Flesh of My Flesh

To be honest though I felt more comfortable when Allegory made them look like everyone else. ARMOR came with lots of new rules. No one is allowed to use MR to change your race, sex, or age except you. No one is allowed to use a model to change your accent or mannerisms except you. If you’re white, you can’t change your race. If you’re any other race, you can choose to be white. You can be a man or a woman, you can be young or old. You can pick a model to transform your accent or your voice or your gait or the way you gesture when you talk. You can’t set your weight because we still live in a world of bodies and physics.

You can enable digital adornments, let the sidewalk turn into a psychedelic parade of special effects. Flaming footprint trails, laser motion blurs, 8 bit voxel people, people made of clouds, people made of water, people made of slime. Historical costumes, Mandelbrot sets. There are stranger things still. the edgy things the kids do. But I don’t really follow fashion.

You can change your face. When you do, your mediated face shifts slowly, at a different pace for each friend over a series of exposures, in order to maintain the continuity of your identity among your friends. You are allowed to have a work face and a casual face, if you want. The ideal age for play and the ideal age for work may be different, likewise the ideal sex. Despite the fact that people can present as any age or race or sex at work, most wage gaps have persisted and this is evidence of the internalized oppression of racism and patriarchy. Most companies now use a special government-approved filter to make your co-workers appear to be the same race as you and whichever sex you don’t prefer. This has been called binary normative and oppressive to people with more complicated preferences but it also mitigates sexual harassment liability.

There’s an old saying that there are no girls online because women enjoy special privileges in meatspace that men afford to them because of their implicit value as sexual objects and that mediated existence deracinates female privilege which paradoxically causes them to perceive their radically egalitarianized social environment as being oppressively misogynistic. But the truth is there are only girls online now because the digital panopticon revealed that men treat beautiful women so much better than everyone else that using an attractive female avatar in all professional or fiduciary matters is now seen as a matter of middle class responsibility. Despite making up only .13% of the population, 52% of online avatars are 20 year old white girls.