self-insert fanfiction pretending to be an ironic roman-à-clef. Nobody can hurt you in a way that matters if you allow nobody to know you fully. Now you’re not a user or a follower anymore: you’re a content creator. Containers collapsed with a whimper, not a bang, all your submissions liquified into content. As a platform dies, three others merge or emerge. How many worlds must die and boil over for one more primordial soup? Start again. False start. Start better. Fail again. Fail better, says Samuel Beckett in ‘Worstward Ho’. And yet, just like May in Beckett’s Footfalls, I find that ‘the motion alone is not enough, I must hear the feet, however faint they fall’.

I want to think that electric sheep exist outside my train window. I hope they sometimes dream of me, too. I don’t dare wish they would want to dream of me, though. I am a data point slowly sinking into the web. My imprint will be paved over and a new X will mark the spot. My number will be reassigned, my username will be up for bidding. The map is the empire. Why would the motherboard bother to desire to summon us if we were to be here today, gone tomorrow? Just because it runs on electric impulses doesn’t mean it’s impulsive enough to want something with such an underwhelming return on investment. ‘I am tired, I am weary. I could sleep for a thousand years. A thousand dreams that would awake me.’ Let the electric sheep dream of electric eels. Let no one find the [re]spawn point, no map or net to ensnare it. Let the dead eat the dead on the dead internet of things. Talk to your fridge all you want. I will let my three-armed shadow lay me down to rest, to sleep, perchance to dream. Can I just say perchance, please?

  For now we live in the mall, but I think it’s closing soon. There are forces outside breaking    through the glass, threatening to interrupt this dream we’re drifting through, doped on consumer goods, energy drinks, and Apple products, climbing toward the bright light of digital deliverance.

(Grafton Tanner, Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts, 2016)

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Text & images: Cristina Diamant and Francis Gene-Rowe

Published: 28/10/25

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