Today, the platforms use a number of forcing techniques. These might be compared to the techniques used by mentalists and magicians, which are designed to give the impression of a free and fair choice being made. They are not limited to variable rewards and the ‘like’ hack. ‘Read receipts’ give us an anxious prompt to reply to messages, keeping the churn going. Default settings, where the preferred settings are more visually appealing than the alternatives, reward acquiescence and put friction in the way of change. Defaults are often linked to a confirming prompt like a tick, further encouraging compliance. Infinite scrolling makes your social media feed a kind of force-feeding; you never get to the end. Autoplay means that audiovisual parts of your feed stand out more and encourage you to pause.10
The ideological power of our interactions with the machine derives from the way that the conditioned choice, be it the compulsive selfie spiral or the angry 3 a.m. thread argument, is experienced as freely and pleasurably chosen.11 From games to feeds, our capacity for reverie is riveted to a wholly designed dream space, our free-floating attention guided down channels strewn with reinforcements that we often don’t even notice.
And the capacity to attend is subject to scarcity. Neuroscientists tell us that, physically, the brain cannot focus on more than one ‘attention-rich input’ at a time.12 The state of being distracted, as when one is constantly ‘notified’ about new messages – new emails, updates, software alerts, app alerts, news alerts – is not a state of magnificently keeping several balls in the air. It is a state of continuous, time- and energy-consuming shifts from one object of focus to another. It can take over half an hour to recover full attention once distracted.13 The state of distraction that we idealize as ‘multitasking’ is a form of squandering. To pay attention is to diminish the attention that one has available; to pay attention in this distracted fashion is to waste it.
What sounds like a problem may be the yield. The opportunity to waste attention, or to dispose of spare attention, may be what we seek. The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips speaks of ‘vacancies of attention’.14 If attention is economized, the condition of attention is inattention. To attend to this, we must ignore that, where ‘that’ is something we may be deliberately avoiding. The vacancies of attention that we must fill appear during public transport journeys, on lunch and toilet breaks, during impasses in dinner conversation, or in those frequent interludes in working life where there is nothing to do but the employee is obliged to look busy. If we didn’t have somewhere to put excess attention, who knows what dreams would come?
The stars are a magnet for excess attention: attention-sinks. And they are made, not born. This has been obvious since the nineteenth century when, according to historian Daniel Boorstin, we learned ‘the processes by which fame is manufactured’.15 In a secular, democratic era, fame has been stripped of its mystique, its mechanism exposed. Stars are now ‘pseudo-events’ accommodating the market demand for a greatness no one believes in. Celebrity, detached from any context beyond itself, has become, in the words of Leo Braudy, ‘a virtually unparalleled fame without a city’.16
Modern celebrity economies, built on this recognition, have devolved into an ever-greater complexity of production. To the existing repertoire of A- , B- and C-list celebs, news eyewitnesses, vox pops, have-a-go heroes, beauty queens and those who regularly write ‘letters to the editor’, the internet has added camgirls, microcelebrities and the ‘Rich Kids of Instagram’, some of whom have become even richer and better known than legacy media peers. The platforms have made stars like Justin Bieber, Chance the Rapper and Charlotte D’Alessio. And everyone gets a taste. Not everyone wants celebrity, but every user is involved. Just by having an account, one has a public image. Just by posting a status, or answering a comment, one has a public-relations strategy.
Instagram users, in addition to collecting likes and followers, can participate in Insta-beauty pageants. Hundreds of thousands of children on YouTube, mostly girls, post videos of themselves asking if they’re pretty or ugly. Snapchat users keep tabs on the scores collected by friends, to see who is receiving the most views. Only a bare few are successful enough to monetize their activity by becoming corporate-sponsored ‘influencers’. For example, the Guardian reports that to become a ‘micro-influencer’, capable of making $5,000 per sponsored post, one must have at least 100,000 followers on one of the social industry platforms.17 The vast majority of people don’t have more than a thousand followers on any platform. For most people, the likes have to be sufficient reward.18
Some are better at working this system than others, but no one knows for sure how stars are made. Too much is contingent on fortune. Where online platforms exist to commodify bits of everyday experience, anything can ‘go viral’. Even a brush with disaster can make you an insta-celebrity. For example, Michelle Dobyne of Oklahoma was made an online celebrity in 2016 by escaping from a burning building with her children.19 Local news cameras recorded her reaction to the event: ‘I got my three kids and we bounced out . . . nuh-uh, we ain’t gonna be in no fire. Not today.’ Witty, charismatic, unruffled, she went viral, an instant meme. YouTube remixes proliferated. Online companies used her image to sell merchandise. News and entertainment channels gained a surge of viewer traffic. This didn’t necessarily help Dobyne, who continued to live out of her car until a supporter set up a GoFundMe page. There was even a whiff of racism in her portrayal as an exotic caricature whose plight was funny. The professed admiration for her was therefore complicated, exploitative on the part of the media and, sometimes, tacitly dehumanizing.
The randomness, misfortune and complexity of cultural wants that led to Dobyne’s celebrity is typical of the way stars are made. The anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker, in her classic study of Hollywood, noticed that the randomness of success led to a tendency towards magical thinking in the movie industry.20 Hollywood formulae were like spells, their market research like divination, executive decisions justified by pseudo-telepathic ‘instinct’. These were magical techniques in aid of compelling Lady Luck. In the emerging field of micro-celebrities and insta-fame, there is a cottage industry of such talismanic formulae. News articles, YouTube videos and Instagram coaches offer would-be online celebrities tips, listicles, the magic remedy, for success. Books promise to help users make celebrities of babies or cats. These guides generally state the glaringly obvious – use captions and hashtags, post at peak traffic times, repeat whatever gets most likes, and so on. But their content is less important than how they make their case. By generalizing from the practices of those who are successful, they make it appear as though celebrities succeed by virtue of cleverness and tactical nous. For Powdermaker, tellingly, those chasing fame were more like compulsive gamblers than clever strategists.
III.
Even if you win, it’s often a poisoned chalice. In 2015, the Instagram model Essena O’Neill smashed her own virtual image.21 She quit the medium, explaining that the dozens of carefully staged, well-lit, glamorous shots of her smiling blonde self which she had posted were corporate-sponsored. It was all a fake. Beneath each photo, she exposed the burden of painful work and emotional turmoil involved in every shot, from 5 a.m. wake-ups to anxiety and depression. The image, concealing a distressing, excluded reality, had become a tyrant, exhausting to maintain and impossible to live up to. Self-love in this sense was shadowed by bitter self-hate. She committed digital suicide. For O’Neill, letting the self-hate win for once was a liberation.
This split between private and public selves, characteristic of celebrity, is an increasingly ordinary experience of social industry users. A generation is growing up with publicity, not as remote dream but as coercive norm. Donna Freitas’ research into young social industry users finds them tyrannized by their obsession with ‘likes’ and comparison with others. Under constant surveillance, they must give the impression of living their best life, of being ‘blissful, enraptured, even inspiring’.22 It is hard work, with diminishing returns. It generates the feeling of
being alone among fakes, a desperate situation. If celebrities often spiral into public displays of self-degradation, Chris Rojek suggests, it is to ‘alert the public to the horror, shame and encroaching helplessness’ of the private self, faced with its metastasizing public rival.23
What hooks us is also what kills us.24 Increased ‘screen time’ corresponds to more depression and suicide, particularly for female users. The rise of the platforms and the smartphone corresponds to rising self-harm, with hospital admissions for related injuries among girls soaring by a fifth in the US and over two thirds in England. The effect is much stronger when users spend their ‘screen time’ engaged in social comparisons: the most addictive part of the medium. In every game of social comparison, we pay most attention to those above us. We lose every time; we fall short. As Alain Ehrenberg put it, ‘the depressed individual is unable to measure up; he is tired of having to become himself.’25
Correlation, as the cliché goes, is not causation. Indeed, the sprawling complexity of the systems we live in makes it hard to identify direct cause–effect situations. It would be difficult to prove, for example, that seeing an advertisement on public transport made you buy new shoes. All that can be said is that your choice is conditioned by the advertising. The social industry platforms hardly invented all the social miseries, insecurities and conflicts of life in the decade or so in which they have come to the fore. Indeed, they may have been taken up as a solution to some of these problems. It is noticeable, for example, that social industry use became ubiquitous in the aftermath of a global financial crash, with devastating effects for billions of people. As opportunities declined and wages stagnated, smartphone ownership, giving users ready access to whole online worlds, may have offered some compensation. And revenues for social industry firms began to take off in the period 2010–11, in a time of severe breakdown in the legitimacy of political institutions, as well as of mass media: the Egyptian uprising, the riots in England, ‘Indignados’ in Europe and ‘Occupy’ protests elsewhere.26 Facebook, Twitter and YouTube all benefited from these events, as they gave ordinary users the means to set the news agenda and to associate with one another in low-cost ways. Scapegoating the social industry evades the question of why people are drawn to it in their billions. What problems does it appear to solve?
Nonetheless, there remains the stubborn and alarming fact that more contact with the social industry platforms corresponds to more misery, more self-harm, more suicide. Which raises urgent questions about how these platforms are conditioning us.
IV.
One of the things we’re being conditioned for is ubiquitous publicity itself. The comedian Stewart Lee compares Twitter to ‘a state surveillance agency run by gullible volunteers. A Stasi for the Angry Birds generation.’27 Ironically, this mass-surveillance apparatus, with the social industry harnessing over three billion pairs of eyeballs, was elevated amid a crisis for traditional media over its invasions of privacy.
In the UK, the Murdoch-owned press was at the centre of ‘Hackgate’, after News of the World journalists were caught tapping the voicemail of missing teenager Milly Dowler. This unearthed a vast machinery of spying, with private investigators illegally obtaining information about celebrities and politicians. At the height of the scandal, veteran News of the World hack, Paul McMullan, justified his practices on the jaw-dropping grounds that ‘privacy is for paedos’. Through years of ‘invading people’s privacy’, he said, ‘I’ve never found anybody doing any good.’28
Nothing to hide, nothing to worry about: it is no accident that this sinister, cynical credo is shared by bin-hoking journalists and state securitarians. The News of the World was a Cold War-era print monopoly that had built up its power through an alliance with Margaret Thatcher’s government and the police. That alliance helped the paper’s bosses break the print unions and gave them access to privileged information. Yet the motto of authoritarian snoopers is always hypocritical. The News of the World, its crooked police informants, and corrupt ex-cops working as private investigators, were up to their necks in criminal behaviour which they kept secret. Jonathan Rees, boss of Southern Investigations, who was paid £150,000 a year by the paper in return for illegally gained information, was jailed for conspiracy to plant evidence. Sid Fillery, an ex-officer and Rees’s associate, was jailed for child pornography. Tom Kingston, another ex-cop turned investigator, was convicted of stealing amphetamines. Glenn Mulcaire, a private investigator who worked for the paper, was jailed alongside its royal editor for hacking voicemails. He was also suspected to have attempted to hack the voicemail of a police officer investigating the murder of Daniel Morgan. Morgan was an associate of Rees who was killed in 1987, allegedly by corrupt officers and with Rees’s knowledge, when he was working to expose police corruption.29
And while the paper depended on a criminal infrastructure, it sanctimoniously used its power to hound people over private moral choices, often to their deaths. Even so jaded a hack as McMullan admits that his paper’s articles about Jennifer Elliott, daughter of the actor Denholm Elliott, may have contributed to her suicide. Nor is it just celebrities who have been targeted. Ben Stronge, a chef ‘exposed’ for swinging, had begged the paper not to publish, as he would never see his children again if they did. They published, and he killed himself. Arnold Lewis, a teacher caught in a similar sting, pleaded with the reporter not to publish. He said he would kill himself. They published, and his suicide followed. The reporter, having been read Lewis’s suicide note at the inquest, was asked if it upset her. ‘No,’ she replied, ‘not really.’30
The economy of surveillance, converting private experience into profitable information, predates the Twittering Machine. The tabloids represent the most egregious version of it, but on the same continuum is the public confessional that is reality television, ‘behind-the-scenes’ documentaries, Oprah, Jerry Springer and ‘shrink’-themed celebrity interview formats. News of the World was driven out of business, but the social industry has normalized unprecedented surveillance. They have universalized the confessional format. Today, in addition to hacking voicemails, investigators can trawl through vast archives of items posted willingly and publicly on the platforms. And journalists needn’t lift a finger. Enterprising users with a grudge will often work to bring decontextualized snippets of controversy to public light. For example, the one-minute celebrity Ken Bone gained admiration for his demeanour while asking a question during a 2016 US presidential debate. But he was brought low by online busybodies turning up a few offensive comments he had made on Reddit. It was trivial, but headlines, hot takes, think pieces and trending flows of attention followed a familiar pattern.
If the pursuit of celebrity poses dangers for would-be stars, the growing fixation of public attention on stars has consequences for the well-being of their ‘followers’. The rising profile of ‘celebrity-worship syndrome’ suggests that constant consumption of the raw material of the lives of others is not just invasive, but also doing something disturbing to the worshippers.31 Anxiety, stress, physical illnesses and increased body dysmorphia have all been correlated with celebrity obsession. This may help explain why worshippers can suddenly turn on their heroes, should they be caught in the glare of scandal, taking incongruous joy in their destruction. The generalization of this kind of star–follower relationship, based on intimate self-exposure, threatens to spread abroad its most harmful symptoms. To put it another way, if the Twittering Machine seems to offer us the best of both worlds as far as celebrity is concerned, it also gives us the worst.
V.
Consolation comes in the form of ‘subversion’. The growing Instagram trend of ‘no filter’ posts, and hashtags such as #uglyselfie, #fatacceptance, #bodypositivity, #epicfail and #nomakeup, apparently show users ironically playing with and challenging the aesthetic conventions of the medium.
Newspapers, working to the woke dollar, alert readers to trends in ‘radical body love’ online, and direct them to ‘incredible body-positive people to follo
w’.32 This challenges oppressive cultural codes, but it is not the subversive strategy it appears to be. The internet may be experienced as a flow of images, but its visual appearance obscures how it really works: behind it all is a written system of protocols and controls. For anything to become content, it has to adhere to these controls. For it to be content on the platforms, it has to be part of an addiction mechanism: it has to be useful for keeping users connected to the machine. One may as well try to subvert a smartphone by changing the wallpaper image.
This refusal of conventional beauty standards fuses with the rising stock of ‘authenticity’ in attention economies. Since the democratization of celebrity in the nineteenth century, the ‘common touch’, ‘naturalness’ and ‘authenticity’ have been esteemed characteristics of the famous. Today’s fascination with catching celebrities in real, ‘unfiltered’ moments of intimate disorganization, with plastic surgery gone wrong, make-up melting in the heat, tantrums, rows and bad deeds has its roots in this urge to tear away layers of illusion and expose the horror beneath.
In the social industry, this desire for authenticity has become much more urgent. The language of the internet is built around the fear of the fake: usernames, passwords and user-response tests encode the desire that each user account should represent a person who can fulfil contractual obligations. ‘Fake Accounts are Not Our Friends’, Facebook’s advertising campaign asserts. In a terrain where people are acutely aware of being manipulated all the time, the worst thing one can be is ‘fake’. One website even allows users to detect when a post tagged #nofilter is discreetly using a filter, so that ‘fakers’ can be caught out.
The Twittering Machine Page 8