And lodged in this web is the social platform, the engine of constant, frantic, distracted writing. It is in this matrix that our passions, our desires, are accumulated as data, the better to manipulate and manage them. We confess to the machine while we walk, offering little ambulatory prayers. In doing so, we become cyborg beings: an assemblage of organic and inorganic materials, bits of technology, flesh and teeth, pieces of media, snippets of code holding it all together. The connections between the parts as simple and fluid as the fingers skating with practised precision over a glassy surface. As Donna Haraway once wrote, our bodies don’t stop at the skin.79 Their very physical infrastructures now extend halfway round the world.
If what is meant by addiction is being unable to do without something, it is increasingly hard to imagine life with any other kind of body. And bodies think; there being, of course, nothing else to think with. Whether we’re walking or writing, we are always experiencing what the phenomenologists call ‘embodied cognition’. This is one of the things Freud adverted to when he claimed in a late, oracular note that the psyche is ‘extended’. By claiming that the mind is extended in space, he was identifying it with the body. Adding that the mind ‘knows nothing about’ its extension, he also linked the body to the unconscious. As though the body thinks without the mind’s noticing.
So what happens if bits of us, what the philosopher Brian Rotman calls our ‘distributed selves’, run in parallel on different processors?80 It is naive to suppose that these technologies simply expand the powers of our organic bodies. They create dependencies; they change us. To use them at all, Lydia Liu argues, we must ‘serve these objects . . . as gods or minor religions’.81 As our lives are rewritten by digital languages, a new theology begins to surface. An emerging dispensation of some ‘post-human singularity’ theorists is that the universe is fundamentally digital, and that reality is in some very real sense generated by a Universal Computer. This, the digital equivalent of praying to a sun god, gives cosmic dignity to the presuppositions of a transient way of life. It is an extreme expression of the way in which our attitudes to technology have always been religious.
IX.
Addicts administer death in small doses. We are devoted to what kills us. In this respect, it is very unlike sun worship. For all the obsession with gratification, the most obvious attribute of addiction in its negative sense is that it kills. And nor is this a purely physical death. The drug addicts of Vancouver’s Hastings Corridor, described by Bruce Alexander, suffer symbolic death, ‘sodden misery’, before their biological death from overdose, suicide, Aids or hepatitis.82 Compulsive gamblers administer death in a symbolic sense, too, building up unpayable debts to the point where they lose everything they have lived for. If their bet poses a question about destiny, the addiction specialist Rik Loose argues, death is the radical answer.83
Social media addiction is rarely understood in this extreme light. Nonetheless, users often describe it wrecking their careers and relationships. The complaints are almost always the same: users end up constantly distracted, unproductive, anxious, needy and depressed – yet also curiously susceptible to advertising. Patrick Garratt wrote of his social media addiction causing a ‘desperate, hollow pressure of waste’ in his working life as a journalist.84 Social media addiction has been linked, repeatedly, to increased depression: interaction with the platforms correlates with a major decline in mental health, while increased screen time (or ‘time on device’) may be contributing to a recent surge in teen suicides.85 Facebook’s own guileful way of presenting the issue was to claim that while ‘passive’ consumption of social media content could pose mental health risks, more engagement could ‘improve wellbeing’. This claim, while not supported by the research, would mean more profitable data for the site.
The dominant view of these self-destructive propensities was vividly explained by addiction entrepreneur, the late Allen Carr.86 In a macabre image, he compared addiction to a carnivorous pitcher plant. The plant lures insects and small animals to their death with the fragrant smell of nectar. Once the creature is inside, gazing down at that delicious pool of sugary liquid, he finds the walls slippery and waxy, then slides down, with growing speed, falling into what he discovers is his watery grave. By the time he realizes that the pleasure is a mirage, it is too late to escape. He is consumed by digestive enzymes. This was Carr’s hard sell, one of a range of powerful suggestion techniques he used to break his clients’ addictions. But it also condenses how we mostly tend to think of the dark side of addiction – as something that ambushes the user, lured by a simple promise of pleasure.
The problem is, widespread knowledge of the dangers of addiction doesn’t stop it from happening. Likewise, we know by now that if social industry platforms get us addicted, they are working well. The more they wreck our lives, the better they’re functioning. Yet we persist. Some of this can be explained away by the manner in which addiction organizes our attention. The platforms, like gambling machines, are experts at disguising losses as wins. These work thanks to an effect similar to that exploited by practitioners of cold reading and ‘psychic’ tricks: we attend to the pleasurable ‘hits’ and ignore the disappointing ‘misses’. We focus on the buzz of winning, not the cost of playing the game, and not the opportunities lost by playing. And if occasionally the habit threatens to crush us, we can fantasize that one day a big win will save us. But to explain away behaviour is not really to explain it. It is to collude in the rationalization of behaviour that may not be rational.
The prevalence of addiction might be attributable in general to ‘psychosocial dislocation’, but as an adaptive strategy it sucks. It quite visibly destroys people. Which raises the troubling question: is self-destruction, in some perverse way, the yield? What if we dive into the pitcher plant in part because we expect a slow death? What if, for example, the images of death and disease on the cigarette packet are an advertisement? Of course, it is not what is consciously sought. Heroin users are always trying to rediscover the bliss of the first hit. Compulsive gamblers live for those manic moments when their strategy seems to have paid off with a big win. But if it was really all about dopamine loops keeping us fixated on the next hit, it would be difficult to explain why random hits of unpleasure would make social media even more gripping. The platforms treat us mean and keep us keen.
One metric for this experience is known as ‘The Ratio’. On Twitter, if the replies to your tweet vastly outnumber the ‘likes’ and retweets, you’ve gambled and lost. Whatever you have written is so outrageous, so horrible, that you are now in the zone of the shitstorm. The notorious examples of this involve corporate CEOs, politicians and celebrities, ostensibly on the medium for professional purposes, pushing the self-destruct button with an awful post. But the telling examples are not those tweets where there is a momentary lapse in good public relations, but those where intelligent users become embroiled in horrendous, undignified, self-destructive fights with their followers.
Consider, for example, Mary Beard, a Cambridge historian who maintains a profile on Twitter filled with amiable selfies, centre-left views and chat with fans.87 Beard’s downfall came as she mused publicly about the horrendous allegations of Oxfam aid workers raping and sexually exploiting children in Haiti. While stipulating that it couldn’t be condoned, she wondered aloud how easy it would be to ‘sustain “civilized” values in a disaster zone’. Beard’s progressive followers were horrified. She seemed to be relativizing the behaviour of rapists. Would she be saying this, people wondered, if the victims were white? Beard was presumably unaware of any racist implication of her argument, but it was striking that she chose this medium as the place to make it. And perhaps just as significant was how ordinary that decision was. Twitter is good for witty banter; the lapidary concision of a tweet makes any put-down seem brutally decisive. Exactly for that reason, it’s a terrible place to idly propose provocative theses.
In the ensuing shitstorm, blizzards of concise, lethal replies were launche
d in her direction. Disappointed followers declared their disaffection. Beyond a certain critical mass, it stopped mattering how accurate the criticisms were. The shitstorm is not a form of accountability. Nor is it political pedagogy, regardless of the high-minded intentions, or sadism, of the participants. No one is learning anything, except how to remain connected to the machine. It is a punishment beating, its ecstasies sanctioned by virtue. Twitter has, as part of its addictive repertoire, democratized punishment.
Rather than backing away from the medium in open-mouthed horror and reconsidering her whole approach to the issue, Beard remained entranced by the flow. As so many users have done, she spent hours upping the ante, trying to rebut, engage and manage the emotional fallout from the attack. She ended the day by posting a tearful photograph of herself, pleading with the medium that ‘I am not really not the nasty colonialist you say I am’.88 This, predictably, egged the medium on, adding ‘white tears’ and ‘white fragility’ to the indictment. Hurt feelings, trivial in the scale of human woe, were being used to evade political accountability. (Besides, sotto voce, hurt feelings are delicious, but not enough.)
Still, Beard kept returning. It was, in its own way, a form of digital self-harm. The mirror that had told her how awesome she was now called her a scumbag, and it was clearly irresistible. Many online self-harmers must set up anonymous accounts to bully themselves, a practice which among the ‘incel’ (involuntarily-celibate) community is known as ‘blackpilling’. On the Twittering Machine, no such efforts are needed. You just have to keep playing and wait for it. Come for the nectar of approval, stay for the frisson of virtual death.
X.
Part of what keeps us hooked is the so-called variability of ‘rewards’: what Jaron Lanier calls ‘carrot and shtick’.89 The Twittering Machine gives us both positive and negative reinforcements, and the unpredictable variation of its feedback is what makes it so compulsive. Routine rewards might begin to bore us, but volatility, the way the medium suddenly turns on us, makes it more intriguing.
Like a mercurial lover, the machine keeps us needy and guessing; we can never be sure how to stay in its good graces. Indeed, the app manufacturers increasingly build in artificial-intelligence machine-learning systems so that they can learn from us how to randomize rewards and punishments more effectively. This sounds like an abusive relationship. Indeed, much as we describe relationships as having gone ‘toxic’, it is common to hear of ‘Twitter toxicity’.
Toxicity is a useful starting point for understanding a machine that hooks us with unpleasure, because it indexes both the pleasure of intoxication and the danger of having too much – hence the clinical term for the administration of toxic substances, ‘toxicomania’. The Renaissance natural philosopher Paracelsus is credited with a major insight of modern toxicology: the dose, not the substance, makes the poison.90 ‘Every food and drink, if taken beyond its dose, is poison,’ he said.
If toxicity is having the wrong dose, what are we overdosing on? Even with drugs, the answer is not straightforward. As Rik Loose points out, similar quantities of the same drug administered to different individuals have widely varying effects.91 The real experience of the drug – the subject-effect, as it’s called – partly depends on something other than the drug itself, namely something in the user. The happy pills have no more magic than magic beans. They have a blunt somatic force, but there has to be something else to act on. And if ‘psychosocial dislocation’ was a sufficient cause, then there would be far more addicts. Beyond a certain point, addiction must act on, and be caused by, the psychic world of the user.
With social media addiction, there are many more variables than with drugs, so it is hard to know where to begin. The designers of the smartphone or tablet interface, for example, have made sure that it is pleasurable to engage with, hold, even just to look at. The urge to reach, irritably, for the device during meals, conversations, parties and upon awakening, can partly be attributed to lust for the object and the soft, nacreous glow of the screen. Once we’ve navigated to the app, it is the platform designers who take control. For the duration of our visit, life is briefly streamlined, as with a video game, into a single visual flow, a set of soluble challenges, some dangled rewards and a game of chance.92 But the variety of possible experiences include voyeurism, approval and disapproval, gaming, news, nostalgia, socializing and regular social comparisons. If we’re addicted, we might just be addicted to the activities that the platforms enable, from gambling to shopping to spying on ‘friends’.
The platforms don’t organize our experience according to a master plan. As the sociologist Benjamin Bratton puts it, the mechanism is ‘strict and invariable’, but within that ‘autocracy of means’, the user is granted a relative ‘liberty of ends’.93 The protocols of the platform standardize and order the interactions of users. They use incentives and choke points to keep people committed to the machine. They manipulate ends for the benefit of their real clients – other firms. They bombard us with stimuli, learning from our responses, the better to teach us how to be the market demographic we’ve been identified as. But they don’t force us to stay there, or tell us what to do with the hours spent on the platform. Even more so than in the case of drugs, then, the toxicity is something we as users bring to the game.
There is no evidence that this toxicity is chemical. To locate it, we may have to go, as Freud put it, ‘beyond the pleasure principle’.94 The name for our compulsion to pursue that which we know will give us unpleasure is ‘death drive’.
CHAPTER THREE
WE ARE ALL CELEBRITIES
Show me someone without an ego, and I’ll show you a loser.
Donald Trump, Twitter.com
The ideological function of celebrity (and lottery systems) is clear – like a modern ‘wheel of fortune’ the message is ‘all is luck; some are rich, some are poor, that is the way the world is. . . it could be you!’
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle
I.
No one kneads us again out of earth and clay/no one incants our dust.
No one.
Paul Celan, ‘Psalm’
A wannish-grey June day in Égly, an ugly banlieue on the outskirts of Paris, and Océane was about to do something with celebrity. The ration of celebrity, even less than the famous fifteen minutes, afforded every random stranger on the internet. Speaking to followers on the Twitter-owned live-streaming app, Periscope, she was enigmatically calm. Her eyes, almost as dark as her wavy black hair, betrayed no hint of disturbance. Even when some of her followers tried to troll her, calling her a ‘dirty whore’, a ‘retard’, or demanding to see her tits, she remained impassive. She told them: just wait, you’ll see, you’ll understand.1
After a while, and having asked minors not to watch, she stopped talking. At half past four in the afternoon, she walked to the nearby railway station, carrying her smartphone with her, still recording – and threw herself in front of a high-speed train. The broadcast, viewed by 1,208 people, was ended when a rescue worker discovered the phone. Absurdly, many reactions to this suicide blamed the medium. Justine Atlan, a campaigner for online child protection, suggested, ‘it’s like putting a Ferrari in the hands of a five-year-old. Obviously it’s going to slam into a wall.’2 It would have made just as much sense to blame the existence of public transport, or French national culture, in a society with suicide rates far higher than the European average. By reducing Océane to a child, such think-of-the-children reactions evaded her message.
Freud, in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, argues that suicide is always a turning back on the self of a murder meant for someone else.3 It’s always a suicide attack, and it’s always, by the same token, a message. In the act of suicide, Lacan said, one becomes an ‘eternal sign for others’.4 This is what Océane wanted. Her death was a protest: in part against the ex-boyfriend whom she said had beaten and raped her; in part against her remote father, a profiteer in the sex industry; and in part against a society which, she felt, lac
ked empathy, especially on the internet.
Rana Dasgupta, in a powerful essay about the suicide for Granta, sees in it a case of celebrity gone horribly awry.5 Océane was ‘wired like everyone else’. She had tried to fit in with online celebrity culture, to ‘make her image conform to that of the triumphal media funster’. But confronted with the ‘online pageant’ of self-promotion, users, like all celebrities, are left with the hollow feeling that only they, in a cold world, have real thoughts and emotions. As in the world of Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, everyone else is a fake. What if, Dasgupta asked, ‘it was not just celebrity that was seen unfurling in Océane, but that hidden core of celebrity, which is always-about-to-die?’
What is it about celebrity that is always about to die? By now, thanks in part to Kenneth Anger’s classic account of Hollywood, the suicides, breakdowns and addictions of past-it Hollywood stars are well known.6 But this isn’t just a phenomenon of those who have fallen off their perch. Research finds that suicide among celebrities is anything from seven times to several thousand times that of the general population.7 There seems to be something about celebrity that horrifies, degrades and diminishes the star, as though the means of exaltation were also the means of their humiliation.
II.
For the first time, we have a generation growing up in the glare of ubiquitous publicity. Everyone can fight for a pittance of fame. ‘The people formerly known as the audience’, as media critic Jay Rosen calls us, are bidding for stardom. In the attention economy, we are all attention-seekers.8
The attention economy is not new. Writing before the advent of the social industry, Jonathan Crary described a concerted effort since the nineteenth century to get individuals to shape themselves in terms of their ability to pay attention.9 Life became, thanks to changes in audiovisual culture, a patchwork of jagged, broken states of attending, of being riveted by a sequence of stimuli. Advertising, movies, news cycles, all relied on their growing ability to force attention.
The Twittering Machine Page 7
