What is Dimes Square? If you Google it, many articles, Substack posts, and Reddit threads will tell you that it does not exist. Besides being quite literally the intersection of two neighbourhoods in Manhattan—Chinatown and the Lower East Side—Dimes Square is described as a “concept,” or rather, “a state of mind” by writer Will Harrison for The Baffler. The enigma that is Dimes Square emerged from a cohort of Gen Z-Millennials-cuspers in response to COVID-era restrictions, when self-expression, connection, and commerce shifted to the online world. From that point forward, the construction and performance of one’s online identity had never before been more powerful.
The figures of Dimes Square, while inevitably profiting off of this solidified alternative reality, had a rather nihilistic response to the shift. As described by New York cultural critic Dean Kissick for Spike Art Magazine, the Dimes Square characters depict a kind of “boredom with performative outrage and disdain for overbearingly earnest didacticism.” Though initially attracting a liberal arts crowd, these creators shared an increasingly anti-woke and contrarian worldview, embodied through ironic detachment and nihilism. Names orbiting the scene include Dasha Nekrasova and Anna Khachiyan of the Red Scare podcast; blogger and Instagram persona angelicalism01; the print publication, Drunken Canal, and, more recently, Peter Vack; actor, writer and director. Perhaps symptomatic of being an internet subculture before an art scene, Kissick argues that Dimes Square “has come to be associated with, and indeed has been created by, relentless self-mythologizing.” Their shared cynical worldview is often taken as evidence of a lack of cohesion or unifying purpose, with critics—like Antiart on Substack—accusing the scene of “making art so that they could be a subculture, not making a subculture in service to the art.” But for a subculture whose only sense of cohesion is nihilism for the times, the very absence of cohesion may be the point.
There seems to be a resistance to the idea that something so overtly meaningless, derogatory, and pessimistic can have true merit. In a city whose broader cultural identity is grounded in transgressive artists like the Warhol Factory and Patti Smith, the supposedly meaningless Dimes Square scene destabilizes New York’s self-image through its association with the performance of the self as depicted online. Audiences claim it isn’t a real scene or a real movement, a way of reinforcing the boundary between the internet and the offline world, actively restricting the subculture’s relevance to the online realm only. What is so troubling about online identity being projected in the physical world?
In “The I in Internet,” Jia Tolentino describes the self as “not a fixed, organic thing, but a dramatic effect that emerges from a performance,” one that can be “believed or disbelieved at will.” Offline, that performance of the self shifts with context and audience, and has a place similar to the backstage of a theatre where one can retreat from their performed identity. Online, there is no backstage and no control or regulation of who is watching and when, turning all new information into a perceived commentary on one’s identity. This fundamental lack of control creates an unstable self where social media users must be hyperaware of their performance, as their identity, which has become their most valuable asset, is at stake in the cultural economy of the internet.
The cultural statement suggested by Dimes Square is a shift in priority: the image of the self now takes precedence over commitment to any shared purpose, mirroring the primacy of identity online. As Kissick writes, “if art was once a way of expressing yourself and through doing so creating your identity […] it has recently felt like your identity […] has become a key part of what gives value to your self-expression.” Identity, in this sense, is no longer produced through art but imported into it, increasingly shaped by online performance. But perhaps what people are most averse to is Kissick’s suggestion that Dimes Square “might also be understood as a mapping of online performance and aesthetics back onto the real world.” If, as Tolentino argues, the online self is the most vulnerable and destabilized version of identity, then carrying that performance into physical space threatens the stabilizing function of the online/offline divide. How does that distinction work to stabilize the self? Why does the instability of that boundary provoke such a strong impulse to defend it? Why does the boundary feel necessary at all?
The backlash around the Dimes Square scene reveals a looming insecurity about the self under social media. Queer theorist Leo Bersani offers a useful way into this anxiety through his writing on sexuality, masochism, and power, particularly his claim that desire has the capacity to “shatter the self.” While Bersani grounds his analysis in sexuality, his framework is ultimately about how power is experienced, relinquished, and internalized through the self. The urge to defend a boundary between online and offline life begins to resemble a defensive response to that shattering. Www.RachelOrmont.com, a 2024 film directed by DS mainstay Peter Vack, gives this anxiety a body. Emerging from the Dimes Square milieu, the film treats social media as a masochistic structure in which users willingly submit to powerlessness while pursuing an illusory sense of selfhood. Through Rachel Ormont’s relationship to online validation, the film suggests that desire under social media is oriented towards endurance rather than fulfillment; an ongoing submission that exposes the instability of the self rather than resolving it.
Www.RachelOrmont.com is a Freudian, theatrical personification of social media. Set in a surreal, semi-dystopian reality, the film follows Rachel (Betsey Brown), who grows up entirely in an auto-erotic online world where her sole purpose is to review videos of Mommy 6.0 (Chloe Cherry), a pop star owned by the corporation NAAA (National Assessment and Advertising Agency), and possibly Rachel’s biological mother. Rachel never goes outside, and her only social interaction—if one can call it that—is with an AI chatbot called Poorspigga. Isolated and perpetually distressed, Rachel obsessively seeks validation from both Poorspigga and Mommy, convinced of a personal intimacy that never materializes. The film stages this relationship theatrically: Mommy 6.0 performs on a stage, while the audience behaves like a live comment section, present but unseen. Polarizing on release, Www.RachelOrmont.com has been hailed as both the movie of the year and unwatchable. This passionate response mirrors its place within the Dimes Square ethos of nihilism and self-dissolution.
RachelOrmont depicts the dissolution of the self through Rachel’s masochistic attachment to Mommy 6.0. In Bersani’s The Freudian Body, he writes that the “fundamental exercise of power over individuals is their own confessional interpretation of themselves.” Drawing on Freud, Bersani traces this dynamic to infantile sexuality, where cruelty—and more specifically, sadism and masochism—sits at the core. He suggests that sexuality may emerge from experiences of cruelty, claiming that all “intense” affective experiences, no matter how terrifying, can spill over into sexuality. Sexual excitement, Freud claims, arises when the body’s ‘normal’ range of sensation is exceeded, and the organization of the self is momentarily disturbed, leaving the subject “shattered into sexuality.” In this sense, experiences that threaten the self are unpleasurable because they destabilize it, even as they are simultaneously experienced as pleasure. Bersani states that “the mystery of sexuality is that we seek not only to get rid of this shattering tension but also to repeat, even to increase it,” binding satisfaction to the “painful need to find satisfaction.” Here, sexuality could be a tautology for masochism— a survival mechanism that “serves life” by allowing the self to endure its own destabilization. Masochism, then, explains not only how the self survives its dissolution, but why it actively returns to it.
In Www.RachelOrmont.com, Rachel is essentially the embodiment of infantile sexuality. Vulnerable and underdeveloped, she was never able to mature beyond her childhood due to the conditions of captivity, leaving her extremely susceptible to the shattering of the self. Rachel is undone by her love and obsession with Mommy 6.0, whose loving slogans Rachel internalizes as personal affirmations directed at her. Rachel endlessly desires to be with Mommy; she masturbates constantly to a life-sized pillow with Mommy 6.0’s face on it. Her longing for Mommy is the result of a self-shattering cruelty, a symptom of her isolation and exploitation. That affection is masochistic, because it sustains Rachel in a perpetual state of pain. Watching Mommy perform offers momentary satisfaction without relief, further intensifying the distance between longing and fulfillment. Rachel is therefore forever suspended in this state of arousing, painful desire; she does not seek escape from this pain, because it is the longing that fuels her.
By the end of the film, Rachel finally meets Mommy face to face in a simulated world of her own design, yet the encounter produces nothing. The expected relief of meeting her is experienced as loss; a shattering of self without pleasure because it is devoid of tension. Disappointed, Rachel turns Mommy “off” and she disappears behind a curtain. She then faces her audience—now reduced to Poorspigga alone—and asks to be rated. Poorspiga gives her a 10, and Rachel smiles. In this final moment, it becomes clear that Rachel never wanted Mommy’s love; she wanted the love that Mommy received. What Rachel desired was approval and validation of her performance, of her self.
Bersani’s language helps make sense of the film’s depiction of social media as a masochistic structure: we return to what shatters us, finding satisfaction not in resolution but repetition. As Tolentino notes, social media “positions personal identity as the center of the universe,” profiting from longing and validation that never resolves, only intensifies. The question that follows is one of power. In “Is the Rectum a Grave,” Bersani approaches this through relations of subordination and domination, arguing that power is most starkly felt where control over the self falters. While power promises mastery, Bersani points to the unspoken appeal in powerlessness, describing the relief found in the loss of control as the “radical disintegration and humiliation of the self.” What matters here is not “jouissance” itself, but the discomfort in admitting that powerlessness can be desirable.
RachelOrmont makes this dynamic clear, collapsing the distinction between consumer and performer. When Rachel is promoted within NAAA, she must perform live advertisements for a vibrator company. Isolated in a green room, Rachel’s life as a performer is revealed to be highly restricted. Her performance is projected as a realistic hologram on stage before an unseen audience. She cannot see the crowd, only a small monitor showing a flattened version of herself while audience comments scroll past in text. Rachel initially finds pleasure masturbating to the “flat” version of herself on the screen, but that pleasure quickly becomes pain. She’s not allowed to stop until the company allows, and any attempt to do so results in electric shock. Whether a consumer or a performer, both roles submit to the institution of social media, both sides endure pain as anticipatory tension of self-satisfaction, a feeling that never arrives other than in the accompaniment of pain.
Taken together, the film’s depiction of the masochistic desire to be online forces audiences to confront the fact that they, too, must actually seek powerlessness when they use social media. This confession shatters the illusion of social media as a means of controlling the representation of the self. Instead, it reveals an act of submission to the demands of the internet, a bending to the will of an illusory, distorted audience whose assessment comes to dominate one’s perception of the self. As Bersani writes, “it is the self that swells with excitement at the idea of being on top,” clinging to the fantasies of mastery even as it participates in its own submission.
In their book, Intimacies, Bersani and Adam Phillips explain that systems of power naturally profit from confession— making subjects visible, legible, and willing participants in their own subjection. RachelOrmont frames social media in similar terms, as a dominant structure that functions as a confessional platform. For subjects to willingly participate, Bersani and Phillips suggest that they must desire something in return. Rachel remains bound to NAAA because it promises a sense of self-security. She desires stability, a fixed sense of who she is, in exchange for submission. In this way, the film reveals that there is another factor within this power dynamic: the control of desires.
Intimacies also explores the idea that selfhood is constructed through the attempt of censoring and punishing desire. But desire is a mobile, ever evolving thing, and resistant to containment. In the film, NAAA manipulates Rachel’s desires into the “stable representation” of Mommy, encouraging her to pursue closeness through consumption of her videos and continued labour. What Rachel actually desires is to experience the love and validation that she projects onto Mommy—a masochistic desire that will never be fulfilled. Through NAAA’s control, the movie shows how social media promises a stable self while keeping identity permanently unsteady.
Www.RachelOrmont.com is a work of art produced from the Dimes Square nihilistic belief of the online world as meaningless and exploitative. But the film takes it further and suggests something more uncomfortable: that people online are complicit, and masochistically experience pleasure through the submission of the self. Both Vack’s film and the Dimes scene depict powerlessness as a contemporary condition of selfhood.
If social media is where we look to determine who we are, then engaging seriously with RachelOrmont requires admitting an openness to its claims. But to accept its claims is to admit a mass pursuit of powerlessness. Rejection, then, becomes an act of self-preservation. By confining the film—and the Dimes Square scene more broadly—to the online realm alone, audiences reinforce the distinction between the digital and the physical as a way of asserting control over their self. As Bersani and Phillips note, a sense of “mastery over the external world swells the triumphant ego,” stabilizing identity through the rejection of what threatens it.
Criticism of the film can be read as a defensive response to this exposure. Rachel’s lack of agency, exaggerated through dystopian excess, mirrors the viewer’s own condition too closely. Cast as dependent and immature, she becomes a figure through which the fantasy of mastery is unsettled. The discomfort of the film lies in its insistence that one finds pleasure and relief in powerlessness. And in fact, one may very well choose powerlessness everyday each time they open a social media app.
Distinguishing the boundary between the internet and the physical world reinforces the feeling of control, while simultaneously revealing an underlying insecurity: the refusal to admit that the self is unstable and the masochistic relief of powerlessness. Dimes Square leans into the dissolution of the self, and exports like RachelOrmont invite its audiences to do the same—or at least acknowledge that the performance of the self may no longer stop at the screen. After all, like Bersani and Phillips said, “to think we possessed power over selfhood was always an illusion.”
Www.RachelOrmont.com ultimately dissolves the self into an inanimate object, symbolic of a security that is never meant to be fulfilled and most pleasurable in the pursuit of it. Powerlessness is but a coping mechanism, a natural desire for relief from the endless hunt for security, for certainty, for stability. If this rhetoric is arising in contemporary art, it suggests that there is a truth to it or, at the very least, something to be heard. Perhaps Www.RachelOrmont.com is transgressive. Perhaps the Dimes Square scene does mean something. And perhaps what is exposed is not new, but newly unavoidable.
