Goodbye Stranger
You are 12. You are 12 13 14 .. and on and on … Omegle Dot Com.
Years later, you will read Deleuze and Guattari's theory of the rhizome as a network that connects any point to any other, as a disorganizing, destabilizing answer to the more conventional, unifying form of the tree, and you will remember being 12 years old, hunched in your room, and also online with 30,000 - 70,000 other people, alone and together.
What's different about a rhizome vs. a tree? A rhizome has no roots, no origin and thus no destination, offers no coordinates with which to orient yourself or organize the world.
You don't know how to pronounce "Deleuze" yet. Because you're 12. You're just beginning to characterize the internet as not just a tool that people use but also a place where people live1. You're just beginning to characterize the churn of calm and concern in your lower stomach/upper pelvis that comes from talking to a stranger as being "turned on."2
You will not be affected negatively by anything online, you think.3 There's no chance. It's all theory until there's a hand on a leg. You are a child and it's penis after penis after penis. "Let me smash." What to make of this hmmmm. He doesn't mean it, so why's he saying it? Giggling is a response for when you don't know how to respond. Some men prefer direct responses over giggles, but not most.4 You're uneasy. To some men, your unease is not unwelcome.5
I wanted, and you wanted, and every other person on and offline, we wanted, more than anything, to be seen as we were, and yet to be seen seemed unbearable. We wanted to be witnessed and recognized and affirmed, to be known, truly and fully known, and to know others, and therefore to love, but we were ashamed, and we were too ashamed of our shame to even be able to admit it to ourselves as shame.
Josh Lee: " I don't think it's a coincidence a site like Omegle got popular around the time Facebook was getting really popular. Facebook was [about being] your real self online," and Omegle was about being a stranger to everybody, most of all yourself.
Zuck & his roommates built FB in their college dorms at 20. Leif K-Brooks was 18 living with his parents in Vermont. The name "Omegle" is a distorted portmanteau of "omega code alpha". Andrey Ternovskiy was 17 when he made Chatroulette (I never used this one; it required a webcam). Young (white) nerd tripping over himself with talent in the early 2000s - it's a story that's by now become a myth. But forget about the momentum and the money for one second and imagine the optimism and innocence of a boy, 18, who discovers undocumented error codes and names them "omega code alpha", who doesn't yet know what people will do to other people, to children, how many ways there are to hurt them.
Leif K-Brooks: "I originally started working on the site out of boredom and curiosity more than anything. It was just a fun coding project."
A fun coding project. You send/receive a message, and you receive/send one back. And that's it. A conversation is a linear-temporal phenomenon: it charms us (or not) one step at a time. Sometime afterwards, you take stock. What has this thing this person said - what has it done to me? What do I know now that I didn't know before?
What's beautiful about Omegle is that at the beginning, with regards to everyone else, everyone's mind is a perfect blank. No priors. The perfect form. Formlessness. A common opening question is ASL (age / sex / location). A common answer is a lie6.
July 20, 2022. Me lying, pretending to be Parisian. Stranger: "It’s a bit strange in my religion [Islam] that God judges people for eternity. I can't believe that Feynman is in hell. I am an animal compared to him."
April 3, 2019. Me lying, pretending to be from Mexico. Stranger: "Well if you want me to tell the truth, the problem started from Chavez and the US."
Leif K-Brooks intended Omegle to be "a sort of melting pot; a place where people could interact safely with those outside of their normal social groups."
And yet it’s impossible to separate this idea from the horrifying instances of child pornography which plagued the site from sunrise to sunset. In 2010, less than one year after launch, Casey Neistat described the website’s demographic as “71% male, 15% female, 14% pervert.” Stern messages from the UN and IWF did not result in any changes to the site. In 2022, there were 608,601 reports of child exploitation on exploitation on Omegle to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s CyberTipline. The Child Rescue Coalition reports that over 72 million IP addresses have shared or downloaded sexually explicit images and videos of children. In 2023, Omegle was forced to shut down by a lawsuit from a sexual abuse survivor. (The legal team had tried and failed several times to dismiss the case.)
In a lengthy statement, Leif K-Brooks said, “the recent attacks have felt anything but constructive. The only way to please these people is to stop offering the service … The battle for Omegle has been lost, but the war against the Internet rages on.” This seems not quite right. Chekhov said, "Art doesn't have to solve problems, it only has to formulate them correctly." It’s not the same with technology. Software is supposed to solve problems, not just pose them. Of course nobody is expecting a company to eradicate child porn but there should be at least a good faith effort.
In a post-Deleuze world, the challenge is not in the conception of a decentralized network; its rather that there are too many networks, each with their own logic, each without a center, each refusing to cohere into a bounded whole.
Being part of a city, a social network, feels like standing in a river, time and music and people moving past, and you want to hold on to everything, or anything, but you can’t, each connection slips through your fingers like water, happy or unhappy, all you can do is stand there, amazed.
All those strangers. Who even were they. Where are they now. I don’t believe in God necessarily but sometimes I wish I knew each of these people the way a God might. In every age, every season: sulky kid, ambitious young adult, lumpy depressed geriatric who’s treated by all the world like a broken piece of furniture. And then, through understanding each person, I would also understand their parents, their siblings, lovers past and president, the towns and cities they lived and died in, each country and its borders …
Like skipping stones and following the ripples outward and outwards into one beautiful body of work, of water.
There's an interesting connection to be made here about Foucault's technologies of self / power, but I'm really not in the mood to go back and reread Foucault.
I recognize this feeling also around fragrance. I'm very sensitive to smell, and almost all colognes (I'm looking of you, Dior Homme - and don't even get me started on DHI), regardless of their price point, make me nauseous. There’s something quite vulgar about smelling musk mixed with sweat on a stranger. And yet the associations with sex are so strong that it’s impossible not to be at least slightly pulled in. My uncle wears a perfume called Fear (I know…) and every time I hug him, I can’t help it, I go to the bathroom afterwards and kneel on the cold tile and gag. Aghhhhhhhhh. Need a partner who smells like wind
I think of Marguerite Duras at 70, writing L’Amante, about being 15 and falling, wonderfully, catastrophically, into love, into lust, into ley lines of power and its lack.
Can we say, for now, that a girl can blossom into womanhood, into sexuality, while also unable to imagine sex apart from sexualization?
If you dislike this paragraph well I dislike it too. It feels tropey, feels whiny, feels weak, feels antifeminist, feels like the opposite of the story any respectable woman wants to tell about her life. But here we return to Deleuze: “nothing is beautiful or loving or political aside from underground stems and aerial roots”.