The Twittering Machine

by Richard Seymour

  45. This was first fully outlined . . . B. F. Skinner, Walden Two, Hackett Publishing Company Inc.: Indianapolis, IN, 2005.

  46. They have to give up and mourn . . . For arguments along these lines, see Marshall Wise Alcorn Jr., Resistance to Learning: Overcoming the Desire Not to Know in Classroom Teaching, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013; K Daniel Cho, Psychopedagogy: Freud, Lacan, and the Psychoanalytic Theory of Education, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009; Stephen Appel, ed., Psychoanalysis and Pedagogy, Bergin & Garvey: Westport, CT, 1999.

  47. Perhaps it is no coincidence . . . Byung-Chul Han, Saving Beauty, Polity Press: Cambridge, 2018.

  48. A small number of real-world . . . Richard Feallock and L. Keith Miller, ‘The Design and Evaluation of a Worksharing System for Experimental Group Living’, Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, Vol. 9, No. 3, 1976, pp. 277–288; Kathleen Kinkade, A Walden Two Experiment: The first five years of Twin Oaks Community, William Morrow, 1973; Hilke Kuhlmann, Living Walden Two: B. F. Skinner’s Behaviorist Utopia and Experimental Communities, University of Illinois Press: Champaign, IL, 2010.

  49. This belief was . . . Henry L. Roediger, ‘What Happened to Behaviorism’, Association for Psychological Science, 1 March 2004; Richard F. Thompson, ‘Behaviorism and Neuroscience’, Psychological Review, Vol. 101, No. 2, April 1994, pp. 259–65. The significance of the behaviourist infiltration of neuroscience and psychology can hardly be overstated. The prestige of neuroscience in particular, thanks to great advances made in the 1990s, became phenomenal. There were some interesting efforts at producing a new synthesis, for example by fusing neuroscience and psychoanalysis. Eric R. Kandel, Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and the New Biology of Mind, American Psychiatric Publishing, Inc.: Arlington, VA, 2005. But the more general pattern was a misleading and ideologically charged reductionism, in which social stereotypes were given ostensible scientific validity. See Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences, Icon Books, London: 2005. Moreover, it tended to corroborate the strategies of authority, by reducing human behaviour to brain behaviour, thus making it more eminently governable. See Suparna Choudhury and Jan Slaby, eds., Critical Neuroscience: A Handbook of the Social and Cultural Contexts of Neuroscience, Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford: 2016; and Nikolas Rose, Neuro: The New Brain Sciences and the Management of the Mind, Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ, 2013.

  50. Nir Eyal . . . Nir Eyal, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, Penguin: New York, 2004.

  51. Strikingly . . . Laura Entis, ‘How the “Hook Model” Can Turn Customers Into Addicts’, Fortune, 11 June 2017.

  52. We are digital ‘serfs’ . . . Jaron Lanier, You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto, Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 2010, p. 117; Bruce Sterling, The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things, Strelka Press: Moscow, 2014, Kindle Loc. 32.

  53. Every time we fill . . . Moshe Z. Marvit, ‘How Crowdworkers Became the Ghosts in the Digital Machine’, The Nation, 5 February 2014.

  54. From the point of view of freedom, says Shoshana Zuboff . . . Shoshana Zuboff, ‘Big Other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilisation’, Journal of Information Technology, 2015, No. 30, pp. 75–89; Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, Profile Books, 2019.

  55. Ludwig Börne . . . Quoted in Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA: 1999, p. 514.

  56. Tristan Harris . . . Tristan Harris, ‘The Slot Machine in Your Pocket’, Der Spiegel, 27 July 2016.

  57. Adam Alter adds . . . ‘Users were gambling every time they shared a photo, web link, or status update.’ Adam Alter, Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked, Penguin: New York, 2017, p. 118; Schüll quoted in Mattha Busby, ‘Social media copies gambling methods “to create psychological cravings” ’, Guardian, 8 May 2018.

  58. When we’re on the machine . . . Natasha Dow Schüll, Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas, Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ, 2014, pp. 18–32.

  59. Some gambling-machine addicts . . . Natasha Dow Schüll, Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas, Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ, 2014, p. 33.

  60. As one former gambling addict . . . Quoted in Jim Orford, An Unsafe Bet?: The Dangerous Rise of Gambling and the Debate We Should Be Having, Wiley-Blackwell: London, 2010, p. 58.

  61. Schüll calls it the ‘machine zone’ . . . Natasha Dow Schüll, Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas, Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ, 2014, p. 34.

  62. Marc Lewis describes . . . Marc Lewis, Memoirs of An Addicted Brain: A Neuroscientist Examines His Former Life on Drugs, Public Affairs: New York, 2011, p. 295.

  63. For gamblers . . . ‘Such intoxication depends on the peculiar capacity of the game to provoke presence of mind through the fact that, in rapid succession, it brings to the force constellations which work . . . to summon up in every instance a thoroughly new type of reaction from the gambler. The fact is mirrored in the tendency of gamblers to place their bets, whenever possible, at the very last moment – the moment, moreover, when only enough room remains for a purely reflexive move.’ Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA, 1999, pp. 512–513.

  64. The ensuing trance-like state . . . David Berry, Critical Theory and the Digital, Bloomsbury: New York, 2014, p. 80.

  65. Whereas gambling was controlled . . . Jim Orford, An Unsafe Bet?: The Dangerous Rise of Gambling and the Debate We Should Be Having, Wiley-Blackwell: London, 2010, pp. 3–44.

  66. As the late literary scholar . . . Bettina L. Knapp, Gambling, Game and Psyche, SUNY Press: Abany, NY, 2000. Similar references to gambling as a divine, or divinatory, practice pepper James George Frazer’s classic, The Golden Bough, Heritage Illustrated Publishing: New York, 2014.

  67. Repetition is then . . . See, for examples of this very pervasive argument, G F Koob, ‘Negative reinforcement in drug addiction: the darkness within’, Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 23(4), August 2013, pp. 559–63; Marc J Lewis, ‘Alcohol: mechanisms of addiction and reinforcement’, Advances in Alcohol and Substance Abuse, 9(1–2), 1990, pp. 47–66.

  68. A study of ‘internet addiction’ . . . Phil Reed, Michela Romano, Federica Re, Alessandra Roaro, Lisa A. Osborne, Caterina Viganò & Roberto Truzoli, ‘Differential physiological changes following internet exposure in higher and lower problematic internet users’, PLOS ONE, 25 May 2017.

  69. According to the neuroscientist . . . Robert Sapolsky, ‘Dopamine Jackpot! Sapolsky on the Science of Pleasure’, 2 March 2011, lecture available on .

  70. Dopamine, as the anthropologist Helen Fisher puts it . . . Helen Fisher, Anatomy of Love: A Natural History of Mating, Marriage, and Why We Stray, W. W. Norton & Company: New York and London, 2016, p. 95.

  71. The psychologist Stanton Peele . . . Stanton Peele and Archie Brodsky, Love and Addiction, Broadrow Publications, New York, 2014.

  72. Addicts who quit . . . Marc Lewis, The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction is Not a Disease, Scribe: London, 2015, p. 59.

  73. And it suggests . . . Jeffrey A Schaler, Addiction is a Choice, Open Court: Chicago & Lasalle, 2009, pp. xiii–xiv.

  74. It breaks up our day . . . Adam Greenfield, Radical Technologies, Verso: London and New York, 2017, p. 36.

  75. What we refer to . . . For an excellent dissection of ‘cloud’ ideology, see Tung-hui Hu, A Prehistory of the Cloud, MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 2015.

  76. . . . ‘everyware’ . . . Greenfield wrote of this trend long before the ubiquitous ownership of smartphones and similar devices. Adam Greenfield, Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, New Riders: Berkeley, CA, 2006.

  77. . . . Google’s ‘smart city’ . . . Ava Kaufman, ‘Google’s “Smart City Of Surveillance” Faces New Resistance In Toronto’, The Intercept, 13 November 2018; Nancy Scola, ‘Google Is Building a City of the Future in Toront
o. Would Anyone Want to Live There?’, Politico, July/August 2018.

  78. It closely resembles . . . Gilles Deleuze, ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, October, Vol. 59 (Winter, 1992), pp. 3–7.

  79. As Donna Haraway once wrote . . . ‘Why should our bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin?’ Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century, University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, MN, 2016, p. 61.

  80. So what happens if bits of us . . . Brian Rotman, Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being, Duke University Press: Raleigh, NC, 2008.

  81. . . . Lydia Liu argues . . . Lydia H. Liu, The Freudian Robot: Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious, University of Chicago Press: Chicago, MI, 2011, Kindle Loc. 227.

  82. The drug addicts . . . Bruce Alexander, The Globalization of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit, Oxford University Press: Oxford: 2011, Kindle Loc. 281.

  83. If their bet poses a question about destiny . . . Rik Loose, The Subject of Addiction: Psychoanalysis and the Administration of Enjoyment, Karnac Books: London, 2002, p. 157.

  84. Patrick Garratt wrote . . . Patrick Garratt, ‘My Life as a Twitter Addict, and Why it’s More Difficult to Quit Than Drugs’, Huffington Post, 29 April 2012.

  85. Social media addiction has been linked . . . Jaron Lanier breezily sums up this research in chapter seven of Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, Penguin Random House: London, 2018. On the link with teen suicides, see ‘Social media may play a role in the rise in teen suicides, study suggests’, CBS News, 14 November 2017; and J. M. Twenge, T. E. Joiner, M. L. Rogers & G. N. Martin, ‘Increases in Depressive Symptoms, Suicide-Related Outcomes, and Suicide Rates Among U.S. Adolescents After 2010 and Links to Increased New Media Screen Time’, Clinical Psychological Science, 6(1), 2018, pp. 3–17. For Facebook’s reaction, see Sam Levin, ‘Facebook admits it poses mental health risk – but says using site more can help’, Guardian, 15 December 2017.

  86. The dominant view . . . Allen Carr, The Easy Way to Stop Gambling: Take Control of Your Life, Arcturus, 2013. Alas, the Allen Carr estate has yet to enlighten us as to the ‘Easy Way’ to stop social media addiction.

  87. . . . Mary Beard . . . Mary Beard, ‘Of course one can’t condone . . . ’, Twitter.com, 16 February 2018. For a critique of Beard’s stance, see Sita Balani, ‘Virtue and Violence’, Verso.com, 23 March 2018.

  88. She ended the day . . . Roisin O’Connor, ‘Mary Beard posts tearful picture of herself after defence of Oxfam aid workers provokes backlash’, Independent, 18 February 2018.

  89. . . . ‘carrot and shtick’ . . . Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, Penguin Random House: London, 2018, p. 9.

  90. . . . Paracelsus . . . See chapter twelve of Hugh Crone, Paracelsus: The Man Who Defied Medicine, The Albarello Press: Melbourne, 2004.

  91. As Rik Loose . . . Rik Loose, The Subject of Addiction: Psychoanalysis and the Administration of Enjoyment, Karnac Books: London, 2002, p. 117.

  92. For the duration of our visit . . . Virginia Heffernan describes this beautifully in chapter one of Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art, Simon & Schuster: New York, 2017.

  93. As the sociologist Benjamin Bratton . . . Benjamin H. Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty, Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Cambridge, MA, 2015, p. 47.

  94. To locate it . . . Sigmund Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, in Complete Psychological Works Of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 18, Vintage Classics: London, 2001.

  CHAPTER THREE

  1. She told them: just wait, you’ll see, you’ll understand Lilia Blaise and Benoît Morenne, ‘Suicide on Periscope Prompts French Officials to Open Inquiry’, New York Times, 11 May 2016; ‘Suicide sur Periscope: Océane “avait fait part de ses intentions suicidaires”’, L’Express, 13 May 2016; Jérémie Pham-Lê and Claire Hache, ‘Suicide d’Océane sur Periscope: “Elle m’avait dit que son ex avait abusé d’elle”’, L’Express, 12 May 2016. Rana Dasgupta, ‘Notes on a Sucide’, Granta 140: State of Mind, August 2017.

  2. Obviously it’s going to slam into a wall . . . Lucy Williamson, ‘French Periscope death stirs social media safety fears’, BBC News, 13 May 2016.

  3. Freud, in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, argues that . . . Or, as Jacqueline Rose put it: ‘All suicides kill other people’. Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, in On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia, Penguin: London, 2005.

  4. In the act of suicide, Lacan said . . . Jacques Lacan, Formations of the Unconscious: Book 5, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Polity Press: Cambridge, 2017, p. 228.

  5. Rana Dasgupta, in a powerful essay about . . . Dasgupta, ‘Notes on a Suicide’, Granta 140.

  6. By now, thanks in part to Kenneth Anger’s classic account of Hollywood. . . Kenneth Anger, Hollywood Babylon: The Legendary Underground Classic of Hollywood’s Darkest and Best Kept Secrets, Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, 1983.

  7. Research finds that suicide among celebrities . . . Dianna T. Kenny and Anthony Asher, ‘Life expectancy and cause of death in popular musicians’, Medical Problems of Performing Artists, 3(1), March 2016, pp. 37–44; David Lester, ‘Suicide in Eminent Persons’, Perceptual and Motor Skills, 87(1), 1998, pp. 90–90. Kenny’s findings are particular to popular musicians, but suggest a rate of suicide anywhere between three and seven times that of the general population. Lester’s study of ‘eminent persons’ finds a suicide rate of 3 per cent, well above that for the general population, when the global mortality rate for suicide is 16 per hundred thousand.

  8. as media critic Jay Rosen calls us . . . Jay Rosen, ‘The People Formerly Known as the Audience’, PressThink (www.pressthink.org), 27 June 2006.

  9. Writing before the advent of social media, Jonathan Crary . . . Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture, MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 2001.

  10. Autoplay means that audiovisual parts of your feed . . . Georges Abi-Heila, ‘Attention hacking is the epidemic of our generation’, UX Collective (www.uxdesign.cc), 1 March 2018.

  11. The ideological power of our interactions with . . . Alfie Bown, The Playstation Dreamworld (Theory Redux), Polity Press: Cambridge, 2017.

  12. Neuroscientists tell us that, physically, the brain cannot focus . . . John Medina, Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School, Pear Press: Seattle, WA, 2014; Eyal Ophir, Clifford Nass and Anthony D. Wagner, ‘Cognitive Control in Media Multitaskers’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 106, No. 37, 2009, pp. 15583–15587.

  13. It can take over half an hour to recover . . . Rachel Emma Silverman, ‘Workplace Distractions: Here’s Why You Won’t Finish This Article’, Wall Street Journal, 11 December 2012; Bob Sullivan and Hugh Thompson, ‘Brain, Interrupted’, New York Times, 5 May 2013; There is some research that suggests interruptions make people work faster, but at the cost of increased stress. Gloria Mark, Daniel Gudith and Ulrich Klocke, ‘The Cost of Interrupted Work: More Speed and Stress’, Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Florence, Italy, 5–10 April 2008, pp. 107–10.

  14. The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips speaks of . . . See Adam Phillips, ‘On Vacancies of Attention’, Provoking Attention conference, Brown University, May 2017 (www.youtube.com); and ‘Forms of Inattention’, in On Balance, Penguin: London and New York, 2010.

  15. . . . according to historian Daniel Boorstin, Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America, Vintage Books: New York, 1992, p. 136.

  16. Celebrity, detached from any context beyond itself . . . Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and its History, Vintage Books, New York: 1986, p. 554.

  17. For example, the Guardian reports that to become a ‘micro-influencer’ . . . Leah McLaren, ‘What would you do if your teenager became an overnight Instagram sensat
ion?’, Guardian, 22 July 2018; Emma Lunn, ‘Putting you in the picture: yes, you can earn a living on Instagram’, Guardian, 5 May 2017; Richard Godwin, ‘The rise of the nano-influencer: how brands are turning to common people’, Guardian, 14 November 2018.

  18. The vast majority of people don’t have . . . The average number of followers/friends for Facebook, Twitter and Instagram is, respectively: 155, 707, 150. Sarah Knapton, ‘Facebook users have 155 friends – but would trust just four in a crisis’, Daily Telegraph, 20 January 2016; ‘The Average Twitter User Now has 707 Followers’, KickFactory (www.kickfactory.com), 23 June 2016; ‘What Your Follower/Following Ratio Say About Your Instagram Account’, WorkMacro (www.workmacro.com), 12 March 2018.

  19. For example, Michelle Dobyne of Oklahoma . . . Mark Molloy, ‘Woman gives incredible interview after escaping house fire’, Daily Telegraph, 12 January 2016; Dave Schilling, ‘Viral video news memes bring fame – but still feel almost racist’, Guardian, 14 January 2016; Zeba Blay, ‘Why do we laugh at viral stars like Michelle Dobyne and Antoine Dodson?’, Huffington Post, 16 January 2016. For a thorough discussion of this case, see Crystal Abidin, Internet Celebrity: Understanding Fame Online, Emerald Publishing: Bingley, 2018, pp. 38–41.

  20. The anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker . . . Hortense Powdermaker, Hollywood, the Dream Factory: An Anthropologist Looks at the Movie-Makers, Little Brown & Company: Boston, 2013, pp. 40–41, 93–8.

  21. In 2015, the Instagram model Essena O’Neill . . . Elle Hunt, ‘Essena O’Neill quits Instagram claiming social media “is not real life”’, Guardian, 3 November 2015; Madison Malone Kircher, ‘Where Are You, Essena O’Neill?’, New York, 4 November 2016.

  22. Donna Freitas’ research into young social media users . . Donna Freitas, The Happiness Effect: How Social Media is Driving a Generation to Appear Perfect at Any Cost, Oxford University Press: New York, 2017, pp. 61–4.