This is a short and not too unusual a story, but one that I feel I should tell. You have probably seen that the Instagram link on this website goes to a de-activated account. Back in May, I found that my Instagram account, girlscallmurder, had been deactivated due to posts that did not adhere to its “community” (Instagram’s word) rules. I had no idea what that meant, since the stuff I post are photos of our dog, quotes from books, and obligatory publicity for my novel published three years ago. In fact, I hadn’t posted anything for a couple months, due to real life, fleshly-materiality stuff going on. Instagram didn’t send me an email regarding this deactivation; the notification was what greeted me when I opened Instagram as usual. There were no options to make inquiry as to what posts were offensive to them. Rather, only two choices: a link to verify my identity or another link to download “content” (its word—not mine) that I had given to them over the past few years. I thought for a few hours and decided that I would just download all the photos and captions I had provided Instagram and end my relationship with it. Like most toxic relationships, it seemed the time had come for a break-up: I was getting sick of going through the motions, suffering through its bombarding me with “suggestions” rather than the stuff of people I actually follow (I don’t want to look at any more cutesy sock-mending hacks or ads of any kind). Moreover, I didn’t like the idea of being forced to verify my identity (As Annette Bening’s Myra says in The Grifters: “I’m me.”) and more so on a social media site that had already verified me when I signed up. Now, Instagram wanted me to take a selfie holding up a six-digit number assigned to me, then send that picture to it for its files. But I just didn’t feel like being assigned a unique numerical identity by Meta (the corporation that owns Instagram and Facebook) and slotted into its digital slaughterhouse of surveillance capitalism.

I clicked on the link to download my “content.” Finally Instagram sent me an email with another link that would self-destruct in four days, that would allow me to save all my stuff to a zip file. But when I clicked on that link it sent me to...the same identity verification page with the same identification number and instructions for posting my selfie.

So that limbo-like digital death is where my social media presence started and ended. I determined that the loss of this kind of digital connectivity and information was a sacrifice worth making for the sake of my own ontological comfort—I’m a creature made of flesh and blood and bone, fracturing into fleeting thoughts, emotions, sensory perceptions received and emitted. I value this fractured sense of self, and social media identity verification is not about fracturing but fixing, for the purposes of a corporate capitalist drive pretending to be an ethos.

Really, I’m not trying to be a crotchety, nostalgia-huffing technophobic queen. Obviously, I have this website and email address. If you’ve read all this thusfar and you know me either personally or through my writing, and when you want to let me know something going on with you or want to know something of me, or hang out together in person, please, always feel free to send me an email. And those of you I know and admire personally I will do the same (Madonna, Courtney Love—as I lose access to your everyday life I keep you in my thoughts). I would love for you and I to stay in touch not just by scrolling through digital scrapbooks but with conversations via email or zoom, having a glass of wine or a couple of cigarettes together: making the relatively painless but imperative mutual effort for intimacy, which is bodily real and marvelously fleeting.