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The Twittering Machine
by
In surrealist artist Paul Klee’s The Twittering Machine, the bird-song of a diabolical machine acts as bait to lure humankind into a pit of damnation. Leading political writer and broadcaster Richard Seymour, author of Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics argues that this is a chilling metaphor for our relationship with social media.
Former social media executive ...more
Former social media executive ...more
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Paperback, 250 pages
Published
August 29th 2019
by The Indigo Press
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More like about 3.5. I’m of two minds here, and trying to be fair to this actually rather good book and avoid faulting it for ultimately failing to be something it doesn’t actually set out to be:
On the one hand, this is an excellent account of how we got into the predicament we’re in online, with so many of us vainly and desperately shouting into, and listening for congratulatory echoes from, the great void of social media—what Seymour, borrowing a phrase from Paul Klee, calls the “Twittering Ma ...more
On the one hand, this is an excellent account of how we got into the predicament we’re in online, with so many of us vainly and desperately shouting into, and listening for congratulatory echoes from, the great void of social media—what Seymour, borrowing a phrase from Paul Klee, calls the “Twittering Ma ...more

Sep 26, 2020
Murtaza
added it
Completely escaping the influence social media use is not really possible or necessarily desirable for most people today. What we should do however is use these platforms thoughtfully and with full understanding of their biases and the imperatives of their creators. What tech companies seek is engagement, nothing more and nothing less. It doesn't really matter if people are using their platforms out of rage, depression, or joy – all that matters is that they use them. Studies show that negative
...more

Dec 14, 2019
David M
added it
What we call addictions are misplaced devotions; we love the wrong things.
We keep {our smartphone} close, charged at all times. It is as though, one day, it’s going to bring us the message we’ve been waiting for.
Not alarmist but deeply melancholy, this book is the best thing I’ve yet read on the subject.

I love the ideas under this book, which the author describes as an essay. The clever approach to references gives confidence that the foundations on which the conclusions are based can be verified, but the text is not littered with footnote markers.
Key points for me:
The twittering machine (social media and more generally digital communications between people) has been consciously constructed as an addictive time sink.
The whole three ring circus - celebrities, influencers, presidents, trolls, fak ...more
Key points for me:
The twittering machine (social media and more generally digital communications between people) has been consciously constructed as an addictive time sink.
The whole three ring circus - celebrities, influencers, presidents, trolls, fak ...more

Utilizing the titular metaphor based on Paul Klee's painting, The Twittering Machine (1922), Seymour delves into many harmful aspects of modern social media. This well-written essay looks a considerably wide range of internet phenomena from the celebrity culture of Instagram influencers to psychological and sociological consequences of online trolling to the social media algorithms that have aided the alt-right.
The underlying focus though is the highly addictive nature of modern internet platfo ...more
The underlying focus though is the highly addictive nature of modern internet platfo ...more

Richard Seymour claims to have written this book in a state of "monastic isolation." That might suggest a certain disconnect between the relentlessly social nature of the "Twittering Machine" and the standpoint of the author himself. However, Seymour's larger point is that the logic of social media lends itself to singularities. Twitter dogpiles and community blog flamewars alienate people and dissolve solidarities and movements. Engagement or "time on device" leads to depression (that most indi
...more

I dunno. Some interesting stuff here about, say, how the thing you’re addicted to is not the explanation for the addiction, and about how you slide into a certain kind of relationship with a technology. But I found the prose a bit ‘guffy’ - too many ‘in a sense’s and ‘if x is a y, then maybe z’. Not to my ‘concretist’ tastes, I guess.

A brilliant essay on what we are really doing when we scroll through social media feeds. Seymour gets into the philosophical side of the proliferation of 'writing' through smartphone technology, and even 'writing' our data as we scroll and scroll, and the creative/metaphysical nature of words. Social media and the data behemoth is described as the 'twittering machine' that we feed our lives into, with its constant need to consume our time and attention as its fuel. It is designed to be addictive
...more

I think I've read too much on the subject, but I wanted something more out of this. It's by far the most readable of Verso's books, but I think it could have actually benefited from being slightly longer.
Too much time is spent on the symptoms of social media. I know it makes you an addict, I know it's destructive. I wanted to know why. The end provides some insight into this, but it's not entirely enough. Why is social media like this? How can we improve it? Is it possible that it can be improv ...more
Too much time is spent on the symptoms of social media. I know it makes you an addict, I know it's destructive. I wanted to know why. The end provides some insight into this, but it's not entirely enough. Why is social media like this? How can we improve it? Is it possible that it can be improv ...more

Apr 08, 2020
rabble.ca
added it
Review by Cristina D'Amico:
Once upon a time, the left was briefly but strongly enamoured of the radical potential of social media. This author counts herself among the enchanted -- the opportunity for collective organizing and political movement seemed immense. Yet nearly a decade after the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, social media has little to show for itself in terms of its ability to facilitate material change. Even more unsettling, those groups that have tended to fare best in the on ...more
Once upon a time, the left was briefly but strongly enamoured of the radical potential of social media. This author counts herself among the enchanted -- the opportunity for collective organizing and political movement seemed immense. Yet nearly a decade after the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, social media has little to show for itself in terms of its ability to facilitate material change. Even more unsettling, those groups that have tended to fare best in the on ...more

The Twittering Machine is ambitious in its scope, attempting to develop a language for describing what is happening in our world with social media. It treads alot of familiar ground, referencing ideas from Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism and recent research on social media, happiness and addiction. The Twittering Machine is the name of a 1922 painting by Paul Klee, where a small row of birds on a mechanical axle lure victims to the fiery pit below them. A metaphoric image of
...more

The Twittering Machine is made of us. Our actions write the internet, using actual language and coded data. Algorithms read and use our writing to feed us with more content. Always more. As Seymour explains, "We write to the machine, it collects and aggregates our desires and fantasies, segments them by market and demographics and sells them back to us as a commodity experience."
One of the fundamental problems of the internet is that it's designed to commodify attention rather than edify or conn ...more
One of the fundamental problems of the internet is that it's designed to commodify attention rather than edify or conn ...more

All Technology is neither good nor bad; nor neutral

Twittering Machine (Die Zwitscher-Maschine) by Paul Klee, 1922.
Twitter as Lacan's 'Modern Calculating Machine' - a machine "far more dangerous than the atom bomb" because it can defeat any opponent by calculating, with sufficient data, the unconscious axioms that govern a person's behaviour. We write to the machine, it collects and aggreagates our desires and fantasies, segments them by market and demographic and sells them back to us as a c ...more

Twittering Machine (Die Zwitscher-Maschine) by Paul Klee, 1922.
Twitter as Lacan's 'Modern Calculating Machine' - a machine "far more dangerous than the atom bomb" because it can defeat any opponent by calculating, with sufficient data, the unconscious axioms that govern a person's behaviour. We write to the machine, it collects and aggreagates our desires and fantasies, segments them by market and demographic and sells them back to us as a c ...more

Extremely disappointing. I am not sure if this even qualifies as a book or would it be better described as a bibliography, so often does Seymour start a sentence with "in the words of ....". The book is a directory of people who have discussed the issues of data, society and social media better than Seymour has and much of his analysis are tired, milquetoast takes read in the voice of a very annoying first year philosophy student. Using the word hegemony or ontology frequently does not elevate t
...more

I chanced upon this book by the virtue of the Book: Targeted by Brittany Kaiser and I didn't expect the book to be the revelation it was. It absolutely blew me away.
For Gamblers, the only temporal rhythm that matters is the sequence of encounters with destiny, the run of luck. For drug users, what matters is the rhythm of the high, whether it is the stationary effect of opium or the build, crescendo and crash of alcohol. The Experience of platform users, on the other hand, is time information an ...more
For Gamblers, the only temporal rhythm that matters is the sequence of encounters with destiny, the run of luck. For drug users, what matters is the rhythm of the high, whether it is the stationary effect of opium or the build, crescendo and crash of alcohol. The Experience of platform users, on the other hand, is time information an ...more

We're lucky to be alive to witness doddering psychoanalysts grasping the spirit of the times and finally focusing their interpretive compulsion on the text that is the internet. Richard lays the internet on a couch and starts at the beginning. What is this so-called fake news? Why is it that the more outlandish the news, the more completely readers give themselves over to sadist fantasies; checking pizzerias for Hillary Clinton sex trafficking tunnels, patrolling the streets of Louisville for an
...more

There is an abundance of books analyzing the impacts of social media from a myriad of perspectives, not limited to political, social, technological, economical, and judicial. The Twittering Machine is unique in that it succinctly synthesizes information from the aforementioned perspectives and asks the question: what does our usage say about us? If the harms are so well documented and well known, why do we keep coming back? It reads like a series of somewhat discrete, yet related lectures in its
...more

Richard Seymour should be most at home in the political economy side of this thing, but it was actually the existential and more speculative parts where his voice shined for me. The chapter on addiction was a kind of literary near-death experience, meaning both terrifying but also enlivening (making me want to do something about the addiction to spend "time on screen", and as the book convincingly shows, most of us by now are addicts). There's something of a bibliographic tone to the book, that
...more

Beautifully written book. However, it is as another Goodreads contributor stated: "a melancholy book" or as Seymour more starky describes his own work: "a horror story". It is also salutary. Lucid observations and perceptive analysis take it above some of the usual social media moral panic literature. Seymour's leitmotif is "writing". We are writing more than ever in this digital era, yet the question is posed - "what are we writing ourselves into?" While Seymour does not claim to provide answer
...more

Sceptical left-wing take on destructive power of social media platforms.
Central premise is that the whole computer era makes writers of us all - writing continuously, as a form of unpaid labour, on social media sites we don't own or control and that aim to control us.
Seymour doesn't buy the reductive perspective that the tech is in some way IN CONTROL now, the tech defeatists perspective. Also rejects the simplistic idea of 'tech addiction'. Uses some psychoanalysis here.
Inspiring, radical, opt ...more
Central premise is that the whole computer era makes writers of us all - writing continuously, as a form of unpaid labour, on social media sites we don't own or control and that aim to control us.
Seymour doesn't buy the reductive perspective that the tech is in some way IN CONTROL now, the tech defeatists perspective. Also rejects the simplistic idea of 'tech addiction'. Uses some psychoanalysis here.
Inspiring, radical, opt ...more

There were moments when I really was impressed, but there were others when it got too much or imply got too abstract and theoretical (even if I like abstract and theoretical when it's needed). Hesitated between 3 and 4 stars, but eventually came down to three because to me eventually the content was too uneven between personal argumentation in a discourse that was too restricted to the English radical english far left. I see myself as radical far left too, but it's the discourse from England tha
...more

Circumstantial
Seymour strings together a series of observations about our digital anxiety and addiction. He waxes poetic and invokes the spectre of stochastic terror and narcissistic death to illustrate how well read he is more than to advance a coherent argument. Entrancing prose that devolves into an exercise in scripturient excess
Seymour strings together a series of observations about our digital anxiety and addiction. He waxes poetic and invokes the spectre of stochastic terror and narcissistic death to illustrate how well read he is more than to advance a coherent argument. Entrancing prose that devolves into an exercise in scripturient excess

I'm mad that this was SO good, as the tone throughout was so pompous and self important that I would very easily have hated a worse book. Incredibly insightful and serious, and for the most part avoids cod-Banksy "what if phones but too much" stuff. By far the best book on the subject of social media. Incredible!!!
...more

This was an OK book, but I really thought it should have been better. There were some really interesting portions surrounding our use of the internet, online celebrity, trolling and lies and there were some other sections that didn't seem to add much.
...more

"A feed filled with topless mirror shots, gym photos, new hair, and so on, might be seen as a peculiar form of idolatry. But it is less a tribute to the user than to the power that the machine has over the user.”
...more

Brilliant and terrifying, if a little over my head. The book is about a problem; do not expect a solution. The revelation is that I am absolutely a neo-Luddite, but the irony does not escape me that I'm posting this book review on a social industry platform.
...more

Aug 26, 2019
Ella
marked it as to-read
http://www.paul-klee.org/twittering-m...
Looking forward to this one. ...more
Looking forward to this one. ...more
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Northern Irish Marxist writer and broadcaster, activist and owner of the blog Lenin's Tomb.
Seymour is a former member of the Socialist Workers Party.
He is currently working on a PhD. in sociology. ...more
Seymour is a former member of the Socialist Workers Party.
He is currently working on a PhD. in sociology. ...more
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“We prefer the machine when human relationships have become disappointing.”
—
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