The Twittering Machine

by Richard Seymour

Whether we’re walking or writing, we are always experiencing what the phenomenologists call ‘embodied cognition’. This is one of the things Freud adverted to when he claimed in a late, oracular note that the psyche is ‘extended’. By claiming that the mind is extended in space, he was identifying it with the body. Adding that the mind ‘knows nothing about’ its extension, he also linked the body to the unconscious. As though the body thinks without the mind’s noticing.

It is naive to suppose that these technologies simply expand the powers of our organic bodies. They create dependencies; they change us.

we didn’t have somewhere to put excess attention, who knows what dreams would come?

contagious.

The suicides in Kars in Turkish novel "Snow" by Orhan Pamuk are contagious precisely because of this.

Now, the self is the commodity. Doubly so, because at the same time as we are producing a commodity-image version of ourselves, we are also busy producing the data about ourselves that enables the social industry platforms to sell us to advertisers. We truly are the product.

perception.

Wouldn't this be true of all photographs, not just the selfie?

To inhabit the social industry is to live in an elaborate panopticon, so that self-surveillance is redoubled many times over. But what is actually being seen?

In the personal sense, identity pertains to what is uniquely you, often assumed to go to one’s core, even though modern markets sell us identities as consumable items. In the social and political sense, identity is how the world has classified you, on the basis of a characteristic you are assumed to have.

The issue is not moderating guidelines. Any platform will have controls, and often they will be used unfairly. The issue is who determines the controls, and whether we want these commercial giants to have a monopoly over speech rights.

There is a collective writing experiment, a descent into madness and violence. What force connects them is still, to us, an occult knowledge.

Instead of selling products, increasingly firms adopting the ‘platform’ structure just lease them as services.

Facebook, Google, Twitter, YouTube, are nothing but media. They exist to generate information, as part of a cybernetic system of surveillance, control and extraction, without bias. Bias is about meaning, whereas social media platforms are fundamentally nihilistic.

this is true of all commodities produced under capitalism: investors are in principle (never entirely in practice) indifferent to content provided it increases the return on investment.

Disagreement about ‘basic facts’ is a condition of a functioning democracy. A fact is just a measurement, and there is always some legitimate disagreement over the relevance of the measurement, the tools used to make it, the authority of the people doing the measuring, and so on. There are no facts without values, so only in a police state can there be a factual consensus.

‘fake news’ is a culmination and fusion of existing trends in the media: propaganda, churnalism and infotainment.

Much of what is classified as ‘fake news’ is just satire taken literally.

growing numbers of people seem to want networks of conspiracy to do the work of shorthand political sociology, explaining how their lives got so bad, and how official politics became so remote and oppressive.

They seem to want to believe that, rather than representing business as usual, today’s centrist state managers are malign outsiders usurping a legitimate system.

We face a crisis of knowing.

The idea that people are shaped ‘by a particular time and culture’ is an Enlightenment, materialist hypothesis.

To say that something is ‘socially constructed’ is to say that it wasn’t handed down by a deity, but was built by humans: another Enlightenment idea.

The belief in ‘objective reality’ independent of human perception is not so much Enlightenment as pre-Enlightenment,

Scepticism about a reality independent of perception is really scepticism about the existence of unobservable entities, which is what in another context would be known as atheism.

Conspiracy theories, though they have often come from threatened powers, today seem to be emerging from a more radical breakdown in meaning.

When long-dominant ideologies break down, and when social interactions are increasingly governed by a confusing war of all against all, paranoia is a natural response.

In the sciences, there is an ongoing ‘replication crisis’ afflicting medicine, economics, psychology and evolutionary biology.

one of the main causes of the problem is that science is becoming commodified.

As it becomes an outsourced research engine for corporations, quality control collapses. A

The numbers never speak for themselves. Every data set requires treatment, processing and interpretation. The volume of data is not a sufficient criterion for judging how useful it is.

And the treatment of it always implies a theory,

Big data is no substitute for the scientific method. Far from having the magical cure, the pioneers of data extraction and analysis have contributed to today’s degraded ecologies of information and research.

the identification of a postmodern era was an attempt to describe something that had happened to capitalism.

The rise of information technologies and whole industries based around communications, signs and images, altered not only the economy but the structure of meaning.

The increase of information corresponds to a decrease in meaning.

Moreover, this production is taking place in a simulacrum much like that described by the theorist of postmodernity Jean Baudrillard. A simulacrum is not a representation of reality. It is reality,

It is simulation woven into...

The world of the simulacrum, a world increasingly drained of meaning, deprives power of its seemingly obvious legitimacy.

the injunction not to lie was one that could never be made to an equal because we have no right to demand answers from equals.

it is only when we acquire the capacity to lie that we really discover freedom of thought:

The problem is not the lies. It is information reduced to brute fact, to technologies with unprecedented and unforeseen powers of physical manipulation by means of information bombardment.

The problem is not the lies, but a crash in meaning. The problem is what the survivors, scrabbling in the rubble and detritus of the internet for answers, will believe.

Whereas mass democracy means that popular desires and interests have to be taken seriously, post-democracies are in the business of population management.

post-democracies are far less interested in consent than in moderating the behaviour of elements within the system.

The Twittering Machine proposes nothing, declares nothing good or bad, but works on the infrastructures of everyday life. It might be called a sub-hegemonic practice.

This is clearly an emerging form of techno-political regime. And it is not the participatory online democracy, or agora, that has been vaunted. But

The violence, though statistically predictable within a given population, is individually unpredictable. The Twittering Machine is designed for just this kind of stochastic influencing.

The effects of content in the social industry, as with advertising, are collectivizing: they are designed to work across a population.

Fascist terror is ‘stochastic’ because fascism is still fractal:

there is no ‘free market’ without substantial public-sector intervention and backing.