I also saw the potential for profit here, intuiting early on that anything money touches opens a new vista of exploitation. Once my year of punishment was over, I signed up for my own Everquest account, where I befriended other players and then stole their loot. (Without getting too deep into it: there was no official way for players to trade items in-game, so you had to drop them on the ground, and with practice it was easy to ninja-gank a Willsapper or Circlet of Shadows to sell through online brokers.) By the time the game’s devs caught wise, I had made about $12K. I convinced my mom to open a bank account for me and told her I was selling Neopets, then went on to explain the microeconomics of Neopets until she bluescreened. She liked that I cared about money and stayed put in the basement all day, which meant I wasn’t selling drugs or gender. But with my new debit card I was still making deals, the most lucrative of which was flipping porn domains; a Scandinavian guy emailed me with an offer to purchase mommythroats.com and teenfuck.com for $15,000, a bargain. By graduation I had minted $35K from my modem, though I spent most of that on weed, anime VCDs, and a used ’96 Toyota Camry.

Friendless, cash flush, rashes, scabs, incredible grades with zero effort: that was high school for me. My college application essay was a hive of falsehoods about being an Olympic hopeful figure skater who, after an ACL tear, discovered a true passion in ukiyo-e woodblock art. I got in everywhere.

As a sop to my mom, I declared a “Symbolic Systems” major, basically a fancy cog-sci degree, which mostly taught me that all roads led to nil.

Back then I’d thought social justice drama was a college phenomenon, but here I learned everyone was doing it, politicizing in bad faith what were obviously just bad manners. If you left dishes in the sink you found yourself accused of spoiling the commons or outsourcing labor. If you asked someone to turn down the music at night, you were entertaining carceral logics. I certainly project-managed my share of callouts and their fallouts, and I have to admit that I played the game hard and well. I led the charge on censuring the textile artist for saying that bisexuals in cishet relationships faced less discrimination. I denounced the cishet Israeli sculptor for centering herself and queerbaiting after she made a Facebook post during Pride with a rainbow flag painted on her cheek. I practiced calling people “folx” and got mad when others didn’t. I also ran a tight defense, deflecting accusations of being an elite by pointing out that my Stanford tuition was funded largely by the inheritance from my immigrant father—who committed suicide, by the way. And I straight-up crucified Craig at a picnic for whining about getting zero pussy, lit him up so hard he spiraled and eventually went full blackpill, which just goes to my point that all identarian politics are homologous: even when they represent opposing values, all are engaged in a vigorous pledge to the same principle of belonging.

After a few months I was essentially in a polycule with Zamira and her traumas. Every conversation was like laparoscopic surgery, a delicate lifesaving procedure performed near-blind, and any attempt to set boundaries was taken as a wholesale rejection of her and our shared ideals. Why couldn’t I drive her to and from a flower shop in West Oakland for an anti-war poetry reading? Was it for the same reason I didn’t share and retweet her post about her new ($900-a-head) three-day community fermentation class for BIPOC? Or let her propagate her monstera cuttings on my vacant windowsill? Always with that syllogism that all bad-faith identitycels use: I am an X, and you don’t support me, therefore you don’t support X. Of course this cynically exploits the real facts of bigotry, that people generally are out to get X, so it’s hard to dispute in general terms, even though, wait a fucking minute, I’M X TOO!!!

Fuck me, I just wanted to exist without ordering the prix fixe, be more than an infinitesimal coordinate in a million-dimensional matrix of demographics—identity, and its convenient synergy with personal branding, the caricature of you it puts in other people’s heads. Suppose it’s true: this idea that your identity imbues you with membership, a kind of inborn sorority with inherited values and traits. Sounds nice. You’re less alone. You get a shorthand for your oppression that in certain quarters commands deference. It goes some way toward feeling less crazy to understand why it’s not your fault you’re treated like dogshit. But I hate having my life judged as the output of generic forces, that however I understand or react to them is secondary to the fact that I share them with others. Identity is diet history, single-serving sociology; at its worst, a patriotism of trauma, or a prosthesis of personality. Privilege discourse a well-meaning attempt to balance scales that has become tainted, like most things American, by the puritanical paradigm of original sin. Never mind that the loudest ones are always the ones trying to expunge their privilege or conceal their complicity—with reaction formation, Freud was right on the fucking money, I fear. This isn’t even mentioning the quirks and hobbies that have come to function as identities; not only the Marcusian stuff, not even anything as robust as astrology, but, like, fandoms, knitting, coffee. Pit bull owning. IBS! Come on.

I started with the alt account I’d been using for years, @MadonnaHaraway, and soon achieved the amount of lvl. 99 brain where you can look at or9hniffva13n\qd0j3nf and as;kk jfdnakdjasjdfwda and tell which one is misspelled. I developed a palate for content, the highest caliber being the shitpost—the kind whose only purpose is to make it so every few weeks until you die you’ll think “ear medication for my sick uncle” and go Heh. Saying nothing, revealing nothing. The shitpost is the opposite of self-expression, it is expression minus the self. Whereas sadposts and thirst traps, teleologically identical forms of validation-seeking, are driven by ego, as are opinions, those being (in my opinion) the dangling silk of the toreador. People who post takes, the ones who write articles or list college degrees in their bios or use their wedding photos as profile pics, are willing to endure universal hatred in exchange for the illusion that they matter, having subscribed to that corniest of ideals, the online agora. Inevitably they get what’s coming to them. The only thing worse than opinions is facts.

Now why am I rehashing years-old Twitter wank? Because, first and most importantly, lol. But also, I was behind the whole thing. I generated the profile pics, I made the Pornhub accounts, I wrote the fanfic, I hired the actor who streamed as Chumpa. I wrote many of the outrageous takes about the incidents, and I deleted many of them, and I screenshot and posted the deletions, since the easiest way to get people online to do your bidding for free is to make them think they’re forbidden to. And this was just a single op, lasting about four months; I usually had four or five going at once. Every post and account, all of it, me. Though the discourse it spawned, the recurrences of The Cancer, that was you.