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All technology, as the historian Melvin Kranzberg put it, is ‘neither good nor bad; nor neutral’. We tend to ascribe magical powers to technologies:
technology is never neutral. And the crucial technology, in this story, is writing.
Writing technologies, being foundational to our ways of life, are never socially or politically neutral in their effects.
As writing has morphed from analogue to digital, it has become massively ubiquitous. Never before in human history have people written so much, so frantically:
To begin with knots is just to stress that writing is matter, and that the way the texture of our writing materials shapes and contours what can be written makes all the difference in the world.
A tool is, first, the medium of a relationship between a body and the world. It connects users in a set of relationships with one another and the world around them.
To talk about technologies is to talk about societies.
This is about a social industry. As an industry it is able, through the production and harvesting of data, to objectify and quantify social life in numerical form. As William Davies has argued, its unique innovation is to make social interactions visible and susceptible to data analytics and sentiment analysis.
This makes social life eminently susceptible ...
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it produces social life; it pr...
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The nuance added by social industry’s platforms is that they don’t necessarily have to spy on us. They have created a machine for us
to write to. The bait is that we are interacting with other people:
We are not interacting with them, however, but with the machine. We write to it, and it passes on the message for us, after keeping a record of the data.
we are writing even when searching, scrolling, hovering, watching and clicking through.
unconscious desires recorded in this way are written into the new universe of commodities.
We write to the machine, it collects and aggregates our desires and fantasies, segments them by market and demographic and sells them back to us as a commodity experience.
The social industry has created an addiction machine, not as an accident, but as a logical means to return value to its venture capitalist investors.
the more technology evolves, the more that new layers of hardware and software are added, the harder it is to change. This is handing tech capitalists a unique source of power.
they don’t have to persuade us when they can directly manipulate our experience of the world.
social media addiction is partly a self-medication for depression and partly a way of curating a better self in the eyes of others. Indeed, these two factors may not be unrelated.
if we get hooked on a machine that purports to tell us, among other things, how other people see us – or a version of ourselves, a delegated online image – that suggests something has already gone wrong in our relationships with others.
While the social industry is perceived as, and can be, a great leveller, it can also simply invert the usual hierarchies of authority and factual sourcing.
The more anonymous the accusations were, the more effective they were. Anonymity detaches the accusation from the accuser and any circumstances, contexts, personal histories or relationships that might give anyone a chance to evaluate or investigate it. It allows the logic of collective outrage to take over.
The risk, in appealing to such outré examples, is that it can legitimize a form of moral panic about the internet, and therefore dignify state censorship.
It is predicated on upholding a traditional hierarchy of writing,
What a society deems acceptable and unacceptable is anchored to an authoritative, venerable text.
the digitalization of capitalism is disturbing these old written hierarchies, so that the spectacles of witch-hunting and moral panic, and the rituals of punishment and humiliation, are being devolved and decentralized.
This has birthed new ecologies of information, and new forms of the public sphere. It has changed the patterns of public outrage.
What it has added is a unique synthesis of neighbourhood watch,
combines the panopticon effect with hype, button-pushing, faddishness and the volatility...
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one of the ironies of writing on the social industry is that it uses non-alphabetic notation in order to represent speech better.
The Twittering Machine invites users to constitute new, inventive identities for themselves, but it does so on a competitive, entrepreneurial basis.
a new type of country is being born, what sort of country is it? And why does it seem so continuously primed for explosion?
any culture that values connectivity so highly must be as impoverished in its social life as a culture obsessed with happiness is bitterly depressed.
It is as if the addictive relationship stands in for the social relationships that have been upended by the turbulence of capitalism.
the smartphone is not a prop for social interaction. It is an escape route,
the Twittering Machine is a techno-political regime which in its own way absorbs any nascent desire to challenge these painful conditions.
Silicon Valley has taken this logic much further, extending privatization into the most public of spaces, soliciting our participation on a solitary basis. At the same time, it has taken the place of previous forms of self-medication.
The fantasy is that it is possible to know, through scientific research, what is good and how people ought to live. It is a fantasy in which meaning is replaced by technique, and all that is contrary, disputatious and unpleasant in social life is replaced by a smooth surface and flow. (Perhaps it is no coincidence that the aesthetic of late capitalism, and particularly of smartphones and apps, is so obsessed with smoothness and flow.)
This requires relentless intrusive surveillance and laboratory-like manipulation of the entire population.
behind the rule of science and technology, there has to be a tyranny somewhere making these decisions.
The machine is not a democracy, and it isn’t even a market; we are neither customers nor voters.
We inhabit a laboratory, a real-life operant conditioning chamber, into which we have been lured by the promise of democratized luxury.
In the emerging world, free labour is extracted from customers under the guise of ‘participation’ and ‘feedback
What we do on the Twittering Machine has as much to do with what we’re avoiding as what we find when we log
The experience of platform users, on the other hand, is organized in a trance-like flow.
is not about pleasure, but desire. Addiction is something that is done with wanting, by those who are done with wanting.
To reduce experience to chemistry, however, is to bypass what is essential to it: its meaning.
to be addicted is to form an emotional dependency where another emotional relationship has failed.
What we call addictions are misplaced devotions: we love the wrong things.
