"Corn World" / Enforcing Our Own Surveillance

Country girls make do, until they don't

I remember getting infuriated by a man I knew’s refusal to call airports anything other than “aerodromes” because he believed “proper” language ended- I guess- somewhere in England at the turn of the century. I couldn’t believe the ego it would take to pick out a moment in the history of language and be able to write off everything that came after it.

I like the evolution of language. I like watching it shift and change with us, grow malleable in the hands of a middle school class and turn into something I don’t recognize anymore.

So I’ve been interested in the development of “algospeak.” People are desperately trying to avoid getting bonked- or banned- by an ever-changing, but consistently difficult-to-understand moderative algorithm, and in these attempts to evade scrutiny they’ve started to develop a language of their own.

Sewerslide, accountant, le-dollar-bean, grape, unalive. Corn!

honestceohilary, keenyakelly, evan.the.counsellor, sheilagamo, longislandtracy, seansvv

But even as a lover of language evolution, something about this new limb feels insidious.

It reminds me of a study done by Roman Emperor Frederick II in the 13th century- he wanted to see what communication would develop if infants were raised with as little liguistic influence as possible, believing that in the absence of guidance a “natural language” would emerge.

Now we’re experiencing some sick inverse of Frederick’s experiment, where our language is controlled so intensely that we’re creating an entirely new one, knit together out of the spaces in between the rules.

When Mark Zuckerberg went online with a tiny chain and a fresh perm to say “It's time to get back to our roots of free expression on Facebook and Instagram,” I laughed like it was a joke.

I knew this pledge- made with Donald Trump’s cock in one hand and his own in the other- wouldn’t apply to us. It’s not for the queers or the sex educators or the hot girls trying to make rent. Proven, when just days later the Erika Lust account was taken down for the near-dozenth time despite having an entire team of smart people in Barcelona singularly dedicated to ensuring it adhered to community guidelines.

But thank God that the First Amendment- the right to call trans kids mentally ill online- has been protected!

The thing is- I don’t even know if the song and dance we put on works. Sometimes I remember to self-censor, to bite my tongue and say “cornography” (humiliating), but sometimes I don’t. I have no clue if it has any effect on my standing within the all-seeing all-knowing Algorithm. My friends and peers don’t either- but we do it anyway, bleeping our podcasts and talking around what we actually want to say. These platforms don’t have to hire moderators to babysit us, we do it to ourselves; scared straight by rumours and de-platforming culls that come seemingly at random.

If my goal is to talk openly about pornography- to bring something out into public conversation that is traditionally hidden- at what point does this censorship actively erode that objective?

“Corn” is just another way to say porn shouldn’t be talked about- that it should be kept hidden and private in nooks and crannies filled with black-mould shame, our understanding of desire and sexuality left to rot and turn rancid.

I’m not interested in reinforcing puritanical, morality police philosophy in the ways I communicate. I believe words matter, I think they can change the way we think and interact with the world.

So personally, I’m spitting the soap out of my mouth and saying porn again. Whoever doesn’t like it can go fork themselves.