#38 __ playgrounds of identity

The livestreams started the day quarantine began. Less than a week passed before the Zoom parties erupted, then just a few weeks later came the concerts in Minecraft and Second Life. Countless tendrils from the dance music community are spreading into every digital venue, ravenously searching for something that feels a little bit like home.

Twitch and YouTube give us a sliver of the audience experience, the synchronous celebration and commentary of shared focus. Chat rooms provide a place where we can choose to lurk and absorb the zeitgeist or dabble in low-commitment chit-chat with strangers. But livestreams remain singularly focused on the performer to the point of dehumanizing the audience; Twitch culture in particular is that of the childish hive-mind, an anonymous stream of primal gibberish reacting moment-to-moment. A party should be full of participants, not spectators.

Zoom gives us faces and bodies to look at, a welcome sight for isolated eyes. A full page of smiling squares can be genuinely healing, and browsing the hundreds of little windows into each other’s lives can be incredibly fascinating — how rarely we get a glimpse into each other’s homes! But video calls re-introduce self-consciousness and social anxiety through the camera lens, an unforgiving perspective that makes everyone look a little shitty through the grainy feed. Turn the camera off and now it feels as though we’re snooping from behind the curtains. Turn it back on and we find ourselves staring into a mirror as we constantly monitor our presentation. Feel out the invisible box projected from the pinhole into our rooms: am I in frame? What’s in the background? Does the light behind turn me into a faceless silhouette? What emotions am I showing; is it okay to look sad or even just neutral? The observation is perpetual; at moments it recalls the naked exposure of stepping onto a bright and empty dance floor.

On the positive side, it’s hard to take ourselves too seriously when we’re all dancing in our bedrooms. This whole thing is absurd and it’s silly to pretend otherwise. It even feels a bit like a space, a unique location we’ve all come to share together. But that space is always Zoom, and Zoom cannot escape its roots in the manila folder reality of office work. Even our voices lose tenderness and nuance as they squeeze through shoddy microphones into the homogenizing compression of conference room software. It’s a tool for sharing slideshows and monitoring facial expressions, not a platform for spontaneous connection, no matter how many wacky virtual backgrounds you throw at it. A party should feel distant from the everyday.

Why should we bring our “real” identities into the equation at all? At the rave, we could express creative and sexual alter-egos through our clothes, makeup, and movements. Parties are laboratories of social and personal experimentation, playgrounds for possible versions of ourselves explored through conversation with the environment, music, lights, and crowd. Similarly, the internet was not always a place where we were expected to use the name, voice, and face given to us by our parents. We can explore and express our identities through chosen usernames, avatars, and a bit of imaginative roleplay. This is one intriguing possibility that the video game as venue offers: if we can’t dance together, maybe we can play together.

When I think about this merging venn diagram of online culture and dance culture, I feel the return of a familiar discomfort. This is a world I grew up in and intentionally walked away from — for so many reasons. I was tired of feeling disembodied after years spent perched over a keyboard, like some brain in a jar. I was exhausted with increasingly toxic cultures around gaming and social media. I wanted to be human with other humans, and the last decade has been a story of authentic internet community dissolving under commodification. Yet, here we are again.

Virtual parties will never fill the club-shaped hole in our hearts — but there is joy to be found once we stop comparing. They’re not a diet version of something we already know, but a new experience to be taken on their own terms, one that will almost certain outlast quarantine. Imperfect as they are today, they’re still far more approachable and accessible — physically, financially, socially — than the club ever was for many people.

Understanding what these experiences can be will require the same creativity that promoters and dancers have brought to the rave. Much the way underground promoters in the real world were on a constant hunt for viable venues, the same eye must be brought to the internet. Where can we recapture the humanity and community we crave? What spaces will allow for the freedom of expression and ease of connection we need? If these spaces do not already exist, can they be built? What would that look like?

Thank you so much for reading.

If you’d like to explore or discuss this with others in the community, come join the raveNY Slack group. It continues to grow and some of the conversations there formed the inspiration for this piece.