Going Postal:
A psychoanalytic reading of social media and the death drive
By MAX READ.
Max Read reviews The Twittering Machine by theorist Richard Seymour, which approaches our seemingly self-destructive addiction to social media from a fresh angle. Rather than focusing on the algorithms and behavioral science behind social media usage, Seymour reflects on the psychoanalytic drives that it stimulates.
“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?”
This is the question asked by Richard Seymour in his excellent new book The Twittering Machine , which takes its title from a Paul Klee drawing—a sketch of four stick-figure birds perched on an axle cranking above a fiery trench. In it Seymour sees an allegory for the tech megaplatforms he calls “the social industry”: “Somehow,” he writes, “the holy music of birdsong has been mechanized, deployed as a lure, for the purpose of human damnation.” The Twittering Machine “confronts us with a string of calamities,” among them increasing depression, fake news, the alt-right, and fast-food brands tweeting on fleek. And yet, despite the obvious fact that it’s very bad for us, we, and about half the population of the earth, remain its inhabitants. Why do we stay on—just to pick an example—Twitter, while also referring to it as the “hell site”? “We must be getting something out of it,” Seymour writes.”
“The telos of the clickbait economy is not postmodernism, but fascist kitsch”—that some will find unbearably pretentious. Personally, I found it charming. (And correct: the telos of the clickbait economy is fascist kitsch.)"
"...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."
"Where the repressive systems built on print media depended on and enforced our silence, the social industry wants us to keep writing—and writing, and writing, and writing, rendering legible, analyzable, and profitable nearly all our basic social interaction. And while massive Facebook server farms whirring away in Scandinavia might be able to make some vague sense of all that data, the rest of us can barely hear over the noise. Each new byte of information adds confusion and entropy, and takes us further away from meaning and consequence."
“The Twittering Machine “reduces information to meaningless stimuli which it jet-sprays at us”; it “habituates us to being the manipulable conduits of informational power.” In this, Seymour grimly concludes, there is “a fascist potential.”
"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."
"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?"
"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?"