The Twittering Machine

by Richard Seymour

  23. If celebrities often spiral into public displays of self-degradation . . . Chris Rojek, Celebrity, Reaktion Books: London, 2001, p. 11.

  24. What hooks us is also what kills us . . . Nadeem Badshah, ‘Hospital admissions for teenage girls who self-harm nearly double’, Guardian, 6 August 2018; Denis Campbell, ‘Stress and social media fuel mental health crisis among girls’, Guardian, 23 September 2017; J. M. Twenge, T. E. Joiner, M. L. Rogers and 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; ‘Media Use, Face-to-Face Communication, Media Multitasking, and Social Well-Being Among 8- to 12-Year-Old Girls’, Developmental Psychology, 48(2), March 2012, pp. 327–36; L. E. Sherman, A. A. Payton, L. M. Hernandez, P. M. Greenfield and M. Dapretto, ‘The Power of the Like in Adolescence: Effects of Peer Influence on Neural and Behavioral Responses to Social Media’, Psychological Science, 27(7), 2016, pp. 1027–1035. Benjamin Fong argues that these effects are good reason for progressives to quit. Benjamin Y. Fong, ‘Log Off’, Jacobin, 29 November 2018. For a sceptical review of such analyses, see Tom Chivers, ‘The truth about the suspected link between social media and self-harm’, New Scientist, 6 August 2018. As regards the tendency to compare ourselves with those above us in the social hierarchy, see Oliver James, Britain On the Couch: How keeping up with the Joneses has depressed us since 1950, Vermilion: Reading, 2010.

  25. As Alain Ehrenberg put it . . . Alain Ehrenberg, The Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age, McGill-Queen’s University Press: Montreal and Kingston, 2010, p. 4.

  26. And revenues for social industry firms began to take off . . . ‘Twitter’s revenue from 1st quarter 2011 to 3rd quarter 2018 (in million U.S. dollars)’, Statista, 2019 (www.statista.com); Facebook’s ‘initial public offering’ of shares was made in May 2012, reaching a peak market value of $104 billion. See Warren Olney, ‘Facebook IPO: A Touchstone Cultural Moment for America?’, To the Point, KCRW.com, 17 May 2012.

  27. A Stasi for the Angry Birds generation’ . . . Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, BBC Two, Series 3, Episode One, available on www.youtube.com, 24 February 2014.

  28. Through years of ‘invading people’s privacy’ . . . Dan Sabbagh, ‘Paul McMullan lays bare newspaper dark arts at Leveson inquiry’, Guardian, 29 November 2011.

  29. Morgan was an associate of Rees . . . See Tom Watson and Martin Hickman, Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain, Allen Lane: London, 2012; Nick Davies, Hack Attack: How the truth caught up with Rupert Murdoch, Vintage, London, 2015; and Alastair Morgan and Peter Jukes, Who Killed Daniel Morgan?: Britain’s Most Investigated Murder, Blink Publishing: London, 2017; Cahal Milno, Jonathan Brown and Matt Blake, ‘Beyond the law, private eyes who do the dirty work for journalists’, Independent, 13 July 2011.

  30. The reporter, having been read Lewis’s suicide note at the inquest . . . On both Stronge and Lewis, see Peter Burden, News of the World?: Fake Sheikhs and Royal Trappings, Eye Books Ltd: London, 2009.

  31. The rising profile of ‘celebrity worship syndrome’. . . Randy A. Sansone and Lori A. Sansone, ‘“I’m Your Number One Fan” – A Clinical Look at Celebrity Worship’, Innovations in Clinical Neuroscience, 11(1-2), January/February 2014, pp. 39–43.

  32. Newspapers, working to the woke dollar . . . Examples of which include: Maya Salam, ‘Why “Radical Body” Live’ is Thriving on Instagram’, New York Times, 9 June 2017; Jess Commons, ‘15 incredible body positive people to follow on Instagram’, Evening Standard, 11 May 2017.

  33. The traditional celebrities who adapt best to the medium . . . Alice Marwick and danah boyd, ‘To See and Be Seen: Celebrity Practice on Twitter’, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 17(2), 2011, pp. 139–58; Alice Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity, and Branding in the Social Media Age, Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 2013.

  34. By 2015, social advertising . . . Chris Horton, ‘Is Social Advertising Subverting Social Media Marketing?’, Business 2 Community (www.business2community.com), 2 May 2015.

  35. It had proven wildly profitable . . . Madeleine Berg, ‘Logan Paul May Have Been Dropped By YouTube, But He’ll Still Make Millions’, Forbes, 11 January 2018; Gavin Fernando, ‘How Logan Paul went from one of the world’s most famous YouTube stars to universally hated’, News.com.au, 3 November 2018.

  36. Fellow YouTuber Japanese-American internet . . . Reina Scully, ‘I have a lot of intense feelings’, Twitter.com, 1 January 2018.

  37. Paul, being a savvy entrepreneur . . . James Vincent, ‘YouTuber Logan Paul apologizes for filming suicide victim, says “I didn’t do it for views”’, The Verge, 2 January 2018.

  38. Katelyn Nicole Davis, a twelve-year-old from Georgia . . . Shehab Khan, ‘Man dies after setting himself on fire during Facebook Live stream’, Independent, 15 May 2017; Travis M. Andrews, ‘Turkish man, 22, fatally shoots himself on Facebook Live’, Washington Post, 13 October 2016; Carol Marbin Miller and Audra D. S. Birch, ‘Before suicide by hanging, girl pleaded in vain for mom’s acceptance’, Miami Herald, 15 March 2017; Kristine Phillips, ‘A 12-year-old girl live-streamed her suicide. It took two weeks for Facebook to take the video down’, Washington Post, 27 January 2017.

  39. Desperate faces, on the brink of desperate acts . . . Béla Bálazs, Theory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art, Denis Dobson Ltd: London, 1952, pp. 62–3.

  40. What if Conrad’s ‘demon of perverse inspiration’ . . . Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent, in Joseph Conrad: The Dover Reader, Dover Publications, Inc.: Mineola, NY, 2014, p. 439.

  41. In 2017, for example, a young woman from Ohio . . . Rob Crilly, ‘Teenager accused of live-streaming rape got “caught up in the likes”’, Daily Telegraph, 18 April 2016; Tyler Kingkade, ‘Why Would Anyone Film A Rape And Not Try To Stop It?’, Huffington Post, 21 April 2016.

  42. According to the prosecutor, Lonina told police . . . Jill Bauer and Ronna Gradus, Hot Girls Wanted: Turned On, ‘Don’t Stop Filming’, Season One, Episode Six, Netflix, 2017.

  43. Josef Fritzel, Ted Bundy, Timothy McVeigh and Jeffrey Dahmer . . . The erotic interest in Lonina was preceded by the fascination with Amanda Knox, who had stood trial for the murder of Meredith Kercher. In the UK, Channel 5’s flagship daytime programme, The Wright Stuff, hosted a debate entitled, ‘Foxy Knoxy: Would Ya?’

  44. Daniel Boorstin called celebrity the condition of being well known . . . Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America, Vintage Books: New York, 1992, p. 136.

  45. There is something spellbinding about . . . ‘Human attention tends to fall on objects whose forms it recognizes, under the spellbinding influence of the direction taken by the attention of others’. Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, Polity Press: Cambridge, 2017, p. 64.

  46. . . . easily reproduced pieces of information, or memes . . . Adam Clarke Estes, ‘A Guide to Facebook’s Announcements’, The Atlantic, 22 September 2011.

  47. The easy solution is to tell a clichéd story about what’s happening . . . Philip Elmer-Dewitt, ‘On A Screen Near You’, Time, 24 June 2001.

  48. From MySpace to Snapchat, the platforms . . . Brad Stone, ‘New Scrutiny for Facebook Over Predators’, New York Times, 30 July 2007; Bobbie Johnson, ‘Wired hacker outs MySpace predators’, Guardian, 17 October 2006; Marion A. Walker, ‘MySpace removes over 90,000 sex offenders’, Associated Press, 23 February 2009.

  49. Complaints about narcissism are almost always . . . Kristin Dombek, The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism, Farrar, Straus & Giroux: New York, 2016.

  50. The morally charged language of the backlash . . . Elisha Maldonado, ‘“Am I ugly?” YouTube trend is disturbing’, New York Post, 27 October 2013.

  51. Young people have taken ‘the desire for self-admiration too far’. . . You
can like yourself just fine,’ Twenge and Campbell advise youngsters in the tough-love style of Dr Phil, ‘without loving yourself to excess’. Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell, The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement, The Free Press: New York, 2009, p. 69.

  52. A swelling library of head-shaking academic papers . . . In addition to Twenge and Campbell, the following are examples of a common obsession: Laura E. Buffardi and W. Keith Campbell, ‘Narcissism and Social Networking Web Sites’, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34(10), 2008, pp. 1303–1314; Christopher J. Carpenter, ‘Narcissism on Facebook: Self-promotional and anti-social behavior’, Personality and Individual Differences, Vol. 52, No. 4, March 2012, pp. 482–6; Andrew L. Mendelson and Zizi Papacharissi, ‘Look At Us: Collective Narcissism in College Student Facebook Photo Galleries’, in Zizi Papacharissi, ed., A Networked Self: Identity, Community and Culture on Social Network Sites, Routledge: London and New York, 2010; Soraya Mehdizadeh, ‘Self-Presentation 2.0: Narcissism and Self-Esteem on Facebook’, Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, Vol. 13, No. 4, 2010; Adam O’Sullivan and Zaheer Hussain, ‘An Exploratory Study of Facebook Intensity and its Links to Narcissism, Stress, and Self-esteem’, Journal of Addictive Behaviors, Therapy & Rehabilitation, 06 (01), 2017; Agata Blachnioa, Aneta Przepiorkaa and Patrycja Rudnicka, ‘Narcissism and self-esteem as predictors of dimensions of Facebook use’, Personality and Individual Differences, Vol. 90, February 2016, pp. 296–301.

  53. It fuses narcissism . . . See Christopher Lasch on the ‘narcissism of the mirror’. The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations, W. W. Norton & Company: New York, 1991.

  54. And we all fake it . . . If, as Oliver Wendell Holmes said, the camera is ‘a mirror with a memory’, we are producing false memories on an industrial scale.

  55. They reject the comforting idea . . . Twenge and Campbell, The Narcissism Epidemic, pp. 65 and 71.

  56. Zoe Williams worries . . . Zoe Williams, ‘Me! Me! Me! Are we living through a narcissism epidemic?’, Guardian, 2 March 2016.

  57. Jeffrey Arnett at Clark University . . . The very trendy Implicit Association Tests, which they use to demonstrate ‘unconscious’ awesomeness on the part of their test subjects, have been savaged by a glut of peer-reviewed scholarship. It isn’t clear that these gimmicks measure anything, let alone the unconscious. Christian Jarrett, ‘Millennials are Narcissistic? The evidence is not so simple’, BBC News, 17 November 2017; Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, ‘The Evidence for Generation We and Against Generation Me’, Emerging Adulthood, 1(1), 2013, pp. 5–10; E. Wetzel, A. Brown, P. L. Hill, J. M. Chung, R. W. Robins and B. W. Roberts, ‘The Narcissism Epidemic Is Dead; Long Live the Narcissism Epidemic’, Psychological Science, 28(12), 2017, pp. 1833–1847; Samantha Stronge, Petar Milojev and Chris G. Sibley, ‘Are People Becoming More Entitled Over Time? Not in New Zealand’, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 44(2), 2018, pp. 200–13.

  58. This is demonstrated in . . . In 2017, amid considerable controversy, the American Psychiatric Association lifted the professional ban on members speculating on the mental health of public officials. Alessandra Potenza, ‘Commenting on Trump’s mental health is fine, psychiatry group says’, The Verge, 25 July 2017. A bestselling book written by thirty-seven psychiatrists diagnosed Trump with pathological narcissism. Bandy X. Lee et al., The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President, St Martin’s Press: New York, 2017; the lead author of the DSM’s definition of narcissistic personality disorder wrote to the New York Times to scold his colleagues, noting that there was no way they had sufficient information to make such a claim. Allen Frances, ‘An Eminent Psychiatrist Demurs on Trump’s Mental State’, New York Times, 14 February 2017.

  59. Twenge’s work with ‘Generation Z’ . . . Jean Twenge, iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy – And Completely Unprepared for Adulthood, Atria Books: New York, 2017.

  60. But it does so using a technology that . . . Adam Greenfield, Radical Technologies, Verso: London and New York, 2017, p. 45.

  61. Through these, photographer Brooke Wendt suggests . . . Brooke Wendt, The Allure of the Selfie: Instagram and the New Self-Portrait, Institute of Network Cultures: Amsterdam, 2014, p. 16.

  62. From Toulouse-Lautrec’s Self-Portrait Before a Mirror . . . For a beautiful history of visibility and self-portraits, see Nicholas Mirzoeff, How to See The World: An Introduction to Images, from Self-Portraits to Selfies, Maps to Movies, and More, Basic Books: New York, 2016.

  63. When Christopher Lasch diagnosed an emerging culture . . . Lasch, Culture of Narcissism.

  64. In our selfies we look . . . Wendt, The Allure of the Selfie, p. 20.

  65. It orchestrates a paradoxically distracted . . . See Josh Cohen, The Private Life: Why We Remain in the Dark, Granta: London, 2013, p. 34.

  66. ‘As if I wrote the Internet,’ . . . Sandy Baldwin, The Internet Unconscious: On the Subject of Electronic Literature, Bloomsbury: New York, 2015, p. 5.

  67. The cultural critic Marie Moran cites . . . Marie Moran, Identity and Capitalism, Sage Publications: London, 2014.

  68. As soon as the infant is captivated . . . Sigmund Freud, ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’, in Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 14, Vintage Classics: New York, 2001.

  69. As the psychoanalyst Alessandra Lemma argues . . . Alessandra Lemma, The Digital Age on the Couch: Psychoanalytic Practice and New Media, Routledge: London and New York, 2017, pp. 136–7.

  70. The artist Sean Dockray’s ‘Facebook Suicide Bomb Manifesto’ . . . Sean Dockray, ‘The Facebook Suicide Bomb Manifesto’, Wired, 31 May 2010.

  71. Facebook’s own options for permanent deletion . . . On the fate of these websites and Facebook’s painstaking measures to prevent disconnections, see Tero Karppi, Disconnect: Facebook’s Affective Bonds, University of Minnesota Press: Minnesota, MN, 2018; and also Tero Karppi, ‘Disconnect.Me: User Engagement and Facebook’, University of Turku: Turku, 2014.

  72. Ironically, Snapchat’s fall . . . ‘Kylie Jenner “sooo over” Snapchat – and shares tumble’, BBC News, 23 February 2018; Mark Sweeney, ‘Peak social media? Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat fail to make new friends’, Guardian, 10 August 2018; Rupert Neate, ‘Over $119bn wiped off Facebook’s market cap after growth shock’, Guardian, 26 July 2018.

  73. Yet, 40 per cent of the world’s entire population . . . Brett Williams, ‘There are now over 3 billion social media users in the world – about 40 percent of the global population’, Mashable, 7 August 2017.

  74. What would happen if . . . Matthew Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head: How to Flourish in an Age of Distraction, Penguin Random House: New York, 2015, p. 13.

  75. What if, as the psychoanalyst Josh Cohen proposes . . . Cohen, The Private Life, Kindle loc. 127.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  1. In February 2011, schoolgirl Natasha MacBryde . . . ‘Natasha MacBryde: Rail death teen threatened online’, BBC News, 21 July 2011; Andy Dolan, ‘Coroner slams “vile” school bullies who taunted suicide girl, 15, in death’, Daily Mail, 22 July 2011; ‘Public schoolgirl fell under train after being taunted by bullies’, Daily Telegraph, 15 February 2011.

  2. Spotting an opportunity, a twenty-five-year-old ‘RIP troll’ from Reading . . . Steven Morris, ‘Internet troll jailed after mocking deaths of teenagers’, Guardian, 13 September 2011; Paul Cassell, ‘“I begged for help for my sick troll son”’, Reading Post, 7 June 2013; Rebecca Camber and Simon Neville, ‘Sick internet “troll” who posted vile messages and videos taunting the death of teenagers is jailed for 18 WEEKS’, Daily Mail, 14 December 2011; ‘Sean Duffy case highlights murky world of trolling’, BBC News, 13 September 2011.

  3. The defence claimed that . . . Robert Zepeda and Emily Shapiro, ‘Matthew Shepard: The legacy of a gay college student 20 years after his brutal murder’, ABC News, 26 October 2018.

  4.
Nor was Duffy’s an isolated case . . . Whitney Phillips, This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture, MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 2015, pp. 28–30; Kenny Rose Bradford, ‘Drowned Teenager’s Family Targeted By Vile Web Trolls’, Huffington Post, 14 August 2013; Gregory Pratt, ‘Cruel online posts known as RIP trolling add to Tinley Park family’s grief’, Chicago Tribune, 12 August 2013.

  5. ‘We are a mass of vulnerabilities’ . . . Jon Ronson, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, Pan Macmillan: London, 2015, p. 273.

  6. Whitney Phillips, author of This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things . . . Phillips, This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, pp. 27, 35, 115 and 121.

  7. Their detached humour was epitomized by . . . Phillips, This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, p. 117.

  8. Most trolls are not RIP trolls . . . Karla Mantilla, Gendertrolling: How Misogyny Went Viral, Praeger: Santa Barbara, CA, 2015.

  9. Everyone has an inner troll . . . Justin Cheng, Michael Bernstein, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil and Jure Leskovec, ‘Anyone Can Become a Troll: Causes of Trolling Behavior in Online Discussions’, ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Feb–Mar; 2017, pp. 1217–1230.

  10. From the first trolls on the Arpanet ‘TALK’ system . . . On the origins of trolling in the early pre-World Wide Web Arpanet system, see Jamie Bartlett, The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld, William Heinemann: London, 2014, pp. 25–68.

  11. This includes a skit by YouTuber Sam Pepper . . . Olivia Blair, ‘Sam Pepper heavily criticised for “vile” fake murder prank video’, Independent, 30 November 2015; ‘Parents reveal reason behind shocking prank videos’, ABC News, 28 April 2017; Sam Levin, ‘Couple who screamed at their kids in YouTube “prank” sentenced to probation’, Guardian, 12 September 2017.

  12. ‘Every joke’, Freud wrote . . . Sigmund Freud, The Complete Psychological Works Of Sigmund Freud, Volume VIII: Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, Vintage: London, 2001, p 151.