Multi-worlding

Your standard sci-fi multiverse usually operates based on the parallel worlds hypothesis in quantum physics - when a "decision" is made, a parallel world is created for each possible outcome, creating incalculable parallel worlds that may have a lot in common or may be completely foreign to everything you know to be true. In such a system, each parallel world is the same size, giving you an incomprehensibly large multiverse for heroes and villains to battle over.

Intrapology draws a lot more from the humanities, particularly feminist technoscience studies, new materialism, and material semiotics. In Intrapology, the world does not just exist separately to the cognition and agency of living beings - we are all, together, involved in an ongoing “worlding”.

I keep seeing the bit of the promo video where I casually mention social constructivism, and cringing a little. Am I really out here in public referencing notoriously abstract postmodern philosophy as if this ISN'T going to alienate people? I am trying to reassure myself that I'm not trying to win over the kind of person who is turned off by a little bit of philosophy - Intrapology should appeal to the kind of person who, for example, loves Star Trek but is critical of its ongoing commitment to colonial institutions.

Then I have a secondary cringe - am I even a social constructivist IRL? A few weeks ago I was listening to a lecture by Mackenzie Wark, in which she jokes "saying something is socially constructed to me is like saying it comes from God... is 'the social' in the room with us right now?" (clip of this moment on Youtube) The theorists I love don't just point at things and say they are socially constructed, they explore how the material and the social work together and shape one another.  For me, the interesting thing about this dichotomy is how tangled up these two things are. I've been in abstract meditative states where thought itself becomes an object of observation, and even then I was experiencing reality through processes that were shaped by society. "You can take the enby out of society", etc. 

So when I say that Intrapology takes social constructivism literally, I mean that I find it fun and generative to think about a fully socially-constructed world, because I think it gives us tools for thinking about our own world. In Intrapology, "people who view the world in a way that erases your existence would literally be unable to see you, and you would not be able to reach them - when this occurs, our once-shared universe fragments into smaller, separate worlds". Like art scenes and fandoms, smaller worlds have the capacity to be much weirder - for better and for worse - because they are not anchored in the larger collective sense of what is normal.

Intrapology will explore how worlds fragment, and how we can reconnect. Although it's rooted in theory and the stakes are existential, my aim is to use this to tell stories about characters dealing with the big feelings that are stirred up in me when I experience a threat to my own fundamental need to live in the same world as other people. I want to focus on the emotional core of how we come to live in a different world from people who were once our allies and kin.

I want the fragmenting worlds of Intrapology to include futuristic households engaged in “kitchen table polyamory”, creepy retrograde enclaves of toxic masculinity, catastrophic solo worlds occupied by lonely shut-ins who have lost everything, and massive warehouse raves where the vibes are so good everyone got swept up in their own mini-universe. Since there are no superpowers in Intrapology that allow a person to overcome the fundamental nature of reality, moving between worlds should always have consequences that reveal our entangled nature.