[D66] The Twittering Machine: our descent into a digital dystopia | theguardian.com

[A.OUT]

  The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour review – our descent into a
  digital dystopia

By
Peter Conrad
theguardian.com
4 min
View Original
<https://getpocket.com/redirect?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fbooks%2F2019%2Faug%2F11%2Fthe-twittering-machine-richard-seymour-review-social-media-industry>

‘People today are the slaves of their fetishised, deified smartphones.’
Photograph: Getty Images ‘People today are the slaves of their
fetishised, deified smartphones.’ Photograph: Getty Images

Back in the blissed-out 1960s, Marshall McLuhan
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/jul/26/marshall-mcluhan-conservatism-medium-is-message>
evangelised for the new electronic media by instructing us to “serve
these objects, these extensions of ourselves, as gods or minor
religions”
<https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=TIh52np9OP8C&pg=PA54&lpg=PA54&dq=Marshall+McLuhan+%E2%80%9Cserve+these+objects,+these+extensions+of+ourselves,+as+gods+or+minor+religions%E2%80%9D&source=bl&ots=Fm2UjxOIvH&sig=ACfU3U3k4-U1HpKYPJrhMW_ZlQWFNUaAXQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiUg5fg_O3jAhVUr3EKHZFbCrwQ6AEwAXoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=Marshall%20McLuhan%20%E2%80%9Cserve%20these%20objects%2C%20these%20extensions%20of%20ourselves%2C%20as%20gods%20or%20minor%20religions%E2%80%9D&f=false>.
It was a prophetic glimpse of a future that has now arrived. People
today are the slaves of their fetishised, deified smartphones; the
religion is no longer minor, and, like the discredited cults it
replaced, it doses the faithful with opium.

Technology, as Richard Seymour
<https://www.theguardian.com/profile/richard-seymour> says, always
boasts of possessing superhuman powers, which is why it arouses our wary
paranoia. In earlier times, industrial engines seemed like monstrous
Molochs that gobbled up workers; nowadays we are unsure whether the
magical gadget we hold in our hand is “a benevolent genie or a
tormenting demon”. The twittering machine, as Seymour calls it, has no
innate morality, but it preys on our weaknesses to monopolise our
attention and modify our behaviour. We are left jangled, needy,
constantly alert for the chirp that announces some new and unnecessary
missive, ever ready to resume our chore of clicking the “like” button,
surrendering to the advertisers who gather up the personal data we so
guilelessly provide.

Twittering Machine, 1922, by Paul Klee. Photograph: The Picture Art
Collection/Alamy Stock Photo Twittering Machine, 1922, by Paul Klee.
Photograph: The Picture Art Collection/Alamy Stock Photo

The title of Seymour’s inflamed polemic comes from a painting by Paul
Klee <https://www.paulklee.net/twittering-machine.jsp>, in which a row
of avian predators “squawk discordantly”, enticing victims into a bloody
pit. As Seymour hears it, what ought to be a lyrical dawn chorus has
become a “cyborg roar”, boosted by Trump’s latest warmongering tweets or
the screech of some anonymous adolescent mob persecuting a luckless
schoolgirl; the whole apparatus exists “for the purpose of human damnation”.

This theological trope is not used lightly. McLuhan, a Catholic convert,
believed that electronic media had endowed us with world-encircling eyes
and ears, and thought we would soon be ushered into a benign,
enlightened “global village”. Seymour’s view is starker and bleaker, and
has no room for any divine dispensation. McLuhan bizarrely claimed that
the universal consciousness sponsored by computers was “a new
interpretation of the body of Christ”. But the algorithms that operate
out of sight on Facebook or in the margins on Gmail are designed to
snare customers, not to save souls: their creed, Seymour says, is
“automated agnosticism, digital nihilism”.

As Seymour promises, his book is “a horror story”. Teenagers livestream
their suicides, and trolls later jeer on RIP sites set up to mourn them.
Message boards such as 8chan
<https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/aug/05/8chan-far-right-message-board-hosting>
allow terrorists to cheer one another on. So-called “swarms” of
protesters rejoice in a sense of “despotic rectitude” that reminds
Seymour of fascist street gangs in the 1930s. Utopians used to insist
that the internet would be a paradise of connectivity, “where minds,
doors and lives open up”. Instead, it is, at best, a virtual Las Vegas
casino, enticing us to enrich the big tech behemoths by playing their
inane games; at worst, it has become a sickbay for neurotics addicted to
“cyber-crack”, a training camp for alt-right crazies and a battlefield.

Seymour has a conspiracy theory to explain the belligerence of these
supposedly convivial platforms. The Wall Street firms that supplied
capital to Silicon Valley envisaged the internet as “a stock market of
status”, powered by “unequal relationships” that would inevitably
explode into violence: “racism and riots, class struggles and
countercultures, mobsters and McCarthyism”. Financial markets thrive on
such aggression, since “volatility adds value” and chaos is excellent
clickbait. The social media industry is happy to function as Trump’s
enabler because his projectile-vomited bile maximises profits: in 2017
his account “was worth about $2.5bn to Twitter, a fifth of its share
value at the time”.

Seymour’s book is dedicated to the Luddites, saboteurs who wrecked
machinery during the industrial revolution, but he at once admits that
we can hardly smash a machine that is a global abstraction, existing
only in the wifi-tingling air. Righteously infuriated, he fires off
volleys of angry aphorisms, yet he blunts their force by citing so many
obscure, jargon-ridden academic experts as backup, and a sense of
futility enfeebles his demand for change.

No technology can be uninvented, so Seymour’s pessimism leads him to a
conclusion that feels merely wistful. The worst offence of social media,
he argues, is “the theft of the capacity for reverie”. Time spent online
is time deducted from our lives, just as taking a selfie is an excuse to
not be yourself. By way of escape, all Seymour can whimsically suggest
is to go for a walk in the park, making sure you leave all your
“devices” behind. In his last sentence, he even recommends lolling on a
lily pad. I have some more earnest advice: if you really want to set
yourself free, you should read a book – preferably this one.

/• The Twittering Machine/ is published by Indigo Press (£12.99). To
order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com
<https://guardianbookshop.com/twittering-machine-9781999683382.html?utm_source=editoriallink&utm_medium=merch&utm_campaign=article>
or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone
orders min p&p of £1.99

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