1. Bachelard is concerned with the ontology of spaces insofar as they are poetic spaces. Bachelard has not met the Internet.
2. This essay is for the internet. On social media, when someone is being unduly (read: incessantly) horny, commentators often post a reply meme that is a photo of a dog with a bat. This dog is the horny police. The graphics say “bonk”, usually in block capitals. The dog is often, but not always, a Shiba Inu.
3. Saying “My dog is a Shiba Inu dog” is redundant, actually, because inu just means dog in Japanese, so you’re really saying “My dog is a Shiba dog.” This would be fine except for that I’m learning Japanese for buildings I will never see. The Nakagin Capsule Tower is a Metabolist masterpiece in postwar Tokyo. You have probably seen it in science fiction, with each unit’s living space like a polyp in coral, bearing a huge, round window. They are demolishing it starting the first of September. It is August and I cannot get on a plane because of whatever variant that will invariably kill me. By the time I get to Tokyo, maybe there will be no more buildings; just abandoned Shiba Inus and wreckage.
4. The Nakagin Capsule Tower is a good example of the “built environment.” It’s constructed by humans, not a landscape that emerges nominally without human intervention (Does such a landscape exist on Earth anymore? I don’t know). Bachelard spends many pages writing about shells – the large and the small – and attics and basements. The Nakagin Capsule Tower is all of that times a million. It’s a cyberpunk imaginary of a world where the internet is the collective attic-basement donut in a past future imaginary. The takeaway is the donut part.
5. We all live on the Internet now. My friends are mostly on my phone.
6. But the buildings are not on my phone.
7. The Internet is arguably a poetic space in Bachelard’s sense, but it’s more than that, and less. It does not emulate a house. It is still a built environment.
8. The ontology of the internet implies a world where you get hit with the bonk of the Horny Police Dog. Not physically hit. It’s still a bonk though.
9. The internet actually exists in servers and in a memorable transatlantic cable and in cryptofarming hubs in dead pastorals of second-third world liminal countries. There is a lot of theory about whether the internet is national. There is a lot of theory about what it’s like as a built space. I’m not doing that here. I am doomscrolling through photos of Nakagin Capsule Tower on my phone. This is a building inside a space inside a device in my hand in the space of my (overpriced) London rental with hideous beige carpet that I had no agency in choosing.
10. Sometimes I go outside and walk around. Sometimes there are cornices. I look at the cornices. I maybe even furtively touch the cornices even though they are not mine. Consider how many hands contributed to their construction: the design (they are Victorian, so it was likely hand drafted), the pouring, the setting into the North London brick, the occupants, the passers-by who touched it. It is embedded with a thousand (thousand) hands that I am touching with my eyes.
11. The Internet sees some of you naked but not all of you. Your apartment or house always sees you naked. It is built around your nakedness, to clothe it with fulfilled needs. When you take an aesthetically pleasing photo of your morning latte on an intentionally unfinished wood table in your dining room, this is a little pornographic, because it is a staged intimacy like a faux pizza delivery man. Bonk. You’re a camgirl performing domestic space perfectly. You make me believe this is your unmediated life, but it isn’t. No latte is so perfectly aligned with the grain of the table, so tastefully highlighted by a filter in “real life”. But the idea that this is somehow unmediated – “real”– even as the viewer’s gaze knows it is curated (and pretends otherwise for pleasure) makes it paradoxical décor porn. How different is this really, from staging a body? A little Botox, lingerie, Instagram lips. The built environment is giving you a lap dance it already knew you wanted. Bonk bonk bonk.
12. Bachelard is sitting on my bedside table. Not the man, whom I have dubbed ‘Architecture Theory Santa’, but the book, which is a Penguin Classics edition full of abstract water-coloured houses on the cover. When I talk about him on the Internet, it gives him an immediacy, like he too is a friend on my phone. The thing is, he makes a big deal of being concerned with the soul, which is not, according to him, the domain of psycho-analysis, like the body and the mind. The horniness of the built environment is a very embodied problem. He would probably hate it.
13. I don’t want to deal with Lacan dealing with Freud here, though I am about to invoke a finial. A finial is a little poky decorative tower, about which you should draw your own psychoanalytic conclusions if necessary. The English architect Nicholas Hawksmoor is, to me, the master of finials. He made a lot of them in the 18th century. I look into the sky in the Square Mile at the gloomy, half-abandoned financial centre of London at Hawksmoor finials. I want to kiss them like each of your fingers.
14. This is too tender for the Internet, this kind of kiss. This is the kind of horny, that with respect to the built environment, can be called ‘the erotic’ or maybe even ‘love’ of a sort. You can be tender on the Internet but you have to hide it in some sideways cranny reserved for your tenderness only. Embed it in a half-serious aside, or an anonymous Tumblr. Not in the main hallways of the place. In a little capsule with a round window, maybe.
15. The built environment of the Internet nonetheless makes me horny because it can be anything. Even a world where we’re not all going to die rather imminently. There’s a lasciviousness to that sort of hope. It feels indulgent because it almost can’t be real. The endlessness of possibility implies also an endlessness of pleasure as a nested infinity; the Hilbert hotel problem, but of course here all the rooms are capsules.
16. The built environment outside the Internet has seen everything, but not in a creepy panoptic way, because its surveillance is routed nowhere. In my flat it just seeps into the brick I accidentally chipped with a drill bit hanging a rack for all my bougie literary tote bags. The built environment that is not the Internet can be good at keeping secrets. Physical surveillance, with CCTV cameras, can’t see how you feel when you run your hands across the textured concrete of the National Theatre, feeling for the lip of the cast.
17. Except for windows, which are reverse eyes outward too. Consider the infamous case of windows in Amsterdam’s red-light district, where sex workers display themselves for their clients. Windows generally are not like this; if you see into a window it is either because a) the occupants have deemed whatever you might see acceptable to be public or b) you are stealing a glance, which is definitely horny. Voyeurism is horny in this sense. Maybe even flâneurism is a type of voyeurism, and therefore horny. It depends on whether you think watching a peacock unfurl its feathers is horny, or watching a pinhole nest cam of an endangered condor gets you bonked. Presuming you’re a bird. But you’re not a bird, so is watching a display horny? Are windows stages or frames for a kind of ontological strip-tease? What’s left when it all comes off?
18. Bachelard talks about seeing a lit window in the snow or a rainstorm and the feeling of sublime aloneness in nature this provides, and comfort, in turn, when one is inside the window’s wall holdings. But, can you do this with a glass front skyscraper? Right now, most of the desks are empty in the City. I want to turn a corner from a Hawksmoor church and sneak in, crawl under one and make a fort like a child.
19. If you’re up high enough, no one can see in the windows. The bathrooms of the Shard have floor to ceiling windows for precisely this reason. People like this a lot. In hotels that are high rises, at least in films, people also have lots of sex against this type of window.
20. The Internet sometimes feels like we are looking down from a gallery of very high windows, watching the world burn and murmuring to each other.
21. The day they demolish the Nakagin Capsule Tower someone will still be posting the meme of the Shiba Inu bonking someone who has expressed desire. It is a fond chastening, that image. It might even make me laugh through my tears. The Internet is always finding new ways to be horny.
22. When the built environment of the world is in ruins, the Internet will be a ghost. It leaves less traces, fallen girders. Or its traces will be nonspecific; coolant racks, wires. The space will collapse into itself like a neutron star becomes a black hole. There will be no more gallery with the high windows. I am not sure how many actual windows will be left either, or if it matters, either for net horniness or anything else.
23. I am jealous of Bachelard for dying before having to consider this problem. He is concerned with the state of the building vis-à-vis the concerns of the soul. I am concerned with the question of whether we are all becoming Carthusians except for typing, with whether we will all be alone with our physical built cells in the end, like polyps of coral, crying out in bits and hexadecimal. I wonder if we will run our hands along the walls. I wonder who will see, and what our hands will be searching for.
24. I am horny for the built environment because it is fleeting, because it is here now, because it is also on the Internet, poking into the sky or the attic of the self like a finial.
