The Twittering Machine

Since no one is pure, and since the condition of being in the social industry is that one reveals oneself constantly, then from a certain perspective our online existence is a list of exploitable traits.

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: our friends, professional colleagues, celebrities, politicians, royals, terrorists, porn actors – anyone we like. We are not interacting with them, h

On social media, you scratch out a few words, a few symbols, and press ‘send’, rolling the dice. The internet will tell you who you are, and what your destiny is through arithmetic ‘likes’, ‘shares’ and ‘comments’.

We prefer the machine when human relationships have become disappointing.

Jonathan Beller, the film theorist, has argued that with the internet, ‘looking is labouring’. It is more precise to say that looking and being looked at is an irresistible inducement to labour.

Within online communities, this produces a strong pressure towards conformity with the values and mores of one’s peers. But even peer conformity is no safeguard, because anyone can see into it. The potential audience for anything posted on the internet is the entire internet. The only way to conform successfully on the internet is to be unutterably

At another level, that of meaning, one could say that addiction is a thwarted form of love. It is a passionate attachment to something that, slowly, occupies a larger and larger part of one’s mind. It exercises a veto over other loves, aspirations and dreams. It occupies attention, when attention is subject to economic scarcity. It usurps our ingen

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.

The fantasy of plenitude, the superabundance of online shit, may allow us to experience our social poverty as affluence, as in the fantasy that the internet and the social industry are ‘post-scarcity’.