The Twittering Machine

by Richard Seymour

  Behaviourism also inspired the enormously influential discipline of behavioural economics, which extends its reach into the heart of government as well into highly profitable industries such as amusement, gambling and tech. Nir Eyal, a businessman and behavioural economist, argues that successful businesses use these techniques to get customers addicted: the ‘Hook Model’ of business.50 The idea is to use ‘rewards’ to plant an ‘internal trigger’ in the customer’s mind. If, for example, the slightest pang of loneliness, boredom or frustration makes us pick up our phones without thinking, that is an internal trigger: we’re hooked. Strikingly, Eyal’s theory rests on the radical contention that ‘there is no such thing as a “self”.51 You are just a collection of your past experiences and habits.’ The best way for a company to make a continuous profit is to be first in the queue in defining those experiences and habits.

  Skinner’s utopia shadows the Twittering Machine. Although, like all corporations, the social industy giants claim to be giving people what they want, their techniques assume that we can’t know what we want. Nor, even if they thought we did know, would they have any reason to give it to us. The machine is not a democracy, and it isn’t even a market; we are neither customers nor voters. We are digital ‘serfs’, says Jaron Lanier, the ‘livestock of a feudal demesne’, according to Bruce Sterling.52 We inhabit a laboratory, a real-life operant conditioning chamber, into which we have been lured by the promise of democratized luxury. In the early days of the internet, the promise was that we could ‘Ask Jeeves’; now we are offered ‘tools’ and ‘virtual assistants’. On that basis, millions of us have entered a web of surveillance in which we are the servants, providing endless hours of free labour. We are even subtly assigned ‘microtasks’ without noticing. Every time we fill in a Captcha, where we are asked to transcribe some letters and numbers to ‘prove we are human’ and get access to our emails, we may be helping a commercial firm digitize an archive.53 In the emerging world, free labour is extracted from customers under the guise of ‘participation’ and ‘feedback’.

  From the point of view of freedom, says Shoshana Zuboff, this new ‘surveillance capitalism’ is worse than the panopticon.54 The panopticon teaches us to conform with dominant norms. But that sort of power at least acknowledges that we might not conform. In surveillance capitalism, by contrast, the mechanisms of observation and manipulation are designed without any assumption of psychological self-determination. Conformity disappears into the machinery, an order of stimulus–response, cause and effect.

  Skinner’s techniques, coupled with the post-Cold War scientific world view, armed corporations and governments with a form of subtle, micro-level social engineering, backed up with decades of scientific research and, now, big data. In the social industry, the teaching machine became an addiction machine. And, as it transpires, it is not the classroom for which operant conditioning is best suited, but the casino.

  VI.

  What if one were to store up all the energy and passion . . . which every year is squandered . . . at the gaming tables of Europe?

  Ludwig Börne55

  The analogy between the gambler and the social media junkie is hard to avoid. Tristan Harris, Google’s former design ethicist, calls your smartphone ‘The Slot Machine in Your Pocket’.56 Most smartphone apps use ‘intermittent variable rewards’ to keep users hooked. Because rewards are variable, they are uncertain: you have to pull the lever to see what you’re going to get. Adam Alter adds that with the invention of the ‘like’ button, users are gambling every time they post. Natasha Schüll, based on her work on machine-gambling, agrees.57

  Today’s casinos are very different from the macho dice and card play organized by old-school crime bosses. At the roulette table, the gambler could justify his perverse pleasure in risk-taking as a matter of honour in competition with peers. In recent decades, however, the favoured form has moved from the table to the slot machine. And the slot machines, digital and complex, have come a long way from the days of the one-armed bandit. Now the gambler experiences no macho showdowns, just an interactive screen offering multiple permutations of odds and stakes, deploying user-experience design techniques similar to video-gaming to induce pleasure. The machines have a range of devices to give users the appearance of regular wins to keep them playing. These are often ‘losses disguised as wins’, insofar as the pay-off is less than the cost of playing. But the wins are not even the goal of playing. When we’re on the machine, Schüll finds, our goal is to stay connected.58 As one addict explains, she is not playing to win but to ‘stay in that machine zone where nothing else matters’. The gambling industry recognizes this desire to avoid social reality. It is called ‘time on device’, and everything about the machine is designed to cultivate it.

  ‘Time on device’ pinpoints something crucial about addiction. Traditionally, casinos have blocked out daylight and banned anything that conveys the sense of time passing: no windows, no clocks, and a constant supply of refreshments rather than timed meals. Some gambling-machine addicts today prefer to urinate in a paper cup rather than leave the device.59 Pubs and opium dens also have a history of blotting out daylight to allow users to enjoy themselves without the intrusion of time. The sense of dropping out of time is common to many addictions. As one former gambling addict puts it, ‘All I can remember is living in a trance for four years.’60 Schüll calls it the ‘machine zone’ where ordinary reality is ‘suspended in the mechanical rhythm of a repeating process’.61 For many addicts, the idea of facing the normal flow of time is unbearably depressing. Marc Lewis describes how even after kicking junk he couldn’t face ‘a day without a change of state’.62

  The Twittering Machine, as a wholly designed operant conditioning chamber, needs none of the expedients of the casino or opium den. The user has already dropped out of work, a boring lunch, an anxious social situation or bad sex, to enter into a different, timeless, time zone. What we do on the Twittering Machine has as much to do with what we’re avoiding as what we find when we log in – which, after all, is often not that exciting. There is no need to block out the windows because that is what the screen is already doing: screening out daylight.

  And it manages time differently. For gamblers, the only temporal rhythm that matters is the sequence of encounters with destiny, the run of luck.63 For drug users, what matters is the rhythms of the high, whether it is the ‘stationary’ effect of opium or the build, crescendo and crash of alcohol. The experience of platform users, on the other hand, is organized in a trance-like flow. The user is plunged into a stream of real-time information and disciplined to stay constantly ahead of it. Twitter highlights not the time and date of posts, but their age and thus currency: 4m, or 12h, as the case may be.

  The ensuing trance-like state, according to digital theorist David Berry, is remarkably similar to what in early stock markets was called the ‘ticker trance’.64 Financial speculators would become absorbed in watching the signals conveyed on stock market ticker tape, vigilant to every minute variation in a real-time flow. That is to say the timestamp, like the coded information on the ticker tape, is information about the state of the game. It enables users to place an informed bet.

  If social industry platforms are like casinos, then they build on the existing extension of gambling in the neo-liberal era. Whereas gambling was controlled in a paternalistic way in the post-war era, laws have been increasingly liberalized over the past forty years.65 In the UK, this change was heralded by Lord Rothschild’s Royal Commission on Gambling, and culminated in nearly wholesale liberalization with the Gambling Review Body’s recommendations in 2001. Today, the majority of Britons gamble in some form, most commonly through the National Lottery. Similar transformations have taken place in the United States and Canada, and the European Commission has pressured holdouts like Italy, Austria and France to liberalize.

  All of this has taken place concurrently with waves of financial liberalization, wherein capitalist dynamism was increasingly dependent on th
e bets and derivative bets of the stock market. And there is a logical convergence between financialization and tech. The financial sector is the most computerized sector of capitalism, and the use of software for trading has resulted in numerous efforts to ‘game the system’ – as in May 2010, when a trader’s use of algorithms to repeatedly ‘spoof’ bets against the market some nineteen thousand times, briefly caused a trillion-dollar crash.

  Culturally, the idea of life as a lottery, which only a few magical adepts know how to ‘work’, has gained widespread traction both as a folk social theory and as an explanation for human misfortune. This links gambling to destiny and divine judgement in a way that reaches back to its earliest expressions. As the late literary scholar Bettina Knapp explained, the use of gambling as a divinatory device, as a way to work out what the Supreme Being wants of us, has been found in Shintoism, Hinduism, Christianity and the I Ching.66 At several points in the Bible, the drawing or casting of lots is used to discern divine will. In essence, the lot or die is a question about fate, posed to a superpower. Something similar happens when we post a tweet or a status or an image, where we have little control over the context in which it will be seen and understood. It’s a gamble.

  The cliché holds that the social industry platforms administer ‘social approval’ in metrically precise doses. But that’s like treating gambling as though it were only about the pay-offs. Every post is a lot cast for the contemporary equivalent of the God of Everything. What we’re really asking for when we post a status is a verdict. In telling the machine something about ourselves, whatever else we’re trying to achieve, we are asking for judgement. And everyone who places a bet expects to lose.

  VII.

  Losing, and anteing up until you lose everything, is a normal part of addiction. Yet this self-destructive aspect is strangely foreclosed by the prevalent ‘dopamine’ model of addiction. In that theory, behaviourism is fused with the fruits of neuroscience to argue that addiction is a result of behaviour followed by positive reinforcement: a rush of dopamine and adrenaline, for example, causing the behaviour to be repeated. Repetition is then further negatively reinforced by physically unpleasant withdrawal symptoms.67

  It is true that addiction has definite physiological effects. A study of ‘internet addiction’ found that withdrawal symptoms are very similar to those for drug addiction: elevated heart rate, blood pressure and anxiety.68 But dopamine doesn’t work quite the way it was assumed to work. According to the neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky, the latest research finds that it is linked not to pleasure, but to appetite and anticipation.69 It makes us hanker for something but doesn’t give us a high. Dopamine, as the anthropologist Helen Fisher puts it, travels down the ‘neurochemical pathways for wanting’.70 It is not about pleasure, but desire. Addiction is something that is done with wanting, by those who are done with wanting.

  So far, though, even this is perfectly congruent with behaviourist assumptions. But physiological patterns are not an explanation for addiction; they are what needs to be explained. The chemical pathways created by the motivated repetition of behaviour are not, at the same time, its sufficient cause. If addiction is a passion, a form of love gone awry, then the medical model of addiction misses the point as surely as does the medical model of love. All experience has a biochemical signature, so it is legitimate to describe it at that level. To reduce experience to chemistry, however, is to bypass what is essential to it: its meaning.

  The psychologist Stanton Peele and psychiatrist Archie Brodsky argue that to be addicted is to form an emotional dependency where another emotional relationship has failed.71 And whether you become dependent on another person, a set of beliefs or a substance is an accident of circumstance. Social class, culture and childhood experiences dispose you to different types of dependence. Your route out of a damaging addiction might be to discover a better dependence, a new consuming passion. This is to treat recovery not so much as a lucky escape from a disease, but as a creative act. Addicts who quit, says Marc Lewis, do so ‘uniquely and inventively’.72 They don’t merely plot a path to abstinence; they learn an entirely new way of being.

  It is not an accident that so many recovering from a drug addiction make their way to religion, the ultimate consuming passion. (And for the gambler, as Pascal suggested, the ultimate wager.) The Latin root word, addicere, has its origins as a technical term in Roman law. To be addicted was to be given over, delivered. But by the early modern period, it had come to mean something else: to addict was to devote, consecrate or sacrifice. To be addicted was to be dedicated, usually to a vocation or calling. Paradoxically, it involved the free surrender of choice, just as any calling does. This is far from the image of the addict as a pathetic, chemically enslaved wreck, their moral autonomy in tatters. And it suggests that the psychologist Jeffrey Schaler is right to argue that the problem is we have chosen the wrong addictions.73 What we call addictions are misplaced devotions: we love the wrong things. But what sort of vocation could the Twittering Machine be? How can we be devoted to a technology that is marketed as our servant?

  VIII.

  To an extent, our devotion to the machine has taken place without our informed consent. After all, what is the distinction between addiction and ordinary use? The more the Twittering Machine expands and colonizes our daily lives, the more the lines between ‘excessive’ and ‘normal’ behaviour are blurred.

  The more society becomes dependent on the social industry to achieve everyday goals, such as socializing, entertainment, job-seeking and romance, the more it becomes logical, not pathological, to use them often and to become anxious when cut off. Think of the smartphone, the technological basis for platform interaction that, in a few short years, has taken over our lives. Since the popularization of the BlackBerry, dubbed the ‘CrackBerry’ by compulsive users, the smartphone has been associated with addictive behaviour. As we did before with mobile phones and personal computers, we have crossed an invisible techno-cultural threshold beyond which there is no return.

  The smartphone is our portal to the world, our golden ticket out of here. It holds our credit cards, music, magazines, audiobooks, maps, movies, games, tickets and keys. It is our wayfinder. It connects us to family members, workmates and irresistible internet bullies. We use it to get dates, to get dinner. It breaks up our day, as Adam Greenfield puts it, into ‘jittery, schizoid intervals’ with constant updates.74 We keep it close, charged, at all times. It is as though, one day, it’s going to bring us the message we’ve been waiting for.

  All of this rests not so much on unconscious substructures, as on layers of hard material infrastructure. What we refer to with such abstractions as ‘the cloud’ began with the laying of underground fibre-optic cables along the pathways of the railroad system all over the continental United States.75 The construction of this system was undertaken not in response to consumer demand, but as part of a digital modernization drive that Clintonite administrative elites believed was essential to future capitalist development. We were, in a sense, addicted to this emerging system before we even knew it existed.

  Increasingly, these abstractions are linked to an emerging web of ubiquitous computing technologies which Greenfield has presciently called ‘everyware’.76 Ostensibly designed to smooth the edges of life, this network connects smartphones, sensors, data collectors, cookies and platforms in a constant flow of information. In so doing, it quietly outsources important decisions. When you ask Alexa or Siri for a nearby restaurant or shoe shop, it will be Apple or Google or Amazon that determines your path of movement through the urban space on the basis of their commercial needs. Naturally, these structures can be used by political authority to promote governing norms, but they can also work as more insidious forms of control.

  The emerging ideal of the ‘smart city’, where sensors and data collectors determine the allocation of resources and assets, is a case in point. Such cities are already being built in Canada, China and India. While the Chinese government wants to use the
technology to promote a ‘social credit’ scheme rewarding good behaviour, Google’s plans in Toronto are seemingly driven by human need. To be called Quayside, Google’s ‘smart city’ will use data collection and sensors to monitor traffic, weather, pollution and noise, to adjust the roads, paving and architecture in response to emerging issues.77 This has met stiff local opposition, for fear of what will be done with the data.

  However, the benevolent face of the ‘smart city’, the way it seems to make life easier, is also its dark side. It closely resembles French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s idea of a ‘control society’.78 In the society of control, no one tells you what to do, whom to worship, or what is good and bad. You are simply presented with a range of tolerable options. Your reality is rewritten to exclude behaviours that the system finds intolerable. In the same way that online spending habits and clicking activities can determine how much debt you are allowed, or which advertisements you are likely to see, or what shops you will be pointed towards, your activity can be kept within a manageable bandwidth. This bandwidth is necessarily the upshot of political and ideological decisions at various stages, but it becomes submerged in the ‘given’ structure of things.