#max read

The social industry doesn’t just eat our time with endless stimulus and algorithmic scrolling; it eats our time by creating and promoting people who exist only to be explained to, people to whom the world has been created anew every morning, people for whom every settled sociological, scientific, and political argument of modernity must be rehashed, rewritten, and re-accounted, this time with their participation. These people, with their just-asking questions and vapid open letters, are dullards and bores, pettifoggers and casuists, cowards and dissemblers, time-wasters of the worst sort. But Seymour’s book suggests something worse about us, their Twitter and Facebook interlocutors: That we want to waste our time. That, however much we might complain, we find satisfaction in endless, circular argument. That we get some kind of fulfillment from tedious debates about “free speech” and “cancel culture.” That we seek oblivion in discourse. In the machine-flow atemporality of social media, this seems like no great crime. If time is an infinite resource, why not spend a few decades of it with a couple New York Times op-ed columnists, rebuilding all of Western thought from first principles? But political and economic and immunological crises pile on one another in succession, over the background roar of ecological collapse. Time is not infinite. None of us can afford to spend what is left of it dallying with the stupid and bland.

By 2021, when Buzzfeed finally went public, it was clear that the scale→???→profit model was not going to work out. The 2010s are over; subscriptions are the future (for now); for advertising-based businesses, the best bet is to build reliably visited homepages like it’s 1997 again. At Slate Hillary Frey calls the decade “a detour” for journalism, which is fine as a quick and dirty metaphor but I think suggests too much that newsmedia is a powerful agent bushwacking a path to success, instead of a pathetic, sweaty interloper trying to outrun a big boulder like Indiana Jones.

[Richard Seymour's] The Twittering Machine is powered by an insight at once obvious and underexplored: we have, in the world of the social industry, become “scripturient—possessed by a violent desire to write, incessantly.” Our addiction to social media is, at its core, a compulsion to write. Through our comments, updates, DMs, and searches, we are volunteers in a great “collective writing experiment.” Those of us who don’t peck out status updates on our keyboards are not exempt. We participate too, “behind our backs as it were,” creating hidden (written) records of where we clicked, where we hovered, how far we scrolled, so that even reading, within the framework of the Twittering Machine, becomes a kind of writing. The rise of print, Seymour points out, played a crucial role in developing the idea of the modern nation, not to mention the bureaucratic state and “industrial civilization.” Now that epoch is ending, and a new revolution in literacy is extending the ability to write in public to billions of people worldwide. What will our new digital-writing culture call into existence? … slavish devotion to the social or biological “incentives” of the platforms is an insufficient explanation of our “scripturience.” If we are compelled to write, it is because of “something in us that is waiting to be addicted”—a lack, a desire, a deficiency that we seek to address. Is it a longing for connection? A yearning for fame? If so, posting is a poor strategy: you are as likely to lose friends as you are to make them, and online celebrity is only ever 240 characters away from online infamy. So why do we keep participating in an activity that acts against our interests and gives us no particular pleasure? “Is self destruction, in some perverse way, the yield?” Seymour wonders. In other words: get in, loser, we’re going beyond the pleasure principle. What if the urge lurking behind our compulsive participation in the Twittering Machine is not the behavioralist pursuit of maximized pleasure, but the Freudian death drive—our latent instinct toward inorganic oblivion, destruction, self-obliteration, “the ratio”? What if we post self-sabotaging things because we want to sabotage ourselves? What if the reason we tweet is because we wish we were dead? On the one hand, that sounds like Freudian mumbo jumbo. On the other hand, speaking as a frequent user of social media, that . . . seems about right to me. What the Twittering Machine offers is not death, precisely, but oblivion—an escape from consciousness into numb atemporality, a trance-like “dead zone” of indistinguishably urgent stimulus. Seymour compares the “different, timeless, time zone” of the Twittering Machine to what the gambling-addiction expert Natasha Dow Schüll calls the “machine zone,” in which “time, space, and social identity are suspended in the mechanical rhythm of a repeating process.” You might say that “Twitter is not real life,” a line intended as a kind of cutting warning, serves equally as an advertisement for the platform. But what is at stake here is not “reality.” It’s time. Seymour compares the Twittering Machine to the chronophage, “a monster that eats time.” We give ourselves over to it “because of whatever is disappointing in the world of the living,” but we do so at great cost. “Given the time this addiction demands of us,” Seymour writes, “we are entitled to ask what else we might be doing, what else we could be addicted to." … These people, with their just-asking questions and vapid open letters, are dullards and bores, pettifoggers and casuists, cowards and dissemblers, time-wasters of the worst sort. But Seymour’s book suggests something worse about us, their Twitter and Facebook interlocutors: That we want to waste our time. That, however much we might complain, we find satisfaction in endless, circular argument. That we get some kind of fulfillment from tedious debates about “free speech” and “cancel culture.” That we seek oblivion in discourse. In the machine-flow atemporality of social media, this seems like no great crime. If time is an infinite resource, why not spend a few decades of it with a couple New York Times op-ed columnists, rebuilding all of Western thought from first principles? But political and economic and immunological crises pile on one another in succession, over the background roar of ecological collapse. Time is not infinite. None of us can afford to spend what is left of it dallying with the stupid and bland.

Perhaps the best lens to examine compulsive, unproductive, inexplicable use of social media is not technical, or sociological, or economic, but psychoanalytic. In which case, rather than asking what is wrong with these systems, we might ask, “What is wrong with us?” […] The writing and thinking emerging from the anti-social-media “techlash” of the past few years has tended to focus on malevolent design choices and business models that supposedly keep users hooked on the big platforms. “The problem,” ex-Google “design ethicist” Tristan Harris told Wired in 2017, “is the hijacking of the human mind.” According to tech critics and industry apostates like Harris and former Facebookers Sean Parker and Chamath Palihapitiya, the brains of users are overtaken by “dopamine feedback loops” “exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology” to reap profits from an attention-driven business model. But as radical (and conspiratorial) as such explanations of social media’s power might sound, they rely on the same techno-determinism that Silicon Valley’s boosters have been pushing for decades: just as networks would inevitably turn everyone into a liberal democratic subject, they now inevitably turn us into slavering zombies. Fundamentally conservative, this school of thought finds its solutions in narrow technical reformism: tweak this algorithm, move these numbers, ban these users, and everything will be fixed. It’s not that the accounts of people like Harris are illegitimate—the social industry was designed as a behavioralist casino; it relates to us, even constitutes us, as addicts, “users” whose natural state is devoted attention to the object of our addiction. But such techno-determinism renders all of us passive objects, our very brain chemistry at the mercy of a small handful of Harvard dorks with admin privileges. Are we really captive to our devices in quite so direct or helpless away? [Richard] Seymour doesn’t buy it, and worries that just-so stories about addiction are disempowering and limiting. “To reduce experience to chemistry”—those dreaded dopamine feedback loops—“is to bypass what is essential to it: its meaning,” he writes. His rejection of determinism isn’t a recourse to personal responsibility, but a warning: regulation will not cure us, and reform won’t save us. If we live in a “horror story, the horror must partly lie in the user.”

[Richard] Seymour is cautious here. As he points out, we’ve only just set aside prophecies of inevitable, internet-borne emancipation, and we should be careful not to make the same confident mistake in reverse, with moralizing, panicked screeds about inescapable algorithmic radicalization. What is scarier, anyway, than the idea that we’re trapped on a collision course with TikTok totalitarianism is Seymour’s insistence that we’re not “trapped” at all—that, in fact, “we are part of the machine, and we find our satisfactions in it, however destructive they may be.” Whatever dark future we hurtle toward, we are copilots on the journey. It’s for this reason that slavish devotion to the social or biological “incentives” of the platforms is an insufficient explanation of our “scripturience.” If we are compelled to write, it is because of “something in us that is waiting to be addicted”—a lack, a desire, a deficiency that we seek to address. Is it a longing for connection? A yearning for fame? If so, posting is a poor strategy: you are as likely to lose friends as you are to make them, and online celebrity is only ever 240 characters away from online infamy. So why do we keep participating in an activity that acts against our interests and gives us no particular pleasure? “Is self destruction, in some perverse way, the yield?” Seymour wonders. In other words: get in, loser, we’re going beyond the pleasure principle. What if the urge lurking behind our compulsive participation in the Twittering Machine is not the behavioralist pursuit of maximized pleasure, but the Freudian death drive—our latent instinct toward inorganic oblivion, destruction, self-obliteration, “the ratio”? What if we post self-sabotaging things because we want to sabotage ourselves? What if the reason we tweet is because we wish we were dead? On the one hand, that sounds like Freudian mumbo jumbo. On the other hand, speaking as a frequent user of social media, that . . . seems about right to me. What the Twittering Machine offers is not death, precisely, but oblivion—an escape from consciousness into numb atemporality, a trance-like “dead zone” of indistinguishably urgent stimulus. Seymour compares the “different, timeless, time zone” of the Twittering Machine to what the gambling-addiction expert Natasha Dow Schüll calls the “machine zone,” in which “time, space, and social identity are suspended in the mechanical rhythm of a repeating process.” You might say that “Twitter is not real life,” a line intended as a kind of cutting warning, serves equally as an advertisement for the platform. But what is at stake here is not “reality.” It’s time. Seymour compares the Twittering Machine to the chronophage, “a monster that eats time.” We give ourselves over to it “because of whatever is disappointing in the world of the living,” but we do so at great cost. “Given the time this addiction demands of us,” Seymour writes, “we are entitled to ask what else we might be doing, what else we could be addicted to.”