THE WORLDWIDE ‘COCOON’: ‘ALT [C]LIT’

NARRATIVES AND POSTHUMAN (INTER)

CONNECTIVITY

LA ‘CRISÁLIDA’ MUNDIAL: LAS NARRATIVAS

DE LA ‘ALT [C]LIT’ Y LA (INTER)CONECTIVIDAD

POSTHUMANA

<https://doi.org/10.26754/ojs_misc/mj.202510975>

VANESA MENÉNDEZ CUESTA

Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University (Japan)

menendez@apu.ac.jp

<https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0602-3364>

Abstract

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This article explores notions of womanhood and youth through new paradigms

that stimulate the proliferation of novel posthuman identities and subjectivities.

The Internet becomes the juncture where these material and virtual realities exist.

Understanding communication as a continual flux of digital data that constantly

crosses the boundaries in and out of the World Wide Web, I set out to examine

how contemporary writing and literary forms, in particular the poetry of ‘Alt

[C]Lit’ authors such as Ana Carrete, Sarah Jean Alexander and Mira Gonzalez,

are redefined by mediated new technologies, such as social media, and how this

influence also converges with making visible new epistemologies about identity,

gender and human relations nowadays.

Keywords: interface, interconnectivity, gender studies, posthumanism, North

American poetry.

Resumen

Este artículo busca explorar nociones de feminidad y juventud a través de nuevos

paradigmas que estimulan la proliferación de nuevas identidades y subjetividades

post-humanas. Internet se convierte en la coyuntura en la que estas realidades

tanto materiales como virtuales existen. Entendiendo la comunicación como un

continuo flujo de datos digitales que constantemente cruza los límites dentro y

fuera de la red informática mundial, me gustaría proponer cómo la escritura y las

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formas literarias contemporáneas, en particular la poesía de las autoras ‘Alt [C]

Lit’ como Ana Carrete, Sarah Jean Alexander, y Mira Gonzalez es definida por la

influencia de nuevas tecnologías mediadoras, como las redes sociales, y cómo este

hecho confluye con la visibilización de nuevas epistemologías sobre identidad, el

género y las relaciones humanas hoy en día.

Palabras clave: interfaz, interconectividad, estudios de género, post-humanismo,

poesía norteamericana.

1. Introduction

In the American TV sitcom Broad City, the episode “The Worldwide Bloodstream”

shows protagonists Abbi and Ilana spending a whole day inside their apartment,

so absorbed by their computers that they do not realise how much time they have

spent doing this activity. The different sequences of this first scene parody the

amount of time people usually spend in front of either their computers or mobile

phone screens, procrastinating by endlessly browsing gossip websites, watching

viral videos, searching through mobile dating apps, and so forth. After a while,

both Abbi and Ilana return to reality after their phone alarms sound. They are

shocked to realise that they are still together in the same room: in other words,

they became so immersed in the Internet that they did not remember that so

much time had passed, sharing the same space inside the darkness of their living

room. After such a shocking moment of awareness, Ilana exclaims, “We were so

tapped into the worldwide bloodstream, we fell into the literal Matrix” (Glazer

and Jacobson 2015). This quote refers to the title of the episode, “The Worldwide

Bloodstream”: the creators of the series, by the using the word “bloodstream”,

instead of the more common expression “Web”, suggests an anatomical-biological

connection to the virtual, through which we navigate digitally and get mentally

trapped as a form of dissociation from our materially corporeal existence, as if the

World Wide Web sucks our lives dry like an immaterial vampire-like entity.

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Using concepts from cultural anthropology and cyberfeminist theory, such as

Remedios Zafra’s (dis)connected room (2012) and netianas (2005) and Paula

Sibilia’s post-organic man (2006), Gilles Lipovetsky’s global screen (2009) and

the social problematics of hikikomori’s isolation, this study aims to expose how

online ‘Alt Lit’ poetry reflects current trends in society and culture, particularly

in the United States. Additionally, this research will explore how these social and

cultural influences impact the production of literature and other artistic artifacts

which cross the boundaries between the Cartesian dichotomies of the material

and the virtual, the human and the artificial, the mind and the body and the like.

Moreover, I would like to explore how these dichotomies blur their limits and

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question the very notion of difference and binary systems. To do so, I will use

an interdisciplinary and comparative approach in which the visual works of artists

Tetsuya Ishida, Polly Nor and Laura Callaghan will be drawn into conversation

with the poems from Alt Lit authors such as Sarah Jean Alexander, Ana Carrete

and Mira Gonzalez. I have included these visual works as part of the online cultural

background that inspires the poetic work of ‘Alt [C]Lit’ authors.

The works of Alt [C]Lit poets are an example of the paradoxical position of

Millennials as a liminal generation lingering between the material reality and a

virtual existence that both connects them to a world while isolating Millennials

from it. Alt [C]Lit is a concept first used by Australian writer Emmie Rae in a 2014

article about the rise and fall of Alt Lit, a community of self-promoting writers and

independent editors who wrote about Internet culture and literature during the

early 2010s. As a result of numerous sexual-abuse scandals and accounts of sexist

attitudes among prominent male figures of the community, female writers decided

to split and form an independent community of only female writers, poets and

editors, currently known as Alt [C]Lit. This article includes the poems of the most

representative Alt [C]Lit poets such as Ana Carrete¹(Baby Babe, 2012), Sarah Jean

Alexander²(Wildlives, 2015) and Mira Gonzalez³(I will never be beautiful enough

to make us beautiful together, 2013). Their work has been published in online and

printed zines, such as Shabby Doll House (2012), founded and edited by Lucy

K. Shaw⁴(WAVES, 2016) and Sarah Jean Alexander; and Illuminati Girl Gang

(2011-2014), which was curated by Gabby Bess⁵(Alone With Other People, 2013),

another poet associated with the Alt [C]Lit sphere. A close reading of their works

of poetry will be employed in this paper to analyse, illustrate and problematise the

paradox of isolated living in a hyper-connected society that relies heavily on both

the immaterial and the ephemeral of the virtual.

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2. A Room of Their Own: Interconnectivity and Isolation

in Internet Communities

The room —either a living room or a bedroom— has become the nexus between

that which is virtual and reality, connecting our private lives with the projection of

our existence into the digital. As Zafra claims, the concept of a “connected room

of one’s own” theorises the impact of the ‘screen’ as the ‘quintessential window’

through which “the room oscillates between the double dimension of space and

place” (2012: 480, emphasis in original), reminding us of Augé’s concept of “non-

places” (1996) as temporary intersectional spaces for anonymous human relations

in constant movement. But Zafra goes a step further by suggesting that the ‘room’

conditions the formation of alternative and constantly updating subjectivities

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outside the traditional social spectrum by creating “bonds of belonging” instead

of excluding through “social networking”. The room, according to Zafra, will be

“a concrete place because it contains memories”, where we can “build an identity”

through “virtual routes and margins” (2012: 480) that make us stay connected

and return to that particular online place.

An example of how enclosed domestic spaces, identity and online lives are radically

intertwined is the figure of the hikikomori. In Japan, hikikomori often deal with

their loneliness by opting out, like hermits, totally withdrawing into their rooms.

A group of sociologists have argued that the existence of such isolated and anti-

social people has been stimulated by the manifold ways in which online media

technologies enable individuals to lead a normal life alone, “making it possible

to live without going out” (Kato et al. 2017: 209), which makes isolation more

feasible and accessible to anyone. It seems that Kato finds a reason to explain this

phenomenon directly: the addiction produced by technology becomes a kind of

soothing coping mechanism to face the emptiness created by real or imaginary

social withdrawal. However, Japan is not the only nation that has developed this

social problem due to the omnipresence of media technologies in our daily routines

all over the world. According to a report from YouGov,⁶the sense of loneliness felt

by US Millennials is rated as higher than previous generations: “[…] they have

no acquaintances (25% of Millennials say this is the case), no friends (22%), no

close friends (27%), and no best friends (30%)” (Ballard 2019). The study also

states that there are a series of factors that contribute to this inability to bond

with other people: one of these factors is “shyness (53%)” whereas a 27 percent

of Millennials claim not to need friends at all or have “any hobbies or interests”

to share with a particular community of friends (Ballard 2019). This has recently

increased because of the social distancing imposed by most governments around

the globe since the COVID-19 pandemic.

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These new forms of social isolation were also depicted by Japanese artist Tetsuya

Ishida (born in 1973, Yaizu) in an image described as follows by the Gagosian art

gallery:

The work depicts a young man —perhaps a likeness of the artist— seated at a

computer. In place of a mouse, a disembodied finger attached to a black wire points

toward a square hole in his desk, from which a minuscule staircase leads downward

into darkness. The subject’s spine has sprouted branches, which burst through his

T-shirt, and he seems to be turning toward us as if to speak, with an expression that

is part dismay, part resignation. (Gagosian 2022)

This image can be associated with that of the hikikomori, the one that Broad City

also brilliantly depicts: the physical disintegration of the anatomical body, which

is virtually absorbed by a liminal space, specifically the online realm. Like Ishida’s

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painting of a robot-man, a hybrid humanoid made up of ears morphed into a

mobile phone while carrying on his shoulder a man dressed in white, working

impassively on his computer (Ishida 1996). Therefore, the priority of the world

going on behind our computer screens is what Lipovetsky described in The Global

Screen as “screencracy”, which is defined as “a flow of images that transforms the

hypermodern individual into Homo pantalicus […]” (2009: 270, my translation).⁷

As he argues, due to the technological shift the Internet has brought into our

lives, “there is a will of the subjects to take over the screen and the tools of

communication” (274, my translation).⁸Hence, the boundaries between material

and virtual communication are ‘decentralized’ (273) and have been appropriated

by users by becoming a by-product of individual expression.

Sibilia speaks about the post-organic man as the new humanistic ideal to transcend

this fleshly prison-(cell), as Socrates once referred to the body in Plato’s Phaedo,

and how this new paradigm has replaced the concept of the hypermodern man.

Finally, the soul —our subjectivity— has found a way to eliminate the burden of

its bodily existence at least momentarily by employing the virtual. This is what

Sibilia argues in the following extract: “As it happens in the ‘angelic’ tendencies

of the cyberculture and tele-informatics, with their proposals of the immortal

mind through artificial intelligence and the overcoming of the physical space

through the virtualisation of the bodies in the data network […]” (2006: 118,

my translation).⁹As she explains further, the quest for the hypermodern man is to

search for the “ethereal and eternal ‘essence’” by employing “artificial intelligence

and biotechnologies” that contribute to “cut off life by separating it from the

body” (118, my translation).¹⁰This is what Deleuze and Guattari defined as the

“body without organs”: “The BwO is what remains when you take everything

away. What you take away is precisely the fantasy, significance, and subjectification

as a whole” (2005: 151). This form of disembodying the mind —our subjectivity—

from its fleshly carcass, responds to this accelerating form of identity formation

online. The battle between the mind and body has intensified in recent years due

to the proliferation of various technologies, including biological procedures and

the expansion of the Web, through which this Cartesian dichotomy has been

exploded to unimaginable limits: plastic surgery; Photoshop programs; Snapchat,

Instagram and other app filters; and so on. As Sibilia puts it, the “technologies

of the virtual and immortality” are affecting our “subjectivities and bodies” since

the first ones have created a “new way of understanding and living the limits of

space and time” (2006: 68, my translation).¹¹Since time and space have been

redefined by these innovative technologies, we are still reconfiguring our notions

of being and living in the current times, which are determined by hectic, fast-

paced developments which are surpassing, somehow, our human abilities to cope

with reality.

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3. Alt [C]Lit Poetry: The Netiana Paradox and Lyrical

Virtuality

As described above, the traditional notions of positioning oneself in space and

time have been dramatically challenged by the emergence of virtual realities, which

proliferate the online sphere. This is what Sarah Jean Alexander (1988, Baltimore)

melancholically proposes in the poem “You by way of me” (2015). The title of

the poem suggests that a connection established between people is conditioned

by our positions regarding others. Locating the body in both time and space is

determined by the hypervisual, as stated in the following lines:

If you look at the moon at midnight

And I look at the moon at 7 PM,

We will be on the opposite sides of the Atlantic

Staring at the same spot in space. (2015: 32)

In the lines above, Alexander points out that the dematerialisation of bodies does

not imply a disconnect with our position in space and time, but an expansive

possibility for transgressing the very notions of subjectivity and engaging with

others. The time zones stated in “at midnight” and “at 7 PM”, which make two

people “look at the moon”, from “the opposite sides of the Atlantic” (32) are a

clear allusion to the “abstraction of existence” that Lipovestky points out in The

Global Screen, which originates from the “advanced process of derealization” at

the same time that “a decorporalized and desensualized universe” (2009: 276, my

translation)¹²is expanding as a result of how the body stops being a reference for

reality and material existence. As Alexander suggests in her poem, people prefer

interacting through a screen, a reference that is implied in the line “staring at

the same spot in space” (2015: 32). This line acknowledges that one’s presence

online has become the epitome of existing: we are stared at, therefore we exist;

as if Alexander twists into contemporary terms Descartes’ famous lines. In the

purest Cartesian sense, our subjectivities transcend our bodily existence in ground-

breaking ways. But, at the same time, the voice of the poem is aware of how this

can exponentially become a threat, as it follows:

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No one ever tells you to stare at the sun.

That would be dangerous. It would hurt too much

But if we are being honest with each other,

Isn’t this supposed to? (2015: 32)

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At this point in the poem, Alexander seems to be reflecting on one of the primary

effects that Alt Lit literature attempts to achieve through writing: showing how

the Internet allows the artificial performativity of what A.D. Jameson calls ‘New

Sincerity’, which consists of a simulated display of honesty on behalf of the author;

honesty being understood as “the illusion of transparency, of direct communication

[...] by means of artifice” (Jameson 2012). Considering that Alt Lit is a literary

movement that originated in a highly artificial medium —that of the Internet— its

authors long for the authenticity and naturality which is currently missing from

social media, and actively react against the literary legacy of postmodern irony and

cynicism.

In Alexander’s poem, the “sun” stands as the metaphor for illuminating as a means

of achieving truth, as Plato stated in his allegory of the cave: “The ascent for the

upward journey of the soul into the region of the intelligible; then you will own what

I surmise; since that is what you wish to be told. […] In the world of knowledge,

the last thing to be perceived and only with great difficulty is the essential Form

of Goodness” (Plato 1941: 231). As Alexander also states in her poem, honesty,

understood as one’s truth, can “be (so) dangerous” for even others that “it would

hurt too much” (2015: 32). This means that revealing our true, naked, honest

selves can potentially harm others while this form of revelation of oneself inflicts

pain on oneself. That is why our online persona is just an idealised projection of

the self: the truth is always too ugly to be freely and openly revealed to others,

because it may cause pain in an uncontrolled and unexpected way. According to

Han, these new media and forms of communication “dismantle” the “relation

with the different”, since the processes of “virtualization and digitalization” make

any real opposition “disappear eventually” (2017: 43, my translation).¹³With the

Internet, mediated phantasies are closer to becoming our immediate reality.

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In the chapbook Internet Girls (2014) by Ana Carrete (1988, San Diego), which

was also published in the Alt [C]Lit magazine illuminati girl gang (vol. 4 2014),

one can find the prototype of what Zafra called Net(i)Ana(s). This is a generation

of “posthuman and immaterial” women, an “alternative theoretical figuration of

the Internet subject” that transgresses “the frontiers of gender, class and race” and

“creates new questions on ways of being and relate to the online universe” (Zafra

2005: 23, my translation).¹⁴What Zafra tries to explain is that the virtual world has

opened the door, at least theoretically, for exploring subjectivity and finding ways

of subverting realities through the new languages available on the Net. These new

forms of construction of the immaterial are directly connected to the production

of the “immaterial”, “desire”, “meaning” and “affection and emotivity” according

to Zafra (2005: 148). Similarly, at least in the first lines of this long poem in the

form of a chapbook, these “internet girls” Carrete speaks about are similar to

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the ones Zafra calls netianas, since both terms allude to the creation of affective

networks through the virtual medium:

and hello hi internet

girls

come to mama

haha just thought

about deleting that

and typing ‘cum 2

mama’ instead but

whoa that’s dumb

just kidding hey sup

what is shaking

internet girls […] (Carrete 2014: 1)

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What makes Carrete’s poem so relevant for this analysis is that she acknowledges

that girls conform to a relevant group of participants in the online sphere. Also,

it is interesting to notice that the language employed is like that used in Internet

chat rooms or apps, which is evident in the use of informal terms: “hi”, “mama”,

“cum”, “sup”; and exclamation words like “haha”, which expresses laughter;

“whoa”, which shows surprise; and “hey”, which is used to draw someone’s

attention. This kind of language is typical of conversations, which have now been

translated into digitised textual formats, through instant messaging conversations,

which attempt to reproduce discourse phonetically by these exclamations and try

to imitate spoken expressions. This creates a sense of spontaneity and improvisation

that is intensified using the apparent lack of content in sentences and the irrelevant

triviality depicted through them, mimicking a daily-life conversation. This artificial

display is directly connected to Jameson’s claim on Alt Lit New Sincerity, which

depicts the poet as a real person in an artificial context such as the online one. At

the same time, the lines “hey sup/ what is shaking internet girls” (2014: 1) show

a need to connect with others, a need to reach out to someone like her in the

immense vastness of the World Wide Web: a group of girls bonding that reminds

one of the importance of human relations, even when these are transformed by the

mediation of the Internet in our daily lives, as well as in our intimate interactions.

It can be said that the “internet girls” that Carrete speaks about in her poem

have an identity of their own, which can be associated with or even included in

one of Zafra’s netianas. This is because “the visual-digital” has become a “new

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power location, connected to the body as an inscription field of socio-symbolic

codes which converges with the machine” (Zafra 2005: 23, my translation).¹⁵

Therefore, these digital media make gender a more complex construction which

is mainly developed in an online context (2005: 22-23). According to Jaquet-

Chiffelle and his group of researchers, contemporary identities are a complex topic

to deal with since the proliferation of new subjectivities online has affected the

way one perceives a subject: “On the Internet, it can be hard to know if the entity

we are interacting with is of flesh and blood, or only digital. We are now facing a

complex reality both in the ‘real’ world and in the information society. We have

to deal with subjects acting behind masks” (2009: 78). For this very reason, their

research on the polymorphous nature of contemporary identities is categorised into

two main ones: “physical” and “virtual (or abstract)” entities (80). Also, Jaquet-

Chiffelle’s study points out the conceptualisation of the “mask” as role-playing

through which “virtual persons” (82) perform and even develop an alternative

identity parallel to their material presence.

How language is displayed by users on the Internet is also an important point

to consider when one reads Carrete’s works. In another of her self-published

chapbooks, Why Fi (2014), there is the poem “404 NOT FOUND”, which is full of

Internet imagery, and perfectly poeticises the hybrid condition of the postmodern

individual, a sort of prophecy turned into reality: the dystopian fantasy that Haraway

wrote about in A Cyborg Manifesto, originally published in 1984. In Haraway’s

text, the cyborg identity is presented as a “creature in a postgender world” (2016:

8) that transgresses the thin boundary between human and animal and gracefully

sneaks out of the “distinction between animal-human (organism) and machine”

(11). Ethereal, invisible, cryptographic, the cyborg identity becomes an alternative

future to the collapsing totalitarian-identity system we remain immersed in now. As

Haraway argues, the “informatics of domination” is implicit in the transition from

“an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous, information system — from

all work to all play, a deadly game” (28). This cyber-hybridisation of the organic

with robotics is reminiscent of the paintings mentioned in the previous section

by Ishida, whose work is full of examples of the mechanisation of human beings

for the benefit of capitalistic exploitation and repression: workers are represented

as isolated machines that repeat routines and working processes until exhaustion.

In the poem “404 NOT FOUND”, Carrete displays computing’s dominion over

Millennials’ existence as how computers function, as it is shown at the beginning:

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open a tab and type loading

turn airport off

page fails

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turn airport on

loading my love life on the internet

chemicals happening getting excited about the world

wide web that cocoons me

cosy warm wide web

long silky envelope (2014: 4)

The language employed mixes Internet terminology with lyricism to make the

following statement: the boundary between the virtual world and the real one is

becoming blurry. The pull of the online world is so strong that the average amount

of time a person spends in front of a computer with Internet access has been

increasing over the years. According to many reports, people use social media an

average of “more than six hours a day”, according to a report made by Hootsuite

and We Are Social (Jiwani 2019). In this sense, one can remark on the extreme

importance the Internet has on people’s lives. The Internet’s influence on our

way of understanding the world and how we interact with it are closely connected

at the same time. The title itself, “404 NOT FOUND”, refers to an HTTP

standard response code indicating that the client could not communicate with a

given server. Still, the server could not find what was requested: it usually appears

when a user attempts to follow a broken or dead link. This phenomenon is exactly

what happens in the poem, which describes in detail many people’s routines when

getting in front of their computers or mobile devices: “opening a tab”. A “tab” is

a computer interface used for navigating web pages, and where you “type” a web

address for “loading”. But the speaker playfully types “loading”, disabling the

airport connection to have access to a wireless signal; nonetheless, the “page fails”

(Carrete 2014: 4). Then, the poet describes the process of enabling the airport

connection again, which is switching off the Internet connection. In this sense, the

poem leads us toward a stream of consciousness in which the poetic voice reflects

on Internet addiction as if it were a toxic verbosity of intimacy. This linguistic

display of our intimacy is connected to how people feel comfortable making their

personal lives public through various online media platforms, such as Facebook or

Twitter.

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As Mira Gonzalez (1992, Los Angeles) co-authored Selected Tweets (2015) with

Tao Lin, one of the big names in the Alt Lit scene, early social media was an

unspoiled territory for experimenting with first-person narratives about one’s life

with the expectation, and even fear, of not being attractive enough to engage

the audience: “I’m already confused as to what I’m supposed to tweet about.

My life isn’t interesting” (Gonzalez 2015: 2). This is supposed to be the first

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tweet with which Gonzalez started her official Twitter account in February 2010.

Nevertheless, she uses this first tweet as the introduction to her collection Collected

Tweets. This example shows how the autobiographical and the use of social media

as a literary medium converge to reinforce the display of New Sincerity in the Alt

Lit movement.

This need for authenticity seems to be a nonsense motivation that fills the actual

need to share whatever belongs to the real world and our personal lives across

the World Wide Web, as it is stated in Carrete’s poem: “loading my love life

on the internet/ chemicals happening getting excited about the world” (2014:

4). Afterwards, the voice compares the Internet to a “cocoon”, which can be

interpreted as the comparison to a spider that weaves their webs to lure their

victims, and then captures them by wrapping them with silk, forming a cocoon:

“long silky envelope”. This predatory and captivating effect the Internet has on

the poet is compared to the effects that Stockholm syndrome has on its victims.

This effect is reflected in the line “this short envelope that protects me from spam”

(4). The protective “short envelope” embodies how the Internet makes her feel,

and this is also described as “cosy warm”. This image of the World Wide Web

as a cocoon that traps you like the spider web catches its prey reminds one of

“Stuck on You” (2015) by Polly Nor (1989, London), in which evil red tentacles

reach out from a computer screen to rock a floating body that holds a phone in

her hand, symbolising our emotional co-dependency with technology and that

which is virtual. This shows the attraction that the Internet world exerts on people.

“Spam” has some connotations apart from being the unsolicited emails people

receive every day, like certain viruses or bacteria that are sexually transmitted

through unprotected sexual practices. This can be deduced from the close position

between the words “spam” and “babies” (Carrete 2014: 4), suggesting that the

Internet somehow prevents people from having sex in the real world, mainly due

to the wide access to pornographic content for free that controls libidinal impulses:

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long or in my case short envelope

short envelope that protects me from spam

and babies are us newsletters i don’t have any

babies someone make me unsubscribe

these emails are making me want some

turn airport on and land on my wait

unbutton my tabs

use cursive script on my stomach

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turn airport on and off and on and off

and on again (Carrete 2014: 4)

The struggle between the real and the virtual is stated in “someone makes me

unsubscribe/ these emails are making me want some” (4), followed by enabling

the airport connection again and landing “on my wait”. These lines seem to refer to

people’s tendency to be constantly distracted by their mobile phones while waiting

for the bus or the train in the “non-places” that Augé mentions. Furthermore,

the process of hybridisation between physical and virtual identity turns out to be

interpreted as a metaphor for cyber-sex: “turn airport on and land on my wait/

unbutton my tabs/ use cursive script on my stomach” (Carrete 2014: 4). These

two lines represent this struggle of constantly living offline and online, compared

to the sexual desire of total union of two separate entities: the one between human

and the online persona.

Following Zafra’s ideas, the mediation of the screen as “an interface” that “liminally

join(s) our bodies to online relations” and becomes the “‘necessary’ appendixes of

our habitation in a connected world” (2015: 16). What seems more evident is that

Haraway’s vision of the hybridisation between the human and cyborg is made by

the mediation of computer and mobile devices as platforms through which we are

connected. This is what Zafra has described as a need for “participat[ing] in the

space that it generates with its own vital experience, committing it in a space that

symbolically identifies it, which it considers its own” (2015: 25). Furthermore,

Carrete also seems to explore this sickening longing for the virtual to live in her

poem “y2k” from Baby Babe (2012), in which the author expresses her concerns

about the dystopian possibility of the disappearance of technology from our lives

as a tragedy:

122

if computers stopped

working i would seriously

consider this

masochistic

ongoing desire

and replace

my eyes with marbles (2012: 49)

In this poem, two facts can be analysed: the first one is the possibility of a virtual

apocalypse, in which “computers” would undergo another Year 2000 Problem

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The Worldwide ‘Cocoon’: ‘Alt [C]Lit’ Narratives

or Millennium Bug, also known as “y2k”, which consisted of a computer bug

associated with the inability of most computer software programs to distinguish

between the year 1900 and the year 2000. Carrete employs this computer bug as

a metaphor for understanding the emotional dependency that Millennials have

on computers and the need to be constantly connected online: “if computers

stopped/ working i would seriously/ consider this/ masochistic/ ongoing

desire” (49). Carrete seems to establish a parallelism between a “masochistic

ongoing desire” (49) and Internet addiction, a fact that is evident in the power

dynamics established between Haraway’s ‘Informatic domination’ and the gradual

submission of people to it, since, as Braidotti stated, “technology” has become

“a material and symbolic apparatus”, “a semiotic and social agent among others”

(1996: 348) in contemporary societies.

The poem ends with two interesting lines that bring to mind Zafra’s concept of

ocularcentrism: “and/ replace my eyes with marbles” (Carrete 2012: 49). Zafra

defines ocularcentrism as the way of perceiving and knowing about the world

through the domination of the eyes: the power of the visual to validate and

interpret reality (2018: 45). As the “machines of seeing” allow the possibility of

creating a “new form of power over subjects and bodies” (49, my translation),¹⁶

this is actually what is displayed in our digital devices and diverse social media.

Zafra names this “online culture”, which is defined as “the cohabitation and

construction of a world and subjectivity through the screens in a context of visual

excess (image, information, data …)”. This results in a new form of “cognitive or

informative capitalism” (39, my translation)¹⁷that, according to Zafra, is what

measures our social and digital interactions throughout the World Wide Web, and

particularly evident, in social media networks.

123

In the poem, Carrete seems to notice the importance of the politics of seeing

digital images, of being connected through the eyes to the screen of our devices to

consume culture, which is also emphasised in the image included in this book that

immediately follows the poem: a blank eye, no pupil with no iris, just a teardrop

falling from the lacrimal duct. This conjures the image of Medusa turning her

victims into stone, just as the blank screen turns our eyes into “marbles”, unable

to see outside the digital. Another popular online illustrator, Laura Callaghan

¹⁸(1991, Belfast), has portrayed Millennial culture through her colorful and

detailed illustrations, like the one described above, in which a girl is surrounded

by her laptop, mobile phone and other technological devices. Like Polly Noir’s

and Callaghan’s illustrations, Carrete’s image and poem emphasise the impact of

technology on younger generations’ lives to the point of becoming embodied, as

it happens more radically in Ishida’s work, as part of the body and the subjectivity,

and conditioning how Millennials interact with their environment.

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Vanesa Menéndez Cuesta

At this very moment, one can imagine how most Millennial poets populate the

Internet as a horde of cyber-spiders, in a way reminiscent of Carrete’s poetic

image, who, 24 hours a day and all year long, non-stop, weave and spin their texts

throughout the Net, hunting readers through their sticky web(s) like predators. At

the advent of this digital revolution, Alt [C]Lit’s writing has actively contributed to

the posthuman strategies of interconnectivity that also influence new realities and

epistemologies that result from the proliferation of new subjectivities. Therefore,

one cannot still ignore the fact that the intricacies of the Big Web that constitute

our immediate socio-cultural legacy make it more than evident that the Internet,

and more concretely, online writing, is the legitimate heir(ess) and successor of

those (wo)men who spun, weaved, knotted and embroidered their stories, their

narratives, their experiences, their emotions into the loom of history, literature and

the arts, in the liminal joint between the material and the immaterial.

4. Conclusion: Futurities

Traditional notions of positioning oneself in space and time have been dramatically

challenged by the emergence of virtual realities populating the online sphere. With

the Internet, mediated fantasies are closer to becoming our immediate reality.

Since time and space have been redefined by diverse innovative technologies, we

are still reconfiguring our notions of being, living and positioning ourselves in the

world. These notions are determined by hectic, fast-paced developments and also

surpass, somehow, our human abilities to cope with reality.

124

As discussed earlier, Alt [C]Lit poets have exposed their concerns as a part of the

Millennial generation about the challenges of a society that relies on the virtual

in almost every sphere of life. By providing their voices to express themselves in

new ways: the simulation of the author’s authentic self and honesty through the

creation of an online persona, as it happens in Sarah Jean Alexander’s poems; or

by reproducing and adapting the language employed on social media platforms to

experiment with new forms creating narratives about the self, as happens with Mira

Gonzalez’s tweets. All this poetry, particularly the work by Ana Carrete, exposes the

yearning to belong to a community by employing the Internet and its possibilities

for socialisation, but also denouncing the dangers behind relying too much on

the virtual, as it makes us more dematerialised, displaced and disconnected than

genuinely connected emotionally and physically.

Therefore, the use of poetic metaphors concerning Internet imagery has been

analysed to describe how this use of the virtual, as a limit of the material and

the immaterial, is affecting our notions of identity, for which Zafra’s concept of

netianas will be employed to explore how the Internet subject problematises not

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only fixed categories of being, such as gender, class and race, but also re-configures

posthuman immateriality. Conceiving the screen as a liminal interface that connects

our corporeal materiality to the virtuality of human interactions, as Zafra claims,

how mediation works will be presented as a key element to understand the Alt Lit

poetry in the ‘connected room(s)’ that we all inhabit nowadays.

Notes

1. Born in 1986.

2. Born in 1987.

3. Born in 1992.

4. Born in 1987.

5. Born in 1992.

6. YouGov is an international research firm of data analysis on public opinion:

<https://es.yougo v .com/>

125

7. “[...] entre la pantalla tamaño sello y la megapantalla gigante circula sin cesar una flota de

imágenes que transforma al individuo hipermoderno en Homo pantalicus e instaura una pantallocracia

cuyo poder temen ya algunos”.

8. “[...] una voluntad de los sujetos de reapropiarse de las pantallas y los instrumentos de

comunicación”.

9. “Como ocurre en las tendencias ‘angélicas’ de la cibercultura y la teleinformática, con sus

propuestas de inmortalidad de la mente mediante la inteligencia artificial y de superación del espacio físico

a través de la virtualización de los cuerpos en las redes de datos […]”.

10. “[...] proyectos como los de la inteligencia artificial y las biotecnologías revelan sus

frágiles cimientos metafísicos, que cercenan la vida al separarla de una “esencia” etérea y eterna”.

11. “Las subjetividades y los cuerpos contemporáneos se ven afectados por las tecnologías de

la virtualidad y la inmortalidad, y por los nuevos modos que inauguran de entender y vivenciar los límites

espaciotemporales que estas tecnologías inauguran” (emphasis in original).

12. “[...] se denuncia el crecimiento de una existencia abstracta, informatizada, sin vínculo

humano tangible. Conforme el cuerpo deja de ser el asidero real de la vida, el horizonte que se perfila es

el de un universo fantasma, un universo descorporeizado y desensualizado”.

13. “También los nuevos medios y las nuevas técnicas de comunicación desmantelan cada

vez más la relación con lo distinto. [...] La virtualización y la digitalización hacen que lo real que opone

resistencia vaya desapareciendo cada vez más”.

14. “NETIANA: sujeto posthumano e inmaterial que n(h)ace en Internet. Figuración teorética

alternativa del sujeto en red. Ficción política que rebasa las fronteras de género, clase y raza y que sugiere

nuevas preguntas sobre las formas de ser y de relacionarnos en el universo on line”.

15. “En su deriva por el territorio Internet, esboza nuevas preguntas y desafíos feministas

que se acercan a lo visualdigital como a una nueva localización del poder, al cuerpo conectado como a

un campo de inscripción de códigos sociosimbólicos que converge cada vez más con la máquina [...]”.

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Vanesa Menéndez Cuesta

16. “[...] las máquinas de ver crean un nuevo mundo, mejor dicho, un nuevo poder sobre los

sujetos y cuerpos en el mundo”.

17. “Esteescenario,alquellamarécultura-red,vienedefinidoporlaconvivenciayconstrucción

de mundo y subjetividad a través de las pantallas en un contexto excedentario en lo visual (imagen,

información, datos ...). Contexto caracterizado en un marco donde conviven formas de capitalismo

cognitivo o informacional con otras formas de economía social que surgen desde la ciudadanía”.

18. Laura Callaghan’s website: <https://ww w .lauracallaghanillustration.com>.

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Received: 14/08/2024

Accepted: 29/05/2025

Accepted: 11/07/2025

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

miscelánea 72 (2025): pp. 111-127 ISSN: 1137-6368 e-ISSN: 2386-4834