Finishing up Legacy Russell’s manifesto I found myself making a lot of connections to experiences I have had, as well as bettering my understandings of concepts that were discussed in the reading. To begin with some groundwork on the piece, Russell is now comparing the glitch more so to human bodies, as well as furthering his ideas of the online and AFK comparisons that were discussed earlier. There is a constant tone of computer and internet style text and ideas, which I believe has to do with the consistent use of a glitch as a reference to these very important topics. For example, “glitched bodies pose a very real threat to social order: encrypted and unreadable within a strictly gendered worldview, they resist normative programming” (Russell, 64). While the text is referring to the form of an actual human body it is using terminology like ‘programming’ that makes me think about more of a digital version.
The body is referenced to a number of times, specifically the details of skin and going further into understanding the anti-body. One quote that stood out to me was from the discussion of glitch as an anti-body: “What purpose can a body that has no body serve?” (Russell, 70). My advanced seminar course at DU was called Books & Bodies, where we spent the quarter reading, discussing, and learning difference ways of identity and expression of the body through literature. I remember walking away from this class with a feeling of gaining so much value, simply just because of the abstract and unconventional ways of thinking that were introduced through the readings and conversations in the class. This manifesto reminded me of that feeling.
Back to the content, the reference that Russell made to fictional character Miquela Sousa was very interesting to me as I am constantly seeing “it girls,” like she is described as, across my social media platforms and it makes you wonder. How much of the bodies that I am seeing are real? To what extent are people on these internet platforms trying to be someone they are not, and to what extent are they trying to be someone that they are? The digital world is a place for people to express themselves however they want. “Skin is as much about what is kept in as what it keeps out” (Russell, 76). I found it powerful how the manifesto described the physical human skin. It is designed as a border, protecting us from the outside world. And yet, it can be broken, permeable and changed. Whether that is a damaging process, or an enlightening one. The digital allows us to access different skins, different genders. It is evidence that we can grow in and out of skins, and that gender is not set in stone.
To conclude I would like to touch on the overall tone of the manifesto, especially as it talks about glitch is virus. There is so much passion throughout the piece, and within that poked through an aggressive tone of the glitch. For example, “we cannot allow these territories of some-where, no-where, no-thing, and every-thing to be delineated by the mainstream... We, the glitch, will encrypt” (Russell, 66). The word ‘encrypt’ here sounds so powerful when referring to the human body, but at the same time is it so relevant to the changes being made in our society. To point out one more example, “Bye, binary! Buffer forever” (Russell, 87) represents the correlation of digital to reality, and its importance in this movement.