The Turkish word for Networking is Ağlaşma which also means “crying together” [1]. This equivoque nicely condenses the following: When any group of people gather in a social network, they invariably:
1) Complain to each other about the evils of the world and the misfortunes they have to undergo.
2) Deliver performances as dissatisfied beautiful souls, bottling up their true frustrations [2].
3) Project their hidden frustrations onto a figure of “other” and ritually scapegoat and sacrifice him/her.

Let’s condense these meanings by calling it Wetworking. This word is already loaded with the following strange meanings:
1) Some weird sexual practice involving body fluids.
2) Sleeping with a big shot to advance one’s career.
3) Spilling blood by carrying out an assassination.

When you match the three points about Ağlaşma with the three points about Wetworking, you can see that they vaguely overlap:
1) Every complaint hystericizes and thereby sexualizes the social exchange.
2) Beautiful souls either function as the henchmen for traditional masters or they become the new hysterical masters.
3) A secret assassination is the ultimate form of ritual scapegoating even though it may posture as an “utilitarian elimination”.

The chronological story of how the network gets perverted into a wetwork follows these three points:
1) Complaining on the network about the world is the most innocent aspect of wetworks, also known as the waterworks.
2) The wetwork will immediately pervert these waterworks by subjecting them to the arbitrary (super)egoic power relations on the network.
3) The only discernible final aim of the wetwork is to “eliminate badness” which in practice amounts to ritual scapegoating, otherwise known as cancel culture.

The first step involves normal healthy hysteria, which then gets perverted by the wetwork in the second step, which constitutes the crucial turning point of deterioration: The wetwork recruits the “hysteria of the one” in a war against the “hysteria of the other” which forms the commonsensical connotations of the word “hysteria”. The third and final step of the wetwork involves the physical removal of the scapegoats. This war of the wetwork has many names including the famous “War on Terror”. To be more specific, the wetwork wages and stages its war on behalf of the “hysteria of the dissatisfied one” against the “hysteria of the frustrated other”.

In such a mirror-relation, it occasionally happens that some of the “dissatisfied ones” will eventually identify with the “frustrated others” and change their sides in the war. Rejecting to perform dissatisfaction and identifying with the hysteria of the frustrated other is certainly a move in the direction of truth, but it is still destructive as it remains within the coordinates of the wetworked mirror-relation. The true solution is to perceive the uncommonsensical fact that (1) the one is just as hysterical as the other, (2) they are two sides of the same coin, and (3) performing dissatisfaction is just the obverse of being frustrated by the world.

Işık Barış Fidaner is a computer scientist with a PhD from Boğaziçi University, İstanbul. Admin of Yersiz Şeyler, Editor of Žižekian Analysis, Curator of Görce Writings. Twitter: @BarisFidaner

Notes:

[1] See “Ağlaşma ve Ağalaşma”

[2] See “Castrated: Cast & Rated”