However, what the Twittering Machine produces is in fact a new hybrid. The voice is indeed given a new, written embodiment, but it is massified. It becomes uncannily detached from any individual. It acquires a life of its own: immense, impressive, playful, polyphonic, chaotic, demotic, at times dread-inspiring. The holy music of birdsong becomes, not a chorus, but a cyborg roar.
XII.
It is ironic, given this massification, that so much social media talk is obsessed with individual liberation. What the social industry does is fragment individuals in new ways – you are so many enterprises, accounts, projects – and routinely reaggregate the pieces as a new, transient collective: call it a swarm, for the purposes of marketing.
The flipside of supposed individual liberation is the idea of a ‘new narcissism’, of selfie-stick, of navel-gazing status update. In truth, there is always narcissism, and it is hardly a sin. And if writing is about giving yourself a second body, then it is in some ways nothing but sublimated narcissism. However, the ‘Skinner Box’ structure posits, as its ideal subject, an extremely fragile narcissist, someone who must constantly feed on approval cookies, or lapse into depression.
The Twittering Machine invites users to constitute new, inventive identities for themselves, but it does so on a competitive, entrepreneurial basis. It can be empowering for those who have been traditionally marginalized and oppressed, but it also makes the production and maintenance of these identities imperative, exhausting and time-consuming. Social media platforms engage the self as a permanent and ongoing response to stimuli. One is never really able to withhold or delay a response; everything has to happen in this timeline, right now, before it is forgotten.
To inhabit the social industry is to be in a state of constant distractedness, a junkie fixation on keeping in touch with it, knowing where it is and how to get it. But it is also to loop what the psychoanalyst Louis Ormont calls ‘the observing ego’ into an elaborate panopticon so that self-surveillance is redoubled many times over. This is central to the productive side of the social industry.47 Indeed, in a sense it is nothing but production – of endless writing – more efficient in its way than a sweatshop. Jonathan Beller, the film theorist, has argued that with the internet, ‘looking is labouring’.48 It is more precise to say that looking and being looked at is an irresistible inducement to labour.
What is it that we’re labouring on? The birth pangs of a new nation. If print capitalism invented the nation, for many people the platform of their choice is also their country, their imagined community. Education systems, newspapers and television stations still defer to the national state. But when sociologists describe the proliferation of ‘lifeworlds’ online, it goes without saying that their porous outlines have little to do with national boundaries.
So if a new type of country is being born, what sort of country is it? And why does it seem so continuously primed for explosion?
____________
i A ‘viral’ content website, specializing in ‘uplifting’ and ‘inspirational’ videos and stories.
CHAPTER TWO
WE ARE ALL ADDICTS
The trouble with modern theories of behaviourism is not that they are wrong but that they could become true, that they actually are the best possible conceptualization of certain obvious trends in modern society.
Hannah Arendt
Remember this: The house doesn’t beat the player. It just gives him the opportunity to beat himself.
Nick ‘The Greek’ Dandolos
Oh this is going to be addictive.
First tweet of Dom Sagolla, software engineer and Twitter co-founder
I.
In 2017, Jonathan Rosenstein, one of the developers of Facebook’s ‘like’ button, deleted his Facebook app. He was worried about what he had helped birth. These ‘bright dings of pseudo-pleasure’ that the button provided, he told the Guardian, had ‘unintended, negative consequences’.1 It was supposed to be a happy button, a way for friends to be nice to each other. Instead, it had created addicted, distracted, unhappy users. It was cyber-crack.
Leah Pearlman was a user.2 Having also helped design the ‘like’ button, she was drawn to its lure. But the promise of the red notification was never fulfilled. ‘I check and I feel bad,’ she explained. ‘Whether there’s a notification or not, it doesn’t really feel that good. Whatever we’re hoping to see, it never quite meets that bar.’ For the sake of her own sanity, she delegated the management of her Facebook account to an employee.
Many social industry and tech executives resist their own technologies. Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook account is run by employees. Apple’s Steve Jobs wouldn’t let his children near an iPad, while his replacement, Tim Cook, doesn’t allow his nephew to use social networking sites. Apple’s design strategist Jony Ive warns that ‘constant use’ of tech is overuse.3 As always, tech is adept at producing profitable solutions to the problems it creates. Now smartphone users can trade in their addictive devices for a range of minimalist alternatives, with the limited texting and call-making functionality of a very old mobile phone. Indeed, some of them initially sold at a substantially higher price than the smartphones they sought to replace.
But how was the addiction machine invented? The social industry platforms appear, as much as anything, to have stumbled on the techniques, in much the same way that their venture-capitalist funders stumbled on the profit model. But the potential for addiction was always there. Facebook’s creator, Mark Zuckerberg, was always attuned to social technologies exploiting the pleasures of prying and social competition. One of his earliest sites, Facemash, exploited Harvard’s online facebooks, which displayed photos and information about students. Taking photographs from these sites, he invited users to rate their comparative ‘hotness’. Similar to another website, Hot or Not, users were shown two photos at a time and invited to vote for the ‘hottest’. The college forced him to take it down for using the photographs without permission. But the site collected 22,000 votes before it was removed.
Zuckerberg returned with thefacebook.com in 2004, which was billed as an ‘online directory’. The site combined some of the affordances of Friendster.com with the format of the Harvard facebooks. Its bare user interface and minimalist design suggested that it was to be a community tool, not titillation. Yet, according to David Kirkpatrick’s history of the platform, The Facebook Effect, early users reported a fascination with the site. ‘I can’t get off it.’ ‘I don’t study. I’m addicted.’4 The site wasn’t just a directory, but a riveting source of voyeurism and social comparison for the students. One of the site’s earliest users, Julia Carrie Wong, wrote for the Guardian of the insidious way that it combined ‘useful information and prurient entertainment’ while transforming social interactions so that ‘popularity was easily quantifiable’.5
Today, most successful apps and platforms depend on our enthusiastic willingness to share information about ourselves. Zuckerberg initially professed to be mystified by the quantity and detail of data people were willing to give him. He told a friend at Harvard: ‘People just submitted it. I don’t know why. They “trust me”. Dumb fucks.’6 He had unwittingly tapped into the complex pleasures of self-display. The most obvious and oft-scolded aspects are the narcissistic pleasure of exhibitionism and competitive pleasure of being compared to others. But one of Twitter’s early founders, Noah Glass, put his finger on another dimension: people would use social networking to make them feel less alone.7 Whatever was happening to them – an earthquake, redundancy, divorce, a frightening news item or just boredom – there would always be someone to talk to. Where society was missing, the network would substitute.
These pleasures are redoubled by the ‘network effect’. The more people use it, the more valuable it is to each user. Zuckerberg understood, early on, that this was how he would build his site. As he told the university newspaper The Harvard Crimson, ‘The nature of the site is that each user’s experience improves if they can get their friends to join it.’8 Other
colleges quickly signed up. And it took just a year for it to attract the attention of advertisers, thanks to the brute scale and objectivity of its data. By 2005, when Interscope Records launched Gwen Stefani’s single ‘Hollaback Girl’, they approached Facebook.9 Facebook, unlike advertisers using cookie data, could guarantee that Interscope’s advertisements would be seen by a specific demographic: college cheerleaders. The result was that ‘Hollaback Girl’ resounded at football stadiums that autumn. Facebook made two decisions. By the end of 2006, it had opened its service to all, accumulating a total of 12 million users. At the same time, its engineers set about developing algorithms to analyse patterns in their vast gold mine of data. Facebook piously claims that it doesn’t sell user data, but the idea was to use the data to quantify, manipulate and sell user attention.
Facebook was catnip for advertisers, but it was also a large-scale public laboratory. By 2007, with 58 million active users on the site, teams of academics from Harvard and the University of California were studying profiles to gather information about the connection between users’ tastes and values and how they interacted. Harvard sociology professor Nicholas Christakis, heralding a rebirth of the university’s tradition of behavioural science, told the New York Times that the sheer scale of the data promised ‘a new way of doing social science . . . Our predecessors could only dream of the kind of data we now have.’10
As William Davies points out, however, behaviourist analysis only works if ‘those participating in experiments do so naively’.11 The more they know about what is going on, the less reliable the results. The most infamous expression of this was the publication, in 2014, of the results of an experiment conducted on Facebook users. Seven hundred thousand users had been the unwitting subjects of the manipulation of their newsfeeds to enable researchers to explore ‘emotional contagion’. The damage to Facebook’s reputation was relatively limited, and social industry companies continue to supply masses of data, at cost, to researchers.
The biggest step forward for Facebook also radicalized its ‘Skinner Box’ propensities: the ‘like’ button. Facebook did not invent this tool. Reddit already used an ‘upvote’ button, and Twitter had allowed users to ‘favourite’ tweets since 2006. In 2007, the social aggregator site, FriendFeed, used a ‘like’ button for the first time. FriendFeed was purchased by Facebook in 2009, just as it launched its own ‘like’ button. This was an example of the practices of ‘knifing the baby’ and ‘stealing the oxygen’ that Microsoft pioneered in the late 1990s.12 Facebook was appropriating the work of a smaller rival, a number of whose features it had already built into its own design, and then buying it up to snuff out a market that threatened it.
According to Pearlman, the ‘like’ button was introduced to change user behaviour. This is what drives many of the innovations on social networking sites. For example, when Instagram introduced an ‘Archive’ feature for old or unwanted photos, it was to disincentivize users from deleting them and depriving the platform of content. In this case, Facebook had been looking at a ‘bomb’ button, or an ‘awesome’ button, which would replace redundant expressions of sentiment in comments threads with low-effort, quantifiable expressions of emotion. Instead of ten messages offering ‘congratulations’ for a wedding photo, there might be a hundred ‘likes’. This would then incentivize people to make more status updates. It also built on Facebook’s existing technique of quantifying popularity and allowing quick and objectively measurable social comparisons.
To say that it worked would be an understatement. The ‘like’ button changed everything on Facebook. User engagement exploded. By May 2012, with one billion active users, Facebook was so rich with profit potential it was able to make an Initial Public Offering for its stock. Other social industry platforms were unable to resist the advantages of the ‘like’ button. One after another, they followed suit: YouTube and Instagram in 2010, Google+ in 2011, Twitter in 2015. With the social industry platforms a new industrial model was being born, and the ‘like’ button was a decisive moment in its consolidation.
The ‘like’ button is the pivot of the ‘Skinner Box’ model – the administration of rewards and punishments – in the struggle for the attention economy. It is the economic organization of addiction.
II.
Whether or not we think we are addicted, the machine treats us as addicts. Addiction is, quite deliberately, the template for our relationship to the Twittering Machine. The problem is, no one knows what addiction is.
What is so addictive about a ‘like’? Until relatively recently, the medical and psychiatric establishment treated substance abuse as the paradigm for all addictions. Governments, led by the United States, have prosecuted a ‘war on drugs’ justified by the claim that users are chemical slaves, lacking control over their lives. This perspective was inherited from the temperance movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which saw alcohol as a demon possessing the drinker. It was then expanded to all use of recreational drugs, whether addictive or not.
Drug use, though, accounts for only a fifth of all addictive practices.13 Over the last few decades, there has been a profusion of treatments for a variety of obsessions – Bloggers Anonymous, Debtors Anonymous, Gamblers Anonymous, and so on. And since the 1990s, there has been a growing concern with something called ‘internet addiction’, followed by ‘social media addiction’. The model for research into social media addiction is gambling addiction.14 Kimberly Young, a psychologist and founder of the Center for Internet Addiction, was an early pioneer in the field. An established expert in gambling addiction, she noticed similarities between the kinds of people who bet their house on a hand of poker, and the kinds of people betting their lives on a blinking screen. Neither involved a physical drug, yet both showed addictive patterns.
Young looked for a cluster of symptoms pointing to ‘excessive’ internet use. If users were preoccupied with the medium, if it took up increasing amounts of their time, if cutting down left them feeling restless, moody or irritable, or if they used it to escape from personal problems or feelings of dysphoria: that was addiction. Users were given a score, based on questionnaire answers, showing how severe their addiction was. Subsequent research into social media addiction has been similarly concerned with ‘excessive’ use of platforms for escapist purposes or mood management, adverse consequences and loss of control.
This has yet to congeal into a stable clinical category. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the bible of psychiatrists in the US, has tended to see addiction through the prism of drug use. It has never recognized internet addiction. Even now, while it recognizes ‘gambling disorder’, it does not speak of gambling addiction. Even if the DSM were to change its approach, there would still be a problem, and it would be the same problem that afflicts most of the DSM’s clinical categories. To describe a cluster of behaviours doesn’t explain how these behaviours are related or what causes them. We can call something addiction because it resembles other phenomena that have been called addiction. But that still doesn’t mean we know what addiction actually is. Amid the prevailing conceptual confusion, we need a new language.
III.
Addiction is all about attention. For the social industry bosses, this is axiomatic. We attend to what feels good, to ‘rewards’. And, in an attention economy, the social industry platforms are waging a constant battle to manipulate our attention in real time.
Facebook’s founding president Sean Parker echoed a raft of research in claiming that social media platforms achieve this by exploiting the craving for a ‘dopamine hit’.15 Their machinery generates regular hits in the form of ‘likes’, with flashing red notifications administering the same high that a slot-machine addict gets when three bells line up. The anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll argues, based on her study of gambling, that once these unnaturally large dopamine rewards flood into the brain, ‘we lose our willpower.’16 Our brains, not prepared by evolution for such a flood, ‘become overwhelmed
and screwed up’. Nora Volkow, director of the US National Institute on Drug Abuse, insists: ‘Addiction is all about the dopamine’.17
And, whether or not the theory is true, techniques based on the dopamine theory seem to work. Adam Alter, a psychologist who studies online addiction, has sifted through the data collected by the app Moment, which tracks smartphone usage.18 Some 88 per cent of users spent ‘an average of a quarter of their waking lives on their phones’. His own data showed, to his astonishment, that he had spent three hours a day on his phone, picking it up an average of forty times a day. And his behaviour may be relatively moderate: a 2013 study found that the average user checks their phone 150 times a day, which other research suggests includes 2,617 touches, taps or swipes.19 One recent survey even found that one in ten users has checked their phone during sex.20 But for Alter, as for most of us, the bait was so subtle and seductive that the catch didn’t even notice his mouth clamping around the hook.
Not everyone accepts the dopamine consensus, however. Marc Lewis, a former heroin addict and neuroscientist, has written movingly about his own escape from addiction, and contributed enormously to the science of addiction. In his book, The Biology of Desire, he argues that addiction is not about taking this or that substance. It is the ‘motivated repetition’ of a thought or behaviour.21 The thought or behaviour might initially be motivated by the prospect of a high, or by the wish to avoid depression. But once it has been repeated often enough, it acquires its own motivation.
This is possible, Lewis says, because of the way the brain works. The billions upon billions of nerve cells that organize thoughts and emotions undergo constant change. Cells die, new cells are born. Some synapses become more efficient through practice, enabling better connections, others less so. By repeating a thought or a behaviour, we ensure the synapses and cells associated with it flourish, while underused cells die or become less effective. We change the ‘brain’s wiring’, the ‘neural circuitry’ of wanting. The more we repeat an action, the more we train our brains for further repetition. We create an attention tunnel. As Lewis puts it, ‘what fires together, wires together’.
The Twittering Machine Page 4
