In late October 2020, towards the end of Victoria’s second lockdown, I logged into the discussion forum on essentialbaby.com.au. That day, a short post appeared in the forum from editor Letitia Rowlands informing members that the forum would close on 30 October. Essential Baby, along with the millions of posts, mostly by Australian women, on myriad topics, would be deleted just over a week later.

Inside the Time Cube it was, admittedly, pretty fucking nice. And our friends were there! Even the dead ones! All of our art and music and culture, and all of the thrilling and dangerous new forms of expression and rebellion were happening there now.

We need a diverse and flourishing media landscape, in which new content providers can make use of the incredible potential of the web and in which the historic role of journalism to speak truth to power is afforded protection and respect. Unfortunately, the proposed media code may take us in the opposite direction.

Being sexually propositioned on Tinder is akin to being asked for sex at a singles party. The same situation on LinkedIn reads like a colleague approaching you in the mail room and asking to fuck you on the copier. By turning LinkedIn into a tool for sex, men have invaded yet another online space, one where women were just going about their business.

It started quite innocently, as these social media collisions always do. A friend and I were discussing on Twitter Ed Whelan’s bizarre conspiracy theory in defence of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, remarking – as many people have – that it was reminiscent of Eric Garland’s infamous 120-tweet long ‘game theory’ thread of late 2016.

Goodreads is about comparison, for better or worse. How many books have you read compared to your friends, your co-workers, your best mate’s mum? What did you think of this book, or that one? The insidious idea of success being measurable through percentages of pages read and stars out of five can reduce reading to another milestone, another item on the to-do list, another way to perform how intelligent, successful, and admirable we are, or want to be.

On the days I work from home I have a habit of watching a YouTube video at lunchtime. A video made by my favourite friend simulator. He is, after all, a superlative comrade: funny, uncomplicated, accessible, chipper and constant. I’ve worked many jobs in any number of fields and I’ve never felt as positively towards a colleague as I do towards this man.

When Pound structured poetry into three forms in the 1930s (melapoeia, phanopoiea and logopoeia), it’s unlikely he could have anticipated the confessional, tag-and-shareable, anti-intellectual iteration of online poetry in the 21st century. #instapoetry, Pinterest poetry and Tumblr poetry, often created by the same individuals and shared across platforms, push a direct, targeted meaning which is arguably without poetic or intellectual interference.

Over the course of the ‘At Least a Million Mission’ series, we witness this willingness for debt in real time. The videos begin with the news that Unkle Adams has sold his house, and during the series we see him sell his car, his possessions, run up Home Depot store credit, flip TVs and drills, (unknowingly) sign scam contracts, and plenty more.

While it would be absurd to claim that women haven’t ever traditionally existed on cyber landscapes, their experiences are often filtered through a masculine lens, or deemed to serve a masculine function. In turn, a woman sharing a photograph of herself in a lavender bikini isn’t just a photo of a woman in a lavender bikini. Her intentions are redundant, her authorship stale and meaningless.

As time went on, and I remained out of a job, I turned on email alerts, began checking my profile daily, and then twice daily. Soon enough I was spending hours each day trawling the site. I had time – I was anxious and broke. In my desperation, LinkedIn seemed to hold the answers, if only I looked long and hard enough.

If you’ve made even a vaguely, politically left-of-centre remark in a public forum online in the last couple of years, chances are that you’ve been hit with the more or less official insult of the alt-right nerd Nazis, and been called a ‘cuck’.

Where they coexist, (and they needn’t) spoken and written language are tightly bound to the social and technological regimes that they animate. Technologies of writing – from hammer, chisel, and stone tablet, to ink and parchment or the modern keyboard – influence how specific systems of writing will emerge. One of the most interesting developments on the internet has been the emergence of the pound (#) symbol as a linguistic figure, for its use in hashtags. What exactly ‘#’ is, is not immediately apparent.

During the first US presidential debate in September, both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were asked to explain how the escalating threat of cyber warfare would be combatted by their prospective administrations. Clinton, whose candidacy was undermined by a hack on Democratic National Convention emails in July, went immediately on the offensive, accusing Russia of waging cyber-attacks on the US and voicing concern about the increased risk of state-sanctioned intimidation via malicious web leaks.

More surprising to me than the media’s creation of a salacious narrative designed to keep the meme alive was the level of hateful vitriol levelled at a clueless but fundamentally harmless young man whose alleged crime against humanity was … wearing his overalls backwards and being a ‘hipster’?

On the chat forums I frequented, the interactions were businesslike. People would ask me my age, my clothing size, my bra size, and details about my genitalia. I would lie, of course. After some time, they would be satisfied and suggest we meet up to have sex. At this point I would reject them. Apoplectic rage and any amount of slurs would follow and I would get my thrills watching them blow a fuse.