The Twittering Machine

by Richard Seymour

  And a product is not a living thing. Looking at a selfie is like looking back on a finished object, on what is no longer alive. In our selfies we look, says Wendt, as though we were already dead.64 We are not so much living our best life as dying our best death, a good-looking corpse in both senses: looking and looked at. The apparent subject of the selfie is in fact its effect. The image is a techno-social precipitate, a petrification, a product of the way the technology organizes our self-perception.

  A feed filled with topless mirror shots, gym photos, new hair, and so on, might be seen as a peculiar form of idolatry. But it is less a tribute to the user than to the power that the machine has over the user. A power which, without prescribing anything, results in a very narrow account of what a self, a life, is really like. It orchestrates a paradoxically distracted, alienated form of attention.65 To be distracted is to be beside oneself, even as the self is the glorified centre of attention. In that sense, the question is not how much self-love is communally acceptable, but whether we can attend to something more satisfying.

  IX.

  The massive expansion of online visibility is paradoxical. It is, after all, a virtual space. The self that achieves celebrity is a virtual self, an avatar. To inhabit the social industry is to live in an elaborate panopticon, so that self-surveillance is redoubled many times over. But what is actually being seen?

  In its origin in ancient Sanskrit, the term ‘avatar’ referred to the descent of a deity to earth in carnal form. In computing language, it has come to refer to the making concrete of something abstract. At first glance, this seems exactly the wrong way round, if it is supposed to refer to our online representatives. Surely, what is happening is that our concrete selves are being represented by abstract information?

  However, it only appears that way because we still like to think we are at the centre of the process, the little godheads from whom everything on the internet flows. ‘As if I wrote the Internet,’ Sandy Baldwin writes, ‘on my iPhone, wrote the entire thing, texted it, 140 characters at a time.’66 User experience is designed to feel that way but, as in the operant conditioning chamber, protocol rules. The algorithm rules. The online image is the visual representation, not of us, but of abstract algorithmic processes. We have some say in the materials acted on by the algorithms, in that we select a name, profile picture, banner image, biographical description and the content of posts. But in doing so, we are working for the algorithms, in conditions not under our control. We attend to the image, in the etymological sense of stretching towards it, but it tends to slip out of our reach.

  Our status as virtual stars is necessarily fragile. Celebrity is already virtual, in that the stars are idealized representations who attract fantasies and emotional identifications. Identification can quickly turn to loathing. It is always ambivalent, both eroticized and necrotized. We are both attracted and repelled, always striving for, and never finding, the ‘right distance’ from the moving object of our identifications. The phenomenon of the ‘milkshake duck’, the viral celebrity who is swiftly brought low, is an online version of this. If anyone can be a celebrity, anyone can fall short of the unrealistic ideals to which celebrities are held. Even if you don’t have a record of racist Reddit comments or bigoted tweets, no one’s online activity is pure enough to evade criticism. The same applies to the tempestuous rows within internet communities, where the toxic pulsions of identification and dis-identification generate passionate solidarities and sudden explosions of hostility. Every such community has its stars, and these stars are always one step away from perdition.

  The rise of fragility-talk betrays a certain anxiety about this point. The racist, sexist alt-right denounces ‘snowflake’ fragility (you can’t take a joke), while the identitarian Left scolds white male fragility (you can’t take the critique). As if everyone is suddenly more vulnerable, might start falling to pieces at any moment, but only notices it in others. And if the language of fragility mainly comes up in relation to identity politics, of the Right or Left, this might tell us something about what online celebrity is doing to identity.

  Identity seems like a simple idea. ‘I am what I am’, as Shirley Bassey sang. But one reason why internet discussions of identity become so ferocious is that it is never that simple. The cultural critic Marie Moran cites three historic uses of the term.67 In the legal sense, identity is what you prove with passports, identity papers and your username and password. It guarantees that you’re a legal person who can enter into contracts. In the personal sense, identity pertains to what is uniquely you, often assumed to go to one’s core, even though modern markets sell us identities as consumable items. In the social and political sense, identity is how the world has classified you, on the basis of a characteristic you are assumed to have. From a certain point of view, identity in all three senses is necrological, an obituary notice. It overwrites you, in lapidary fashion, with the deposit of history. Here lies the user: account details, turn-ons, preferences, search history, sex, race, class, nation.

  The irony of the internet is that it was supposed to free us from identitarian constraints, to enable us to live beyond the diktat of ascription and belonging. Instead, it seems to compound the importance of identity in all three dimensions. Online security discourses show a terror of identity theft. Online celebrity involves obsessively curating a personal self, which may include mobilizing elements of one’s ascriptive identity. Online politics is often a struggle over the thresholds of ‘cultural appropriation’ and identitarian belonging. The social justice warrior’s injunction, #stayinyourlane, suggests we can never transcend identitarian boxes. The era of the platforms has witnessed an explosion in identity-talk.

  There are some good reasons for this. Much of what is described as identity politics addresses long-standing injustices, impacting on people precisely because of how they’re identified, from Black Lives Matter to #MeToo. Beyond this, however, the internal politics of the medium is itself a politics of identity, because it compels us to dedicate more and more of our time to performing an identity. The self that the social industry engages is ephemeral in the sense described by Lasch: trapped in a continuous, distracted response to stimuli. The compensation and incentive is that we can also be the stimuli. We can carefully brand ourselves, producing an identity as a consumable good, an attention magnet, an image for image junkies.

  There is death in this. Twenge and Campbell are getting at something when they urge people to worry less about their identities and more about their lives. Between life and the self, there is a choice. This is implicit in the idea of an attention economy. The more compulsively we curate the self, the less we live. We may find it helpful to forget ourselves from time to time. We may need, that is, a form of ‘anti-identity’ politics, a resistance to all trends which force one to spend too much time on the self, or on a particularly narrow, depressing and ultimately coercive idea of what a person can be. It would treat all the labour spent on the self as wasted potential. It would cultivate forgetting and disconnection.

  X.

  I had forgot myself; am I not king?

  William Shakespeare, Richard II

  To remember that one is king is also to be apprised that one is living under a tyranny. To value oneself too highly is to live under a one-person dictatorship, with a dissenting remainder that yearns for its overthrow.

  From the beginning of life, the image in the mirror is not just a lover, but a rival. As soon as the infant is captivated by a mirror image, it lords it over him like a monarch – ‘His Majesty the Baby’, as Freud described this primary narcissism.68 The image is too perfect, in contrast with experience. The infant’s sensory-motor system isn’t working yet, and he can barely speak. Yet he finds a completely coherent image of himself, confirmed by his parents’ gaze, to identify with. And in identifying with the image, he also identifies with the gaze that looks at it. He is not just seeing, but seen. That is what makes the image so tyrannical. The fascination with bodily disintegration, dismemb
erment, castration and slaughter that Freud associated with the death drive can be seen, in this sense, as auto-iconoclasm. The death drive is a regicide plot.

  Life in the Twittering Machine isn’t exactly like gazing into the mirror with mother. Mirrors, like the nuclear family, are an old and almost superseded technology. The Freudian theory underpinning Lasch’s analysis of narcissism bears the hallmarks of its genesis, by emphasizing the role of a tiny number of adults in the child’s emotional universe. The infant’s body, in classic Freudian theory, was libidinized through identification with its parents. But the nuclear family structure has loosened, and the enclosed family home is now permeated by new communications technologies.

  It is now the screen, not the mirror, in which the child finds not only the image, but the gaze. As the psychoanalyst Alessandra Lemma argues, whatever self-love and self-hate there is, is engendered by a new link between the body and technologies.69 If there is a death drive, or indeed any drive at all, it is insinuated into this virtual world. But what does that mean? In a sense, drives are already virtual. Freud used the term ‘virtual’ to describe the space of mental life, of fantasies, dreams and desires. He defined drives, not as physical instincts, but as the mental representation of bodily impulses, which is to say that they virtualize physical realities. Meatspace was already virtual reality. All that we have added, first with the invention of writing, then with print and finally with digital writing, are new layers of virtualization.

  It is for this reason that Lacan defined all drives as potential death drives. If a drive is virtual, then, unlike an instinct, it can’t be satisfied. It spins on eternally, immortally, indifferent to decency, pleasure or organic survival. And it wages asymmetric war against all constraints, including the deathly constraints of identification. So there is a sense in which the death drive is on the side of life. Given the chance, it would smash the idol we call a self, or a selfie; it would commit digital suicide. Indeed, the perplexing public meltdowns and shitstorms to which online celebrity is beset may be, just as much as the drugs and alcohol benders of traditional Hollywood stars, a thwarted attempt at auto-iconoclasm.

  The social industry platforms are far more worried about the prospect of digital suicide, of disconnection, than they are about any purported ‘subversive’ use of their means. In the supposedly halcyon days of social media, shortly after the global financial crash, the idea of a mass virtual suicide risked going viral, as is always the risk with suicide. The artist Sean Dockray’s ‘Facebook Suicide Bomb Manifesto’ urged users to commit online hara-kiri.70 Websites offered users a quick and stylish exit from their accounts. Seppukoo.com allowed users to create ‘last words’, which would be automatically sent to their friends, and created a memorial page in their name before permanently deleting their account. Suicidemachine.org deleted all friends and information, replaced the user’s profile picture with a noose icon and added the user to a group called ‘Social Media Suiciders’.

  Since the platforms benefit from the ‘network effect’ – the more people are connected, the more valuable it is – this would have been a catastrophic reversal. Both websites were subject to cease and desist letters from Facebook’s lawyers, and were duly forced to stop offering the service to Facebook’s users. Social industry platform protocols are carefully designed to discourage disconnection, since it is a threat to their very existence. Facebook’s own options for permanent deletion are carefully hidden, appearing nowhere in any menu or settings option.71 Users must instead fill in a form reached through the Facebook Help Center, and wait through a ‘reconsideration period’. Meanwhile, Facebook tugs on the heartstrings by displaying photos of friends who will ‘miss you’ – leveraging its control over uploaded content for commercial purposes.

  There is evidence that the existing platforms are reaching their peak. Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat have all seen declining user numbers, especially during 2018. Ironically, Snapchat’s fall may have been precipitated by its dependence on celebrity, as a single tweet from Kylie Jenner announcing to her 25 million followers that she didn’t ‘open Snapchat anymore’ instantly wiped $1.3 billion off the company’s value.72 But the trend is universal. Facebook’s announcement that it had lost a million users across Europe in one year has cost it $120 billion worth of value, as teens drop out. Twitter, beset by fake posts and cyberbullying, lost a million users and saw its share price plummet.

  Yet, at least 40 per cent of the world’s entire population still uses the social industry.73 This remains a massive synchronization of attention, with over six billion eyeballs rapt. The platforms may recede or mutate, but they are unlikely to disappear. They have become monopolies, giants with immense political and ideological power. Their system is never a finished object, but always a work in progress, reacting to the latest trends to keep users hooked. The likelihood is that, in the absence of alternatives, they will work with existing fusions of venture capital, entertainment and amusement complexes, and news media, to produce new technologies for the production of distraction.

  However, the platforms only work on the raw material of social trends. They work because competitive individualism was already culturally and politically incentivized, and the rise of mass celebrity ecologies was already under way. And they work, in part, because they address legitimate wants: they offer opportunities for recognition, for creative self-styling, for interruptions to monotony, for reverie or thinking-as-leisure-time. But they only do so on the basis that these activities are economically productive. Far from being a break from overwork, they work us harder than ever.

  The platforms have shown us that our attention is valuable. What would happen if we took the suggestion of writer Matthew Crawford, and treated our attention as being too valuable to waste?74 What if we asserted a right not to be constantly addressed, and not to be continuously servicing an image whose fortunes are as volatile as the platforms’ stock market values? The platforms have demonstrated that our everyday lives can be commodified, provided we consent to their darkest corners being flooded with light. What if, as the psychoanalyst Josh Cohen proposes, we deem this intrusion, this obliteration of the ‘mute spot’ in our being, ‘whose natural elements are darkness and silence’, to be ‘the most profound violation a person can experience’?75 What if there are great works, vocations, adventures, awaiting us if we can work out what it is our inattentions are for, and find something else to attend to?

  CHAPTER FOUR

  WE ARE ALL TROLLS

  Lulz is engaged in by Internet users who have witnessed one major economic/environmental/political disaster too many, and who thus view a state of voluntary, gleeful sociopathy over the world’s current apocalyptic state, as superior to being continually emo.

  Encyclopedia Dramatica

  Life is unfair

  kill yourself or get over it

  Black Box Recorder, ‘Child Psychology’

  I.

  Trolls are the anti-celebrities. They are propagandists of human failure. Far from extolling awesomeness, they ruthlessly exploit and show up weakness: for the lulz.ii They remind you that there’s always a point of view from which you don’t matter, and from which your pain is hilarious.

  In February 2011, schoolgirl Natasha MacBryde went out to kill.1 She was not unlike many teenagers: driven to anguished despair by school, friends and teachers, bullied by a clique, ‘friend-zoned’ by a boy she fancied and tormented by a string of abusive, anonymous messages on a social networking site. MacBryde, at the end of her tether, reached a decision. Having researched the method on the internet, she slipped out of her house after dark, climbed a steep embankment, stood on a railway track and waited. The next day, Valentine’s Day, her body was found less than 150 metres from her house. The coroner determined that she had killed herself: a vehicular attack on her own body. MacBryde’s heartbroken older brother created a Facebook tribute page in her memory.

  Spotting an opportunity, a twenty-five-year-old ‘RIP troll’ from Reading, Sean Duffy, com
menced a trolling campaign.2 He blitzed the page with comments and meme images with MacBryde’s face: ‘I fell asleep on the track lolz’, ‘I caught the train to heaven lol’, ‘I committed suicide for the lulz’, ‘Natasha wasn’t bullied, she was just a whore’ and ‘Train late and bloody? My bad’. He posted an image from The Simpsons, of a Valentine’s card given to Ralph Wiggum by Lisa Simpson, with a train belching out the slogan: ‘I Choo-Choo-Choose You’. He made a YouTube video called ‘Tasha the Tank Engine’. Duffy was a veteran of several such campaigns. He seemed to be particularly fascinated with taunting the grieving parents of dead teenagers. In a stroke of irony that would delight his online confederates, his campaign resulted in another teenager, wrongly accused of making the posts, attempting to commit suicide.

  In court, in a meagre effort to mitigate his actions, Duffy’s solicitor explained that he had Asperger’s and didn’t understand the effects of his actions. Yet his campaigns showed an extraordinary sensitivity to pain thresholds. For example, he chose Mother’s Day to taunt the grieving mother of teenager Lauren Drew by sending her an image of a coffin with the words ‘Happy Mother’s Day’ on it. He posted on Drew’s memorial page, ‘Help me mummy, it’s hot in hell’. If anything, far from being oblivious, he seemed enthralled by the pain he could cause. It is precisely because trolls know what hurts that they find it so hilarious.