What a time to be off social media
One of the greatest tricks the platforms have pulled is making it seem like saying something is the same thing as feeling something, or doing something, or figuring something out. This is a very strange and stressful moment in a very strange and stressful week, month, year. I’m not going to process it with words written for the internet, however private and personal this newsletter space may still seem. Instead, here are some quotes from The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour, which I eagerly read after discussing a great review of it a few weeks ago. I don’t mean for any of these to be a response to Right Now. They are just passages I underlined and thought about, in order of where they appear in the book. Maybe you will find it valuable to think about them, too.
“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, however, but with the machine. We write to it, and it passes on the message for us, after keeping a record of the data.”
“What we do on the Twittering Machine has as much to do with what we’re avoiding as what we find when we log in—which, after all, is often not that exciting.”
“The opportunity to waste attention, or to dispose of spare attention, may be what we seek.”
“The platforms have show us that our attention is valuable. What would happen if we took the suggestion of write Matthew Crawford, and treated our attention as being too valuable to waste? What if we asserted a right not to be constantly addressed, and not to be continuously servicing an image whose fortunes are as volatile as the platforms’ stock market values? The platforms have demonstrated that our everyday lives can be commodified, provided we consent to their darkest corners being flooded with light. What is as the psychoanalyst Josh Cohen proposes, we deem this intrusion, this obliteration of the ‘mute spot’ in our being, ‘whose natural elements are darkness and silence,’ to be ‘the most profound violation a person can experience’? What if there are great works, vocations, adventures, awaiting us if we can work out what it is our inattentions are for, and find something else to attend to?”
“Its economic model presupposes a surplus of misery, which, Rumpelstiltskin-like, it spins into gold.”
“In a way, the hyper-productivity of the machine might have the effect of producing a new kind of silence. The cathartic effect of writing, reacting to stimulus, can be a way of filling the void with endless monetizable chatter. A new form of stifling that leaves no space to say what matters.”
“We are only up for addiction to mood-altering devices because our emotions seem to need managing, if not bludgeoning by relentless stimulus. We are only happy to drop into the dead-zone trance because of whatever is disappointing in the world of the living.”