mind projection fellatio
in praise(?) of superpositional hyperorgies
The Sims Social was a Sims-themed Facebook game published in 2011 by Electronic Arts. I played it for about an hour and lost interest when I realized it was just a FarmVille clone, but one aspect of the game stuck with me—despite its title, The Sims Social did not feature real-time multiplayer. When you “visited” another player, the game dropped you into a local copy of their Sim house with their player character replaced by a random-walking computer-controlled avatar. Game journalist Tim Rogers explained the uncanny effect in his scathing review:
All the hanging out in The Sims Social is asynchronous. It’s not just asynchronous — it’s deceptive. I can go to a friend’s house in The Sims, and I can be Skyping with her in The Real World, and I can tell her that I’m in her house and that I’m using the microwave in the kitchen while she plays the keyboard in the living room. Then she says that’s impossible, because she’s in my Sim’s house taking a shower while I paint a still-life on the easel outside. It’s always like this. The Sims Social is a game about ghosts trying and failing to embrace other ghosts. When you sexual-intercourse your friend’s Sim […] you’re watching your Sim do her Sim in her Sim house while she watches her Sim do your Sim in your Sim house.
We’re accustomed to all kinds of pseudo-multiplayer trickery in modern games (network programming is hard!), but in 2011 it was an unsettling contrast to other virtual environments, like unexpectedly stumbling into a hall of mirrors.
I spent a lot of time on phpBB forums in the mid 2000s. Despite their technical limitations and frequent flame wars, they felt like miniature public squares transplanted into the digital realm—just a bunch of people hanging out, no different than the local comic book shop or munch. The space felt shared because everyone was observing the same environment, just like a physical room. Threads were displayed in simple chronological order, and when you posted a comment you were instantly part of the conversation. If you were unfamiliar with the local etiquette you would get flamed or scolded by an admin, but you were rarely ignored. Participants took up space, both socially and physically on everyone else’s screen.
There are still digital environments like this (Discord servers, for instance) but large social media platforms are entirely different animals—in order to obtain billions of active users while still maintaining a palatable experience, tech companies were forced to partition the social graph. Facebook initially accomplished this by piggybacking on existing IRL connections, and Tumblr and Twitter did it with tag-based search. Most platforms grew block/mute/unfollow buttons, making it possible to converse with a group while completely oblivious to some of the participants—a very un-physical, non-Euclidean kind of conversation. Eventually all of these platforms converged on algorithmic recommendation systems, allowing the user’s field of view to warp and reshape itself even without conscious involvement.
We are slowly coming to terms with the omnipersonalization of our online environments. “Filter bubble” has entered the lexicon, along with the more recent metonym “my algorithm.” We’ve even come up with a name for spaces like The Sim Social’s multiplayer facade: heavenbanning. But our folk understanding of these mechanisms is only beginning to develop. “Filter bubble” is often used as a synonym for “echo chamber,” a hermetically sealed cave where The Algorithm traps all of the lost souls with identical extremist opinions. Despite what popular Netflix documentaries may tell you, this is not what modern recommendation systems actually do. We notice these systems when they fuck up, but most of the time they use a light touch—hiding distateful content, suggesting posts very similar to ones you liked, and grouping users into porous clusters which overlap and intermingle.
Psychologically, recommendation algorithms don’t need to work very hard to produce content which feels perfectly tailored to our tastes, or to locate other accounts which tickle our social instincts—we excel at assuming everyone else shares our state of mind. This is why so much viral content, of both the #relatable and ragebait varieties, is vague, substanceless, and easy to (mis)interpret—they are Rorschach blots, inviting us to project our own desires and anxieties onto them, and we are happy to oblige.
Crucially, this mind projection fallacy also applies to our ideas about the online communities we inhabit. We bring onto social media our preconceptions about the kind of community where we belong—usually one where everyone else shares our core values. Recommendation systems hide anything which overtly contradicts these expectations, preserving our perception, or illusion, that we’ve found a like-minded scene. Unlike the local comic book store or phpBB forum, on social media we do not share communal knowledge of our environment—rather, the collective understanding is splintered into billions of individual ideas about the kinds of cliques we see ourselves in. Recommendation algorithms allow these projections of communities to move around freely in high-dimensional space, sometimes overlapping but rarely pushing against each other.
pictures of ponuts with compression artifacts
In the field of accessible design, “competing access needs” refers to a situation where the accommodations different groups of people need to participate in an activity are in conflict. For example, most conference rooms are well-lit so participants can read facial expressions, but this makes them less accessible to autistic people with hypersensitivity to bright light. Similarly, autistic people might prefer a structured meeting with formal communication, whereas non-autistic people might prefer informal discussion. It’s not always possible to satisfy both sets of needs within the same physical space or the same social group.
Kink, like autism, is a minefield of competing access needs. They are so ubiquitous in fetish-related discourse that we often don’t recognize them as such:
Here Kazumi is articulating an access need—she wants the social role of cuckold to connote emotional maturity so she can comfortably participate in the kink. Other practitioners, however, want to inhabit this role specifically because it’s understood to be degrading. Both interpretations of “cuck” can’t coexist in the same scene—there is a genuine conflict here about how the category should be defined. Of course, this is a pretty innocuous example. Weapons-grade kink-access-need discourse includes SSC vs RACK, gender inclusive vs gender exclusive spaces, and the tradeoff between allowing edge play vs avoiding mental health triggers.
In-person kink communities and online shared spaces like phpBB forums and Discord servers tend to grow until these debates introduce friction, at which point they either enforce a common set of access needs and/or explode into interpersonal drama. It’s not a coincidence that the kink/sex/porn-themed forums I frequented had the most intense internal conflicts—more intense than even Vim vs Emacs debates on tech forums. If you’ve ever seen a gooning Discord server with a TOS page worthy of an operating system EULA—this is what “success” looks like.
Competing access needs are an insurmountable barrier which prevent kink scenes from scaling up—NSFW communities larger than you can fit in a Discord server have only survived on digital platforms which partition users by preferences and access needs, either by forcing them to build the social graph themselves (as on Fetlife) or via recommendation algorithms (as on Twitter). As we learned on Tumblr, in a more shared environment where the block button and For You feed don’t exist, we don’t all magically get along.
Consider gooning. Today’s gooning diaspora is a hybrid strain of early-internet masc-gay bator subculture crossed with Tumblr-era humiliation kink communities, including porn addiction fetishism. On Twitter/X these combined clusters sometimes refer to themselves as “goon twitter” or “goontwt,” although the vibe in any given region varies significantly based on cultural influence and sexual preferences. For some people goontwt is about jerking off to egirls and vanilla porn; for others it’s a brotherly community of practice in self-love; for others it’s an artistic venue for experimental derivative works; for others it’s a queer space exploring the boundaries of sexuality and processing trauma.
All of these subcultures identify themselves as “goon twitter,” despite the obvious local differences between them. Everyone sees their own version of the community hyperobject, and everyone assumes their peers see it the same way. Somehow, this is enough to create the appearance of a unified community—but if you poke around a bit, you can discover the regions where the mind-projections are mismatched.
trying (and failing?) to embrace
Here’s the most controversial thing I ever posted:
Respondents were shocked to discover that so many people in their social circle, especially their mutuals, answered the question differently. Lively debate ensued. (Unfortunately, goontwt accounts have the average lifespan of fruit flies, so most of the original comments no longer exist, and I didn’t have the foresight to archive them.) Here’s a representative reply from a “no” voter:
can someone who picked "yes" pls explain the rationale here; roleplaying can be a part of one's gooning experience, sure... but how is the act of "gooning" itself intrinsically roleplay? what aspect of prolonged edging is "acted out/imagined" here?
And here’s a summary of the debate from a member of the “yes” faction:
I feel like it is roleplay but when you submerge yourself so much into the roleplay, it inherently because you come to accept it. The best version of getting lost in the sauce so to speak lmao
These comments are perfectly split across gooning’s cultural weld bead. The “no” voters are the descendants of the bator/penis worship tradition, sometimes spiritual and sometimes animalistic but always embodied, hyperfocused on the physical mechanics of edging. The “yes” voters are offspring of the Tumblr humiliation fetish memeplex, which made heavy use of abstraction and wish-fulfillment and practices like erotic (fan)fiction, text-based e-sex, and hypnosis. These two cultures have very different understandings of what it means for a fetish to be “real” or “fantasy” and the degree of commitment required for ones participation to be considered genuine.
It’s frankly miraculous that these two groups of kink practitioners can overlap so closely without being aware of their differences. The Twitter users who debated each other in the comments section were not random strangers—most followed each other’s accounts, and in NSFW social spaces, mutuals often share more intimate details of their personal lives than they do with their in-person friends. This is the raw power of the algorithmically-mediated mind projection fallacy on display. Our relationships on social media appear to us as mutually social, but they are sometimes better described as mutually parasocial, with both participants projecting their ideas about the relationship onto the other, all watched over by algorithms of loving grace.
Many insightful analysts of the Internet have confronted this Silent Hill-ification of online life and freaked the fuck out. Better writers than I have explored the limitations and anxieties of digital intimacy, and these days it’s almost banal to worry about how we’re transplanting sexual intimacy into lossy, proprietary platforms. In this sense, Tim Rogers’ summary of The Sims Social, “ghosts trying and failing to embrace,” also functions as a painfully apt metaphor for the parasocial nature of digitally-mediated sex—I’m in my room fucking my mental image of you, and you’re in your room fucking your mental image of me.
I’m sympathetic to these concerns, but remain very skeptical of critiques which frame Internet usage as a ‘replacement’ for other forms of socialization. (Admittedly, I have some personal biases here—I’ve met romantic partners on Omegle and Craigslist Personals, and have watched communities I care about transition back and forth between Online and Real Life.) Anti-screen-time arguments also tend to contain implicit, unsupported claims that online interactions, especially parasocially-tinted ones, are less impactful, less “real,” or have less moral weight. Adam Elkus’s prescient 2020 essay about chatbots highlights some of these assumptions:
There’s an argument that its unreal precisely because it overproduces the real – that its a much more exaggerated version of the real thing. Therefore our need for it is somehow illegitimate or compromised. It is our revealed preference, but in the same way getting high is a junkie’s “revealed preference.” […] There’s something else missing from the argument: a recognition that the “real thing” being substituted for is unevenly distributed both in basic availability and quality. ELIZA is not the same as a “real” conversational partner, but this is also like saying that Olive Garden is not the same thing as a French bistro with a five-star Zagat rating. The depressingly common error of tech analysis is the comparison of an imperfect technical substitute for an idealized human original. Hence the technopanic about automated simulacrum of intimacy is in part also a desublimation of generalized inequalities in intimacy and interpersonal bonds.
For my part, I’m content to marvel that these overlapping digital environments are able to exist at all. This is a genuinely new piece of social technology which enabled fetish scenes to exist at an impossible scale. What we do with these hypercommunities, and how we navigate the parasocial space, is up to us. ✨