As I write this paragraph, somewhere in Los Angeles my dreamy little slave is waiting for further instructions. I have something for him. An image I think he will like. I want something in return. It is an image as well. Some forms of exchange in our recent interactions include: emoji, clothes, songs, texts, images, spit. More might be: vulnerability, power, pleasure, pain. There is a foreground and a background in a transaction of digital photos across two iPhones, with equally material realities. On either side of our recurrent (…)s are our bodies, their surroundings, their productions (verbal, emotional, and otherwise), but also the faux palm tree scaffolding broadcasting his cell signal, my neighbor’s modem (how I steal wifi), the fiber optic cables that tunnel beneath the city, connecting our data (how romantic), the government satellites tasked with surveying it, the guarded server farms where it is inevitably stored.

-Tracy Jeanne Rosenthal

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