Social industry platforms are, moreover, very well suited to gratifying the yearning for authenticity, by allowing fans seemingly direct contact with celebrities. Direct fan management replaces the controlled, centralized regulation of interactions through public relations agencies. The traditional celebrities who adapt best to the medium appear to offer ‘backstage’ access, albeit in a contrived way that meets fan expectations while observing status differentiation.33 They generally don’t follow back, or engage in prolonged exchanges, and they expect a degree of deference from followers. Micro-celebrities emulate these practices of contrived intimacy. Instagrammers and YouTubers, for example, disclose private parts of their lives, relationships and feelings as part of a consumable performance.
This performance of authenticity is also becoming a necessity for marketing. By 2015, social advertising, based on ‘authentic’, personalized relationships with consumers, occupied more than a tenth of digital ad spending.34 We can vary our tactics on the medium, use it to promote images and ideas that contest those that gained consent in legacy media. But each time we do, we confirm, corroborate and consolidate the machine’s power over us.
VI.
Aokigahara, the ‘sea of trees’, is a hauntingly beautiful forest growing out of cooled lava on the northwest flank of Mount Fuji. In Japanese mythology, Aokigahara is roamed by yurei, the spirits of those left there to die. It is dense, vast and silent, the volcanic rock and trees absorbing sound. Today, it is where dozens of people commit suicide every year. The bodies turn up dangling from boughs or lying on the forest floor among the tangled roots.
In December 2017, a bleach-blond Hollywood surfer dude stood in the thick of the woods, gawping at a corpse, long dead, spinning at the end of a rope. The surfer dude, wearing a lurid green Futurama ‘brain slug’ hat, looked slightly frantic, panicked. Staring death in the face, he cracked nervous jokes. Logan Paul is a hugely successful YouTube vlogger, and had intended to make a video while camping out in the forest with his friends, when he stumbled on destiny. The camp-out was cancelled. The authorities were called. And the video was posted on YouTube.
Why not? This was authentic, riveting content. Paul had kept his viewers hooked by sharing stylized bits of his life with them. It had proven wildly profitable, winning him over a million dollars a month in Google Preferred ad revenues, starring roles in several YouTube series and his own line of clothing.35 And here was an undeniably compelling story from his life, the sort of story that should reverberate in excited ripples of attention and reaction. Social industry giants are not moral arbiters. They are agnostic about what users post because their trade is in attention – an abstract commodity – not content. With two billion people ceaselessly churning out content, the platform is so designed as to automatically convert the stuff of everyday life into economically valuable informatics. Content stimulates users to produce more content in a virtuous, or vicious, circle.
But this time, Paul crossed a barely legible threshold of taste and decency. Handled more sensitively, it might have been a gold mine. Instead, the backlash was swift and brutal. Politicians and celebrities lined up to denounce his insensitive display of the corpse. A petition demanding that his channel be pulled gained tens of thousands of signatures. YouTube condemned his actions, suspended him from the Google Preferred revenue stream and cancelled his series appearances. Fellow YouTuber Japanese-American internet celebrity Reina Scully scolded him, ‘Get out of my beautiful motherland.’36 Paul’s success brought social responsibilities, he was told. He had disrespected the dead person’s family, and risked triggering further suicides. Precisely because suicide is a symbolic act, it can be contagious.
Paul, being a savvy entrepreneur, pivoted quickly.37 His gamble having failed, he took down the video, delivered a well-scripted, emotional apology, and followed it up with a new segment in which he interviewed suicide experts. He had got ‘caught up in the moment’. All he had ever wanted to do was ‘raise awareness for suicide and suicide prevention’. He now understood that ‘with great power comes great responsibility’. It was a deft turn, converting a scandal into a tacit tribute to his own ongoing importance. This showed he understood how the medium worked. Paul’s gamble had worked out badly for him, but not for the social industry: it still generated floods of new content and new flows of attention. If he played it well, he could still benefit from the attention flows he had created.
It is instructive, in this context, to note how the growing niche of live-streamed suicides have fuelled the machine. Jared McLemore from Memphis, Tennessee, set himself on fire. James Jeffrey, from Alabama, shot himself in the head. Erdogan Ceren, from southern Turkey, shot himself in the stomach. Naika Venant, a fourteen-year-old girl from Miami, hanged herself, leaving frantic users to bombard her mother with messages and screenshots. Katelyn Nicole Davis, a twelve-year-old from Georgia, broadcast her own death by hanging after disclosing that she was being sexually abused.38 In every single one of these cases, the suicide produced floods of monetizable attention. Sequences of footage, screenshots, likes, statuses and comments linked to these broadcasts, entered seamlessly into the flow of the attention economy. The images of people in the moments before their suicide made newspaper and webpage headlines even more dramatic. Desperate faces, on the brink of desperate acts, displaying, as Hungarian poet Béla Bálazs said of the actor’s face, the ‘silent monologue of the solitary human soul’.39 Riveting material for the news cycle, tried and tested, drawing valuable attention both to legacy media and to the platform itself.
It is for cultural reasons, external to the logic of the platform, that such content can pose a threat, by inviting government regulation or encouraging users to disconnect. Even then, there is little the platforms can do without upsetting the ecologies of attention and data creation. For example, Facebook’s efforts to demonstrate conscientious engagement include changing the content of someone’s feed if the machine’s sentiment analysis discloses that they might be at risk of suicide. A page offering help for suicidal people might appear in the feed. Friends of the possible suicide might see an enlarged ‘report post’ button. But what if there are perverse incentives that arise from features that are intrinsic to the profit model? What if Conrad’s ‘demon of perverse inspiration’ now works by algorithm?40
In 2017, for example, a young woman from Ohio was sent to prison for nine months, after she live-streamed the rape of her friend by an older man.41 Marina Lonina was eighteen years old, her friend was seventeen and the rapist, Raymond Gates, was twenty-nine. They had met Gates the previous day, at a mall, and decided to meet him for drinks. He was interested in the victim because he wanted to take her virginity. He brought a bottle of vodka, they drank together, and when she was properly intoxicated, he pushed her onto the bed, held her down and violently raped her. Lonina grabbed her phone and started the broadcast. As the rape proceeded, Lonina was heard giggling in the background while the victim screamed, ‘No, it hurts so much.’
About Gates’s actions there was no mystery: he was a predator, who by his own account was turned on by reluctant ‘virgins’. Lonina’s behaviour was more bewildering. According to the prosecutor, Lonina told police that she had started the live stream in the hope that filming it would somehow stop the attack, but – astonishingly – ‘got caught up in the likes’.42 Later, she told a Netflix documentary, Hot Girls Wanted, that she hadn’t initially realized what was going on but that, ‘All these guys on Periscope started writing “Film it! Film it! I want to watch it!” And it wasn’t just one, two or three people. There were dozens of people following us. I was in an excited state.’
This claim is astonishing on its own terms, but the mere existence of these ‘likes’ is also arresting. Most viewers presumably had no reason to expect to see a rape, let alone egg it on. The ‘bystander effect’ is notoriously worse in the case of witnessed sexual assault than for other crimes, but these were no bystanders. The ‘like’ button seems to have facilitated a form of detached inv
olvement in spectacular cruelty. And it’s plausible that the feedback made a difference. By her own account, for Lonina the approval of a watching public was decisive: she was abruptly making a hit, a box-office success, and it was thrilling enough to override any concern she could have had for her friend. If Lonina came to regret this short burst of celebrity, it is now perpetuated in algorithmic form. Google searches for her name now return pornography websites offering pages titled ‘Marina Lonina Periscope Porn’ and ‘Marina Lonina Rape Video’.
This dark side of celebrity is not in itself new. Josef Fritzel, Ted Bundy, Timothy McVeigh and Jeffrey Dahmer are among the murderers and rapists who have become overnight celebrities, receiving dozens or hundreds of love letters in prison.43 What is new is that, as celebrity is rewritten by algorithm, all can participate in the darkness.
VII.
Celebrity has always been an efficient means of focusing attention; the best attention hack money can buy. If the addiction machine guides attention by harnessing the pathways of wanting, celebrities are an efficient package for our wants.
Daniel Boorstin called celebrity the condition of being well known for being well known.44 Another way to put this is to say that people draw attention because they draw attention. There is something spellbinding about what other people are attending to: this is the ‘viral’ aspect of fame.45 By ‘making the web more social’, as Mark Zuckerberg boasted, the platforms have converted ordinary social interactions into potential celebrity pseudo-events: quantifiable, and easily reproduced pieces of information, or memes.46 On the addiction machine, celebrity is reduced to the barest mechanism of orchestrating attention.
This suggests, though, that when we now talk about celebrity, popularity or ‘liking’, these terms no longer mean exactly what they used to. Far from having an adequate language for what we’re going through, we may need to invent a new one. The easy solution is to tell a clichéd story about what’s happening, which enables a form of cultural policing.47 The inventory of moral panic about the internet revolves around young people and sexuality, beginning with Time magazine in 1995 warning: ‘On a Screen Near You: Cyberporn’. From MySpace to Snapchat, the platforms have been accused of creating hunting grounds for predators.48 But a more subtle and pervasive worry is that the platforms are begetting a new narcissism. Social media, on this view, is an elaborate hall of mirrors in which we can’t stop looking at ourselves.
Complaints about narcissism are almost always, as Kristin Dombek writes, about the ‘selfishness of others’.49 It is always other people whose too-hot selfies, too-glamorous dinners, too-happy relationship photographs, too-charming holiday snaps, evince narcissism. Narcissism in this sense is, as Wilde said of wickedness, a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others.
The morally charged language of the backlash against insta-celebrity is, indeed, evidence of a kind of thwarted attraction.50 Young people are ‘obsessed with the superficial’, the New York Post laments. Young people have taken ‘the desire for self-admiration too far’, according to psychologists Jean Twenge and Keith Campbell.51 A swelling library of head-shaking academic papers, articles and surveys detailing the descent into online narcissism adds to the chorus.52 Young people, the refrain implies, are so fake.
The popular cultural lament about narcissism is not totally wrong. Most of what there is to do in the social industry involves continually procuring a self-portrait to admire. It fuses narcissism to a digital mirror, a self-image made out of the quantified ‘reactions’ of other users.53 And we all fake it, whether by filter, camera angle, or the carefully edited sentiments and observations with which we build our digital selves.54 Our smartphone gives us the means to do so. But how far is too far to take self-admiration? At what point does self-love become toxic? And how, practically, do we want people to respond when we call them narcissists?
Historically, we only scold people like this when we suspect them of having a really good time. And lurking in the backlash literature is the extraordinary idea that young people are really enjoying themselves and their bodies. Campbell and Twenge complain that young people have become exhibitionists, entitled materialists, ‘aggressive when insulted, and uninterested in emotional closeness’. They reject the comforting idea that narcissism conceals insecurity: in fact, the new breed of narcissists unconsciously think ‘they’re awesome’.55 The idea of a generational boom in narcissism is widespread. Zoe Williams worries that selfies, cosmetic surgery and digital oversharing indicate a ‘narcissism epidemic’.56
The problem with such claims is that the survey evidence is contradictory. For every study claiming to find surging narcissism, another survey finds the opposite. Jeffrey Arnett at Clark University goes so far as to claim that Millennials are ‘an exceptionally generous generation’.57 Perhaps the biggest difficulty is that there is little agreement on what narcissism really is. This is demonstrated in the public rows between psychiatrists over whether Trump, the bombastic quintessence of Twitter celebrity, qualifies as a narcissist.58 Many researchers try to get round this by comparing long-term shifts in measurable attitudes to the criteria for narcissism listed by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or the Narcissistic Personality Inventory. But these are open-ended to the point of being vacuous. And an uptick in people agreeing with statements like ‘I am a very important person’ or ‘I can live my life any way I want to’ can mean any number of things. If I claim to be able to live my life any way I want to, for example, I may be expressing a wish, defying religious and secular authoritarians, or declaring a preference for constitutional liberalism or free markets. Or it may have a deeply personal meaning. It would be hard to know without in-depth interviews, which would regularly throw up material that was not amenable to quantitative analysis.
This isn’t to dismiss the issue. If, over time, people become more willing to endorse attitudes that seem to resonate with individualist or competitive values, that may tell us something important about the culture. Is it significant, for example, if more people feel they have to be important? Twenge’s work with ‘Generation Z’ finds some of the biggest shifts occurring around 2011, when smartphone ownership became ubiquitous among adolescents.59 And no one who uses social media for very long can have missed the compulsory ‘awesomeness’ of everything. A status I agree with is ‘awesome’, a person I like ‘slays’ and a sentiment I find congenial has to be quote-tweeted with orgasmic squees of ‘THIS. ALL OF THIS.’ And if I can induce such charmingly ridiculous outbursts among my followers, I’ve hit the jackpot. The platforms, being structured as a game of competitive like-hunts, a form of rivalrous attention-seeking, are perfectly well suited to magnifying the existing cultural drift towards compulsory awesomeness.
But narcissism is always ambivalent. The image that satisfies us can also frustrate us. We may love the image, but, as Narcissus discovered, it doesn’t love us back. And it is munified at our expense, accumulating all the approval and love we were seeking for ourselves. In our devotion, in our addiction to it, we are belittled.
VIII.
The epitome of modern narcissism is the selfie. But the selfie is a paradox. It supposedly represents a unique person, living her best life, from the best angle, in the best light. But it does so using a technology that, as Adam Greenfield puts it, distributes and smudges the self across ‘a global mesh of nodes and links’.60 This hard infrastructure, from sensors in the smartphone to cellular base stations, undersea cables, microwave relays and networks of users, organizes from end to end a person’s experience of the world, her selfhood. In addition to breaking up the self into digitalized components, the technologies of the selfie also have the alarming effect of making everyone look the same.
Some of the repetitive banality of selfies can be blamed on the conventions of selfie-taking. Some of it can be blamed on the pursuit of ‘likes’ which incentivizes the repetition of popular images. But the platforms, from Snapchat to Instagram, and apps like Meitu
, also offer a form of memetic enchantment. Selfies are worked through a limited range of reality-enhancers, called filters. Snapchat filters make us look cartoonish, with cute puppy ears and noses, while Instagram filters were at first notoriously nostalgic, casting a spell of mal du pays. Filters soften the features and flaws of the face, making us appear polished, perfect, almost mythical. Through these, photographer Brooke Wendt suggests, we are encouraged to ‘act as though under a magic spell for the benefit of the cameras’.61
Modern consumers, said William Burroughs, are image junkies. And our selfie-spirals epitomize this junkie craving. For most of human history, selfies were a prerogative of the powerful. As such, they portrayed either majesty or artistic genius. The democratic and industrial revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries triggered an explosion of new visibilities: print technologies spread to the poor, the photograph and film were invented, and new forms of self-portrait emerged. From Toulouse-Lautrec’s Self-Portrait Before a Mirror to Duchamp’s Self-Portrait Before a Five-Way Mirror, the new selves portrayed were often disabled, injured, distressed, fractured.62 They portrayed the universal limitations and susceptibilities of all human beings.
With the selfie, we seem to have returned to the ideal of majesty, albeit on an individual scale. Selfies tend to eschew any visible sign of injury, distress or weakness. They portray flawless desirability, heroic self-fulfilment. This portrayal is not only a lie, but it is a very telling kind of lie. It says something about the very brittle form of modern narcissism. When Christopher Lasch diagnosed an emerging culture of narcissism in the 1970s, he insisted on the fragility of this narcissism.63 The individual was being overvalued at just the point that individuality was disappearing. The ‘sovereign individual’ of the market was just an ephemeral consumer, trapped in a state of fugue-like enchantment with a flow of easy but transient satisfactions. The template of all satisfactions was the commodity-image: what appeared on television, the silver screen or advertising billboards. Now, the self is the commodity. Doubly so, because at the same time as we are producing a commodity-image version of ourselves, we are also busy producing the data about ourselves that enables the social industry platforms to sell us to advertisers. We truly are the product.
The Twittering Machine Page 9
