A Special Vibration of the Soul: Virtual Chaos in Cathy Park Hong’s “The World Cloud”

Social media and a plethora of other digital applications have so gradually settled in our daily existence that we rarely question their origin or the fact that they ask nothing in return. Timeo danao et dona ferentes, famously sentenced Laocoön before the gigantic gift horse the Greek offered his Trojan peers. Today, amidst the overwhelming torrent of noise generated by the relentless production and exchange of information, the flip side of the ominous present takes the sibylline form of quiet surveillance. Cathy Park Hong’s “The World Cloud,” the third section of her speculative long poem Engine Empire (2012), explores the psychological and social consequences for the individual living in the age of surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2019) and post-disciplinarian psychopolitics (Han, 2017b), where technological companies surreptitiously extract seemingly unimportant personal information from oblivious users who ignore the fine print of the Faustian deal. In this paper, I contend that Hong’s fictional future works as an analogy of our hyperconnected present, bringing to the fore the pressing subject of human relations in the infosphere and its effect on the corporeal and social body. I further claim that the virtual realm described in “The World Cloud,” an unhinged internet of sorts, coincides with Henri Bergson’s ontological plane of pure memory, the repository of human perception, which has been hijacked and commodified. Finally, I will consider Byung-Chul Han’s prediction that the age of big data implies the “end of the person who possesses free will” (2017b, 17-18) and advocate for a more empathetic use of technology in our posthuman future.