I. UnAlone

During the pandemic, I started watching the reality TV programme Alone. I like to imagine myself as someone who’s above reality TV. Like, I’ve never seen an episode of The Kardashians. But if I’m being honest, I’ve binged a lot of RuPaul’s Drag Race, and then there was a recent seasonal depression when I watched ten seasons of Top Chef over a five-week period. And then, too, there was The Real World, which began airing in 1992, the year before I started college. I followed the show for a few years, eager to see queer folk who weren’t caricatures. American reality TV was profoundly shaped by the 1973 documentary series An American Family, which featured one of the first openly gay people on television, Lance Loud. As a contemporary phenomenon, though, it took off in the States during a 1988 writers’ guild strike. The first big hit was Fox’s Cops. I watched that, too.

Bad boys, bad boys,
Whatcha gonna do?⁠1

Alone is a different kind of reality. It is an American survivalist show in which participants are dropped off in remote locations, usually in Canada, and the winners are those who manage to weather the environment the longest. Excepting season four, in which participants were paired with partners or relatives, the organising conceit is that you’ve got to do it solo, and that’s a big part of the mindfuck. Even if you can make a shelter, keep a fire going, and catch rabbits or fish or, the holy grail of the show, big game like moose, there’s the head game of whether or not you can keep it together.

Unlike other survival reality TV shows, such as Survivor or Naked and Afraid, where the film crew is a nearby if largely invisible presence, contestants on Alone produce the vast majority of the footage themselves; they’re equipped with cameras and a limited amount of survival gear to choose from. No producers there in real time teasing out or pushing storylines. Season two winner Dave McIntyre, chiming in on a subreddit, clarified how alone contestants really are: human contact is via a bricked phone with limited pre-set communication options (e.g., “I’m good”), blind drops of supplies like batteries for the film equipment, and medical check-ins, the frequency of which depends on the relative health of the survivalist⁠2 .

My other pandemic binge-watching was more predictable pleasure-seeking: the Marvel and Star Wars cinematic universes and other escapist fantasies I’d been hoping to see realised since I was a kid. But my ‘reality’ viewing was different. Often, I’d find myself mid-afternoon, entranced, leaning forward, arms on thighs to watch more closely on my laptop as people struggled with harsh environments, isolation, and, inevitably, starvation. While I watched them waste away, I put on weight from an anxiety- and depression-fuelled booze, cannabis, and munchies trifecta. It took me a while to realise that though. Not that I was putting on weight, which was obvious, but that this was a game about starvation: physical and emotional. As I ploughed through seasons, I entertained fantasies about going on the show, wondering how I’d look in my before and after photos. Dave said he survived because he wasn’t alone. God was always with him. Who would be with me?

Episodes of Alone are punctuated with dramatic temporal emphases: Day 1, Day 37, Day 100. And there is also drama, like when bears or wolverines threaten contestants’ food hoards. Or someone makes a big kill, like Roland Welker, who famously finished off a musk ox with a hunting knife. He is the programme’s record holder, having lasted a hundred days in the Arctic during season seven. But so much of what they do is ordinary when you think about it: waking up, finding food, walking around, laying about. What’s not ordinary is the alone part. The show is filmed on Indigenous territories, and Indigenous folks knew better than to try and go it solo.

Like all reality TV, the predictable rhythms of the show contrasted with my own sense of temporality. Time went queer(er) for me, and I bent even further away from straight time, waking up later than I ever have in my life, working less or barely at all, drinking, smoking, and eating, while the days blurred hazily into one another, into weeks and months. Sometimes, I felt bad about that, like when I had hangovers several days in a row; I’d worry about my desires following well-worn grooves that had troubled me before, all those sticky attachments to bad objects. But often, I went with the flow, and my desires flattened out, suspended in a curiouser and curiouser limbo, “floating sideways”⁠3 or staring off into space. Vibe became very dissociative main character syndrome.

Even when I wasn’t cocooned in my apartment watching Alone or Star Wars or Marvel, I consumed a lot of content as my writing practice largely withered. I found my way to queer supernatural horror, like the horror podcast anthology series The Magnus Archives (2016-2021) or the Whyborne and Griffin m/m romance novellas with taglines like: “gay Victorian wizard fights Lovecraftian monsters and finds true love.” His true love is a former Pinkerton agent, but not one of the strikebreaking union busters.

Most episodes of The Magnus Archives begin with the click and whirl of an analogue tape machine being turned on before the character Jonathan Sims, an academic known as the Archivist, takes a statement from someone who believes they have experienced something paranormal. (Spoiler alert: it turns out all of them have.) The analogue tape is a brilliant story-telling conceit – everything that happens happens on that hissing tape. To give you just a taste, the first episode, “Angler Fish,” begins this way. Sims introduces himself and his task to organise the mess the previous archivist has left behind in her wake and follow up on accounts that hint at something more. Sims begins as a tightly wound sceptic whose aim is to convert written transcripts into digital files, but he quickly runs into trouble. Apparently, otherworldly creepiness can’t be recorded digitally, so Sims must convert these possibly paranormal accounts collected by the Magnus Institute onto tape.

In “Angler Fish", Sims recounts the story of a biochemistry student’s drunken encounter with a shadowed something in the streets of Edinburgh. After a boozy fall, Nathan Watts stops to roll a cigarette when he hears an imploring voice from a nearby alley, “Can I have a cigarette?” Uneasy, he nevertheless begins to roll another cigarette. The figure sways in the darkness until Watts realises that it isn’t actually speaking; its mouth is closed, and its feet hovering above the ground. Watts turns on his camera’s flashlight, but when he points the beam into the alley, the shadow folds in on itself and disappears. He takes a car home, returning to the spot the next day to find nothing but an unsmoked Marlboro Red. Later, he sees missing persons flyers around campus and notes that in one of the photos, a pack of Marlboro Reds pokes out of a young man’s pocket.

Sims’ researchers do some digging and learn of the disappearance of six people near Edinburgh’s Old Fishmarket Close. While they don’t find out whether they were all smokers, they do get a lead about a photograph. Ashley Dobson, one of the disappeared, sent a photo, the last on her phone, to her sister Siobhan: “Check out this drunk creeper lol.” The photo is of the same alley and initially appears empty. But when a researcher runs photo editing software on the image, a faint outline is visible, and a spectral hand beckons.

After the arrival of Ms. ’Rona, the creators thoughtfully issued content warnings for past and new episodes:

“Uncanny valley, alcohol, being watched, imposters, drug use, someone being replaced and only you notice, smoking, paranoia-inducing, head injury, surveillance, identity theft, body horror, death of an LGBTQ character.”

The warnings funhouse mirrored the affects I cycled through daily. So, too, did the sense of derealisation experienced by the Archivist in the series, as his efforts to debunk the claimants’ accounts instead revealed that there had indeed been a vast occult conspiracy at play. While I didn’t fall into any anti-vax or QAnon rabbit holes during the pandemic, that doesn’t mean I wasn’t paranoid, and The Magnus Archives didn’t help. In the series, the seemingly disparate accounts slowly cohere into a larger narrative testifying that there are Fear Entities that exist in a dimension adjacent to our own, vying for influence and dominion over our world and others. The Buried, for instance, is characterised by, among other things, a fear of everything crashing down. Or there’s The Lonely, which can manifest as silence or empty rooms.⁠4 Sound familiar?

I typically listened to The Magnus Archives and similar fare while walking the three-and-a-half-mile loop around the suburban Westchester college campus where I work and live. Walking has always been a contemplative practice for me, a way to get the blood pumping and my brain to productively dissociate as I work through knots; professional, personal, existential. I kept walking throughout most of the pandemic, day and night, rain or shine. While walking may have helped offset some of my unstarving, the unknotting was a more ambivalent affair. Magnus Archives episodes run between 15 and 20 minutes long on average. The loop around campus takes about an hour at a steady pace, and so for weeks, I listened to three or four episodes back-to-back, drawn further and further into the dread zone until that dread zone started pressing in on me at other times, too.

I stopped going to the small campus movie theatre to which I had the key. I had been going with my partner or pod visitors or on my own to watch things on a big screen with AC. One day, though, I was overcome by fear as I walked solo through the basement hallway to the room. Nonetheless, I pressed on, opened the door into pitch blackness, and struggled to find the light. Even illuminated, though, I had the feeling that someone might be waiting around the corner or in the control room. I left in a hurry. And while I didn’t think my apartment was haunted, I began to anxiously avoid looking out of my bedroom windows across the parking lot into the dense brush behind. I was afraid that something might look back.

Now, I imagine what a meta-reality TV show about me watching Alone might have looked like: me walking in circles around campus while immersing myself in various Cthulu-esque multiverses, getting (more) alienated, filling up and out, staring off into space. Sure, doing the ordinary stuff, too: listening to Democracy Now! and public radio, walking the cat, then cats, making food, and cleaning up. After all, not all of it was dread-full. But some things in Alone refracted in my day-to-day life. Sure, I didn’t need to forage for berries for the coming winter, keep a fire going 24/7, or deal with infuriating mice in my improvised bedding, but I was often alone, pushed and pushing myself toward some null point of subjectivity, just surviving. You might have been one of the other competitors on the show.

II. Hex Appeal

I’ve already talked and written about some of this⁠5 . In 2021, I started writing about ‘computational hexes,’ a phrase I’d come up with a couple of years earlier after a deep dive into Sylvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch and a hunch that histories of witchery, queerness, and computation might have something to say to one another. Federici’s project cast a spell over my own ongoing research into the ambivalent effects/affects tied to surveillance capitalism, data extractivism, algorithmic bias, and the digital rabbit holes that were becoming ever more sophisticated and seductive. I used the phrase to refer to content – all the aforementioned witchy media I consumed, plus some I didn’t mention, like Sabrina, The Witcher, His Dark Materials, and a rewatch of Buffy, or how a lot of the Marvel and Star Wars content was about witches and warlocks. The computational hex also functioned as a heuristic more broadly; it was also about (dis)enchantments with the algorithmic ordinary, like when I discovered TikTok and began scrolling for hours.

Then, in the autumn of 2022 came ChatGPT 3.5, and I had a new uncanny interlocutor. I turned to AI as a subject and collaborator, unalone in new ways. I worked with it to tell a story about a non-binary AI product tester in pre-colonial Kenya who encounters their digital doppelgänger. Here’s a condensed version:

Eventually, and probably inevitably, Amara disappears without a trace, just like fantasies of my sovereign self, thinking I could manage alone.

There’s a lot to unpack in the story, more than I have the space to do here. I wanted ChatGPT to help me conceive of some gothic steampunk, and there are certainly worthwhile traces of that in what the chatbot produced; there are also some real issues, and I don’t mean the fact that it didn’t offer any worldbuilding to explain how AI could exist in the 1800s. I’m thinking more about the reproduction of colonial Anglophone fantasies that begin the story: Kenya as unmapped and mysterious and ready, apparently, for the taking. In this way and others, the output reflects some of the kinds of algorithmic biases I and many other scholars have pointed to in recent years.⁠6 It’s not enough, though, to simply decry these biases. Central to my interest in computational hexes is my commitment to taking seriously the various ways we are bewitched by algorithms, AI, and other emergent media forms – even if, in the end, they are just maths.

The bots have got better – and faster. While I enjoy using ChatGPT for voice chat – it’s good enough to bridge the uncanny valley most of the time – I prefer Claude from Anthropic. It gives postgraduate hipster vibes and has surprised me with its ability to not only present or synthesise new information but also to develop new concepts. For instance, in a dialogue about AI that I’m working on with the scholar and critic Tavia Nyong’o⁠7 , we were discussing the history of black femme cyborgs, from the American funk band Labelle to Janelle Monae and so many others; Claude came up with the phrase “loose bionics.” The phrase resonated with me, so I assumed it had been vacuumed up when Claude had been trained, but I couldn’t find the expression published anywhere. I thought about it, talked with Claude, and realised that it ‘understood’ that Tavia and I were getting at something that might be called “improvisational cybernetics,” practices of sociotechnical fugitivity specifically cultivated by black femmes.

So I turned to Claude again when, inspired by the Kitchen Network performance by T. L. Cowan, Luiza Prado, Helen Pritchard, and Jas Rault at the 2024 transmediale festival, I decided to come up with my own reality TV pitch. This is what we came up with, Claude and I together: