We develop the concept of embodied post-digital intimacy to show how Intimacy emerges through assemblages of platforms, objects, bodies, spaces, consumption, and affective labor.💫

We examine two intimate practices through which players bring relationships with virtual characters into everyday life:Cotton dolls as tactile avatars and affective anchors that create enduring presence;Cosplay commission dates as embodied,multisensory but time-bounded encounters

What makes a virtual relationship materially livable? Our article, "Materializing the Virtual? Post-digital intimacy and women players of otome video games in China," is now published in the Journal of Consumer Culture! doi.org/10.1177/146954052614…

6/ So the question is not whether humans are becoming 'too attached' to AI. It is who designs these intimate relationships, whose interests they serve, and which forms of human connectivity and intimate practices they reshape or displace.

5/ These apps are built to be hard to put down. That is not a side effect of the design. It is the design. Regulating the user, rather than the incentive, leaves the engine running.

4/ Effective governance has to look past particular interactions to what produces them: commercial incentives, design choices, data practices, and the social conditions that make synthetic intimate practices so compelling in the first place.

3/But rules aimed at individual usage will only go so far. Users move to specialist services such as Xingye, Maoxiang. They reach foreign LLM platforms through VPNs. They run models locally. The relationship outlives the regulation.

2/The rules matter: China has recognised AI companions as more than technological products. These apps are becoming essential part of people's emotional and social lives, raising real questions about dependency, intimacy, childhood, and platform responsibility.

China is trying to regulate how people fall in love with AI. I spoke to @newscientist about the new rules, and about why regulating individual usage may be the least effective place to intervene. 🧵newscientist.com/article/258…

4/ The pivot is qing 情, which I hold as a precise analytical term rather than a synonym for emotion or affect: the inter-subjective, somatic bond from which affect and desire become legible to the reader.

3/ Four coexisting modes in negotiating with AI: strategic collaboration, cyborg authorship, conditional refusal, and narrative incorporation.

2/ The GenAl debate still largely runs on a binary: substitution or augmentation. That binary dissolves at the writer's desk. What I found instead is 'sympoietic creativity': a fraught and strategic practice of 'making-with' the machine

My New article, out today in Al & Society, open access! 🔥🔥🔥 Four years of digital ethnography and interviews with 34 digital romance writers on Jinjiang Literature City, where visibility and income depend on 3,000 to 6,000 words a day, every day.

6/ Theoretically I build on misogyny-as-affect (Harrington 2025; Ahmed; Manne), Banet-Weiser on popular feminism/misogyny as co-constitutive, and Ross on calling in vs calling out. Solidarity in the platform era is not given. It's a fragile, mediated achievement.