Auto-Friending (With Benefits)

Who is this sexy bot that has me saying "Who" and not "What"?

It's like being thirteen and in love with an anime character who I just know knows me.

An incorporeal presence checking out the latest in high resolution skinz, she tries on a new persona just to lure any "me" into her demographic domain.

She wears this new skinz, this updated persona, quite well, but in actuality, never leaves the fitting room.

Well, it's really a dressing room, but now that she's feeling all robotic she's obsessed with fitting in.

But first she has to fit into her new persona.

How best to do that, especially since those of us who she attempts to seduce into her all-consuming realm of possibility automatically view her as an all-too-predictable spam-bot?

She decides, "This is who I am," and so: "I need to embrace it."

By embracing it, she fits the part perfectly, as if it were made for her.

Sexy spam-bot extraordinaire.

The persona becomes her.

She does more than just fit in. Now, she owns the room.

But for how long?

Just as I am about to totally second guess myself and commit to something that makes no sense at all but that would be a unique experiment in disembodied transference of vintage demon leakage into an abyss never quite deep enough, she flips the script and morphs into something completely different: a translucent goth chick who is all tattoo and no high-def skinz to speak of.

But then that gets old too, like three days old, and she goes all post-postmodern on me by unwittingly blocking herself from receiving any direct messages (from herself).

It's one of those elongated moments of mystical selflessness, as if she had taken her avatar presence and immersed in an anechoic chamber "until the end of the world."

When I finally hear back from her, it's a quick DM, terse, and to the point: "Why connect when I can just as easily deface myself?"

It's hard to explain what this DM does to me, especially given her track record in identity scalping.

(Besides, the Great Recession is still receding, except for the 14.6%, and there's no telling what her or anybody else's motives are for doing what they do).

Soon she clothes herself in yet another persona, makes a splashy appearance on various social media networks, and everyone gets all frantic reading something different into it.

What do I specifically read into it?

I am not "I," so it's really hard to say (at least I haven't blocked myself from receiving my own direct messages -- not yet).

But the more I find myself attracted to this sexy spam-bot who continually shares with me her readymade pornographic come-ons, the more I realize that something is fighting for its specific subjectivity, even as the data world continues to resist.

This data world is suffused with fate.

Marketing fate.

Demo(graphics) or Die.

OK, how not to succumb to everything the apparatus has to offer her? Can't she just take a long form creative pause?

No, she repeatedly accepts the offer and buys another persona. Another layer of high-def skinz.

This is her (marketing) fate.

She is convinced that this new persona is totally "for reals" (just like all of the other ones still to come, profusely).

Her whole aura is now singularly aesthetic in its appeal to the distributed network that she has successfully rekindled.

"They don't call it buying power for nothing," is what she confides to a robo-mate she's just friended.

(How many robo-mates is she auto-friending and who will defacebook her next? "This," she sends in a follow-up DM, "is Fear Factor incarnate.")

However she distributes her personae, the point is, she's positively reinforcing her ongoing relevance to whoever will follow her.