We recognize that bodies are not fixed points, they are not destinations. Bodies are journeys. Bodies move. Bodies are abstract. We recognize hat we begin in abstraction and then journey toward becoming. To transcend the limits of the body we need to let go of what a body should look like, what it should do, how it should live. We recognize that, within this process of letting go, we may mourn; this mourning is a part of our growing. We celebrate the courage it takes to change form, the joy and pain that can come with exploring different selves, and the power that comes from finding new selves.

We throw shade by existing in the world, by showing up and not only surviving, but truly, fully, living. We practice the future in the now, testing out alternatives of being. We openly, honestly consider together how to be strategically visible, when visibility is radically necessary.

We ghost on the body, refusing to respond to its cultural texts, incessant calls, damaging DMs. We acknowledge that gender is an economy. It is a spoke in the wheel of capitalism. We reject being bought and sold. We feel no guilt or shame about turning our backs on a market that wants to eat us alive. We will strategize and collectivize toward uselessness, a failure that imagines, innovates, emancipates.

We are the most fantastic and beautiful mistake. Never meant to survive, we are still here: an error in the algorithm. We are not empty signifiers, however; we are not dead-end hyperlinks. We reject the violent act of naming. We will reconfigure ourselves as we see fit. Modifying and recoding, we choose our own names, build our own families and communities, proudly fail in the present as we dream new futures.

We are encrypted: how we are coded is not meant to be easily read. We recognize that the care-full reading of others is an exercise of trust, intimacy, belonging, homecoming. We reject the conflation of legibility and humanity. Our unreadable bodies are a necessary disruption. Our unreadable bodies can render us invisible and hyper-visible at the same time. As a response to this, we work together to create secure passageways both on- and offline to travel, conspire, collaborate.

If to be recognized as a body that deserves to live we must perform a certain self—look a certain way, live a certain way, care for one another in a certain way - we strike against the body altogether. We will hold mirrors up for one another, hold and care for the reflections seen. We will see one another and the selves we become, recognizing those selves as real, loved, and so very alive.

While both protective and permeable, the skin of the digital, despite its entanglements, remains necessary as a tool of experimentation. Thus, we celebrate ourselves and the framework offered by the skins we put on and take off. We recognize that our performance of other bodies is prosthetic. We recognize that the skin of the digital transforms and is transformative.

We want to corrupt data. We want to fuck up the machine. Infectious, viral, we will tear it all down. We recognize that in this breaking, there is a beginning.

We will mobilize and take action! We recognize that all work cannot be done all the time all on the Internet. Completing the online-to-AFK loop, we will dare to live away from our screens, embodying our ever-slipping selves as an activist action. Empowered by the virtual worlds we traverse, we will reboot and rebuild hese worlds when they no longer suit and need to shift. Along this loop, we commit to making space for rigorous criticism, feedback, play, and pleasure as activism.

Affirming our role in building new worlds, we will imagine, innovate, and remix. We will rearrange and repurpose by any means necessary, rendering what rises from this rebirth unrecognizable from the violence of its original. We will create fissures in the social and cultural algorithm as an active act of advocacy, advocating for the user, advocating for ourselves and advocating for one another.

In 1993, one year before Sadie Plant coined the term cyberfeminism, poet Lucille Clifton wrote “won’t you celebrate with me.” As glitch feminists we call for it here, celebrating with Clifton at her request and sharing her transformative words: