The Individual’s Guide to User Optimization: Tao Lin “on” the Internet

Abstract This article examines Tao Lin’s drug writing as a record of human consciousness at the intersection of the digital and the chemical, using media theory, literary history, and perspectives from the biosciences to argue that drugs act like technologies, creating environments that correspond to their sociohistorical contexts and optimize their “users” in ways inextricable from neoliberal logics of enhancement. A close look at the texture of quotidian drug use recorded by a writer concerned with the relationship between technology and consciousness asks us to consider “drugs” as a broader category of mediation between bodies and environments, individuals and systems, and the fraught, increasingly blurry line between being “on” and being “off.”