Justin Taylor - The Gospel of Anarchy

They bit their lower lips and looked away from the camera. Soft-focus, standing half behind a gauzy white curtain through which a clump of pubic hair is basically an idea about itself. Or harsh light on razor rash. Or a sequence in which three short-haired, flat-chested Russians swim in a shallow pond, then towel each other off in tall weedy grass. Thick rugs on hardwood floors. Women relaxing and relaxed. Natural breasts, floppy and pale on a tanned body: she stands next to a palm tree, one hand on the trunk, she’s leaning — this is the relaxed part, a woman is taking it easy— the other hand on her hip, thumb inside the waist of her bikini bottom, like who knows what she might do next? But I know what she might do next. What else is there to do next?

A girl wearing reading glasses, a backward baseball cap, and nothing else. Her eyes are squinched shut, mouth wide open and stuffed full, nose half disappeared into some guy’s auburn bush, in what appears to be one or the other of their dorms — UMass Amherst, if the pennant on the wall is to be believed.

Rooms washed in evening, in morning light. In full ugly Texas sun. Asians in stilettos. Blacks in nurse uniforms.

Every image was a whole world, complete, unfolding. But the sites were always trying to tell me what I was seeing, frame my experience with narrative, override or manage it somehow. They — the sites — were heavy on text; lousy with it, in fact, and choked with ads. It was worse than cable. Hell, it was worse than talk radio. I hated all of it: the captions, backstories, scene-setting, conceits and premises, banners that flashed. And the cartoonish language, the gleeful gilding of the filth. The sites spoke only of miracles. They told me that what I saw was even hotter, dirtier, stranger, than I already thought it was. And they told me I hadn’t seen the half of it. They told me I was about to get my mind blown — better, faster, again — around the next digital bend. There was more, always more and better, just waiting. It was one big medicine show.

Some of the sites were in Spanish, or Russian, and that was better, because I didn’t know those languages. The text became less like an interruption then, more like background noise, patterned wallpaper. The text tried to reach you but couldn’t, and so you remained free.

Eventually I made my way to message boards, AOL chat rooms. These were of two kinds. Public rooms were established, maintained, and moderated by the company. “Automotive.” “Singles.” “Baltimore.” Private rooms were unlisted, and anyone could make them. They weren’t password protected, but in order to get to one, you had to know its name. All the rooms — public and private — capped at twenty-two users at a time. If a public room had no users, it just sat there, but a private room would disappear. Of course the very next time somebody typed that name in, the room would reinvent itself, and there that guy would be in it, all alone.

Think of a likely-sounding name—“nakedgirls,” let’s say, or “amateurs,” or simply “pics.” Then throw a number behind it—“jpeg14”—because dozens of these rooms ran at once, and the low numbers almost always had the virtual equivalent of lines around the block. Most people used the chat room to shout out what they had or what they wanted: “cheerleaders,” “double-team,” “teens.” Then the like-minded would work their trades out in private, over IM.

I didn’t do any of that. It was more noise, the opposite of what I required. What I did was fight my way into a room, any room was fine, and then I sat there in silence, waiting for the hackers.

The hackers had homemade programs, which they called proggies, and each proggie had some stupid scary-sounding name that paid homage to the miasma of gangsta rap and Mountain Dew from which it had been born. HaVok, AOHell, Fate X. The proggies enabled the hackers — or any kid who got hold of the software — to log on via fake and therefore untraceable screen names. They wielded godlike powers; for example, they could boot users out of chat rooms and usurp the freed-up space themselves. The hackers would go from room to room, recording all the names of all the users in each room. When they felt that they had enough names, they’d send out a mass email with a picture attached. The idea was that if everybody on the list replied with one picture, then everybody on the list would get however many free pictures. Of course not everybody responded, and some people only offered their “commons” to the share lists (sometimes the hackers tracked these people down and punished them for being skinflints), but there would be hundreds of names on each list. The Amway logic of the thing actually worked, and the result was cornucopia. It was the prosperity gospel. My apartment building had just installed broadband, complex-wide. I had never seen anything like this speed. It was a state of perpetual overload, and there was no reason — no way, in a sense — to ever stop. A single list might linger on for days.

With my name affixed to a list — or several — and the first fruits of the harvest starting to tick in, I would minimize (though never exit) the chat room window, maximize the mailbox window in its place, and begin.

A girl with a perfect, pale ass like an upside-down heart is standing in the doorway of a bedroom. Her own, it seems fair to assume. Her hair is tied back, appears wet. The picture is cockeyed, suggesting that the photographer was a little off balance, maybe snagged the shot while in motion, snuck it on the fly. We can see into the girl’s room, somewhat, around her shape and through her legs. There’s a loud pink bedspread, mussed. All kinds of stuff on the floor.

Every single one of these images was a betrayal. Privacies violated, trusts broken. That was the real frame narrative, the superstructure, and this knowledge made them so much more powerful. They stank of aura.

Except that wasn’t always the case, was it? A woman sitting in a rolling chair in a home office, a converted den, wearing a tank top only, tipping the chair back, legs spread wide, playing with herself with one hand and holding up a sign with the other: the name of some Usenet group, the date of the picture, the words #1 Fan. Swingers. Exhibitionists. Baby, you know how many people are gonna see this and get themselves off to it? No, baby, tell me, tell me all about it. Okay, baby. Now tell me again.

So there were two narratives, actually, of equal but inverse and irreconcilable power. It was either She never wanted this, or else it was She got exactly what she wanted. You had to decide for yourself. You had to make it up as you went along.

Topless girls in front of sinks, their own or that of some hotel room, blowing their hair out, brushing teeth, looking away from the camera or sidelong into it with an expression like Seriously, Anthony, would you knock it off?

In bed, fully nude, reclining, dark hair in a bun and a deep natural tan, legs crossed at the ankles, blanket scrunched down by her feet, weirdly demure, a single dollop of jism near her pierced navel like a pale moon orbiting a silver-ringed planet, one hand behind her head. In the other hand, a bulky gray cellular phone, which indicated that the image was from at least four or five years ago. And where was this girl now? Still with the guy who’d snapped the photo, or had their breakup been the trigger for his sharing?

I copied and saved my favorites so I could look at them again later. One folder, holding all I’d culled from the sites and from the lists. A window on my own desktop. No interference. No connection at all required. I could unplug the broadband, if I wanted, and just cycle through the thousand favorites I already had. But of course I didn’t do that. I minimized the whole AOL window, but inside it, tucked away, the mailbox was open and the chat was still logged on. I changed my desktop background to pure white. I hid all the other icons, and the toolbar, too. I opened the image browser. I pressed the little box that maximizes.