Pope Salmon the Lesser Mungojelly

the software companies/collectives supply some seeds and you install them on a computer and that’s all that’s there, various sterile dead-end identical programs that are literally exactly the same as everyone else’s in the whole world

there’s no weeds infiltrating from any software wilderness, a computer is just a space station growing only those identical things in perfect rows

you can change some things but the things you change don’t matter, fail to produce heirloom programs, because you don’t pass on to other people how the program is now that you’ve changed it, you just take them back to the source to get perfectly replicated identical originals

It’s desperate and wrong, this picture of “consent” where how you get “consent” is you’re plunging towards doing something you desperately want to do and then you ask whether or not you get to immediately do your idea of acting your own fantasies out on other people. “Is it OK if I just do what I would have done if I hadn’t even asked please say yes?” 

What’s the hurry anyway? Well, perhaps that rushed quality could be to avoid the natural alternative: descriptions of desires separate from their immediate fulfillment. Expressing desires and then just leaving them there open to the air, aching. This is how desires appear to us inside ourselves, as holes that just stay there open. Speaking and then not fulfilling desires brings that internal vulnerability out into the social world– other people knowing what you need, other people knowing where you’re fragile and undone, other people knowing what can condition your actions, other people seeing your emptiness.

Buried in https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/mar/07/crisis-touch-hugging-mental-health-strokes-cuddles which is otherwise mostly the usual bullshit is a rare bit of useful technical info:

Known as c tactile afferents, this last is the one that McGlone has studied for years. To find it, a needle is inserted into the skin to “fish”. “It’s like sitting on the banks of the river,” McGlone says. “One’s a pain fish. One’s an itch fish.” Hours can pass before anyone catches a gentle touch nerve, but this elusive fibre has helped to teach scientists why humans need touch.

By watching the nerve’s discharge behaviour while the skin is stroked, scientists have learned that the optimum speed of a human caress is 3cm to 5cm a second.

Getting people to think of asking at all or caring whether it’s an outright transgression before just doing something to someone is progress, I guess. There’s a lot further to go. 

A next step could be to switch in general from trying to craft experiences for other people to focusing on controlling your own experiences. This is less about which ways of acting and moving and more about which perspective you take on them. If you’re wanting to put your hand on someone’s back, rather than asking them if you can “give” them the experience of your hand causing a feeling on their back, like where you’re just making up how you’d like their back to feel and then with or without permission doing that to them, you could instead think more about asking them to facilitate your own experience by “giving” you a still back to put your hand on. 

Your ideas about what might be nice touches for other people are mostly fanciful and wrong. Your experience of which touches feel good or bad to you and your intuitions of which touches would help you are more direct and mostly accurate. Good consent comes from somewhere deeper than just asking a few times here and there if things are OK. You get better consent the more you connect to real meaningful information about what people need and what feels right.

Over the years (I’m 37) I’ve come to have some understanding of the habitual eye contact patterns of neurotypical people in my society (the US), but I haven’t been convinced to like them. I haven’t even been told really that NTs especially like these patterns and think they’re awesome, they don’t even sell them, they explain that since they’re completely habitual they have no idea what they even are. So I don’t think it’s an unreasonable idea at all that they might actually just be quite ill-considered ugly patterns, since no one’s even paying attention.

For instance it took me years and years to learn how to make eye contact with people while crossing paths with them on the sidewalk, like you’re walking one way and they’re coming towards you from the other way. Here’s the pattern as I understand it so far. There’s a certain distance, I guess like 10-15 feet, which is the only place it’s not taboo to make eye contact in that context. Further than that and you’re staring at them even though they’re outside your social context, closer than that and it would be already inside their space. So there’s this false narrative of like “oh, my, look, you seem to have just come into the periphery my social space, what’s this here, oh it’s you” that’s acted out at that point. I say false because actually it’s predictable you’re going to enter that space, you’ve been walking towards each other for a while, so everyone checks each other out before they get that close and prepares for how they’re going to “notice” the person they’ve already been walking towards for a while. Depending on various markings and symbols and taboos they’ll intuitively decide how much they want to engage with or recognize or acknowledge or praise you, and then the amount and style of eye contact they give at the one non-taboo moment depends on that judgment. 

So uh now I can get respectful acknowledging eye contact from lots of people as I walk down the street, if I want, by doing that dance. But.. it.. sucks??? You’re repeatedly judged. You have to be good enough in various ways just to deserve acknowledgement. And then it’s very cursory momentary acknowledgement, which it seems there’s some implicit idea that that’s supposed to be about not disrupting people’s busy vibes and days, but in the context of everyone being desperately lonely and insecure it’s really mostly about keeping up a screen against attention begging. It’s like “oh hello fellow busy modern human, you’re looking great very respectable, but I of course like you am very busy so I’ll just rush on now because I’m not hollow inside at all, c-ya!” It’s fake and depressing and doesn’t even try to be a good use of the time and human contact.

This eye gazing meme is the same confusion as most of the discussion about other affectionate touches/gestures, but in a particularly clarified form. The touch in question isn’t even a touch. Pupils aren’t even actually a rich source of information. So there’s nothing there, it’s all atmospherics. To the extent there’s any real communication it happens in facial gestures. But clearly actually mostly it’s just hallucinated imagined communication and most of the experience is produced by the content of the frame.

We could play lots of games by giving meaning to eye contact. One that’s popular is to assume that any eye contact beyond a moment indicates sexual interest. Also just one game. The game could be that if anyone makes eye contact with you even for an instant they want to hurt you. Then you keep your eyes to the ground. In some games you can make eye contact with someone to let them know they’re getting something wrong. So then eye contact makes you feel corrected and ashamed.

Here’s another eye contact game: Everyone goes around making sounds and gestures, and if someone makes eye contact with you they’re telling you it’s time for you to change what sound and gesture you’re making. It doesn’t mean that your sound and gesture were wrong, just that they think you should move on to another one now. So here eye contact means, hey, could you change to another sound and gesture now please.

Here’s a different framing for eye gazing: Tell the participants that they’re likely to find it boring. Tell them there’s not much information in someone’s pupil and they’ll just be staring at meaningless blankness. Tell them that if someone happens to twitch or laugh or smile it’s probably because this activity is awkward and unusual and so it means nothing. Tell them that since they’re strangers they’re unlikely to have any deep emotions about each other.

Don’t get me wrong I’ve done the eye gazing thing and I enjoyed it a lot. But if we understood that that enjoyment comes from the framing then we’d be empowered to make whatever we want out of it, to develop it. This passive story where there’s an inherent magical essence to it just isn’t true. It’s just vague enough to let people fill in within themselves some vaguely plausible story and then everyone goes ahead believing in this vague external magic. That denies the actual power we actually have of being able to create meaning for it by framing.

The question of choice vs choicelessness is a different matter than the question of consent vs coercion. Entering a space or period of choicelessness moves the question of consent to the entrance or beginning of the choicelessness, to whether you agree to all of the range of what might happen within the choicelessness.

a line of people on their hands and knees or curled up facing the ground, so that their backs form a continuous surface– other participants go along the line touching each back in turn with their hands (cloth, paintbrush, nails, drops of cold water, drops of hot wax, thorns)