the ulcer
I am a child of the internet. I was raised by strangers whose faces and physical forms I have never seen. Only a string of words disembodied in a strange box to which I attached humanity and realness. For all I knew they could have been burly, adult predators thrice my age. Or the simple disturbing alternative that they were not human at all. An ironic consideration because that situation is much more likely today, in fact, it is certain, and this my adult self knows and yet volunteers its participation.
It was 2005, and I was 11 years old, crossing over the threshhold of something important with respect to my relationship with the internet. Prior to 2005, I was using the internet only to enhance or expand upon my life which was already existing in the real world of faces and physical forms. All of my schoolmates with whom I would play video games in person, I would chat with on AOL instant messenger. Or we would play MapleStory and Ragnarok Online together. Sometimes, I might interact with a stranger on these games but back then I was not looking to do that, so it didn't happen. I think I reveled in the safety of hanging out on the digital space with my friends, who were real, and therefore safe.
In the spring of that year, I believe it was March or April, I had gone to a family gathering the night before. The next morning, it was Sunday. I woke up to feel a very strange feeling. I remember feeling strange, with no way of describing how I felt. I was like a cloud. Or a mist. That was halfway there.
My bedroom was on the second story of our condo in Anaheim Hills. There were three bedrooms, which were upstairs, and then there was the first floor, which had the living room, kitchen, and dining room all connected into a sort of contiguous open air room. I wandered out of my room, delirious after waking up and stuck in this strange feeling. I remember wondering if I was having a stomach ache, and I tried to poop, hoping for diarrhea that would have indicated a need to purge, but nothing came out.
At the time, this condo that I grew up in, bought by my dad in 1996, had carpet on all of its surfaces. I think it was the way, in the 90s, to have carpet everywhere. I used to ask my parents if we were poor, because all of my friends' houses had wood floors, and we had carpet. My mom would be aghast at me asking this question. I think she was shocked and confused as to how I could have gotten to a place of believing that I was poor. To her, the successful inclusion and integration into a wealthy white suburb of Orange County where everyone had wood floors was itself an indication that we were not poor. To me, when I used the word "poor", it was in substitute of a difference between us and them that I could easily perceive. It was a difference that I had not yet found the words for.
I wandered downstairs, still feeling very strange. In front of me was the dining table in our dining room. The dining table was one of those tables that is essentially a giant, impractically heavy glass disc that sits centered on a similarly heavy pedestal made of wood, or stone, or something else that is of a solid material all the way through. The glass was at least one inch thick, so thick that its transparency yielded to a sickly green hue, and the pedestal was pitch black and had little crown molding details, like a roman pillar. It was simply so hideous and I remember always thinking so. In my family of three, me, my mother, and my father, we never once had dinner at this dining table for as long as I lived in that condo. Instead of eating at this dining table, we always ate dinner in a different room, the living room, where there was our TV. We sat down on the floor to eat dinner, and used a cheap plastic floor table that has kick-out table legs. This glass dining table, like the condo as a whole, was one of many instances of my parents' lifestyle choices made out of some kind of subconscious regression towards an assimilationist mean, with no conscious understanding of the aesthetic logic within. Even at that young age, I knew that it made no sense to have such a useless and ugly table that you didn't even eat at. Now, I understand. The explanation for this table has been one of the more salient and illuminating realizations of my adulthood, one that transcends appeals to culture and Koreanness, one that is simply a truth of who my parents were as two individuals coming together to raise a single child, is that my parents both were deeply and pathologically unstylish.
It was in front of this dining table that my strange feeling collapsed, instantaneously to such a degree that I felt nothing, and was instead just a wavefunction being observed for the first time. I started vomiting onto the carpet, in an orange-yellow, thick-but-not-chunky spew of bile. It wasn't quite projectile vomiting, but I was taken by such surprise that I took several steps backwards away from the dining table while I was puking, and so traced out a long dotted line of puke that was now permanently stained into the carpet.
If I try and remember how I felt after this time, I want to say that I felt a kind of relief that you feel after you vomit, but I question my own memory, because the objective facts of what followed, must contradict that. I can't have felt that much relief, because what had followed was that I missed the next two months of school. I didn't return back to the 6th grade at all, and instead I just graduated into the summer, and then into the 7th grade in the fall.
The reason I missed all of that school was because that feeling of strangeness never went away. It festered inside of my little body and I harbored it like a parasite. It was incubating, and sometimes I still think that the strange feeling is still there.
During those two months, I lost at least twenty pounds. I used to be a chubby kid. But ever since then, I have had the same frame I have always had. Somewhat slim.
I lost all of that weight becuase I simply didn't eat. I didn't eat anything except the occasional liquid food like Ensure that my mom would get me to drink.
However it wasn't that I just didn't eat because I wanted to eat and I would always throw up the food that I ate, it was more like, I didn't eat because I was actually terrified of the strange feeling that I would have if I ate. So it was actually a psychological ailment as much as a physiological one. It wasn't so much that I couldn't eat, but that I was refusing to eat.
It came to be that I actually had an ulcer. This was discovered via endoscopy which I had while I was finally hospitalized because I was having to receive nutrition via IV.
The confusing part about this experience was that nobody knew what was going on for so long. If the answer was that I had an ulcer, why did it take so long? We knew what ulcers were. Why didn't anyone ask me questions to deduce that it was an ulcer? Was it that I wasn't even put in front of the right doctors fast enough? But also, why didn't I alert people to my internal state? Why wasn't I crying out in distress?
These questions circled the peculiar combination of two people. There was me, the child, unable to detect the internal sensations from within as something worthy of being sensed and turned into meaningful experience. It was like a dissociation or deadening. And then beside me was my mother, who had no ability to discern, to attune, or to correctly observe. She was simply as perplexed as was I, because the concept of peering into me to see what was wrong could not have happened. Despite how much time we spent together, she did not see me. However, I don't place the full blame on her. Because wasn't there also some reasonable expectation that I should cry out in pain if I was in pain? But instead, I hold the strange feeling in, until it turns to legible vomit through no will of my own, but due to the intrinsic, almost sentient force of a feeling unfelt, finally taking matters into its own hands.
It was in this context that I began talking to strangers on the internet for the first time. The first one I can remember, though I don't remember his name. He was someone that I met through the nintendo.com forums. My username at the time was dasharigan. It was supposed to be "da" like "the", and then "sharingan" from Naruto, but I made a typo on accident and couldn't change it, so it was "dasharigan". And people kept nicknaming me "dash" which had nothing to do with the intended name.
Anyway, I would talk to this guy who I met on the forums, because there was an option to include your AIM. We met through a contest that he was running which was a "design-your-own" fan contest for Legend of Zelda fans. The contest was to design a boss that could fit in the Ocarina of Time/Majora's Mask universe. I designed a boss called Sandatana. She was like a sandy Gerudo boss with two swords. I want to say I even drew pictures of her, but I can't remember if that's true or not because the point of the contest was definitely just to design the gameplay elements of the boss and not the actual visual design. But it could have been possible because I was of the age where I was drawing a lot of anime and gaming characters.
I would chat with this guy on AIM, and I don't remember what we talked about, it must have been games, but looking back it was one of the first times I felt an actual attraction or affection for someone without knowing them or meeting them. Maybe it was the first time I COULD feel those things, due to the separation and atomization that the internet provided.
I mean, in my head he was a little older than me, like 14, but he literally could have been like 25. And I guess it didn't really matter, because we never asked each other our ages.
I never told anyone that I went on the nintendo.com forums. No one knew me IRL from there. And I had no interest in sharing that world with any of my IRL schoolmates. No one knew about my AIM strangers that I chatted with. And why should they? It was just a world for me and me alone.
In retrospect, I think the effect that may have had is that it gave me a little bit of a Truman Show experience where I didn't even know if they were real or not, but yet it didn't even matter, because to me, inside of me, I was having an experience that was real.
Today, I am feeling extremely motivated and resolute yet again to delete my Instagram by January 1, 2027.
I had a disturbing experience the other day where I was laying in my bed late at night, awake because I was high on Adderall, weed, and ketamine. I opened my phone to look at porn so I could jerk off. I was on one of those Reddit porn subreddits where there is basically an endless tik tok FYP scrolling feed of porn. My brain was in a perfectly introspective yet body-conscious place due to the cocktail of drugs I was on, and so I was watching this porn, and I was tripping out a little bit looking at it, high as hell, and having a sudden realization that it was an AI-generated porn. It was because the of the way that the person's hands in this porn were moving, morphing and shifting in a bizarre, alien way, but I also couldn't tell if it was just the pixelation of the video quality, or if it was simply because I was high and my visual perception was warped. I continued to jerk off anyway and once I was finished I just kind of sat there stunned in horror.
Lately, I've been noticing that I keep redownloading the IG app in order to "catch up" and it quickly devolves into me getting stuck in my chair and scrolling endlessly. My algorithm has a lot of the "guru/expert talking at the camera" style video with tidbits or wisdom or whatever. I was doing this the other day and I suddenly had the same realization that I did with the porn experience, where it dawned on me that every single video I had watched in the past hour was literally just a person reading off of a script that was generated by Claude AI. I don't know how I came to realize this and I don't have any actual proof that it is the case, but something in me just knows, because its a sum of all of the registration of eye-movement reading a script, the way that the cadence of the sentences and the captions and everything all sounds. Also, I have used Claude a lot in my own personal life, so I know what it sounds like.
Oh, finally, another thing that I realized that really made me fucking sad. I have been listening to the Assata Shakur autobiography on audiobook on Audible before I go to bed every night, and it's supposed to be read by an actual person, and advertised as such, but I basically had the same realization because I realized after one sentence that just sounded really off, that what they are doing is using an AI voice generator that emulates the voice of a specific person. So technically, yes it is the likeness and voice of that actual person, but the entire reading is AI-generated. Again, I know this intuitively because I have used that technology before for my own purposes, for example there was elevenlabs.io. Basically, what you do is you input a 60 second recording of a person actually speaking, and then it uses that 60 second sample as a baseline to then generate however much of an audio output you want, given any length of a written text sample. So yeah, it is undoubtedly how Audible is generating all of these audiobooks.
Okay, actually, I'm not sure about that one. Maybe it was just a fluke where the person reading the audiobook had faltered, and that's why it sounded off. Surely they wouldn't use AI-generation to record the audiobook for the fucking Assata Shakur autobiography? But it's fucking Amazon so that's exactly something they would do. Regardless, the fact that I even have to pose these questions at all is maddening.
I guess I am feeling introspective about all of this and my relationship to AI-generated content because I am wary and protective of those little parts of me that are susceptible to it. There is still that 11 year old me inside of me who is willing to talk to strangers on the internet because there's no one else to talk to. And the 14 year old who learned how to have sex from internet porn, alone in his room, hiding a secret about his body. And the 17 year old who expressed his true opinions on Reddit because there was no space for his voice in the real world. It's as if the AI-generated content is a laser-directed weapon used by the platforms to home in on all those versions of Ben within me, those for whom the world of flesh and bone is too scary to hold, but yet I do hold, I hold and hold and hold, and it all turns to vomit in the end.
But I'm not 11 years old any more, and I am willing to live in the world of vomit because I want to be as real as I can be in a world that continues to forsake what is real. The feelings I have inside of me that tell me when something is real and not real have always been sacred, and I await the moment when I can drive a stake through the heart of my Instagram account. I not only want to be as real as I can be, but I want to divest from and repel and deny all that isn't real.