16. Xtreme Streaming*

In this chapter, I propose a tactical renaming of the internet and the rapidly growing Internet of Things (IoT) as xtreme streaming in a rhetorical move that is feminist materialist and anticolonial. Drawing upon a lineage of authors who have sought to theorise and problematise patriarchal and imperialist narratives of technological progress with ecological conceptions of media and information (Ursula Le Guin, Donna Haraway, Elizabeth Grosz, N. Katherine Hayles, and, more recently, Legacy Russell), this chapter positions embodied experiences of networked communication as akin to being submerged in a fast-flowing and all-encompassing stream, absent clear boundaries and replete with porous bodies (of information). To stress the role of language and narrative in this expanded conception of networked media, much of the chapter is a work of fictocriticism, which intentionally interweaves theory and fiction and collapses subjective and objective voices to mine the epistemological gaps that emerge between. I employ formal strategies of fragmentation, textual collage, and citational writing to evince the felt experience and affective properties of living in a post-internet environment. The fictocritical portion is followed by a traditionally written conclusion that summarises and ‘translates’ the former into an academic argument.