The Twittering Machine

by Richard Seymour

  5. It is a form of shorthand propaganda . . . Marcus Gilroy-Ware astutely draws on Todd Gitlin’s concept of ‘instant propaganda’ to describe the work that such phrases do. Marcus Gilroy-Ware, Filling the Void: Emotion, Capitalism and Social Media, Repeater Books: London, 2017, Kindle loc. 288.

  6. As William Davies has argued . . . William Davies, ‘Neoliberalism and the revenge of the “social”’, openDemocracy, 16 July 2013.

  7. Our lives have become . . . Shoshana Zuboff, ‘Big Other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilisation’, Journal of Information Technology, 2015, No 30, pp. 75–89.

  8. . . . redolent of the ‘Skinner Box’ . . . B. F. Skinner, The Behavior of Organisms: An Experimental Analysis, B. F. Skinner Foundation: Cambridge, MA, 1991.

  9. . . . according to former editor-in-chief . . . Chris Anderson, ‘The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes The Scientific Method Obsolete’, Wired, 23 June 2008.

  10. We no longer have to believe, as neo-liberal economist . . . F. A. Hayek, The American Economic Review, Vol. 35, No. 4. (Sep., 1945), pp. 519–530.

  11. Estimates of social platform usage vary wildly but . . . Hayley Tsukayama, ‘Teens spend nearly nine hours every day consuming media’, Washington Post, 9 November 2015.

  12. And the number of us checking our phones . . . Deloitte, ‘Global mobile consumer trends’, 2nd edition, 2017 .

  13. . . . violent, eroticized, animated fantasies aimed at children . . . James Bridle, ‘Something is wrong on the internet’, Medium.com, 6 November 2017.

  14. This is the ‘modern calculating machine’ . . . Jacques Lacan, ‘Seminar on “The Purloined Letter” ’, in Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, W. W. Norton & Company: New York, 2006, p. 45. On the cybernetic origins of Lacan’s thinking here, see Lydia H. Liu, The Freudian Robot: Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious, University of Chicago Press: Chicago, MI, 2011, Chapter Four.

  15. He blames the ‘short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops’ of social media . . . Julie Carrie Wong, ‘Former Facebook executive: social media is ripping society apart’, Guardian, 12 December 2017; Alex Hern, ‘ “Never get high on your own supply” – why social media bosses don’t use social media’, Guardian, 23 January 2018.

  16. Sean Parker, the Virginia-born billionaire hacker . . . Thuy Ong, ‘Sean Parker on Facebook: “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains” ’, The Verge, 9 November 2017; Olivia Solon, ‘Ex-Facebook president Sean Parker: site made to exploit human “vulnerability” ’, Guardian, 9 November 2017.

  17. It was another former Twitter adviser and Facebook executive . . . Antonio García-Martínez, ‘I’m an ex-Facebook exec: don’t believe what they tell you about ads’, Guardian, 2 May 2017.

  18. As the Silicon Valley guru Jaron Lanier puts it . . . Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 2010, p. 11.

  19. We would enjoy ‘creative autonomy’ . . . Manuel Castells, Communication Power, Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2009.

  20. Multitudes would suddenly swarm . . . Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, Penguin Books: New York, 2004.

  21. A 2015 study . . . Eric P. S. Baumer, Shion Guha, Emily Quan, David Mimno, and Geri Gay, ‘Missing Photos, Suffering Withdrawal, or Finding Freedom? How Experiences of Social Media Non-Use Influence the Likelihood of Reversion’, Social Media and Society, 2015.

  22. For those who are curating a self . . . Mike Elgan, ‘Social media addiction is a bigger problem than you think’, CIO, 14 December 2015.

  23. . . . the ‘gamification of capitalism’. Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, Verso: London and New York, 2017.

  24. Even Skinner’s rats were not Skinner’s rats . . . Bruce K Alexander, ‘Addiction: The View from Rat Park’, 2010 www.brucekalexander.com.

  25. Marcus Gilroy-Ware’s study of social media . . . Marcus Gilroy-Ware, Filling the Void: Emotion, Capitalism and Social Media, Repeater Books: London, 2017.

  26. . . . our online avatar resembles a ‘virtual tooth’ . . . Hans Bellmer, Little Anatomy of the Physical Unconscious, or The Anatomy of the Image, Dominion: Waterbury Centre, VT, 2004, p. 5.

  27. The global rise in depression . . . Laura Entis, ‘Depression is Now the World’s Most Widespread Illness’, Fortune, 30 March 2017.

  28. Steven Rudderham had been targeted . . . Steve White, ‘Steven Rudderham: Dad falsely accused of being paedophile on Facebook found hanged’, Mirror, 24 May 2013; Keith Kendrick, ‘Dad “Driven to Suicide” by Facebook Trolls Over False Paedophile Claims’, Huffington Post, 14 August 2014.

  29. . . . Chad Lesko of Toledo, Ohio . . . Camille Dodero, ‘Viral Facebook Post Alleges Man Is a Wanted Rapist, But He’s Not’, Gawker, 24 May 2013.

  30. Garnet Ford of Vancouver, and Triz Jefferies of Philadelphia . . . Doug Ward, ‘Man wrongly accused through social media of Surrey homicide’, Vancouver Sun, 12 October 2011; Jessica Hopper, ‘Wrong Man Shown in Wanted Photo for Philadelphia “Kensington Strangler” ’, ABC News, 21 December 2010; Stephanie Farr, ‘Wrong Man Shown in Wanted Photo for Philadelphia “Kensington Strangler” ’, Philadelphia Inquirer, 21 December 2010.

  31. In 2006, a thirteen-year-old boy named Mitchell Henderson . . . Mattathias Schwartz, ‘The Trolls Among Us’, New York Times, 3 August 2008; Whitney Phillips, ‘This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture’, MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 2015, pp. 28–30.

  32. . . . an eleven-year-old boy from Tennessee, Keaton Jones . . . ‘How is a bullied child like “Milkshake Duck” ’, BBC Trending, 17 December 2017; Joanna Williams, ‘Poor bullied Keaton Jones has become a Milkshake Duck, the latest viral victim of fake celebrity compassion’, Daily Telegraph, 12 December 2017.

  33. Ashawnty Davis, who, her parents say . . . Doug Criss & Laura Diaz-Zuniga, ‘Parents say 10-year-old daughter killed herself because of bullying’, CNN, 2 December 2017.

  34. . . . domesticate them with the ‘rule of law’ . . . See Martha Nussbaum, Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, and Justice, Oxford University Press: New York, 2016.

  35. . . . the workings of the liberal state. See Corey Robin, Fear: The History of a Political Idea, Oxford University Press: New York, 2006.

  36. The spectacle . . . Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, Rebel Press: London, 2014.

  37. The debacle . . . Nick Cohen, ‘ “Twitter joke” case only went ahead at insistence of DPP’, Observer, 28 July 2012; Owen Bowcott, ‘Twitter joke trial became confrontation with judicial establishment’, Guardian, 27 July 2012.

  38. Less well known . . . ‘Azhar Ahmed sentenced over Facebook soldier deaths slur’, BBC News, 9 October 2012.

  39. This is what happened . . . Taylor McGraa, ‘Exclusive: Bahar Mustafa Speaks to VICE After the Police Drop “#KillAllWhiteMen’ Charges”, Vice, 3 November 2015; Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff, ‘I’m glad the CPS saw Bahar Mustafa’s #killallwhitemen tweet in context’, Guardian, 5 November 2015.

  40. Trolls programmatically search . . . On ‘exploitability’, see Whitney Phillips, This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture, MIT Press: Cambridge, MA: 2015.

  41. The late writer, Mark Fisher . . . Mark Fisher, ‘Exiting the Vampire Castle’, Open Democracy, 24 November 2013.

  42. ‘Language is mysterious’ . . . Karen Armstrong, The Bible: A Biography, Atlantic Books: London, 2007, p. 1.

  43. So that a future reader can breathe . . . Seamus Heaney, ‘A Kite for Aibhin’, Human Chain, Faber & Faber: London, 2010.

  44. The religious historian . . . David Frankfurter, ‘The Magic of Writing and the Writing of Magic: The Power of the Word in Egyptian and Greek Traditions’, Helios, Vol. 21, No. 2, 1994.

  45. The Polish-American grammatologist . . . I. J. Gelb, A Study of Writing, University of
Chicago Press: Chicago & London, 1952.

  46. According to the software developer . . . Joel Spolsky, ‘The Law of Leaky Abstractions’, Joel on Software, 11 December 2002.

  47. But it is also to loop . . . Louis R Ormont, ‘Cultivating the Observing Ego in the Group Setting’, International Journal of Group Psychotherapy, Vol. 45, No. 4, 1995.

  48. Jonathan Beller, the film theorist, has argued . . . Jonathan Beller, The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle, Dartmouth College Press: Hanover, NH, 2006.

  CHAPTER TWO

  1. . . . ‘bright dings of pseudo-pleasure’ . . . Paul Lewis, ‘ “Our minds can be hijacked”: the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia’, Guardian, 6 October 2017.

  2. Leah Pearlman was a user . . . Victor Luckerson, ‘The Rise of the Like Economy’, The Ringer, 15 February 2017; Julian Morgans, ‘The Inventor of the “Like” Button Wants You to Stop Worrying About Likes’, Vice, 6 July 2017.

  3. Apple’s design strategist . . . Mark Sullivan, ‘Jony Ive says “constant use” of iPhone is “misuse” ’, Fast Company, 6 October 2017.

  4. Yet, according to David Kirkpatrick’s history . . . David Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World, Simon & Schuster: New York, 2011, p. 118.

  5. One of the site’s earliest users . . . Julia Carrie Wong, ‘I was one of Facebook’s first users. I shouldn’t have trusted Mark Zuckerberg’, Guardian, 17 April 2018.

  6. He told a friend . . . Josh Halliday, ‘Facebook: Mark Zuckerberg college messages reveal steely ambition’, Guardian, 18 May 2012.

  7. But one of Twitter’s early founders . . . Nick Bilton, Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal, Penguin: New York, 2013, p. 152.

  8. As he told the university newspaper . . . Alan J. Tabak, ‘Hundreds Register for New Facebook Website’, The Harvard Crimson, 9 February 2004; see also Tom Huddleston Jr., ‘Here’s how 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg described “The Facebook” in his first TV interview’, CNBC, 17 April 2018.

  9. By 2005 . . . David Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That is Connecting the World, Simon & Schuster: New York, 2011, p. 319.

  10. Harvard sociology professor Nicholas Christakis . . . Stephanie Rosenbloom, ‘On Facebook, Scholars Link Up With Data’, New York Times, 17 December 2007.

  11. As William Davies points out . . . William Davies, The Happiness Industry, Verso: London and New York, 2015, pp. 241–243 and 253.

  12. This was an example . . . Declan McCullagh, ‘Knifing the Baby’, Wired, 5 November 1998; Bruce Sterling, The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things, Strelka Press: Moscow, 2014, Kindle Loc. 200.

  13. Drug use . . . Bruce Alexander & Anton Schweighofer, ‘Defining “addiction”, Canadian Psychology Vol. 29, No. 2:151–162 April 1988.

  14. The model for research . . . Kimberly S Young, Caught in the Net: How to Recognise the Signs of Internet Addiction – and a Winning Strategy for Recovery, John Wiley & Sons: New York, 1998; see also the website for Young’s Center for Internet Addiction .

  15. Facebook’s founding president . . . Olivia Solon, ‘Ex-Facebook president Sean Parker: site made to exploit human “vulnerability’’?’, Guardian, 9 November 2017.

  16. The anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll . . . Mattha Busby, ‘Social media copies gambling methods “to create psychological cravings’’?’, Guardian, 8 May 2018; see also Natasha Dow Schüll, Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas, Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ, 2014.

  17. Nora Volkow . . . Abigail Zuger, ‘A General in the Drug War’, New York Times, 13 June 2011.

  18. Adam Alter . . . Adam Alter, Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked, Penguin: New York, 2017.

  19. . . . a 2013 study . . . Joanna Stern, ‘Cellphone Users Check Phones 150x/Day and Other Internet Fun Facts’, ABC News, 29 May 2013.

  20. One recent survey . . . ‘1 in 10 of us check our smartphones during sex – seriously’, Daily Telegraph, 13 May 2016.

  21. In his book . . . Marc Lewis, The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction is Not a Disease, Scribe: London, 2015.

  22. Thomas De Quincey’s . . . Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings, Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2013.

  23. When the Catholic mystic . . . Francis Thomson, ‘The Poppy’, Selected Poems of Francis Thomson, Amazon Edition.

  24. Technology has never . . . The psychoanalyst Sherry Turkle is insightful on this. See Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other, Basic Books: New York, 2011.

  25. This is how the telecommunications firm . . . This commercial, known as ‘Anthem’, is widely quoted. For a useful analysis, see Lisa Nakamura, ‘ “Where Do You Want To Go Today?”: Cybernetic tourism, the Internet, and transnationality,’ in Nicolas Mirzoeff, The Visual Culture Reader, Routledge: London and New York, 2002.

  26. Facebook’s first video advertisement . . . Sadly the ad is no longer available. It is described in detail by Tim Nudd, ‘Ad of the Day: Facebook’, Adweek, 4 October 2012.

  27. But as the cyberpunk writer . . . Bruce Sterling, quoted in Virginia Heffernan, Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art, Simon & Schuster: New York, 2017, p. 25.

  28. What Bruce Alexander calls . . . Bruce Alexander, The Globalization of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit, Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2011.

  29. . . . ‘uniform distancelessness’ . . . Christopher Bollas, Meaning and Melancholia: Life in the Age of Bewilderment, Routledge: London and New York, 2018, p. 49.

  30. We prefer the machine . . . Sherry Turkle’s research finds a surprisingly large constituency of people who would prefer a robot as a romantic or sexual partner, because they wouldn’t come with the oddities that human partners bring. Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other, Basic Books: New York, 2011.

  31. First, a sharp decline . . . The decline in violence is linked to a general decline in all sorts of crime since the mid-1990s. For an overview of some of the evidence, see A. Tseloni, J. Mailley, G. Farrell, & N. Tilley, ‘Exploring the international decline in crime rates’, European Journal of Criminology, 7(5), 2010, pp. 375–394; and Jan van Dijk, A. Tseloni and G. Farrell, The International Crime Drop: New Directions in Research, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Despite efforts to link the crime drop to improved property security or changes in policing tactics, it is so sustained and general as to elude that type of explanation. It is indicative of a deeper social threshold having been reached.

  32. . . . a decline, almost a crash, in rates of alcohol and nicotine consumption . . . See, for example, ‘Under-25s turning their backs on alcohol, study suggests’, BBC News, 10 October 2018; Linda Ng Fat, Nicola Shelton and Noriko Cable, ‘Investigating the growing trend of non-drinking among young people; analysis of repeated cross-sectional surveys in England 2005–2015’, BMC Public Health, 18 (1), 2018; Sara Miller Llana, ‘Culture shift: What’s behind a decline in drinking worldwide’, Christian Science Monitor, 3 October 2018; Denis Campbell, ‘Number of smokers in England drops to all-time low’, Guardian, 20 September 2016; ‘Adult smoking habits in the UK: 2017’, Office for National Statistics, 3 July 2018; ‘Why young people are now less likely to smoke’, BBC News, 7 March 2017; Frank Newport, ‘Young People Adopt Vaping as Their Smoking Rate Plummets’, Gallup, 26 July 2018.

  33. Analysis of American . . . Jean Twenge, iGen - Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy – And Completely Unprepared For Adulthood, Atria Books: New York, 2017.

  34. It is no accident . . . Darian Leader, Hands: What We Do With Them – And Why, Penguin Random House: London, 2016, Kindle Loc. 686.

  35. . . . ‘post-scarcity’ . . . for one version of this fashionable theory, see Jeremy Rifkin, ‘The Rise of Anti-Capitalism’, New York Times, 15
March 2014.

  36. The literary critic Raymond Williams . . . Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form, Routledge: London and New York, 2003, pp. 19–21.

  37. The psychoanalyst Colette Soler . . . Colette Soler, Lacan: The Unconscious Revisited, Karnac Books: London, 2014, Kindle Loc. 3239.

  38. In an arresting image . . . Marcus Gilroy-Ware, Filling the Void: Emotion, Capitalism and Social Media, Repeater Books: London, 2017, Kindle Loc. 610.

  39. . . . rules which English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, in a pregnant metaphor, compared to the ‘laws of gaming’. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Oxford University Press: Oxford and New York, 1998, p. 230.

  40. B. F. Skinner was not . . . Daniel W. Bjork, ‘B. F. Skinner and the American Tradition: The Scientist as Social Inventor’, in Daniel W. Bjork, Laurence D. Smith and William R. Woodward, eds., B. F. Skinner and Behaviorism in American Culture, Lehigh University Press: London, 1996; Daniel N. Wiener, B. F. Skinner: Benign Anarchist, Allyn & Bacon: Boston, MA, 1996.

  41. The behavioural scientists . . . Kaya Tolon, ‘Future Studies: A New Social Science Rooted in Cold War Strategic Thinking’, in Mark Solovey and Hamilton Cravens, Cold War Social Science: Knowledge Production, Liberal Democracy, and Human Nature, Palgrave Macmillan: New York, 2012; see also Robert L. Solso, Mind and Brain Sciences in the 21st Century, MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 1999.

  42. The programme was surprisingly successful . . . On ‘Project Pigeon’, see C.V. Glines, ‘Top Secret WWII Bat and Bird Bomber Program’, Aviation History, May 2005; and James H. Capshew, ‘Engineering Behaviour: Project Pigeon, World War II, and the Conditioning of B. F. Skinner’, in Laurence D. Smith and William R. Woodward, eds., B. F. Skinner and Behaviorism in American Culture, Lehigh University Press: London, 1996.

  43. In Science and Human Behavior . . . B. F. Skinner, Science and Human Behavior, The Free Press: New York, 2012.

  44. As long as he had the means . . . Here is the rub. As William Davies argues, the plausibility of such agnosticism is only plausible as long as the agnostic ‘is privy to huge surveillance capacities’. William Davies, The Happiness Industry, Verso: London and New York, 2015, p. 254.