Digitally Queer

     It is difficult to write how I think technology has changed queerness, because my only experience of queerness has been through the technoscape. I know no before, only now. I can provide no contrasting lenses or a temporal depiction of how queerness has transformed with the help of technology over the years, yet I have made some observations. All the good that the internet and technology have done with regards to representation, provision of resources, expanding contact within communities, enabling intimacy, etc. are all acknowledged, yet they are not the main themes covered in this essay.

     The ever expanding technoscape has made queerness much more accessible than before, one can view niche queer cultures from different countries through reels and detailed social media posts & engage with them (Bayramoğlu et al, 2024). The possibilities of expression are nearly endless, yet they feel fabricated. What this circulation has led to is a transformed experience of queerness itself. Accessibility does provide an entrypoint into the life individuals seek, but it has also changed its meaning. Queer milestones like coming out, transitioning, gaining acceptance – although imperative to our experiences, have taken a backseat in the general experience of queer lives.  They have  become tropes (Floegel, 2019). Political knowledge has become more and more available but yet we are all the more desensitised to it due to its availability. Seeing violence inflicted on members of our community followed by an ad of vibrators doesn’t warrant sincerity (Matthes et al, 2023). The viewers want something new. 

      Today, our lives are more centered around looking and acting queer, to fit in popular shallow molds of masc, fem, andro – inevitably forcing us back into the boxes we want to escape from. It is like a performance. Being on the queer spectrum quite literally means that our multiplicity cannot be standardised. Yet we have more and more distinctions which put us back in the same places as before. Constantly being seen, recorded, analysed has made us paranoid beings.

       Neo-liberalism has transformed life from complex emotionally rich experiences to script-like, rehearsed interactions with people, with each word being calculated. The math of interaction pervades all our spaces – online, offline, private. The same effect is also visible in the online sphere. Our relationships have become stale, lacking in substance and dull. Technology enables individuals to engage in a perverse ritual of lying. Every pretext of interaction has a point to prove/investigate. How queer are you? Do you match my standards of queerness? Are you fem? Are you masc? Do you dom? Do you sub? Maybe you’re a switch?

      Outfits have a rehearsed diction, a new aesthetic evolving faster than the last. There are many “-core” aesthetics, like gothcore, cottagecore, dark academia, fairycore, goblincore, kidcore, dreamcore, and Y2K core, each representing a robbery of “expression” so to speak. Our curated online personas not only betray individuality but also just reproduce the same dynamics of yin-yang, feminine-masculine, girl-boy (Santoniccolo, 2023). The freedom to express is only  limited to what is easy to sell (Abuasba, 2023). It is so easy to participate in queerness, without even being part of the community – if you know the right things to say, clothes to wear, mannerisms to copy – you don’t even need to be queer to be queer.

        Techno-intimacy is a whole new game. Sex is not just physical anymore – we constantly engage in vulnerability, in the act of laying ourselves bare for acceptance and connection. Desire is constructed and fabricated – you are constantly cognizant of the falsity of dating profiles. The novelty wasn’t there to begin with but the difference is that now we engage with it out of pure desperation. Traditional forms of dating – (“meeting organically”) aren’t even looked down upon anymore, they are just out of relevance. Nobody cares, move on. The flow is constant. 

        Phones are not just accessories, they are extensions of us. Appendages if you will – the evolved tail of mankind. At no point in history have we been so available – to each other and to ourselves. There is no actual Big Brother. We are Big Brother. We watch, censor and erase all parts of ourselves which don’t fit in our ideal molds. Privacy is just an exhaustive wait to be found out. The ‘spectacle’ is what is real. Representation is the only presentation (Debord, 1995). 

      Technology exacerbates our individuality, giving a voice to queer artists, individuals and activists – but what this has created in turn is a cycle of isolation (Debord, 1995). We are too niche, too unique, too campy and that makes us ever more lonely. The specialists of personality are just that, specialists. In the 1990’s, technology like VHS, Home Video was explicitly used for documenting queer stories (Watermelon Woman, Go Fish), an announced sincerity to the truthfulness of being gay was always the aim of filmmakers and thinkers alike (Chaplin, 2015). In today’s day and age, we have lost the need to document. Because everything is permanently on the record. Google Photos will give you reminders of exact days and memories before you remember to forget them. The experience-ness of our experiences has inevitably vanished, because everything has already been said, predicted and done. 

    The meaning of queer love itself has taken on an evolved form. Even in our togetherness, we are alone. The technoscape has standardized and made our experiences so uniform that it is not difficult to predict the entirety of an individual’s interests, preferences, love life through the reels they like, the things they post. Instagram has a new feature – Notes. One can drop comments on stories and reels as well as write tiny messages open to their followers without even DMing them directly. We are talking to everyone, all the time – without saying a word. 

        Connection with the community has also become extremely streamlined. There are specific threads for each interest, preference, doubt and question. Fragmentation of our experiences is  such that often the entirety of our beings is limited to comments carefully drafted under posts or meticulously planned posts themselves. We don’t step out of the line. There are thriving communities around kink, BDSM and sexuality which are well-kept and helpful for a lot of people in navigating intimacy. Our desires, feelings are all privy to the internet. In the 1994 film, Videodrome (dir David Cronenberg), Max Renn, the head of CIVIC-TV, a Toronto-based UHF station focused on provocative programming, is introduced to a program called Videodrome by Harlan, the station’s satellite technician. The show, said to originate from Malaysia, features graphic scenes of torture and murder without any storyline. Seeing potential in its shock value, Max decides to air it on CIVIC-TV without proper licensing. Meanwhile, Nicki Brand, a radio host with a penchant for sadomasochism  becomes romantically involved with Max, is captivated by an episode of Videodrome. Upon discovering that the show is actually produced in Pittsburgh, she decides to audition for it but mysteriously vanishes afterward. Seeking answers, Max approaches Masha, a producer of softcore pornography, for assistance. Through her, he uncovers the chilling truth: the violent footage is authentic and serves as the outward representation of a larger political agenda. The film’s predictive value  is flawless – the addiction   to violence, torture and pain is more present in our intimate lives than ever documented before. Videodrome gave its viewers a glimpse of the future, in which sex would only become a tool for inflicting fantasies of hurt. 

      When it comes to intimacy, sex has lost its connective value as well. Queer sex historically has been seen as an act of freedom from hetero-centric desire, an act of genuine pleasure. But because of the hypersexualisation, hyper-porn : the intimate nature of sex has been erased, all our desires are on public display – ready for consumption. Real sex just doesn’t cut it, unless it’s extreme and intense. Cronenberg’s Crash explores the same themes of sex becoming mechanical and impersonal. We can have sex, make love, be intimate, but we don’t fuck.The story centers on a film producer who, after enduring a serious car accident, becomes entangled with a group of individuals who experience arousal from car crashes. As he delves deeper into their world, he also attempts to revive the intimacy in his strained relationship with his wife. In the final scene of the film, James crashes his car into his wife’s, ending with them having sex at the scene of the crash. Liberation was attained only through chaos and destruction. The final act of connection is surrendering it all to the intimacy of violence.

          In a 2009 anime, Kaiba, memories are digitized and stored as data on memory chips, allowing individuals’ consciousness to persist even after death. This technological advancement enables the transfer of minds into new bodies, but it has also normalized the theft and manipulation of memories. Society is starkly divided into two classes: above the clouds, the elite reside in a domain shielded from memory-erasing electrical storms. These wealthy individuals exploit the system, trading bodies and memories to extend their pleasure and lifespan. Below the clouds lies a chaotic, perilous world where resources are scarce, and obtaining a functional body is a constant struggle for survival. The representative capacity of Kaiba is absurdly poignant. Theft and manipulation of one’s thoughts and opinions and identities is now an ever present reality.  The commodification of identity is predictable.  Everybody wants to be like somebody. Our ideal selves are also shaped not by the expectations and desires of our community but through the replication of what already exists, in more abstract forms. The meaning of masculinity and femininity has evolved for example, however the very use of these concepts (often in a contrasting binary) defeats that evolution in the first place. In Kaiba, the transferability of memories reduces the essence of an individual to something tradeable, mirroring how identities are now commodified online. Social media platforms, for instance, capitalize on our curated personas, turning our lived experiences into consumable and replicable data. The memory chips in Kaiba serve as a poignant metaphor for the “datafication” of selfhood. Our digital footprints—photos, statuses, likes—function as fragments of our identities that are stored, manipulated, and even sold without our consent. This commodification erases individuality and flattens experiences into templates that can be bought and sold, much like how bodies and memories are traded among the wealthy in Kaiba. 

       Additionally, the constant evolution of culture and lifestyle has put queer identities in a consistent flux. In the previous century, each decade – 1910 to 1990, was entirely distinguishable from the other. That distinction does not stand today. Our perception of time is so warped that 2015 (which was 10 years ago) feels like only yesterday. Time feels warped because capitalism has shrunk experiences to the minutest intensity. So everything feels big even though nothing actually happens. The compression of time has undoubtedly led to the compression of experience itself. We are constantly nostalgic (Niemeyer & Siebert, 2023), feeling a sense of longing for ‘eras’ in our lives – events which happened a year or 6 months ago. Queer communities often romanticize the past of queer culture as well, whether it’s the ballroom scene of the 1980s or the indie queer aesthetics of the early 2010s. The fleeting nature of our being has created a lack of consistency. Continuity undoubtedly exists. We are unable to swallow the continuity of time and we cling to it dearly – harking to the past at every inconvenience – but consistency does not. Communities are not allowed to take their course of growth because their paths have already been finalised by digital tropes. A popular phenomenon of twink death is an example of the same. Twink death refers to an attractive man losing his boyish features – sharp jawline, high cheekbones, striking eyes – to age. The twink starts to look “regular”, signifying the death of his relevance. The impending need for digital relevance pushes us to physical and psychological extremes. Complex surgical procedures, bizarre lifestyles, and strict diet regimes are examples of the same. Tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson recently enlisted his 17-year-old son, Talmage, and his 70-year-old father, Richard, to participate in the world’s first multigenerational plasma exchange (Royle, 2023). The divide between the digital and real has long vanished and the “digital death” is a piercing reality many wish to escape from.

       Technology has undeniably transformed queer identity, expression, and community in ways both liberating and limiting. While it has created unprecedented access to information, representation, and spaces of connection, it has also commodified individuality, fabricated experiences, and reinforced performance-based models of identity. The technoscape has made queerness more visible yet paradoxically flattened its depth, turning unique expressions into marketable molds and intimate moments into curated spectacles.

      As the lines between digital and physical experiences continue to blur, the challenge for queer individuals and communities lies in resisting the mechanization of intimacy, reclaiming sincerity in expression, and fostering connections that prioritize authenticity over aesthetics. Queerness, in its essence, defies standardization, yet technology often compels us to conform to predefined templates. The question then becomes: how can we navigate these evolving landscapes without losing the fluidity, multiplicity, and richness that define queerness itself?