‘[We] are all chimeras, theorised and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism: in short, we are cyborgs. This cyborg is our ontology: it gives us our politics. This is an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction’

Donna Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’ (1985)

I start from a place of unknowing. A quiet and undefined place between two loud and firm constructions. Locating myself in the silent middle out of which it is almost impossible to speak – this is paradoxically the only place where I might build more stable grounding for an authentic and precise voice. To learn to speak from first falling silent. To begin by dying, and through suicide, make space for hope and livelihood. I am killing my previous avatar. She has become too bleak, too needy, too volatile, and too vulnerable. She was always unsustainble. I could kill her by simply losing interest.

An ego is a hungry thing. It feeds on attention and recognition, requiring some external persuasion of its importance, exhausting its environment to satisfy unstable and unrequitable needs. The black hole of the ego is a parasite, but it contains a powerful energy. Worlds are built upon this foolish hunger: markets, states, cultures, production and reproduction. Without ego-desire, motivation would be so much more difficult to manipulate. We need motivation to have civilization.

But I don’t know. What is my role in the idea of civilization, anyway? – I seem to consort closely with darkness. With anarchy. Is this a creative thing? (There are always self-righteous reasons. And also less self-righteous compulsions and postures.) A certain destructiveness pushes all the Rubix pieces around, and I’m told it is not entirely a bad thing. Or so they say in the stories of Shiva and the teachings of the Tao.

I am grounded in some kind of ideology like that. A paradoxical one. Eastern according to Westerners. I romanticize the monk, the ascetic, the Taoist fisherman and his simplicity. To reject power is to have freedom. To reject the quest for fame and fortune and love, and the basic thirst for immortality, or genetic reproduction, or home – that is to become friends with death, or at least, to become pen pals with her. And that is how I will think of my writing: some landless, liberated correspondence with my mortality.

I am done with ambition. I am exhausted by the routine yelling and scurrying. What a narrow cesspool of thought I have constrained myself to, when what I really want is freedom, knowledge, an expansion of experience, a mastery of craft, the ability to create more beauty, and the capacity to contribute in a more meaningful way…. All of this requires hitting “restart,” I think – at least for now.

There are so many things I do not know. Why was I ever talking at all? Delete.

It will all be deleted.

Rather than surrendering my self-worth to some upwardly striving social drive for permanence, I will try for anonymity instead. To leave no trace under my name, no legacy, no prestige, no status, no achievement, no being. To resign to my humility and ultimate namelessness. Anonymity is freedom and suicide. (At least, if earnest – if it is not just another outfit, radically chic – it could potentially be a powerful vehicle for creativity. But of course, there is the inauthenticity of fashion: the sexy hacker, the femme fatale, oh the tropes. I am not unmoved by those. But I would really like to be more timeless in my suicide than that…)

Motivation is beyond us. We must go with the muses in whatever form they come for us.

Speaking of muses: I could never summon the motivation to learn about computers, no matter how important I recognized this knowledge to be. But activism moves me. I am headed towards an activist conference this week, a cybersecurity training for human rights advocates from around the world. Suddenly, I am moved to learn. It could be no other thing.

I am moved by the romance of social change. It is not a noble motivation, though – it is just a strange quirk of my mind, like any other quirk we have to work around…

But I am excited by all this newness! I want to learn about all the exciting things: technical tools, the invisible wires that run our world, this underground with its culture, insiders and outsiders, the high stakes and the spy movies, the potential to be valuable in expertise. I am ready to move beyond the chatter class into the technical class, and acquire some prized skills. I am also only willing to make this move if I can keep one foot on the margins where my soul resides.

Because there is power in the margins, and it moves me: political dispossession is also belonging to a subculture of rapid meaning-creation, marginality is the privileged site of creative power, and the edge is the center of invention. I choose this life with a fierce consciousness of its benefits as well as its hurts and dangers. It is my essential soul that is bohemian, not by aesthetics alone but by some deep instability in my nature that I can not change. I must reside in these places because I am essentially a nomadic being. I am the trickster and I must make the road I walk on.

I have always been this.

I just want to be more authentic, ever more truthful – this way forward.