A long time ago, in an internet far far away, there was once a place called (yes, I’ll say the name out loud! I’m not scared of you, Voldemort NickAlan! The cash fan-shaped scar between my eyebrows is proof enough of my valor, thank you very much!) Gawker. I used to hang out there all the time, like many of you and unlike many others of you. At one time, it was a Big Fucking Deal that one its past editors left and was subsequently maligned and then became embroiled in an imbroglio revolving around things like “oversharing,” “narcissism,” “betrayal,” and (after the parsing became exhausting), over-performed internet “yawn”-ing by studiously disinterested interested observers.

In other words, it was a typical internet contretemps; indeed, at the time, it struck me as maybe an archetypical one. Why did I care? Why did anyone? To answer these questions, I did what any self-respecting internet citizen does – I wrote an unreadably long, meanderingly idiosyncratic post about it on my completely unread blogspot-powered personal blog!

Marxist critic Louis Althusser is probably most famous for his theory of the “Ideological State Apparatus.” This was his name for those things within a capitalist nation that keep its population docile and willing to be subjected to the state’s will over their own best interests; unlike the courts, prisons, and Departments of Motor Vehicles that make up its counterpart, the Repressive State Apparatus, these “ISA”s habituate their subjects to subjection (and subjugation) by “hailing” them, affording a type of pleasure through mutual recognition. “Hey you!” says the Pepsi can, “Don’t you find me fizzy, refreshing, and affordable?” And sometimes we say, “Sure do! I can afford you and I love the way you taste and how you fit in my hand! What a wonderful world I live in!” Or, if we’re feeling a mite iconoclastic, we say, “Pepsi, you can shove right off! I am a free wo/man! What a wonderful world I live in! Now where’s my Coke?”

I was reminded forcibly of this dynamic a couple days ago while fiddling along through the RSA-that-walks-like-an-ISA “social networking” techno-monstrosity called “Facebook” at a computer whose browser, unlike my personal one, is not set to block ads (“I’m a free wo/man! What a wonderful world I live in! Ooh, what a clever product-placed joke about product placement Tina Fey just told!”). Jittering down the margin like a pixel-powered centipede, row upon row of dancing pandas shucked and jived for my attention. Was I hallucinating? What were they offering? And what did they want?

As promised, this week’s column is on one of Japan’s most spectacularized exports, the pornographic genre Wikipedia rather demurely refers to as “tentacle erotica.” But where to start? As any ancient mariner of the cyberseas can tell you, the internets are woven in no small part out of endless, clammy, somewhat salty-smelling threads devoted to the subject, slithering over publication histories, generic boundary confusions, censorship codes and the like with unsettling single-mindedness.