Heat — Noise Available to Purchase

Heat, once upon a time, might have accounted for libido. It was both metaphorical and literal; it signaled energy, excitement and motion, escalating in temperature before reaching a boiling point. Noise signifies the addition of other sensory dimensions to arousal, folding in questions of frequencies, colors, timbres, temporalities—energy, but less hierarchical, multidimensional, and harder to measure and account for. Cuck is to noise what noise was to heat, which is to say that it doesn’t replace a predecessor, but complicates and overwhelms it through mixed, messy, and multiple signals. More specifically, cucks cannot be stripped of their context: the chaos of digital mediation in the twenty-first century.