The Twittering Machine
Page 28
39. By 2014, as the Iraqi government suppressed Sunni protests against their political exclusion . . . Martin Chulov, ‘Isis: the inside story’, Guardian, 11 December 2014; Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan, ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror, Regan Arts: New York, 2016; Patrick Cockburn, The Rise of the Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution, Verso: London and New York, 2016, pp. 42–5.
40. By February 2015, it was estimated that . . . James P. Farwell, ‘The Media Strategy of ISIS’, Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, 56:6, 2014, pp. 49–5; Ben Makuch, ‘ISIS’s Favorite Hashtag Is a Weapon of War’, Motherboard (www.motherboard.vice.com), 27 June 2014; Emerson T. Brooking and P. W. Singer, ‘War Goes Viral’, The Atlantic, November 2016; Emerson T. Brooking and P. W. Singer, LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: Boston, MA, 2018.
41. They shared slick videos aimed at Western millennials . . . Majid Alfifi, Parisa Kaghazgaran, James Caverlee and Fred Morstatter, ‘Measuring the Impact of ISIS Social Media Strategy’, MIS2: Misinformation and Misbehavior Mining on the Web (workshop), Los Angeles, CA, 2018; Matt Broomfield, ‘Twitter Shuts Down 125,000 Isis-Linked Accounts’, Independent, 6 February 2016; Lisa Blaker, ‘The Islamic State’s Use of Online Social Media’, Military Cyber Affairs: The Journal of the Military Cyber Professionals Association, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2015; Jason Burke, ‘“Gangsta jihadi” Denis Cuspert killed fighting in Syria’, Guardian, 19 January 2018.
42. If anything, ISIS became known for the extravagance of its displays of violence . . . Laura Ryan, ‘Al-Qaida and ISIS Use Twitter Differently. Here’s How and Why’, National Journal (wwwnationaljournal.com), 9 October 2014; Kyle J. Greene, ‘ISIS: Trends in Terrorist Media and Propaganda’, International Studies Capstone Research Papers, 3, 2015.
43. In the first six months of the US-led bombing campaign to oust ISIS . . . ISIS drawing steady stream of recruits, despite bombings’, Associated Press, 11 February 2015; Aya Batrawy, Paisley Dodds and Lori Hinnant, ‘Leaked Isis documents reveal recruits have poor grasp of Islamic faith’, Independent, 16 August 2016.
44. Polling controversially suggested that 7 per cent of British citizens . . . Madeline Grant, ‘16% of French Citizens Support Isis, Poll Finds’, Newsweek, 26 August 2014.
45. Nor did it build the torture chambers during the anti-occupation insurgency in Iraq . . . ‘Iraq torture “worse after Saddam”’, BBC News, 21 September 2006; Terrence McCoy, ‘Camp Bucca: The US prison that became the birthplace of Isis’, Independent, 4 November 2014; Neal McDonald, ‘Iraqi reality-TV hit takes fear factor to another level’, Christian Science Monitor, 7 June 2005.
46. In fact, the invasion forces consisted of just two thousand jihadists . . . Ned Parker, Isabel Coles and Raheem Salman, ‘Special Report: How Mosul fell – An Iraqi general disputes Baghdad’s story’, Reuters, 14 October 2014; Matt Sienkiewicz, ‘Arguing with ISIS: web 2.0, open source journalism, and narrative disruption’, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 35:1, 2018, pp. 122–35; Steve Rose, ‘The Isis propaganda war: a hi-tech media jihad’, Guardian, 7 October 2014.
47. At one stage, ISIS accounts asked followers to video themselves waving the ISIS flag . . . Greene, ‘ISIS: Trends in Terrorist Media and Propaganda’.
48. Alberto Fernandez argued that the US . . . Alberto M. Fernandez, ‘Here to stay and growing: Combating ISIS propaganda networks’, The Brookings Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World, U.S.-Islamic World Forum Papers 2015, October 2015; Richard Forno and Arnupam Joshi, ‘How U.S. “Cyber Bombs” against Terrorists Really Work’, The Conversation, 13 May 2016.
49. By 2016, they were vaunting their ability to use ‘cyberbombs’ . . . Brian Ross and James Gordon Meek, ‘ISIS Threat at Home: FBI Warns US Military About Social Media Vulnerabilities’, ABC News, 1 December 2014; ‘“ISIS hackers” threats against U.S. military wives actually came from Russian trolls’, Associated Press, 8 May 2018.
50. Another study by George Washington University . . . ‘Enhancing the Understanding of the Foreign Terrorist Fighters Phenomenon in Syria’, United Nations Office of Counter-Terrorism, July 2017; Lizzie Dearden, ‘Isis: UN study finds foreign fighters in Syria “lack basic understanding of Islam”’, Independent, 4 August 2017; Christal Hayes, ‘Study: ISIS has lost territory but could still pose long-term threat’, USA Today, 6 February 2018.
51. Its use of the platforms shows us something . . . Jonathan Beller, The Message is Murder: Substrates of Computational Capital, Pluto Press: London, 2018, p. 5.
52. If the spectacle is a social relationship mediated by images . . . Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, Rebel Press: London, 1994, 2014.
53. As a presidential campaigner . . . Samuel C. Woolley and Douglas Guilbeault, ‘United States: Manufacturing Consensus Online’, in Samuel C. Woolley and Philip N. Howard, eds, Computational Propaganda: Political Parties, Politicians, and Political Manipulation on Social Media, Oxford University Press: New York, 2019, p. 187.
54. An analysis of Trump’s tweets during the election . . . Cora Lacatus, ‘For Donald Trump, campaigning by Twitter limited the public’s access to his policy positions and strategies’, LSE Blogs, 21 January 2018.
55. Historically, the far right has succeeded by building roots . . . Dylan Riley, The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe: Italy, Spain, and Romania, 1870–1945, Verso: London and New York, 2019.
56. Rather, far more lethally, it may be indicated by the phenomenon . . . For an explanation of this concept, see Heather Timmons, ‘Stochastic terror and the cycle of hate that pushes unstable Americans to violence’, Quartz (www.qz.com), 26 October 2018.
57. In the decade from 2008 to 2017, according to the Anti-Defamation League . . . Aamna Mohdin, ‘The far-right was responsible for the majority of America’s extremist killings in 2017’, Quartz, 18 January 2018.
58. Media commentary has begun to argue that the internet . . . For examples of this style of coverage, see Amanda Coletta, ‘Quebec City Mosque shooter scoured Twitter for Trump, right-wing figures before attack’, Washington Post, 18 April 2018; Kevin Roose, ‘The far-right was responsible for the majority of America’s extremist killings in 2017’, New York Times, 28 October 2018.
CONCLUSION
1. The average global internet user now spends . . . ‘Daily time spent on social networking by internet users worldwide from 2012 to 2017’, Statista, 2019; ‘People spend most of their waking hours staring at screens’, MarketWatch, 4 August 2018.
2. In the Latinized Christian use propagated by Evagrius of Pontus . . . Jean-Charles Nault, OSB, The Noonday Devil: Acedia, The Unnamed Evil of Our Times, Ignatius Press: San Francisco, CA, 2015.
3. As the historian of writing Barry Powell argues . . . Barry B. Powell, Writing: Theory and History of the Technology of Civilization, Wiley-Blackwell: Malden, MA, 2012, p. 12.
4. The ease of associative linking with hypertext . . . Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, University of Toronto Press: Toronto, 2011, p. 455.
5. It shows us how much our inherited standards of punctuation . . . Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, University of Toronto Press: Toronto, 2011, p. 455.
6. ‘The more I read,’ Frederick Douglass wrote in 1845 . . . Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Literary Classics of the United States: New York, 1994, p. 42.
7. ‘The subject cries out,’ Lacan exclaimed . . . Jacques Lacan, ‘Response to Jean Hyppolite’s Commentary on Freud’s “Verneinung”, in Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, W. W. Norton & Company: New York, 2006, p. 322.
8. Where it was taught, penmanship was indexed . . . Tamara Thornton, Handwriting in America: A Cultural History, Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 1996.
9. The characteristic experience of literacy prior to the Internet . . . Deborah Brandt, The Rise of Writing: Redefining Mass Literacy, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2015.
/> 10. As Colette Soler put it. . . Colette Soler, Lacan: The Unconscious Reinvented, Karnac Books, London: 2014, Kindle loc. 3239.
11. An alluring myth of the internet’s origins has it . . . Cade Metz, ‘Paul Baran, the link between nuclear war and the internet’, Wired, 4 September 2012;
12. The underlying idea for a ‘distributed network’ of writing . . . Paul Baran, ‘On Distributed Communications: I. Introduction to Distributed Communications Networks’, United States Air Force Project RAND, RAND Corporation, August 1964.
13. As Sandy Baldwin puts it . . . Sandy Baldwin, The Internet Unconscious: On the Subject of Electronic Literature, Bloomsbury: New York, 2015, pp. 33–7.
14. It was desperate to outdo Britain and Germany . . . Antonio Gonzales and Emmanuelle Jouve, ‘Minitel: histoire du réseau télématique français’, Flux: Cahiers scientifiques internationaux Réseaux et territoires, 2002, Vol. 1, No. 47, pp. 84–9.
15. Gérard Théry, the French director general of telecommunications . . . Julien Mailland and Kevin Driscoll, Minitel: Welcome to the Internet, MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 2017; Gonzales and Jouve, ‘Minitel: histoire du réseau télématique français’, Flux: Cahiers scientifiques internationaux Réseaux et territoires, pp. 84–9.
16. ‘I am dreaming,’ wrote artist Ben Vautier . . . Vautier quoted in Annick Bureaud, ‘Art and Minitel in France in the 1980s’, in Judy Malloy, ed., Social Media Archeology and Poetics, MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 2016, p. 144; Emmanuel Videcoq and Bernard Prince, ‘Félix Guattari et les agencements post-média: L’expérience de radio Tomate et du minitel Alter’, Multitudes, Vol. 2, No. 21, 2005, pp. 23–30; Félix Guattari, ‘Toward a Post-Media Era’, Mute Magazine, 1 February 2012.
17. The ‘machines of information, communication, intelligence, art . . . Mailland and Driscoll, Minitel: Welcome to the Internet, pp. 289–90; Videcoq and Prince, ‘Félix Guattari et les agencements post-média: L’expérience de radio Tomate et du minitel Alter’, pp. 23–30.
18. During the strike, they forged a new union . . . Danièle Kergoat, ‘De la jubilation à la déreliction, l’utilization du minitel dans les luttes infirmières (1988–1989)’, in Les coordinations de travailleurs dans la confrontation sociale, Futur antérieur, Paris: 1994.
19. Among other things, it was a state-maintained free market . . . Mailland and Driscoll, Minitel: Welcome to the Internet; ‘The French Connection’, Reply All, Gimlet Media, 21 January 2015.
20. The telecom entrepreneur Xavier Niel made his fortune . . . Mailland and Driscoll, Minitel: Welcome to the Internet; ‘The French Connection’, Reply All.
21. There was a chance that French technique . . . Julien Mailland, ‘101 Online: American Minitel Network and Lessons from Its Failure’, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Vol. 38, No. 01, January/March 2016.
22. As Julien Mailland points out, however, both Minitel and the internet . . . Mailland and Driscoll, Minitel: Welcome to the Internet, pp. 18–19; Julien Mailland, ‘Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet’, The Atlantic, 16 June 2017.
23. While the regime harnesses computerization and big data to state surveillance . . . Jack Lingchuan Qiu, Working-Class Network Society: Communication Technology and the Information Have-Less in Urban China, MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 2009.
24. A tour of a brewery won’t explain why somebody became . . . Francis Spufford, The Child That Books Built, Faber & Faber, London: 2010, Kindle loc. 120.
25. To break an addiction, the neuroscientist Marc Lewis has argued, Marc Lewis, The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease, Scribe: London, 2015.
26. The whole earth, according to this dispensation . . Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants, Viking: New York, 2010, pp. 26 and 515.
27. The technium was ‘actually a divine phenomenon . . . Kevin Kelly, ‘How Computer Nerds Describe God’, Christianity Today, 1 November 2002.
28. From Manuel Castells’ celebration of online ‘creative autonomy . . . Manuel Castells, Communication Power, Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2009; Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, Allen Lane: London, 2008.
29. The openness and indeterminacy of the network seemingly permitted what John Stuart Mill would have called ‘experiments of living’. John Stuart Mill, ‘On Liberty’ in The Basic Writings of John Stuart Mill, The Modern Library: New York, 2002, p. 174.
30. . . . as the historian Enzo Traverso writes . . . Enzo Traverso, Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory, Columbia University Press: New York, 2016, p. 9.
31. They cross-dressed and marched . . . Katrina Navickas, ‘The Search for “General Ludd”: The Mythology of Luddism’, Social History, Vol. 30, No. 3, August 2005, pp. 281–95; Richard Conniff, ‘What the Luddites Really Fought Against’, Smithsonian Magazine, March 2011.
32. We need the ‘intercalary gush’ of Catholic poet Charles Péguy . . . Traverso, Left-Wing Melancholia, p. 226.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book was written in a state of near-monastic isolation. Even so, it couldn’t have been finished without some invaluable assistance.
First of all, I’d particularly like to thank China Miéville and Davinia Hamilton, both of whom reviewed the drafts closely and offered tonnes of suggestions, ideas and challenges. Thanks also to Rosie Warren for her thoughtful feedback. I also benefited from conversations with Sam Kriss, who knows the Twittering Machine quite well.
I’d like to extend immense thanks to Susie Nicklin for seeing potential in the book, my agent Karolina Sutton for her support and my editor, Ellah Wakatama Allfrey, for her sharp-eyed guidance. And thanks to everyone at The Indigo Press and Curtis Brown for their patient help.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard Seymour is a writer and broadcaster and the author of numerous books about politics including The Liberal Defence of Murder (Verso, 2008), Against Austerity (Pluto, 2014) and Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics (Verso, 2016). His writing appears in the Guardian, Jacobin, London Review of Books, New York Times and Prospect. He lives in London.
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