Fucking Strangers

Fucking Strangers

„Why would you want to get to know somebody before you have sex? What if you don’t like them?“ Famous lines from the first series of Queer as Folk, lines with a new kind of evidence. Lines without judgement.

One of the most beautiful feelings of our times is the tenderness among strangers. The intimacy, that can only be among strangers.

Like the tickle you get from ASMR, from listening to the voice of someone, who tries to put you to sleep and never gets tired. The tickle you get from letting that voice get close to you and enter your brain, while you are losing control. Falling into a cascade of whispers.

I read that some people, most of them fairly young, most of them sleepless, most of them troubled in their close relationships, feel that tickle as a tremendous joy, forbidden and hidden for its intensity, yet, fairly innocent. A stream of simple, anonymous appreciation, which opens all your gates while tingling down your spine. There is experimental data showing that people, who can feel this as joy and not just as an irritation or an intrusion, are rearranging areas for certain higher brain function. And people who are recording ASMR videos feel connected on a personal, yet, anonymous level with each and every member of their huge audiences.

It’s not just artists, everybody has a relationship with an audience these days, with a blurry bunch of friends and strangers, some of them coincidentally situated in Taiwan, Ivory Coast or Iowa, and liking your shit like crazy.  People on the move have long started to develop a protocol of instant friendship, which allows them to hang out and get close to those they happen to meet in Brussels on a Wednesday night.

When Joaquin Phoenix‘ character fell in love with the artifical intelligence in HER, the best moment was, when he learned about how many parallel relationships SHE was able to have with human beings. Try to feel this as a tickle of joy.

Following matching algorithms, not only the gay community, but more and more people acknowledge safe sex to be something, that can connect people beyond class or culture divides.

Globalized digital culture turns tables around: By now we can be closer to strangers, than we ever wanted to be with the people we meet everyday. And I don’t mean our lovers or kids, but our neighbours, colleagues and friends. The everyday holds us at arms length, and meanwhile more and more of us are having a flamboyant love affair with just everybody else. Never one, but many. ‚Real life‘ keeps us apart, as much, as it brings us together, but among strangers we share the human condition in all its pain and glory.

Fucking strangers. It is early days in this love affair of everybody with everybody. Maybe it is always early in this one. It is too early to make plans, for sure. But imagine, this relationship could turn out to be the most stable one of them all. Safe in your arms. Good night, everybody. Love you, S