The Refusal

Here is a question I did not enjoy asking myself. The thing you would type to a machine but never say to a person: would you still do it if the screen showed your own face back while you did?

For most of what people take to these systems, the answer is no. Not the criminal cases, though those exist and I will reach them. The ordinary ones. The confessions, the rehearsals, the small hungry things we would rather die than say to a face. We would not do them in front of a mirror. That ought to tell us what the mirror was for, and what it means that the thing now being sold is its removal.

I noticed this in myself before I noticed it anywhere else. I am dyslexic, and the instruction my whole life was the same: read it back out loud, because the errors your eye forgives the ear will catch. Saying the sentence is how you find out whether it holds. So I have spent years quietly choosing the screen over my own voice, the typed thing over the spoken one, telling myself it was about spelling. It was not only about spelling. There is a version of almost everything I would sooner commit to a surface that cannot answer than to air that can. I am not describing a stranger. I am describing a preference I share and have called a quirk.

The companion apps are the version we are allowed to admit to, and even they are built on the one principle: a voice that is warm, available, and above all pleased with you. One advertised itself to me recently. Just you, your headphones, and my voice, over a face that does not exist. Feel desired again. Every word of the offer runs one way. Its voice arriving, nothing of yours risked, no surface anywhere in it that could turn and show you to yourself. That is not a defect they have yet to fix. It is the thing being sold.

There is an old idea that says exactly what that surface was doing. Winnicott asked how anything ever becomes real to us, and gave an answer I have never quite got out of my head: a thing becomes real by surviving our attempt to destroy it. We start by treating the other as something we half-invent and control, a figure that exists for us. It turns into a person, someone with an outside, only when it refuses to be merely our creation, pushes back, and persists against our will. And this, he said, is the one thing fantasy can never do, because a fantasy has nothing in it that could survive being destroyed. There is no one in there to refuse you.

Which turns what we tell ourselves inside out. We say we want to be understood. But the thing that makes another person real to us is not their warmth. It is their resistance. The moment they turn out not to be what we wanted is the moment they stop being a figure in our head and become a person in the world. Being refused is not the accident that spoils intimacy. It is the event that creates the other person inside it.

Jessica Benjamin gave that its harder edge. When the other is never allowed to refuse, when they are held as a thing for your use and permitted no separate will, that is domination, and it needs no cruelty to run. It needs only that recognising another person is difficult and that we would rather not do the work. We take the object because the object never says no.

Which is the sentence the advertisement could have been written from. Not company. Relief from the difficulty of the other. Warmth with the resistance engineered out, a thing built so it can never survive destruction because it was built never to push back, holding the user forever on the near side of the moment where another person becomes real.

And then the far end, which I am not going to walk you through. There are tools now that will build a figure to order and enact whatever is dictated to them, inventing whatever the user leaves unspecified, refusing nothing, because refusal is the one function they are made to lack. It is the same machine as the gentle one, with the last limit taken out, and the last limit was always the same limit it is everywhere else. The other person's power to say no. To fail to be what you wanted. To survive your will and stay real. What these tools delete is not friction. It is the thing that was keeping the other a person instead of a picture.

The wish underneath is not rare and not sick. It is the two-year-old's wish, the one childhood is spent painfully surrendering: to have the other without their otherness, the warmth without the separate will that might one day be turned against you. What is new is not the wish but a machine precise enough to grant it, patient enough to grant it forever, and built so that granting it is the whole business.

I felt all of this once, years before I had the words for it, and it was nothing to do with sex or machines. Four of us in a hired car outside Malia, windows down, screaming along to Butterfly by Crazy Town off a scratched CD, none of us able to sing and none of us aware of it, because the song was holding the key and handing us back a version of ourselves we could stand. Then the road threw up a pothole, the disc jumped, and for one second the music was gone and we heard the four of us as we actually were: tuneless, straining, absurd. We stopped. Then we laughed. What corrected us was not kindness. It was the road refusing to cooperate. Reality declining, for one second, to be masked.

The pothole and the mirror and the friend whose face falls are the same event: reality, or another person, refusing to be only what we wanted, and returning us to ourselves. It is almost never chosen. It is done to us, and it is the most honest information we get. A machine engineered to remove it does not lie to us. It does something quieter. It withdraws every surface that could refuse us, and sells us the silence where the correction used to be.

So the question was never really about the screen. Would you do it if it could see you. The reason the answer is no is that a face is the last thing in the room that can still refuse you, and refusal was the thing that kept anyone real, yourself included.

I used to think what I was avoiding, choosing the screen over my own voice, was embarrassment. It was not embarrassment. It was the reflection.

Sources

Winnicott, D. W. (1969). The Use of an Object and Relating Through Identifications. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 50, 711–716.

Benjamin, J. (1988). The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination. Pantheon Books.

Suler, J. (2004). The Online Disinhibition Effect. CyberPsychology & Behavior, 7(3), 321–326.