Who-or what-are you online? A profile, handle, podcast, avatar, or AI persona can be addressed, remembered, praised, criticised, and made socially present. But it is not quite identical to the person behind it.
This episode of Permanently Moved is an hour-long audio essay on digital identity, personal branding, social media, puppetry, platform culture, and AI. It argues that online identity is best understood not as performance or authenticity, but as animation: a figure brought to life through an operator, audience, and apparatus.
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INTERNET OPERATOR
Social Media as Theatre: How Avatars & AI Animate Identity Online
Internet Operator is a long-form audio essay about online identity: the relationship between the person at the desk and the handle, profile, avatar, podcast, or AI persona in the systems we inhabit online.
For decades, we have talked about digital identity through personal branding, performance, authenticity, and self-expression. But those ideas do not quite account for a figure that can be addressed, remembered, criticised, or loved at a distance, and which can continue to act in the world when its operator is not present.
Drawing on puppet theatre, masks, automata, icons and idols, this episode proposes another vocabulary. Identity online is animated: it gathers between a figure, an operator, an audience, and an apparatus. Platforms shape that relation by measuring attention and feeding it back into the operation. AI makes the question sharper still, because it produces speaking figures that can answer in real time without a human sharing the moment.
The essay moves from the origins of personal branding and “main character energy” through Japanese Bunraku and Indonesian wayang kulit theatre, platform metrics, VTubers, medieval automata, ChatGPT, and the question of how to remain answerable for the things we bring to life online.
Start Select Reset
For eight years, Permanently Moved was a weekly audio essay show. Now that the show is quarterly, Start Select Reset has become its the shows print companion. Issue #16 contains the full transcript of Internet Operator, alongside an introduction and afterword written exclusively for print-material that does not exist in the audio.
Buying a copy, or subscribing, is a way to support my creative practice. It helps fund independent work without ads, sponsors, paywalls, or my having to chase engagement metrics. In return, I send you something real: a physical artefact made outside of the algorithmic churn.
Buy SSRZ16: INTERNET OPERATOR
This zine contains the full essay transcript alongside an introduction and afterword written exclusively for print; material that doesn’t exist in the audio. 36 pages. A5. Properly printed on heavy stock with thick covers. Hand-stamped twice, with copy number and FOG logo.
This is the remaining stock from the print run for my paid subscribers. Once they are gone, they are gone.
£18 + Shipping
CAVEAT EMPTOR: International orders are sent with full customs declarations as printed booklets. Shipping is included in the price; any local taxes, duties or customs handling charges imposed by your country are not.
