The Twittering Machine
Page 1
THE
INDIGO
PRESS
THE TWITTERING MACHINE
THE
INDIGO
PRESS
The Twittering Machine, Paul Klee, 1922
The Museum of Modern Art © Photo SCALA, Florence.
THE TWITTERING MACHINE
RICHARD SEYMOUR
THE
INDIGO
PRESS
THE INDIGO PRESS
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COPYRIGHT © RICHARD SEYMOUR 2019
Richard Seymour asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Paul Klee image: © Klee, Paul (1879–1940):
Twittering Machine (Zwitscher-Maschine), 1922. New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Watercolour, and pen and ink on oil transfer drawing on paper, mounted on cardboard; comp. sheet 16 1/4 x 12" (41.3 x 30.5 cm), mount sheet 25 1/4 x 19" (63.8 x 48.1 cm). Purchase. 564.1939. © 019. Digital image © 2019, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence
To the Luddites
CONTENTS
FOREWORD
ONE: WE ARE ALL CONNECTED
TWO: WE ARE ALL ADDICTS
THREE: WE ARE ALL CELEBRITIES
FOUR: WE ARE ALL TROLLS
FIVE: WE ARE ALL LIARS
SIX: WE ARE ALL DYING
CONCLUSION: WE ARE ALL SCRIPTURIENT
REFERENCES AND BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
FOREWORD
Everything on the computer is writing. Everything on the net is writing in sites, files and protocols.
Sandy Baldwin, The Internet Unconscious
The Twittering Machine is a horror story, even though it is about technology that is in itself neither good nor bad. All technology, as the historian Melvin Kranzberg put it, is ‘neither good nor bad; nor neutral’.1
We tend to ascribe magical powers to technologies: the smartphone is our golden ticket, the tablet our mystic writing pad. In technology, we find our own alienated powers in a moralized form: either a benevolent genie or a tormenting demon. These are paranoid fantasies, whether or not they seem malign, because in them we are at the mercy of the devices. So, if this is a horror story, the horror must partly lie in the user: a category that includes me, and probably most of the people reading this book.
If the Twittering Machine confronts us with a string of calamities – addiction, depression, ‘fake news’, trolls, online mobs, alt-right subcultures – it is only exploiting and magnifying problems that are already socially pervasive. If we’ve found ourselves addicted to social media, in spite or because of its frequent nastiness, as I have, then there is something in us that is waiting to be addicted. Something that social media potentiates. And if, with all these problems, we still inhabit the social media platforms – as over half the world’s population does – we must be getting something out of it. The dreary moral-panic literature excoriating ‘the shallows’ and the ‘post-truth’ society must be missing a vital truth about their subject.
Those who enjoy the social media platforms tend to like the fact that they give them a shot at being heard. It weakens the monopoly on culture and meaning formerly enjoyed by media and entertainment companies. Access isn’t equal – reach is bought and paid for by corporate users, PR agencies, celebrities, and so on, who also have better-funded content – but it can still give marginalized voices a chance where previously they had none. And it rewards quickness, wit, cleverness, play, and certain types of creativity – even if it also rewards darker pleasures, such as sadism and spite.
And if the use of social media unsettles political systems, this isn’t entirely bad news for those traditionally excluded by those systems. The once-hyped idea of ‘Twitter revolutions’ vastly exaggerated the role of social media in popular uprisings, and these have since been overtaken by darker forces embedded in social media, from ISIS to Men’s Rights Activists (MRA) killers. But there are times when the flow of information between citizens makes all the difference; times when the traditional news media can’t be relied on; times when the possibilities of social media can be put to good use. Times, generally, of crisis.
Nonetheless, the crucial part of Kranzberg’s observation is that technology is never neutral. And the crucial technology, in this story, is writing. A practice that binds humans and machines in a pattern of relationships, without which most of what we call civilization is impossible. Writing technologies, being foundational to our ways of life, are never socially or politically neutral in their effects. Anyone who has lived through the rise of the internet, the spread of the smartphone and the ascent of social media platforms will have seen a remarkable shift taking place. As writing has morphed from analogue to digital, it has become massively ubiquitous. Never before in human history have people written so much, so frantically: texting, tweeting, thumb-typing on public transport, updating statuses during work breaks, scrolling and clicking in front of glowing screens at 3 a.m. To some extent, this is an extension of changes in the workplace, where computer-mediated communication means that writing takes up an ever-larger share of production. And, indeed, there is an important sense in which the writing we’re doing now is work, albeit unpaid. But it is also indicative of new, or unleashed, passions.
We are, abruptly, scripturient – possessed by a violent desire to write, incessantly. So, this is a story about desire and violence, as well as writing. It is also a story about what we might be writing ourselves into, culturally and politically. It is not an authoritative account: that is impossible this early in the evolution of a radically new techno-political system. This book is an attempt, as much as anything else, to work out a new language for thinking about what is coming into being. And finally, if we are all going to be writers, it is a story that asks the minimal utopian question: what else could we be doing with writing, if not this?
CHAPTER ONE
WE ARE ALL CONNECTED
There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.
Umberto Eco, ‘Ur-Fascism’
In 1922, the surrealist Paul Klee invented the Twittering Machine. In the painting, a row of stick-figure birds clutches an axle, turned by a crank. Below the device where the voices squawk discordantly is a reddened pit. The Museum of Modern Art explains: ‘the birds function as bait to lure victims to the pit over which the machine hovers.’1 Somehow, the holy music of birdsong has been mechanized, deployed as a lure, for the purpose of human damnation.
I.
In the beginning was the knot. Before text, there was textiles.
From about five thousand years ago, the Inca civilization used quipus, coloured strands of knotted string, to store information, usually for accounting purposes. They w
ere sometimes called ‘talking knots’, and they were read with practised motions of the hand, much as Braille is today. But every beginning is, to some extent, arbitrary. We could just as well start with cave painting.
The ‘Chinese Horse’ in Dordogne is more than twenty thousand years old. The image is spare. The animal has some objects protruding from it which might be spears or arrows. Hovering above is an abstract design which looks like a square pitchfork. Here, surely, is writing: marks on a surface intended to represent something for someone else. One could also begin with clay engravings, notches on bone or wood, hieroglyphs, or even – if you take a very narrow view of what writing is – the blessed alphabet.
To begin with knots is just to stress that writing is matter, and that the way the texture of our writing materials shapes and contours what can be written makes all the difference in the world.
II.
During the fifteenth century, sheep began to eat people. Thomas More wondered how animals ‘that were wont to be so meke and tame, and so smal eaters’ could have turned carnivore.2 He blamed enclosures. The emerging agrarian capitalist class found that they could do better business rearing sheep to sell wool on the international markets, than if they allowed peasants to subsist on the land. Sheep ate; people starved.
In the nineteenth century, the Luddites exhorted against another paradox: the tyranny of machines over human beings. The Luddites were textile workers, who noticed the way the owners were using the machinery to undermine the bargaining position of workers and accelerate their exploitation. A proto-labour movement, they used the only disruptive tactic available to them: they smashed the machines. But to little avail in the long run, as work was more and more automated and taken under managerial control. Machines operated the workers.
Something similar is happening to writing. At first, says historian Warren Chappell, writing and print were one and the same thing: ‘They both begin with the leaving of footprints.’3 As though writing were both the journey and the map, a record of where the mind has been. Printed matter, arguably the first authentically capitalist commodity, has been the dominant format of public writing almost since the invention of the movable-type printing press almost six hundred years ago. Without print capitalism and the ‘imagined communities’ it helped call into existence, modern nations would not exist.4 The development of modern bureaucratic states would have been impeded. Most of what we call industrial civilization, and the scientific and technological developments it depends upon, would have come, if at all, far more slowly.
Now, though, like everything else, writing is being restructured around the format of the computer. Billions of people, above all in the world’s richest countries, are writing more than ever before, on our phones, tablets, laptops and desktop computers. And we are not so much writing, as being written. This is not really about ‘social media’. The term ‘social media’ is too widely used to be wished away, but we should at least put it in question. It is a form of shorthand propaganda.5 All media, and all machines, are social. Machines are social before they are technological, as the historian Lewis Mumford wrote. Long before the advent of the digital platforms, the philosopher Gilbert Simondon explored the ways in which tools generate social relationships. A tool is, first, the medium of a relationship between a body and the world. It connects users in a set of relationships with one another and the world around them. Moreover, the conceptual schema from which tools are generated can be transferred to new contexts, thus generating new types of relationship. To talk about technologies is to talk about societies.
This is about a social industry. As an industry it is able, through the production and harvesting of data, to objectify and quantify social life in numerical form. As William Davies has argued, its unique innovation is to make social interactions visible and susceptible to data analytics and sentiment analysis.6 This makes social life eminently susceptible to manipulation on the part of governments, parties and companies who buy data services. But more than that, it produces social life; it programmes it. This is what it means when we spend more hours tapping on the screen than talking to anyone face to face; that our social life is governed by algorithm and protocol. When Theodore Adorno wrote of the ‘culture industry’, arguing that culture was being universally commodified and homogenized, it was arguably an elitist simplification. Even the Hollywood production-line showed more variation than Adorno admitted. The social industry, by contrast, has gone much further, subjecting social life to an invariant written formula.
This is about the industrialization of writing. It is about the code (the writing) which shapes how we use it, the data (another form of writing) which we generate in doing so, and the way in which that data is used to shape (write) us.
III.
We are swimming in writing. Our lives have become, in the words of Shoshana Zuboff, an ‘electronic text’.7 More and more of reality is being brought under the surveillance of the chip.
While some platforms are about enabling industry to make its work processes more legible, more transparent and thus more manageable, data platforms like Google, Twitter and Facebook turn their attention to consumer markets. They intensify surveillance, rendering abruptly visible huge substrata of behaviour and wishes that had been occulted, and making price signals and market research look rather quaint by comparison. Google accumulates data by reading our emails, monitoring our searches, collecting images of our homes and towns on Street View and recording our locations on Google Maps. And, thanks to an agreement with Twitter, it also checks our tweets.
The nuance added by social industry’s platforms is that 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 other people: our friends, professional colleagues, celebrities, politicians, royals, terrorists, porn actors – anyone we like. 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 machine benefits from the ‘network effect’: the more people write to it, the more benefits it can offer, until it becomes a disadvantage not to be part of it. Part of what? The world’s first ever public, live, collective, open-ended writing project. A virtual laboratory. An addiction machine, which deploys crude techniques of manipulation redolent of the ‘Skinner Box’ created by behaviourist B. F. Skinner to control the behaviour of pigeons and rats with rewards and punishments.8 We are ‘users’, much as cocaine addicts are ‘users’.
What is the incentive to engage in writing like this for hours each day? In a form of mass casualization, writers no longer expect to be paid or given employment contracts. What do the platforms offer us, in lieu of a wage? What gets us hooked? Approval, attention, retweets, shares, likes.
This is the Twittering Machine: not the infrastructure of fibre-optic cables, database servers, storage systems, software and code. It is the machinery of writers, and writing, and the feedback loop they inhabit. The Twittering Machine thrives on its celerity, informality and interactivity. The protocols of the Twitter platform, for example, centred on its 280-character limit on posting length, encourage people to post quickly and often. One study suggests that 92 per cent of all activity and engagement with tweets happens within the first hour of the post being made. The feed has an extremely rapid turnover, so that anything which is posted will, unless it ‘goes viral’, tend to be quickly forgotten by most followers. The system of ‘followers’, ‘@ing’ and threading encourages sprawling conversations to develop from initial tweets, favouring constant interaction. This is what people like about it, what makes it engaging: it is like texting, but in a public, collective context.
Meanwhile, hashtagging and ‘trending topics’ underline the extent to which all of these protocols are organized around the massification of individual voices – a phenomenon cheerfully described by users with the science fiction concept of the ‘hive mind’ – and hype. The regular sweet spot sought after is a brief period of e
cstatic collective frenzy around any given topic. It doesn’t particularly matter to the platforms what the frenzy is about: the point is to generate data, one of the most profitable raw materials yet discovered. As in the financial markets, volatility adds value. The more chaos, the better.
IV.
From print capitalism to platform capitalism, the apostles of ‘big data’ see in this story nothing but human progress. The triumph of data heralds the end of ideology, the end of theory and even the end of the scientific method, according to former editor-in-chief of Wired, Chris Anderson.9
From now on, they say, rather than conducting experiments or generating theories to understand our world, we can learn everything from mammoth data-sets. For those in need of a progressive-sounding pitch, the advantage of making markets massively more legible is that it spells an end to market mysticism. We no longer have to believe, as neo-liberal economist Friedrich Hayek did, that only markets left to their own devices could really know what people want.10 Now the data platforms know us better than we know ourselves, and they can help companies shape and create markets in real time. A new technocratic order is augured, in which computers will enable corporations and states to anticipate, respond to and mould our desires.
This fantastical, dubious prospectus is only plausible to the extent that we are writing more than we ever have, and under these very novel conditions. Estimates of social platform usage vary wildly but, to take a middling example, one survey found that American teenagers were spending nine hours a day looking at a screen, interacting with all kinds of digital media, composing emails, sending tweets, gaming and viewing clips.11 Older generations spend more of their time watching television, but they spend a similar amount of time gazing at screens – up to ten hours a day. Ten hours is more time than most people spend asleep. And the number of us checking our phones within five minutes of waking ranges from a fifth in France to two thirds in South Korea.12