Let’s now turn our attention to superheroes. First order of business: What exactly do they have to do with the Internet? A simple answer would be “They both are things geeks are into.” Being a geek myself, I can testify to the validity of this response. However, there is more subtlety to the connection than that. There exists a second possible answer, namely the fact that both share a theme of nicknames, of handles, of code names, of making up new identities and keeping the “real” ones secret. No one can perhaps explain it better than Professor X, the smartest of telepathic mutants:

“But these aren’t nicknames, Storm. You’ve just been rebaptized as a post-human being. It’s an idea Magneto and I devised once upon a time: a name which describes your own skills and personality as opposed to those of a long-dead ancestor.”¹

But notice the slight difference between the idea of secret identities (so prevalent with superheroes of the Golden and Silver Ages²), and what Professor X is talking about. And compare it to the summary of the arguments against doing away with handles in the Gaming Outpost forums. This is not about secrets. This has nothing to do with hiding anything. This is a look into the birth of the post-human and, whether we consciously acknowledge it or not, the Internet is the Star Trek Genesis Planet for bringing it about. Take this same idea from another angle:

Morro: Honestly, I find the fundamental conceit of post-human culture fascinating. We’re talking the wholesale adoption of classical mythology as a driving meme. I think post-humans embrace mythic thought as a coping mechanism. The problem is: they remail [sic] unaware of any hidden damage they can cause. Any myth can be broken down to a series of mythemes; relational structures that question human origin and purpose. A series of primal existential questions.³

The above quote serves to further elaborate the point made my Professor X—or, rather, Charles Xavier:⁴ Not only is there a need to rename to get away from “long-dead ancestors,” but there also exists a certain level of the “coping mechanism” Morro mentions. The superheroes, for whatever reasons, are not content with who they are. Changing their names is one way to deal with this. And that leads quite nicely into the central argument of this essay:

This all must tie together somehow. Superheroes, the Internet, names, and post-humans. It’s a lot of what could be described as “disparate topics” packed into a few short paragraphs. The point is this: For human beings, as linguistic creatures, identity is formed and driven by the linguistic tether, by that thing that links us, as physical objects, as animals, to the greater system of language as a whole. Lacan claimed that tether was the pronoun “I”. However, his analysis is slightly off. Ask any kid who’s filled out Madlibs—possibly the greatest instructional tool for grammar ever slipped past children’s defensives—what a pronoun is and he’ll answer, “Something that takes the place of a noun.” So, if the “I” is the center of consciousness, what noun is it taking the place of? The answer is the name. The name is who we are. It is what gives us a place in language. It is the personal signifier for which each of us is the signified. It is the method of our presence.

That is where the Internet comes in. With it, it brings superheroes as an effective analogy, as a spoonful of sugar. The Internet is the first place where communication can happen without any reminder of the physical. Talking is face-to-face. Telephones carry the voice. Even written letters have the ghost of the physical (as the market for autographs proves). But on the Internet, there is no connection between the speaker and the spoken. To fall to a cliché, you can be whoever you want to be. There is no body (nobody?) holding you to a specific identity. Like the code names of superheroes, you can give yourself a new moniker and change along with it. That is why the readers of the Gaming Outpost objected so strongly when the threat of having handles taken away was presented: they felt their identities were at stake. They would suddenly have to go back to being who they always had been and would no longer be able to claim the escape, the coping mechanism, of the Internet. By shifting names, they had shifted their tethers to the linguistic system and, effectively, rebaptized themselves as post-human blanks, ready to be pressed into whatever mold each individual saw fit. This then becomes a possible reason for much of the behavior that takes place online. It also can be used to explain why the Internet is packed with the type of content it is—namely, so much pornography.

The Internet is identity without the physical and, consequently, identity without consequences. And what a strange, looping identity it is. If the name is the center of consciousness by providing something for the pronoun “I” to replace, then the users of handles on the Internet have removed or changed that name. They have taken the stability out from under the I. They are, in a sense, unmaking themselves. Let us briefly turn back to the quote from “The Monarchy” given above. The part already presented was the first volley in a conversation between two United Nations employees, Morro and Bay. This very short introduction closes with the remainder of that conversation:

Bay: Listen. If I’m understanding this, you’re saying post-human culture’s far more rooted in existential subtext than it appears. Doesn’t that seem kinda, I dunno, post-modern and depressing?

Morro: Uh-huh. And that’s not the worst part. When’s the last time anything post-modern had a happy ending?

Notes

1. Millar, Mark (writer). “Ultimate X-Men”, Vol. 1, Issue 1. Marvel Comics. 2000.
2. I lack hard numbers to prove it, but there appears to be a clear trend away from the notion of secret identities in modern comics. Superheroes still use code names and costumes, but they seem to care little if people know who they are. The exception that proves the rule is Batman, a character so caught up in the notion of keeping his identity secret that Bruce Wayne and Batman have become two separate identities entirely. In the one-shot “Ego”, they even go so far as to fight each other.
3. Young, Doselle (writer). “The Monarchy”, Issue 2. WildStorm Productions. June 2001.
4. Although, I must admit that the quote is also included simply because it is so very neat. I am always attempting to demonstrate the maturity of comic books, to show how much they have grown up since the days of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, and including a quote like this is just one more blow in the fight against public perception. Pardon me my vices.