What do nomads have in common with graffiti artists, hackers and electronic music DJs? What does your clothes have to do with the balance of political power. If you answered, "The Apocalypse!" you'd be correct.
The Digital Nomad Manifesto is a poe...
This is an excerpt from The Digital Nomad Manifesto, now available on Amazon as an ebook. Print copies will be available this Fall! GET your copy or give it to your parents. It's the book for explaining why the apocalypse is right on time. http://amzn.com/B01EGIK024
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
People shouldn't be forced to categorize themselves as "gay,""straight," or "bi." People are just people. Maybe you're mostly attracted to men. Maybe you're mostly attracted to women. Maybe you're attracted to everyone. These are historical claims ― not future predictions. If we truly want to expand the scope of human freedom, we should encourage people to date who they want; not just provide more categorical boxes for them to slot themselves into... I don't see why it needs to be any more complicated than that.
― Aaron Swartz
The realm of virtual interaction can distance us from others, but it also has a potential to enhance our connections. In all intimacy, experience creates a feedback loop, that either affirms or denies a person's needs and their basic goodness. As sexuality expands, so does gender and so can our self-understanding. The technosexual experience is not simply one where flexibility of gender or choice in sexual gratification are paramount. Technosexuality is part of our developing sexual ecology.
Technosexual as a term is immediately reminiscent of metrosexual; to someone whose gender, usually a male identity, is seen as somehow on the fringes of fully masculine behavior. The new sophistication of both the metrosexual and technosexual are indicative of the shifts in identity that were enabled via metropolitan life where the constraints of villages and suburbs could traditionally be shaken by individuals who found those parameters suffocating.
A technosexual remains most strictly defined as a person who interacts sexually with or is aroused by technology. Expanded, the technosexual is not simply one who loves devices or receives an erotic charge at the sight of an object, but someone whose sexuality is influenced by inhabiting a techno-centric world, one of virtual realities and mobile engagement. The broader sexual experiences we are engaging in via chats, games, robotics, all give shape to a spectrum of technosexuality. This implies a rise of technosexual understanding, something well beyond an affinity for gadgets alone. Technosexuality admits to the impact of information technologies on sexuality in much the same way as metrosexuality exposed the impact of the urban landscape on personal behavior.
In the same way that metrosexual can be used to deride someone's masculinity or to reconcile it to their style, so is technosexual an opportunity for both contraction or acceptance of the evolving human condition. Just as a metrosexual identity is perceived as an in-betweeness, so is the technosexual experience representative of a space that escapes previous definitions. Technosexuality is a rich web, encompassing our changing relationship to our bodies not just through fetish or interaction with hardware, or as a stylistic set of adornments or modifications, but as an all-inclusive experience in a nascent techno-culture.
The technosexual experience extends into all types of intimate relationships, even in those portrayed as being more traditional, in keeping with old orthodoxies. For example, an app installed on the phones of a husband and wife allows the husband to message his wife with electronic pulses that run through her phone's Wi-Fi, and via Bluetooth activate a wearable stimulation device worn in her under garments. The use and integration of the technology does not necessarily improve or destroy the relationship, between the husband and wife, it simply adds another layer to their intimacies. By some standards the technology is usurping the husband, by others, it is expanding his presence. This traveling, ethereal and mobile technosexuality, illuminates our needs for personal autonomy in the techno-frontier, for defending our information privacy, well beyond abstract ideas of free speech, directly into our realm of intimacies. Our technosexuality is not something to do with a future time when we use our network connections to make love to robots, rather it is something to consider in the here and now.
Just as anyone who has stared longingly at an empty chat box might realize after the breakup of a long-distance relationship, the intersection of cyber and bodily reality built up over time can place technology at the center of memories of a love affair, at the center of our experience. The protection of sexuality on the techno-frontier demands limitations on surveillance and censorship, just as much as any other human right to self-expression. By protecting this ecology of self-expression for ourselves, we open up to a full array of ever-changing sexuality, and defend the right for humans to be truly autonomous in the world. The measures needed to control digital behavior and its expression in sexuality would require gross intrusions into our lives and can not be tolerated.
