The Twittering Machine

by Richard Seymour

  Minitel was not, however, a leftist utopia. In fact, it was far more akin to the agora that enthusiasts of the internet would later celebrate. Among other things, it was a state-maintained free market.19 Because it was open, one could just as easily use it to sell sex as incite revolution. In fact, the burgeoning online sex industry became one of its major hives of activity. The telecom entrepreneur Xavier Niel made his fortune running cybersex services on Minitel.20 This was, as a former Minitel sex worker described, an industry that demanded industrial work rates. He was compelled, for example, to work with four terminals, using four different (usually female) identities at the same time, ‘processing’ clients as quickly as possible. What wasn’t commercialized was the infrastructure itself. There was no way to make money from taps and clicks, and therefore no technological incentive for addiction, celebrification, trolling and the regular moments of explosion around aggregated sentiment that characterize the Twittering Machine.

  It was also limited by its narrowly national basis. There was a chance that French technique could have globalized.21 For a brief moment, Minitel had the ear of the California tech scene, its cultural leaders, ravers, tech geeks and anyone else who might be interested. In the early 1990s, before the internet was launched, France Télécom approached the influential West Coast guru John Coate, who had popularized the online bulletin board system The WELL. Coate was successful in gaining the attention of the tech scene, whose vanguard was impressed by Minitel. A system was duly pioneered, called ‘101 Online’. The problem is that, rather than providing the sort of open platform, the ‘electronic “meeting place”’, that Minitel provided in France, it ended up being a version of the proprietary services already available for the wealthy few from CompuServe and AOL.

  Minitel failed for other reasons, too. Its technical basis was not kept up to date, and it relied too much on a national telecommunications infrastructure using circuit-switching. Minitel was outmoded and unable to compete with the World Wide Web. Its antiquated video transmission services couldn’t beat the power of hypertext. In addition, France Télécom stopped supplying terminals free of charge, so user growth began to fall for the first time. The European Commission, seeing the global potential of the internet, recommended that the EU adopt the Californian ‘free market’ model as the basis for its dissemination. France Télécom began to link the Minitel network to the global internet, but with personal computing these terminals were no longer necessary and too restrictive. The dissemination of computing technology and, soon, mobile phones outstripped Minitel’s accomplishments.

  Yet, despite all of its limitations, the continuing affection for Minitel meant that it didn’t immediately disappear. Millions of users continued to work with this antiquated model of ‘télématique’, and the platform wasn’t finally shut down until 2012.

  IV.

  Silicon Valley mythology holds that Minitel failed because it was too dirigiste, too state-directed. As Julien Mailland points out, however, both Minitel and the internet were the products of different quantities of state investment, private capital and thriving cultures of amateur enthusiasts and experts improving the technology and proselytizing for it.22

  Both Minitel and the internet show that there is no ‘free market’ without substantial public-sector intervention and backing. The internet’s history also shows us that when we rely on the private sector and its hallowed bromide of ‘innovation’, quite often that will result in technical innovations that are designed for manipulation, surveillance and exploitation.

  The tax-evading, offshore wealth-hoarding, data-monopolizing, privacy-invading silicon giants benefit from the internet’s ‘free market’ mythology, but the brief flourishing of Minitel shows us that other ways, other worlds, other platforms, are possible. The question is, given that there’s no way to reverse history, how can we actualize these possibilities? What sort of power do we have? As users, it turns out, very little. We are not voters on the platforms; we are not even customers. We are the unpaid producers of raw material. We could, if we were organized, withdraw our labour power, commit social media suicide: but then what other platforms do we have access to with anything like the same reach?

  The fate of minimalist Facebook alternatives like Ello demonstrates the dilemma of users. Ello was launched in 2014, with almost half a million dollars of venture capital funding. Its unique sell was that it would not turn users into commodities: ‘You Are Not a Product’, it offered. The majority of users ruefully rejoined, ‘Oh Yes We Are’. Over a million people signed up – hardly negligible, but it barely made a dent in the Facebook leviathan. Any competitor to Facebook would have to offer something special to counter the ‘user effects’ which favour monopoly, let alone its addictive propensities. And the truth is that Ello, because it is not addictive, has very little eye candy and is not based on creating a hive of users goaded into frenzied activity, is rather boring. It’s hard to imagine, during a conversation or train ride, repeatedly pulling out one’s smartphone and irritably navigating to the Ello app to check the notifications. And that, in a nutshell, is the problem.

  There are democratic potentials in the internet. Even if it is in essence a commercialized system of surveillance and controls, there have always been ways of writing against the grain. Radical movements, from Bernie Sanders’ campaign in the United States to the Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour Party, have used professional social media campaigns to outflank and subvert the old media monopolies. Even in the People’s Republic of China, the spread of online communications technologies has created new enclaves outside of the state’s and companies’ control. While the regime harnesses computerization and big data to state surveillance and the disciplinary system of ‘social credit’, workers use popular social industry platforms such as QQ and Sina Weibo – Chinese equivalents of Facebook and Twitter – to organize walkouts, discuss strategies and collate demands.23

  There may also be ways to fight the social industry, incrementally, for control of the social media platforms. In the United Kingdom, the Labour opposition is experimenting with ideas of a public service platform run by the BBC, one of the few brands with perhaps more global clout than Facebook. To some extent user-governed, and stripped of the data-hoarding, privacy-invading propensities of the existing social industry platforms, this has been proposed as part of a wider agenda of democratizing mass media. A successful public-sector competitor to Facebook and Google would be a significant problem for these giants, and for the advertisers that rely on them, given that the UK provides 40 million of Facebook’s most affluent active users. However, whatever advantages it could have, it may also face the same problem as existing commercial competitors: a collective, culturally reinforced addiction, and the self-reinforcing tunnel of attention and satisfactions that it has generated.

  And this is where the story is not just about corporations and technologies. The Twittering Machine may be a horror story, but it is one that involves all of us as users. We are part of the machine, and we find our satisfactions in it, however destructive they may be. And this horror story is only possible in a society that is busily producing horrors. We are only up for addiction to mood-altering devices because our emotions seem to need managing, if not bludgeoning by relentless stimulus. We are only happy to drop into the dead-zone trance because of whatever is disappointing in the world of the living. Twitter toxicity is only endurable because it seems less worse than the alternatives. ‘No addiction’, as Francis Spufford has written, ‘is ever explained by examining the drug. The drug didn’t cause the need. A tour of a brewery won’t explain why somebody became an alcoholic.’24

  To break an addiction, the neuroscientist Marc Lewis has argued, is a unique act of reinvention.25 It requires a creative leap. The addict gives up meth not by going cold turkey or taking a pharmaceutical substitute, but by breaking the compulsory force of habit. It is not a matter of a single ‘crossroads’ decision, like a vote or a purchase in which everything immediately resolves into clarity. It is
a process of becoming different. For the individual addict, that might mean undergoing intensive psychotherapy, learning a new art or skill, or religious conversion. The beauty of neuroplasticity, says Lewis, is that while brain tissue is lost during addiction, as the attention tunnel prunes and shears unused synapses, once the addiction is over, the lost matter is not only replaced but actually increases. Recovering addicts don’t simply get back what they have lost: they tend to develop entirely new and more sophisticated capacities. New ways of being in the world.

  The question is what, collectively, would such a reinvention look like? How could we acquire new and better habits, better ways of writing to one another? If we’ve written our way into this situation, how can we write our way out of it?

  V.

  What could a utopia of writing look like? There is, and could be, no answer to that. If anyone knew what utopia looked like, it would have ceased to be utopia: we would be living in it.

  Utopia is, literally, a non-place, meaning that utopias at their best are not prescriptions but imaginative placeholders for human desires. At its worst, cyber-utopianism has been a neo-liberal sublimation of 1960s communalism, reflecting the journey from the hippy Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog to Wired magazine. The whole earth, according to this dispensation, is a ‘global, massively interconnected system of technology vibrating around us’, as executive editor of Wired, Kevin Kelly, put it.26 This conception, which he calls ‘the technium’, saw Kelly, Brand and their confederates serenaded by venture capital and lauded at Davos. But for Kelly, it had a more mystical significance. The technium was ‘actually a divine phenomenon that is a reflection of God’, he told Christianity Today in doxological tones.27 More circumspect in his book, he ventured that ‘if there is a God, the arc of the technium is aimed right at him’. This literally assigned a holy significance to the global triumph of Silicon Valley.

  At its best, however, cyber-utopianism has revelled in untold possibility. From Manuel Castells’ celebration of online ‘creative autonomy’ to Clay Shirky’s egalitarian ‘communities of practice’, cyber-utopianism has welcomed, not so much a desired end state as the expansion of new horizons.28 The openness and indeterminacy of the network seemingly permitted what John Stuart Mill would have called ‘experiments of living’.29 This is the utopian side of liberalism. The virtue of a platform model, from this point of view, is that it would enable everyone to write as uniquely as they must and as weirdly as they will.

  The destruction of an ill-founded cyber-utopianism, insufficiently attentive to the political economy of platform capitalism and its pathologies, has given rise to a counter-utopian backlash. It manifests in the proliferation of articles with headlines like, ‘I quit social media and it changed my life’. TED talks such as Cal Newport’s ‘Why you should quit social media’. Books like Jaron Lanier’s Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. Alongside these are the innumerable head-shaking think pieces about how to combat ‘fake news’ and stop Russian trolls from destroying democracy. Increasingly, the rich absent themselves, professionalizing and delegating their social media accounts. Platform bosses, of course, never get high on their own supply: social media abstinence is not an affliction of the poor, but the cultural distinction of the affluent.

  ‘A world without utopias’, as the historian Enzo Traverso writes, ‘inevitably looks back’.30 Without them, our thwarted longings sour and turn reactionary. And the backlash style, despite having the advantage that it disputes the inevitability of our assimilation into the Borg, is reactionary. It is compromised by a subtending fantasy that it could somehow be sufficient to exhort others to quit. Which is further underpinned by a fantasy that the frequent flights into mob irrationality, paranoia, nihilism and sadism characteristic of the social industry could be solved simply by ‘going back’. As though these phenomena had no deeper and farther-reaching roots.

  This is the sort of position that is incorrectly derided as neo-Luddite. By now it is well known that the Luddites have been historically misrepresented, their struggle against exploitation and destitution having been unjustly caricatured as technophobia. They were not against machines, but skilled in their use. Their utopia, such as it was, was not a pre-industrial Arcadia, but an incipiently socialist one in which the machines were dominated by workers, rather than workers being dominated by the machine. They smashed the tools to disrupt an emerging social machine that treated them as expendable units of a production process.

  The Luddites were also excellent trolls. They were, like the movement that was massacred at Peterloo a few years later, a prototypical class insurrection: but they carried it off with tremendous elan. The very name ‘Luddite’ deliberately evoked a fictitious leader, Ned Ludd, a product of legend and fantasy, fear of whom had British authorities and spies searching high and low for sign of him. His supporters decided that Mr Ludd lived in Sherwood Forest, home of the equally legendary Robin Hood, and signed their letters, ‘Ned Ludd’s Office, Sherwood Forest’. They cross-dressed and marched as ‘General Ludd’s wives’.31

  Luddism in the twenty-first century is an entirely defensible position; indeed, a desirable one. But what would it look like? It could hardly begin by smashing the machine. It is far too distributed, globally. And at any rate, many of the things we call tools are abstractions: we can’t ‘smash’ the like button. And our immediate problem with the Twittering Machine is not that it drives us into unemployment, but that it works us without remuneration the better to sell us as a product. It gives us tasks in the form of a casino-style game: it is in the vanguard of the gamification of capitalism. And if all that happened was that, in a giant digital suicide, we killed off the social industry, the media, amusement and entertainment complexes would fuse with venture capital to do it all again only more efficiently. We need more than this. We need an escapology, certainly, a theory of how to get out before it’s too late. We also need to free up our time and energy and shape them to better purpose. We need something to long for, the better to devise grander escapologies. We need the ‘intercalary gush’ of Catholic poet Charles Péguy, a moment of rupture in our daily habits through which to escape not only the Twittering Machine but the unnecessary burden of misery that it successfully monetizes.32

  Cyberspace is dreamspace, a place for exploration and reverie. Reverie is a dream, and a dream is a wish fulfilment; a momentary pleasure wherein a desire is partially satisfied. This is something to be cautiously optimistic about. If desire, as opposed to need or an instinctual programme, is distinctly human, then so is the ability to satisfy it indirectly, through fantasy. Indeed, since most desires can’t be satisfied in any other way, reverie seems to be essential to a pleasurable life. The theft of the capacity for reverie by the social industry, the way it has used gaming-industry techniques to lead us into a guided trance, down pathways lit up with virtual rewards, is therefore no trivial matter. We might ask whether there are other technologies for reverie in modern life, what the neo-Luddite approach might be to that.

  We feel a compulsion to participate, to react, to keep up to speed, to be in the know. There is something to be said for refusing to be in the know. Robert Frost’s poem from 1916, ‘Choose Something Like a Star’, speaks of an entity that both shows itself and hides itself. It appears in remote, dark obscurity and will only say ‘I burn’. Even as it reveals itself to us, Frost suggests, something of its being remains mysterious, elusive. It asks of us, not understanding, but ‘a certain height’. He says, when ‘the mob is swayed to carry praise or blame too far’, then, ‘we may choose something like a star’ to stay our minds. And with that, we can escape – from the hot flows of information, the flux, the bombardment, of impressions, of exposure to messages, more now than ever before, a data apocalypse, from which nothing intelligible can ultimately be wrested – to a fixed point of unknowing.

  What would happen if we applied Delany’s strategy of ‘stupidity’: that is, of only taking in as much information as we coul
d put out? What if we were not in the know? What if our reveries were not productive? What if, in deliberate abdication of our smartphones, we strolled in the park with nothing but a notepad and a nice pen? What if we sat in a church and closed our eyes? What if we lay back on a lily pad, with nothing to do? Would someone call the police?

  REFERENCES AND BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

  FOREWORD

  1. All technology, as the historian Melvin Kranzberg put it . . . Melvin Kranzberg, ‘Technology and History: “Kranzberg’s Laws” ’, Technology and Culture, Vol. 27, No. 3 (Jul., 1986), pp. 544–560.

  CHAPTER ONE

  1. The Museum of Modern Art explains: Paul Klee, Twittering Machine (Die Zwitscher-Maschine) 1922, MoMA: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/37347.

  2. Thomas More wondered . . . Quoted in Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I: A Critique of Political Economy, Dover Publications, Inc: Mineola, NY:, 2011, p. 761.

  3. At first, says historian Warren Chappell . . . Warren Chappell & Robert Bringhurst, A Short History of the Printed World, Hartley & Marks: Point Roberts, WA, 1999, pp. 9–10.

  4. Without print capitalism . . . Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Verso: London and New York, 2006.