The Twittering Machine - Richard Seymour Flashcards
Introduction
Like drug addicts, we are users, waiting for our next hit as we like, comment and share.
We write to the machine as individuals but it responds by aggregating our fantasies, desires and vulnerabilities into data, and returning them to us as a commodity experience.
Those who enjoy the social media platforms tend to like the fact that they give them a shot at being heard.
Scripturient - having a strong urge to write
WE ARE ALL CONNECTED
We are not so much writing as being written. We generate data through writing, and the data is then used to shape (write) us.
What do the platforms offers us, in lieu of wage? What gets us hooked? Approval, attention, retweets, shares, likes.
The nuance added by social media platforms is they they don’t necessarily have to spy on us. They have created a machine for us to write to. The bait is that we are interacting with our friends. We are not interacting with them, however, but with the machine. We write to it, and it passes on the message for us, after keeping a record of the data.
The logic of algorithms means that we have often, in a sense, written the content, collectively. We are writing even when searching, scrolling, hovering, watching and clicking through.
Now the data platforms know us better than we know ourselves, and they can help shape and create markets in real time.
To talk about social media is to talk about the fact that our social lives are more and more mediated. Online proxies for friendships and affection - ‘likes’, and so on - significantly reduce the stakes of interacting, while also making interactions far more volatile.
Social media sites rely on a ‘social validation feedback loop’ too ensure that they monopolise as much of the user’s time as possible. This is because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.
Social media giants have created addiction machines, not as an accident, but as a logical means to return value to their venture capital investors.
If social media is an addiction machine, the addictive behaviour it is closest to is gambling: a rigged lottery.
On social media, you press send ‘rolling the dice’. The internet will tell you who you are, and what your destiny is through arithmetic ‘likes’, ‘shares’ and ‘comments’.
Our social media accounts are set up like enterprises competing for eyeball attention.
Going viral, or ‘trending’ is the equivalent of a windfall.
People who stay away from social media are less interested in controlling how other people think of them, implying that social media addiction Is partly a self-medication for depression, and partly a way of curating a better self in the eyes of others. These 2 factors may not be unrelated.
For those who are curating a self, social media notifications work as a form of clickbait. Notifications light up reward centres of the brain.
If we get hooked on a machine that purports to tell us, among other things, how other people see us - or a version of ourselves, a delegated online image - that suggests something has already gone wrong in our relationships with others.
There is a particularly strong correlation between depression and the use of Instagram among young people.
The only way to to conform successfully on the internet is to be unutterably bland and platitudinous.
One’s whole online life can be spent sharing ‘empowering memes’, ‘uplifting’ quotations and viral video clickbait.
It can make the production and maintenance of online identities imperative, exhausting and time-consuming.
To inhabit social media is to be in a state of constant distractedness, a junkie fixation on keeping in touch with it, knowing where it is and how to get it.
The spectacle, which the French Situationist Guy Debora defined as the mediation of social reality through an image, is no longer organised by large, centralised bureaucracies. Instead, it has been devolved to advertising, entertainment and social media.
Debord argues that the history of social life can be understood as “the decline of being into having, and having into merely appearing.”
This condition is the “historical moment at which the commodity completes its colonisation of social life.”
Social media has added a unique synthesis of neighbourhood watch, a 24 hour infotainment channel and a stock exchange (with volatility of financial markets)
Infotainment = broadcast material which is intended both to entertain and to inform
WE ARE ALL ADDICTS
‘It was supposed to be a happy button. Instead it created addicted, distracted, unhappy users. It was cyber-crack.’
Whether or not we think we are addicted, the machine treats us as addicts.
Addiction is all about attention.
Facebook piously claims that it doesn’t sell user data, but the idea was to use the data to quantify, manipulate and sell user attention.
Once these unnaturally large dopamine rewards flood into the brain, we lose our willpower.
Facebook introduced the ‘like’ button to replace redundant expressions of sentiment in comments threads with low-effort, quantifiable expressions of emotion.
Addiction is the motivated repetition of a thought or behaviour. The more we repeat an action, the more we train our brains for further repetition.
We prefer the machine when human relationships have become disappointing.
Social media is a fridge which has something new in it every time we look.
Most smartphone apps use ‘intermittent variable rewards’ to keep users hooked.
Affection and romantic excitement can be accumulated in an objectified form as ‘likes’ and ‘matches’. But it is the fantasy, the wish fulfilment of the poor
The ‘like’ button is the pivot of the ‘Skinner box’ model - the administration of rewards and punishments - in the struggle for the attention economy.
Our interactions with the machine are CONDITIONED. The user experience is designed like the ‘Skinner box’. In this chamber, the behaviour of laboratory rates was conditioned by stimuli - lights, noises and food. Each of these stimuli constituted a ‘reinforcement’ either positive or negative, which would rewards some forms of behaviour and discourage others. Test subjects are taught how to behave through conditioning.
Social media is the real-life operating chamber/laboratory.
This is the new ‘surveillance capitalism’.
Social media platforms administer ‘social approval’ in metrically precise doses. We are asking for judgement.
The Twitter shitstorm is not a form of accountability. Nor is it political pedagogy, regardless of the high-minded intentions or sadism, of the participants. No one is learning anything, except how to remain connected to the machine. It is a punishment beating, its ecstasies sanctioned by virtue. Twitter has democratised punishment.
WE ARE ALL CELEBRITIES
Neuroscientists tell us that, physically, the brain cannot focus on more than one ‘attention-rich input’ at a time.
It can take over half an hour or recover full attention once distracted.
In every game of social comparison, we pay most attention to those above us.
Social media have normalised unprecedented surveillance.
Social media are not moral arbiters. They are agnostic about what users post because their trade is in attention - an abstract commodity - not content.
Social media continually involves procuring a self-portrait to admire. It fuses narcissism to a self-image made out of the quantified ‘reactions’ of other users.
Now the self is the commodity. Doubly so, because at the same time as we are producing a commodity-image version of ourselves, we are also producing the dat about ourselves that enables the social media platforms to sell us to advertisers. We truly are the product.
The question is not how much self-love is communally acceptable, but whether we can attend to something more satisfying.
The more compulsively we curate the self, the less we live. We may find it helpful to forget ourselves from time to time (a form of anti-identity politics).
To remember that one is king is also to be apprised that one is living under a tyranny. To value oneself too highly is to live under a one-person dictatorship, with a dissenting remainder that yearns for its overthrow.
What if we treated our attention as too valuable to waste?
WE ARE ALL LIARS
Facebook automatically selects for information that is impressive and seductive, rather than accurate or even meaningful. It degrades the ecology of information, while inflating it and adding a new volatility it. It radically accelerates the existing drive to infuse journalism with the imperatives of amusement and entertainment.
Michiko Kakutani argues that the crisis of knowing is a legacy of the ‘postmodernist’ assault on knowledge and the Enlightenment.
The theory that postmodernism has promoted a pernicious subjectivism which relativises truth to such an extreme degree that it provides cover to right-wing science-deniers, is ubiquitous.
The global financial crisis had damning implications for the economics profession.
We make a fundamental mistake if we assume that an increase in information corresponds to an increase in knowledge.
Information is entropy. The more uncertainty, the more information. An increase in information could be proportionate a reduction in meaning.
The production of information on social media is solely of the purpose of producing effects on users that keep us hooked.
What if information is like sugar, and a high-information diet is a benchmark of cultural poverty? What if information, beyond a certain point, is toxic?
WE ARE ALL DYING
The ‘red pill’ is a metaphor used by right-wing activists for the process of ideological conversion.
Social media does not deal in truth; it deals in addictive substances, which it administers to the melancholic.
YouTube may be one of the most powerful radicalising instruments of the 21st century.
Social media tools ‘materialise’ the neo-liberal ideology - the way in which users think of themselves as ‘entrepreneurs’ that tech geeks idealise. It’s a stock market of status.
The platforms are the most efficient means thus far of objectifying and quantifying social life. However, they don’t just survey and measure social life; they produce it and programme it.
The platforms magnify our mobbishness, our demand for conformity, our sadism and our crankish preoccupation with being right on all subjects. This despotic rectitude is allied with ‘swarm’ propensities - a metaphor for the 21st century version of fascist street gangs.
The spread of smartphone ownership has expedited the colonisation of life by these attention-seeking industries.
No one consciously sets out to devote themselves to the machine, to become its addict.
Given the time this addiction demands of us, we are entitled to ask what else we might be doing, what else we could be addicted to.
A near-death experience often forces us to take a more executive view, to see our micro-decisions in the context of an absolute scarcity of life.
We still read, but differently. We read less for edification than to be productive: scanning and scavenging material from a flow of messages and notifications.
We are only happy to drop into the dead-zone trance because of whatever is disappointing in the world of the living.
We need to free up our time and energy and shape them to better purpose. We need something to long for, the better to devise grander escaplogies.
There is something to be said for refusing to be in the know.
