The Twittering Machine

by Richard Seymour

  Addiction occurs through choices, but somehow it also happens behind our backs. No one consciously sets out to devote themselves to the machine, to become its addict. Its veto power over all other possible attentions takes place, cumulatively, through every apparently free choice made as a user. We drop into the dead zone, the ‘ticker trance’ of feed addiction, by increment. The way the chronophagic machine fights for our attention recalls what Eastern Christianity used to call the demon of acedia. This was a predecessor of the modern concept of melancholia, and it was used in monasteries (those ancient writing machines) to describe an affliction of the devoted. In the original Greek, ‘akedia’ meant ‘lack of care’. In the Latinized Christian use propagated by Evagrius of Pontus, it described a lack of care about one’s life; a listless, restless spiritual lethargy.2 The condition left one yearning for distraction and continual novelty, exploiting one’s petty hates and hungers. It dissolved one’s capacity for attending, for living as if living mattered, into a series of itches demanding to be scratched. Ultimately, it was dehumanizing, corrosive of meaning: it was spiritual death.

  This way of describing our predicament runs the risk, innate to Christian demonology, of paranoia. It is less ‘they’re all out to get me’ than ‘evil is something that happens to me, rather than something I am involved in’. As with conspiracy theory, it externalizes evil. After all, the platforms are not only not demons; they are ostentatious about it. ‘Don’t be Evil’, as the Google slogan has it. They don’t, by themselves, generate the acedia, the generalized depression and weariness that they monetize. No more than the pharmaceutical industry does. They offer us a solution, an addiction which magnifies and potentiates acedia. But, as with all addictions, we succumb to it with our choices and our rationalizations. We are, after all, only staying in touch, only seeing what’s happening, only looking for the news, friends, entertainment: the mood-altering substance which is euphemized as ‘variable rewards’ is something that affects other people.

  Given the time this addiction demands of us, we are entitled to ask what else we might be doing, what else we could be addicted to. A near-death experience often forces us to take a more executive view, to see our micro-decisions in the context of an absolute scarcity of life. It imposes a rigour which is counter to acedia. If we had, for example, just one year to live, and really intended to live, how much of that time would we spend doing what we now do on the Twittering Machine? If we are suddenly ‘scripturient’, if we feel compelled to write to one another, could we find a better platform for doing so? And if cyber-utopianism has collapsed, what would a utopia of writing really be like?

  II.

  It would be hard to overstate the scale of the change we’re going through. Writing is fundamentally conservative. It is a conventional system of markings that, to be comprehensible, has to be preserved. As the historian of writing Barry Powell argues, this conservatism is supported by political power.3 The use of writing stabilizes language, suppresses local variation, gives the impression of homogeneity. Even revolutionaries, as Mao discovered, struggle to transform writing systems.

  That makes it, curiously, harder to see the cultural and political impact that each specific technology of writing has. Writing is a technology whose materiality – whether it is with papyrus and reed, pen and paper, movable type or computer – is never neutral as to its possible uses. But the more it stays the same, the less there is to contrast it with. Alphabetic writing has dominated in most parts of the world for 2,500 years. Printed writing has dominated for six hundred years. Partly because of their longevity, there has been no direct way to see their deep cultural effects in everyday life: to see how the material properties of our writing systems favour some kinds of expression and prejudice others. Making these visible has been the work of archaeologists and historians.

  The digital revolution over recent decades has suddenly offered a freshet of contrasts. The ease of associative linking with hypertext underlines just how deeply embedded linear writing – and therefore linear thinking – has been in print culture.4 The internet spontaneously achieves the kind of montaging and remediation of content that in the print era was the preserve of cultural margins: scrapbooking, for example, or modernist poetry. The availability of real-time written communication has revived the use of logographic and pictographic elements in writing, the emoticon for example, to efficiently convey aspects of spoken conversation such as register and expression. This abruptly highlights how contrived the dominance of exclusively alphabetic writing has been, and the degree of formality and protocol in expression that it has required of us.

  The emerging economy of digital writing, with drastically reduced costs of reproduction, upends economies of scale by which writing has been organized into note, letter, article, essay, novel, encyclopedia. A couple of ordinary sentences can be of enormous economic value, as demonstrated by Snapchat’s loss of $1.3 billion stock value after a single tweet by Kylie Jenner. It shows us how much our inherited standards of punctuation, rubrication and letterform are a legacy of the early modern reinvention of the book as, in Marshall McLuhan’s words, the ‘first uniformly repeatable commodity, the first assembly line, and the first mass-production’.5 It also upsets centred hierarchies of writing, where all texts ultimately refer to and are legitimized by a single, sacred text such as a bible or constitution. On a distributed network of writing, there is no single centre.

  Above all, the digital revolution blurs the social distinction between reader and writer. Part of the allure of the Twittering Machine has been the way it extends the privilege of writing. The history of literacy is also a history of repression and exclusion. Of fictional women, burning ‘like beacons’ in the literature of men, as Virginia Woolf put it in her essay ‘A Room of One’s Own’, while real women were ‘locked up, beaten and flung about the room’. Of slaves forbidden to write, secretly acquiring the means to send private letters, or learning to read only to burn incandescently at their captivity. ‘The more I read,’ Frederick Douglass wrote in 1845, ‘the more I was led to abhor and detest my enslavers’.6

  In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s feminist short story from 1892, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, men are desperate to control writing. Writing, the protagonist is told, is her symptom. It rots her brain. All these morbid fantasies. It is not motherly. It is not wifely. It gives rise to her hysterical illness. In fact, as becomes clear in the story, writing is both her symptom and her only hope of a cure. It is the return of the repressed. ‘The subject cries out,’ Lacan exclaimed, ‘from every pore of his being what he cannot talk about.’7 Her writing sweats with an overplus of meaning. There’s something the writer can’t say; it pours out of her anyway.

  Since the men in her life, terrified of her sexuality and its potential violence, can’t hear her, Gilman’s protagonist must write. She compulsively writes and writes, and suffers boredom, withdrawal and restless visions when prevented from writing. Writing and its absence exercise a despotic power over her life, no less than the patriarchs do.

  We are, abruptly, writing more than we ever have before. Our ‘scripturient’ disease, the writing symptom, shows, in part, how much was waiting to be expressed before the digital upheaval incited a new revolution in mass literacy. Handwriting was once the privilege of a few, before the first explosion of mass literacy in the late nineteenth century. Where it was taught, penmanship was indexed to social class, gender and occupation: merchants, lawyers, women and upper-class men were taught distinct letterform styles.8 The very appearance and configuration of the shapes and spacing of letters allowed a reader to quickly understand its social significance. Even in the printed word, there emerged an association of letterform with social class: think, today, of the different fonts deployed by ‘popular’ newspapers and those of the broadsheets. Writing has always been laden with hierarchies of significance and signification.

  What distinguishes the new mass literacy from its nineteenth-century predecessor is the spread of writing, in the homog
enized fonts of the computer, the smartphone, the Twittering Machine. The characteristic experience of literacy prior to the Internet was reading; now it is writing.9 Amid a collapse in trust in the old media, whose commercial strategies and political affiliations have drawn it further and further away from the priorities of its audiences, the people formerly known as the audience have become the producers. We still read, but differently. We read less for edification than to be productive: scanning and scavenging material from a flow of messages and notifications. And as we do so we are, behind our backs as it were, writing in digital script. The practices of the computerized workplace overflow into those of the Twittering Machine.

  Our dilemmas are therefore not those of the nineteenth century, when the spread of writing often had the inflection of social rebellion, as women, slaves and workers wrote against the wishes and purview of their masters and superiors. While there remain regimes, institutions and individuals who wish to shut us up, power more often works by making us speak, coaxing our confessions, our testimonies, our cries from the heart, out of us. Today Gilman’s narrator, instead of encountering the assured authority of doctors and husbands, would be besieged by swarms of wishful online patriarchs, gendertrolls, far less assured but no less terrified of what she might say. But she would also encounter the even more anonymous, semi-occulted means by which her writing is extracted: the Twittering Machine.

  The old story in which the vital truth is repressed, and cries out to be told, isn’t for the most part the story of the Twittering Machine. If we have nothing to write, or we don’t know what to write, the machine will goad us. There will always be something to react to. The content agnosticism of the machine means that we can sometimes use it to break unjust silences, from #MeToo to Black Lives Matter. But the format in which even this writing takes place is coercive, harnessed to ceaseless production. In a way, the hyper-productivity of the machine might have the effect of producing a new kind of silence. The cathartic effect of writing, reacting to stimulus, can be a way of filling the void with endless monetizable chatter. A new form of stifling that leaves no space to say what matters. As Colette Soler put it, ‘The gag has not been lifted: it has only changed its terms.’10

  If we want ‘free expression’ today, it is no longer enough to demand the abolition of political constraints. We have to free expression from the ceaseless production of redundancy, and ourselves from the compulsion to labour. We have to withdraw our labour and reclaim the pleasures of writing as leisure time.

  III.

  Things could have been different. Before the cyber-utopianism of the California tech scene, there was the cyber-utopianism of Paris’s Left Bank. Before the internet, French hipsters were experimenting with online anonymity, an experience they called ‘fading’. Before the Twittering Machine, there was a public-sector platform, open to all, which was at the cutting edge of communications technology, the envy of Silicon Valley.

  They called it Minitel. The Médium Interactif par Numérisation d’Information Téléphonique: France’s internet avant la lettre. Except that Minitel was not exactly like the internet. The terminal was a small, sleek wood-brown box with a keyboard that flipped out to reveal a screen. It was a videotex service, a service that allowed users to access pages of text and images in a computer-like format. It used slightly different technological principles from the internet, resulting in a more limited system. For example, Arpanet used a distributed network, rather than a centralized information system. It implemented a form of packet-switching, wherein a message is broken into bits of data, distributed over optimal routes and reassembled at destination, and which is still used today in the foundational protocols of the internet.

  These systems were chosen, in part, for their military virtue. An alluring myth of the internet’s origins has it that it was essentially invented by Paul Baran, of the RAND Corporation, as a way for communications to survive nuclear war.11 The Arpanet system was actually designed separately, without Baran’s direct involvement. Nonetheless, it used remarkably similar ideas, and Baran was one of the major inventors of the distributed network and the packet-switching method. The underlying idea for a ‘distributed network’ of writing, published in a 1964 article, was that in the event of a nuclear strike, the communications system would best survive if it wasn’t centralized.12 This necessitated plenty of redundancy in the network. As Sandy Baldwin puts it: ‘you design a distributed network full of waste to guarantee that it can communicate beyond the apocalypse.’13 Even if every last human life was obliterated, there would still be bots messaging one another, Microsoft’s ‘TayTweets’ riffing on new languages with Facebook’s ‘Bob’ and ‘Alice’.

  The French government paid close attention. It had just withdrawn from NATO a few years before Arpanet was launched in 1969, and it was trying to build a competitive economy. It was desperate to outdo Britain and Germany by modernizing the French economy first.14 The Gaullist state was ploughing money into advanced technological research, to update its telecommunications system. In 1973, engineers at the Institut de Recherche en lnformatique et en Automatique had developed a network to rival Arpanet: CYCLADES. It was based on similar practices of decentralized networking. And it deployed its own version of packet-switching, using the ‘datagram’ invented by Louis Pouzin, which had been a major influence on the Arpanet design. The first CYCLADES terminal with television and keyboard calling was made public in 1974. This combination of telephone and computer was the earliest echo of what would later be called, with official gusto, ‘telematics’.

  The public sector threw its weight behind the development of this system. Gérard Théry, the French director general of telecommunications, drew up plans to develop a ‘telephone for all’ system as the infrastructural basis for ‘computing for all’.15 In 1978, a government report anticipated the ‘computerization of society’ and called for state investment to expedite the future. CYCLADES was ultimately defeated, however, by the internal politics of the public sector. France’s telecommunications department, Postes, télégraphes et téléphones (PTT), had been developing its own system, Transpac. Transpac used, instead of packet-switching, a circuit-switched network. Circuit-switching is a much older system initially designed in 1878 for handling phone calls, using dedicated point-to-point connections for the duration of the call. At the insistence of the PTT, CYCLADES was defunded and the Transpac system was the basis for the emerging videotex service, Minitel.

  Minitel was pioneered in 1981, in a small experiment in Velizy, connecting 2,500 homes with an experimental range of services. Central to this, and the major incentive for households to adopt the device, was that it offered a computerized file of the telephone directory so that calls to anyone could be made quickly and easily. By 1983, the service was successful enough to be extended throughout the whole of France. And the terminal was free, distributed by local authorities. France Télécom astutely surmised that the public couldn’t be expected to buy something without knowing in advance what services would be available. Users were billed, not by subscription fee, but on a play now, pay later basis. The number of terminals in use soared to 531,000 by 1984. By the mid-1990s, just as the internet was being launched, there were over six and a half million terminals.

  The advantage of Minitel was that it was an open platform, guaranteed by the public sector. Anyone could offer any service or promote any idea. All one had to do was register and pay a fee. Initial press hostility diminished as the newspapers saw an opportunity to sell their product in a new medium. The services available included online shopping, chatting, booking tickets, interactive gaming, checking bank accounts – even the rudiments of what we today call ‘smart homes’, such as remote control of thermostats and home appliances.

  New online visual arts flourished. So did a certain cosmopolitan cyber-utopianism. ‘I am dreaming’, wrote artist Ben Vautier, ‘of a Minitel with which we should send a message in French and it would be received in Bantu at Tombouctou and in Basque in Bayonne.’16 On th
e Left and within social movements, the technology generated breathless radical enthusiasm. There was good reason for this, as social organizations proved able, from the start, to turn the technology to their advantage.

  In late 1986, for example, social movement organizations created a new Minitel service: 36-15 Alter. This combined twenty-five associations representing psychiatric patients, anti-racist students, farmers and other heterogeneous groups. They all paid the fee together, and collectively managed the informational commons. Alongside the ‘free radio’ movement, it showed that the old one-way communications system was breaking down. The old mass media had wielded the power of hypnotic mass suggestion, with audiences reduced to passive recipients of mediated messages. Philosopher Félix Guattari, a participant in 36-15 Alter, looked forward to the vanishing of ‘the element of suggestion’, and the emergence of a ‘post-media era’. The ‘machines of information, communication, intelligence, art and culture’ could be collectively and individually reappropriated.17

  In the same year as the launch of 36-15 Alter, student protesters used the message system of Libération, a left-wing daily which supplied Minitel content, to organize mass protests against education minister Alain Devaquet’s reforms to the university system. The government’s plan was to impose more selection in universities and charge fees. Within days of the mass protests, during which the student protester Malik Oussekine was killed in police custody, the law was withdrawn and Devaquet resigned. In 1988, nurses used the network to coordinate their strike action against health cuts, staff shortages and low wages. During the strike, they forged a new union, La Coordination Nationale Infirmière, and used Minitel as, in the words of sociologist Danièle Kergoat, ‘a tool for transforming social reality’.18 On Minitel, they could collectively discuss their situation, share notebooks of grievances, maintain shared status updates. Guattari enthused that the nurses ‘knew how to use Minitel for transversal communication’ to cut across old lines of division. They were able ‘to dialogue’ between different practices in different fields. They could fuse ‘individual points of view with the collective movement’ and allow ‘minority positions’ to be taken into account.