It’s been twenty-three years since Le Tigre cajoled us all to “Get Off the Internet” and meet them in the streets. It would be easy to dismiss a book titled Log Off as yet another oversimplified “the internet is bad actually” thought exercise — which would be a mistake.
Log Off (from @littlepusspress) takes a long, hard, smart, funny, and necessary look at the state of the wide-open internet. The place where we were promised that any human could talk to or eavesdrop on any other human in the world. The internet that was, to quote a long gone comic that I worry only I remember, “gonna save us*”. It’s true that author Katherine Cross finds the present state of that promise wanting, but she shows her work and attempts to grapple with the conversation beyond the usual talking points. A quote from a footnote late in the book sums up its energy well
”It’s frustrating, of course, because despite writing a hundred pages of scolding, I remain a slut for drama and dearly want to see what people were mad about for five minutes”
Katherine spends a lot of time with Twitter and social media — a world I never fully inhabited. My gen-x layers of half acceptance and denial kept me away from trans Twitter and a personal hagiography around the mid/late ‘90s home page era made me turn up my nose at the post blogging phase of the internet. This is no great morale victory. I was there, but I used the platform to perform a certain sort of professional enthusiasm that kept me self-employed for a decade or so as I perfected a dissociative life. Despite all this I found the framework presented in Log Off useful for thinking about the ways I have and will continue to use social media and the wider internet in the future.
Also — it’s often a funny book! Katherine’s droll charm comes shining through. Read it, it’s good!
- Brandon Bolt, Nobody Scores