telepresence

01 Jun, 2026

18+!!

Yesterday I read the Taffy Brodesser-Akner profile of A.I. actor Tilly Norwood for New York Times Magazine, and I plan to read it 50 more times. It’s really an iceberg of a profile about Tilly’s creator, Eline van der Velden, a former aspiring actor whose spirit Tilly embodies (if Tilly can really be said to be the embodiment of anyone, which is questionable).

It’s clear—although Akner, a veteran writer, is deft enough to never say so outright—that van der Velden, cut down over the course of a terribly short adulthood by multitudinous microaggressions and professional disappointments, is not only highly masked, but is in fact a disembodied ghost, using the avatar of Tilly as a vessel to channel her spirit. At certain points it’s unclear whether van der Velden sees Tilly Norwood as a fully separate entity with a ‘life of her own’. I mean, she isn’t, and she doesn’t, but it’s also hard to tell who I mean when I say “she.”

And I thought about how people are systematically turfed out of using their voices, or feeling any ownership over their bodies. I already think about Jem, Hannah Montana, 1996 virtual idol Kyoko Date (the inspiration for William Gibson’s novel Idoru, which I might reread now that people are marrying their A.I. boyfriends and girlfriends), and I often dwell on Surrogates, a 2009 science-fiction/action movie about how Rosamund Pike, locked away in another room of the house, won’t sleep with or even talk to her husband Bruce Willis without her synthetic, haptic body. It’s certified 37% Rotten.

But now I was reconsidering the kind of body dysmorphia that occurs over time the more one attempts to perfect their glossy, digitally-enhanced, tool-assisted Instagram persona. I wondered whether one’s crafted public persona, their “personal brand,” is really all that dissimilar from creating one’s own full-on Tilly Norwood. In the olden days, before A.I., we’d call this same sort of behavior—a pseudonym, a paid actor, a fabricated biography—a “literary hoax.”

I also thought about how we outsource our voices to our partners, especially when we ourselves feel undesirable, unlikable: how Whitney always referred to her spouse as the “face of the operation”; how, terrified of other people after GamerGate, I’d encouraged my own spouse to function as my “emissary” in the world; how, after working in an office for the first and last time, I’d decided that the interpersonal problems only arrived after people were finally able to see me, could lean over my shoulder and read my computer monitor, scaring me, and afterward I’d vowed that, if all went according to plan, no one would ever see my face again.

And in a lot of ways I must’ve been successful, because the members of the Chicago writing group I was in, in the very early 2010s, would joke that I was a ghost, a ghost who could send emails, since at that time almost no one had ever seen or met me in public, except Chris.

I’ve spent my entire cognizant life studying telepresence: that is, the hope of managing to divide myself, to always be in two places at once—perhaps hoping to divide my attention perfectly between where I am and where I would like to be.

“On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” I was 11 years old when I started tying up the phone line, forging a more private, perhaps more cosmopolitan digital life. It was in my still-early 20s that I began sitting on video all night, falling asleep with another man not-really-sleeping-next-to-me, neither of us willing to hang up or log off. He put me on to a new concept: ambient intimacy. Today we’d use that term interchangeably with another word (“parasocial”), but what the man really meant was that I was part of the environment, the atmosphere, an ambient setting, built into his open MacBook, a sort of bedside lamp: the ghost in the machine.

Of course we tried it out in person eventually, believing that removing the layers and layers of digital prophylactic could only be a great thing—and I’m almost certain that man had me professionally blacklisted soon after. I guess I hadn’t really considered our respective ages or positions until then. It’s a brutal and confusing lesson, one that I was bound to learn. Many people will retaliate, will overshare and confess and then blame you for their indiscretion, for their own messiness, pointing back at your messiness, your youthful indiscretion, as if you’d deliberately snared them. Your total banishment from their personal and professional kingdom is the only way forward. Avoid this one; she knows everything about my line of work, because I inexplicably told her everything, wholly unprompted and unsolicited.

My bio-mother had put it into my head, at a startlingly young age, that I was redoing my life, replaying it. “I thought, I just have to get through this, I just have to get through school and out into the real world again,” I explained to my best friend as we were crossing a parking lot with her daughter. I truly, truly believed I was trying to escape into my own adulthood unscathed.

That belief, along with actual early-childhood squalor, had resulted in being germaphobic. Thinking of myself as an adult who’d been humiliatingly re-trapped in childhood, I was disgusted by our peers, who were constantly picking boogers and eating them and peeing their pants and leaving unidentifiable smears everywhere—I was acutely aware that my fellow first-graders were sticky petri dishes—and so I did not want to be around them, because I didn’t want to catch anything. This was why, at the school library and the public library, I only withdrew books that were clearly untouched, unplagued by human hands, and all of this was pretty antisocial and it’s also never completely gone away, and I used to feel very ashamed about this interpersonal squeamishness.

My best friend was laughing. She said my instincts for self-preservation were most likely correct, and that they had probably prevented me from catching way worse.

“I was just thinking that,” I agreed, “like I would’ve had way more earaches or strep as a kid otherwise.” I don’t believe in past lives, exactly, but I do believe in some sort of foreknowledge, and maybe I would’ve gotten far sicker far more frequently otherwise.

It was my good friend and former coworker Scott who’d gotten me to log in to Second Life in my mid-20s, where the two of us, two snickering trolls, had enjoyed many adventures together. I used to grouse to Scott that, now that I’d worked as a community manager once, my resume was somehow worse than the day I’d first arrived, young and wide-eyed and idealistic. (“You know, you’re right about that,” he’d laugh, shaking his head.) I’d been taken off the writer career track, had been dropped onto the office wife career track—somehow demoted before I ever had a chance to start—and it seemed like there was nothing I could do to change it back.

Scott had already tried to get me into World of Warcraft, but I was too confounded by the supposed appeal of grind, unable to assume a single additional duty on top of my day-to-day responsibilities. I immediately understood Second Life, though, the inherent safety of it: because of its then-steep learning curve, it was harder to access than the ‘actual’ Internet and, therefore, seemingly much more like the Internet in 1993.

I’d always included my real-life deets in my Second Life profile, self-identifying as a ‘tech journalist’, perhaps so that other users would not dare try me. Doing this is considered highly atypical because, in Second Life, there’s a certain presumption of anonymity: no strings attached.

When I first started reviewing video games in 2005—my earliest paid gig—someone went into the website’s CMS and changed my display name, replacing it with my given name, since I was no longer a “user” and so my display name and my byline needed to match, so readers could come find me.

People still find me, still message me directly, and there’s an imbalance there that makes me deeply uncomfortable, because these pursuers tend to be pseudonymous, while I don’t get to be, because people think of me as a public figure, or maybe a chatbot with a fabricated backstory, rather than a human with an entire nervous system attached and, therefore, one who suffers occasional bouts of an unpleasant disposition.

I’ve been carrying on in DMs for a few days now with someone with a semi-random username, a person I do not know (presumably!! how would I know one way or the other!!!), and I’m currently experiencing an anxiety that is deepening and spiraling. (“Just stop engaging, then,” you think to yourself, exhausted with me. Well, okay, but they haven’t actually done anything wrong! It would be so unfair of me to disconnect.)

I finally snapped at the pseudonymous conversation partner this morning. “My horoscope today is ‘give yourself a new name’ and honestly I fucking might,” I replied to them. An alt account, a new last name, a new first name, a new phone number, a new everything: witness protection.

I continued: “Something that has always driven me insane is, I’ve never gotten to stop being a CM. I feel like everyone on the Internet uses an assumed identity except me, so there’s always an information asymmetry when I jump into DMs because the other person is hiding themselves and I’m not, which means I’m the one at greater risk because I have just the one identity. It makes me so uncomfortable.” A line break, a pause.

“I’m not saying I want your birthday and SSN,” I clarified now, because I’m not proposing Discord identity verification, “I’m just saying I’m stressed that I’m always a little more vulnerable in conversation than other people seem to be.” One of us is transparent, searchable, a consistent narrative through-line; the other person shifts identities, names, entire personas, as circumstances call for it. I mean, at a certain point, it’s sockpuppeting. In this way, one person can be mobbed by just one other person, like a nightmare episode of MTV’s Catfish. I think about it a lot.

I’m in this position where I have to take a certain ownership and responsibility for anything I communicate—any opinion, any thought, any feeling—always overexposed, always up for being screenshotted and documented. How am I to form any lasting, meaningful connections under these conditions?

Last year, for a chapter someone was planning to contribute to an academic book, I wrote reams on how I’d designed and constructed a virtual environment, should she wish to incorporate my design notes into her own written work. In a virtual setting, people’s senses are limited to sight and sound, I explained. There’s no proprioception, no tactility or haptic feedback, unreliable vestibular information, no scent or flavor. So being dropped into a virtual environment for the first time means feeling disembodied, disoriented, ghostly, having your autonomy stripped away: hurdles that, as a designer, you want the user to quickly overcome. Retention. And I circled this topic, of how to lightly hand-hold and orient a new user, without explicitly tutorializing or aggravating them: emboldening them, empowering them, giving them confidence in driving an avatar, a virtual self, with tank controls.

This collaborator and I had, during Covid, created a virtual facsimile of a real-world event, a simulation of a conference or festival. I was excited to work on this. Accessibility! Embodiment! Put me in, coach, I’ve been training for this my whole life. But during the virtual event site’s planning and implementation I’d deliberately concealed how much work I was doing—my fault, really, a very funny type of shame. All this research, exorbitant personal expenses, the documentation I’d drafted, the labor over UX and visual cues, and the object scripting, attempting to enforce a logical design consistency so as to reduce cognitive load for the visitor, and the sheer length of time I spent onboarding and interviewing other collaborators: it wasn’t documented, wasn’t witnessed. I was embarrassed by how effortful it’d all been. Me, a try-hard.

Then, as if I were still a compensated community manager, permanently an administrator forevermore, I’d functioned as the event’s de facto helpdesk. I’d made time for other contributors, telling them what was materially possible, interviewing them to find out how they wanted things to look and feel—an abstract doodle of a vision—and I’d supplied almost everything else, so that everything mysteriously happened on its own, like Christmas morning. As a result, the contributed chapter was… oversimplified, incomplete. Just an incomplete picture: my fault. It described how scrappy the project had been, how easy, with all due credit going to its single visionary, to bottomless pockets of sheer imagination.

And this is gendered labor. Or rather, when someone else does it, he’s an auteur, he’s Todd Oldham, it’s environmental storytelling, it’s interior design, it’s game design; when I do it, it’s invisible. It’s inevitable. It’s ‘homemaking’¹, it’s shit work. It’s only gendered labor when it’s mine.

My L.A. friend was asking me increasingly granular questions about Second Life sex—ultimately concluding, all on her own, that although people might feel real feelings in a virtual world, they still cannot have ‘real’ sex in it—when the two of us started talking about sex and intimacy as mediated by technology.

“Teledildonics,” I laughed. “One of my favorite subjects.” I took a deep breath. “It’s just… awful,” I said to her meaningfully. I wrinkled my nose, not sure how much I wanted to say about this.

Oh, well. It’d been during Covid. My spouse was still out and about, still doing groceries during lockdown, still expecting to travel. I’d sealed myself in a sort of vault downstairs, a sort of bunker with sliding glass doors, worrying, as I do, about my white blood cell count, avoiding everything and everyone like the plague.

So my spouse and I gave it a shot: two purple thingies. One of the thingies seemed much more fun than the other; for anatomical reasons beyond my control, I had the boring one.

“It just doesn’t work,” I told her. “It can’t hold a connection. It’s infuriating, actually.” Frustrated, you end up texting “I’m sorry, it’s not working, perhaps it cannot be done,” and you disconnect the device from your phone. Maybe the mechanical simulacrum of physical intimacy is still on the horizon, but not yet.

Now my friend and I speculated on the dystopian future ahead of us.

“I think it’s great,” I said. People swearing off other people in order to fuck their chatbots and fleshlights, I meant—even threatening to ‘replace’ women if they don’t straighten up and fall in line. “Great! Leave people alone!” I said to her, laughing. We should be giving inanimate lovedolls away for free. Give the people what they want!

It’s, like, a literal human uprising, right? What’s the use in being as robotic and dronelike and feminine and conciliatory as possible, when there are actual, physically pliable robots people can fuck—especially if that’s the thing they ever wanted in the first place? (And if there’s a robot uprising? Even better. This whole thing was a great plan. I’m all in.)

A couple weeks ago I phoned one of my best friends, who is in her 80s. I need her just as badly as I needed her when I was 30. She and her husband had tried to show me the ropes back then, had tried to launch me into independence and self-sufficiency. I’m in the process, now, of trying to acclimate to adulthood in the exact same ways as then.

“Well, it sounds like a journey you’ll have to take alone,” she told me seriously.

“Oh, obviously,” I said, laughing. “I wasn’t saying… I wasn’t asking for anything.” No, I’m just in grief, that’s all. Griefreciation. And I just missed her, that’s all.

“I’ve never lived alone,” she mused aloud now. She’d been thinking about it lately, in the sunset of her life, constantly worrying about her own spouse, his eventual absence, her own, the state and well-being of their adult children. I think, too, she was acknowledging certain blind spots, certain gaps in her experience, the ways in which she could not help a grown child, including me.

I went silent for a spell, lost in thought, as I realized my adoptive mom had never lived alone, either—that she’d moved directly from her mother’s house to her husband’s, had attempted to scream me into doing something she’d never actually done herself.

My friend’s husband, also in his 80s, is now housebound, she explained to me. But he’s been enjoying his third wind, this time as a freelance journalist—coin collecting, “enthusiast press”—and he spends his days online in coin-collecting groups.

“A Mind Forever Voyaging,” I said to her wistfully. Then I apologized to her. It’s the name of a text adventure game, I explained, one that I’ve never actually played. I don’t even know what it’s about, I said to her thoughtfully. It’s just one of those titles, I told her, one of those little phrases or fragments that periodically comes to me, the way we remember song lyrics.

The Wisdom of Uncertainty, I said, then. That’s a book I’ve never read, by Alan Watts. Alone With All That Could Happen. That’s another book I’ve never read, about the art and technique of fiction writing. Someday I’ll read these unopened books; for now I just enjoy their evocative little titles.

Last week I met with my dietitian, who lives in my old neighborhood, where I used to own a house. Her background is sports science, but she and I barely talk about food anymore. Anyway, I confessed to her about 2014. We were on Zoom.

After a long pause she managed, “I have never heard you talk about this before.” She frowned. “Which I guess is the point.”

“Oh, I have been so scared,” I told her, “no matter where we’ve lived. Scared of the neighbors learning my real last name, or if they ever look me up online…” I sighed, propping my head in my hands on my desk. I started to tremble, to cry.

Yesterday my best friend was lamenting that her young child is not fit to travel long distances, being, as she is, “a child of Covid.” Because they’d never gone anywhere those first few years, the child now struggles to tolerate unfamiliar settings.

“She’s just a homebody,” the child’s grandpa said reassuringly.

My best friend reiterated that her child gets so scared.

I pointed out that when I was a kid, my adoptive parent had repeatedly said to me, “I just wish you weren’t so scared all the time.” From a young age I’d been repeatedly unsettled, dislocated and relocated again, with no internal sense of home, no place of origin, utterly disoriented. And so I was scared, of everything, constantly, which my parents had treated like a personal moral failing, from the moment I’d first arrived with my duffel bag. (“It’s the real reason they adopted me,” I explained to my friend now, “so I could obtain a passport and travel outside the country with them.” I laughed. “Can’t leave the country with someone else’s kid!”)

But then, once he’d developed dementia, my adoptive dad had himself been scared all the time, scared of everything, and I remember how my heart hurt in my chest to watch him, while remembering his angry admonitions toward me, I just wish you weren’t so scared all the time, why are you so scared all the time. “And dementia is defined, in the medical literature,” I continued, “as the inability to estimate where you are in space and time, really a loss of the sense of home in oneself.” I felt a rising tide of bereavement: by this definition, I’ve always had dementia.

I rubbed my face and told my friend, then, that anyway, her kid will grow out of it.