THE FEMALE INTERFACE
Girl Online: A User Manual by Joanna Walsh
VersoMay 2022Selected by TANK
Joanna Walsh’s latest book, Girl Online, frames women’s online experiences in Faustian terms: coerced into commodifying their bodies and pressured into portraying their selves according to strictly policed social codes, women are destined to become “girls online”. In her wide-ranging and far-reaching prose, Walsh, a multidisciplinary artist and luminary in the relationship between literature and technology, incorporates programming language and digital symbols into her narrative, creating a visual reading experience that feels uncanny. Girl Online’s narrator is a girl, a mother, a writer and a commodified online persona, and Walsh shows not only how these differing selves are simultaneously upheld and hidden, but also, how they might ultimately be integrated into something freer.
Functionalists hold that mental states are defined by the causal role they play in a system. In the Chinese Nation thought experiment, † pain is a point in time. It occurs when enough components say it does.
Say there’s a woman working alone in a room at a screen and the screen screens her privacy – the privacy she also is. She is sitting in front of logic gates that have not yet closed behind her. Let’s say this logic gate is a pain switch.
In programming, a logic gate has a single binary function. From a dual input it produces a single output. It does this by way of conjunctions, like AND, which has the symbol “∧”, or OR, which has the symbol “∨” – which is a non-exclusive or – and XOR, which is an exclusive or, where only one thing is true, or the other. This switch’s XOR logic gate is PAIN/NOTPAIN. The pain is not any specific sort, physical or mental; it is the pain the woman is feeling. Any sort of pain may go through the gate so long as she is willing to call it pain.
Say there are enough women sitting alone, each in a room, each in front of a logic gate. Say their switches form a system and if enough switches flip at the same time, something exists that can be called pain. If enough women sitting in front of enough screens flip the pain switch, will pain have been felt? And how many is enough?
If enough women flip enough switches to cause pain, where is this pain located? Is it located in each woman, her particular pain, or is it located in the system? If it is located in the system, in what sense can the system be said to feel pain? How many women in front of how many screens must make the decision to flip the switch before the system can be said to be in pain? And how much in pain does the system have to be in order that the pain of the women be acknowledged? In what part is pain allowed to each of the women, and “is it evenly distributed yet” if some of the women are more in pain than others but each has only one switch?
What about the pain caused by making the decision to flip the pain switch or not? This might be a slight pain, pain as by-product, or might be a major part of the pain, or greater than the pain registered.
Does the amount of pain each woman feels change once the woman feels herself to be part of a system? In her prison memoir, the writer and activist Margaretta D’Arcy ‡ describes how women political prisoners dealt with pain that might otherwise cause them to “go under”. They dealt with it as a system. They mentioned the incidence of pain to each other in strictly unemotional terms, like flipping a switch. Thus, the pain was dispersed as a system across space and time.
The effect of switches flipped is felt across the system, but each woman sitting in front of a screen makes the decision to flip the switch alone. No woman knows what difference her decision will make. Any woman may refuse to flip the switch and choose instead a default screen face that does not look like it has undergone any pain whatsoever, which is the most fortunate female interface, the face of a girl online.
To lay claim to pain is to lay claim to experience. It is also to have the option to claim experience only as pain. Flip the switch together ⇒ gain power ⇒ claim pain. Flip the switch alone ⇒ claim pain ⇒ lose face: a prisoner’s dilemma. To save face, there is something to be said for staying in front of the logic gate refusing to go in. ◉
† The Chinese Nation thought experiment, or China Brain, was an experiment derived from philosophy of the mind in the second half of the 20th century. The experiment considered the question of if each Chinese national was equipped with a walkie-talkie and told to behave as a single neuron does in the brain, China could be said to have a consciousness.
‡ Margaretta Ruth D’Arcy is an Irish actress, writer, playwright and activist. She was imprisoned in 2014 after she refused to sign an agreement stating that she wouldn’t trespass on restricted areas of Shannon Airport during ongoing protests over United States military stopovers at the site.