The Twittering Machine: A psychoanalytic reading of social media

September 3, 2020 1:38 PM

The Twittering Machine “confronts us with a string of calamities,” among them increasing depression, fake news, the alt-right, and fast-food brands tweeting on fleek. And yet, despite the obvious fact that it’s very bad for us, we, and about half the population of the earth, remain its inhabitants. Why do we stay on—just to pick an example—Twitter, while also referring to it as the “hell site”? “We must be getting something out of it,” Seymour writes.

In the September issue of Bookforum, Max Read reviews The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour.
posted by rollick (44 comments total)

The problem here is that "what is wrong with us?" isn't just the wrong question to ask, but frames the issue in a fundamentally hostile manner - something that I keep seeing in social media criticism. And I think that also explains why they can't understand why people gravitate to social media - if you see Twitter as "the hell site", it's not surprising that the attraction to it can be alien to you.
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:07 PM on September 3, 2020 [10 favorites]

Aren’t there people who call it a hellsite and also spend a lot of time there? I thought there were. Not unlike the way people used to complain about meat market bars every weekend, while in then.
posted by clew at 2:24 PM on September 3, 2020 [10 favorites]

Aren’t there people who call it a hellsite and also spend a lot of time there?

Journalists.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 2:27 PM on September 3, 2020 [2 favorites]

I spend a lot of time on Twitter because I've met a lot of cool people there, and I like interacting with them. Everything else about Twitter is deeply unpleasant.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 2:28 PM on September 3, 2020 [6 favorites]

Sorry, "journalists".
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 2:28 PM on September 3, 2020 [1 favorite]

Twitter isn't calling itself a social media platform/network etc anymore and embracing the fact that its a news site with direct feeds from on the ground in multiple continents, if you craft your following properly and very attractive to infowhores with a touch of over thought beans. I pivoted my entire phd during lockdown in the form of threads of literature review, following real time transformations in the world system. pumpkinhead's twitter is not my twitter and its a lovely place.
posted by infini at 2:38 PM on September 3, 2020 [2 favorites]

Aren’t there people who call it a hellsite and also spend a lot of time there?

I guarantee that 100% of the people who use "hell site" in references to Twitter spend at least 8 hours a day reading it.
posted by sideshow at 2:40 PM on September 3, 2020 [8 favorites]

Twitter does seem different from other social media in that almost everyone who uses it will tell you in detail how horrible it is and how addicted they are to it nonetheless.

I don’t use Twitter myself but I appreciate that its users are fully aware of and honest with themselves about how bad it is. Better than obsessive Facebook users, some of whom almost get personally offended by criticism of it as a hellsite.
posted by scantee at 2:42 PM on September 3, 2020 [4 favorites]

DESPITE THE OBVIOUS FACT

I'm curious if anybody else will interpret it as an annoying review about a dumb book. [screed deleted]
posted by rhizome at 3:05 PM on September 3, 2020 [1 favorite]

I found the bit about social media feeding a compulsion to write incessantly interesting. I quit Twitter 3 years ago (I think, it's been a while) and I noticed right away that I kept mentally constructing tweets about things going on in my life or my thoughts about current events. Which, since I wasn't tweeting, was bizarre and it took a bit for me to stop doing that.
posted by selenized at 3:08 PM on September 3, 2020 [10 favorites]

I believe Twitter is, in some respects, a continuation of postcard culture. Maybe telegrams, too. I have to think that by this point in the overall literacy game that communicating a few sentences at a time has its own value.

I'd love to find out that telegraphers got in flame wars with each other during their downtime (if they had any).
posted by rhizome at 3:25 PM on September 3, 2020 [3 favorites]

This was an interesting read. I can buy that there’s a relationship between this kind of urge to publicly self-document and the types of unpleasant and self-defeating, yet compulsive, behaviors the death instinct was used to explain. Compulsive tweeting seems more like ruminating or doing rituals or reenacting a traumatic event than like drug addiction, which is the metaphor that’s most often used by critics of social media. But it also doesn’t seem like a very satisfying explanation to just say, well on some level we must just want to do these things that neither feel good in the moment nor get us closer to any of our goals, out of an appetite for self-destruction. Maybe I’m not quite getting the point.
posted by en forme de poire at 3:29 PM on September 3, 2020 [3 favorites]

I thought the review ended with a very clear hypothesis, that Twitter arguments are an effective distraction from problems we’re afraid we can’t solve. Twitter, social media, chattering at the bar are all very right-now and personal, easy to focus on.
posted by clew at 4:05 PM on September 3, 2020 [7 favorites]

It is interesting to me that the author of the book, at least according to the reviewer, eschews some of the techno-determinism that Silicon Valley "apostates" argue about (presumably like Jaron Lanier, unmentioned in the review but writer of the 2018 book Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now which seems like a clear antecedent to this book). Lanier in a recent interview at GQ reiterates pretty clearly his view:

"...people who are addicted to Twitter are like all addicts—on the one hand miserable, and on the other hand very defensive about it and unwilling to blame Twitter."

While I don't entirely agree with this sentiment (despite having many interactions with people on this topic that the results of which often confirm it) the line of thinking in the reviewed book, that we are not entirely passive social media dopamine addicts, is a nice change. There are people who can and do get more out of Twitter (and other dumpster fire social media platforms) that you can't solely blame users' desire to remain and contribute to the platforms entirely on evil Silicon Valley behaviourists. At least I would hope.

In any case I'm probably not going to read the book but, like the author of this review, I do like the phrase from the quoted work - “The telos of the clickbait economy is not postmodernism, but fascist kitsch” - which is totally pretentious but I do think it is correct.
posted by Ashwagandha at 4:30 PM on September 3, 2020 [5 favorites]

Thank you for posting, very thought provoking and sounds about right. I know I've wasted hours and hours of time online other than on social media without accomplishing anything much of significance for basically the same reason, to fill time.
posted by blue shadows at 4:36 PM on September 3, 2020 [4 favorites]

I'd love to find out that telegraphers got in flame wars with each other during their downtime

They totally did.
posted by MrBadExample at 4:54 PM on September 3, 2020 [6 favorites]

And I think that also explains why they can't understand why people gravitate to social media - if you see Twitter as "the hell site", it's not surprising that the attraction to it can be alien to you.

Aren’t there people who call it a hellsite and also spend a lot of time there? I thought there were.

Calling Twitter “the hell site” is something that mainly happens on Twitter. And when I look it up apparently this was also a thing on Tumblr (there referring to Tumblr, not Twitter). It’s self-deprecation, and the “us” referred to in the pull quote is explicitly people who complain about social media/joke-not-joke about it being terrible while using it nonetheless.
posted by atoxyl at 5:16 PM on September 3, 2020 [3 favorites]

I really do think the design of Twitter particularly puts people on edge. For one thing the way it blurs the boundary between “talking about” and “talking to...”

Unfortunately attempts to address this have tended to go in the direction of making it more of a broadcast medium, which misses that the ability to interact with celebrities and politicians and public figures “as equals” (up to and including telling them to fuck off) was always part of the appeal.
posted by atoxyl at 5:22 PM on September 3, 2020 [2 favorites]

Twitter does seem different from other social media in that almost everyone who uses it will tell you in detail how horrible it is and how addicted they are to it nonetheless.

No tumblr's exactly like this as well as also uses "hellsite" to describe the site, TBH I think it's tumblr refugees on twitter using this phrasing (or vice versa).

Twitter is where you can push your writing or art on other sites out to your followers, or practice being witty about your day. The one thing I like about that review is that it frames a twitter addiction as an addition to writing.
posted by subdee at 7:04 PM on September 3, 2020

The most terrible thing about twitter is you can't comment on anything without reblogging it, thereby spreading the exact thing you disagree with to your own followers, who will of course take your side because they're your friends. It's a horrible mechanism for discussion, and a beautiful one for anyone who wants to play the game of saying inflammatory things for clicks.
posted by subdee at 7:10 PM on September 3, 2020 [3 favorites]

It's a horrible mechanism for discussion, and a beautiful one for anyone who wants to play the game of saying inflammatory things for clicks.

On Twitter the mechanism for severing the "for clicks" thread back to the bad person is to use a screenshot of the tweet. I think it works pretty well at winnowing the audience for replies, better than the new feature of the tweeter restricting replies to people the tweeter follows.
posted by rhizome at 7:24 PM on September 3, 2020 [4 favorites]

56% Ass strap.
32% blinders
10% bit
2% bridle
posted by clavdivs at 8:41 PM on September 3, 2020 [1 favorite]

Would it be wrong to say that Twitter is pretty much mandatory for someone looking to make a career as a content creator or at least sell some sort of content (e.g. e-books, comics)? Or do authors, artists ect. still have the option of at least some sort of anonymity? I'm thinking more about people just starting out rather than more established figures that created careers pre-social media.
posted by eagles123 at 9:37 PM on September 3, 2020

Pretty sure Twitter is not the first time in history people have had to go someplace unpleasant to spend time with people they wanted to spend time with and chose to do so because the people were worth the unpleasantness.
posted by straight at 10:14 PM on September 3, 2020 [3 favorites]

I really appreciate the comments that engage with the piece, but I also appreciate the comments that don't seem to do anything at all with the piece because they seem to demonstrate one of the piece's most significant points:

The Twittering Machine is powered by an insight at once obvious and underexplored: we have, in the world of the social industry, become “scripturient—possessed by a violent desire to write, incessantly.” Our addiction to social media is, at its core, a compulsion to write.

We have no power and so, we must post.
posted by Ouverture at 10:52 PM on September 3, 2020 [5 favorites]

The most terrible thing about twitter is you can't comment on anything without reblogging it, thereby spreading the exact thing you disagree with to your own followers.

Yeah see this is the sort of shit I’m talking about! And I enjoy Twitter, because there are fun and interesting people there, and I can take some drama and flame wars because I grew up on that version of the internet, but man, I‘ve seen a lot of people on Twitter I would like to think generally have it together as people just losing it and I think it’s kind of built into the site.
posted by atoxyl at 11:56 PM on September 3, 2020 [1 favorite]

Pretty sure Twitter is not the first time in history people have had to go someplace unpleasant to spend time with people they wanted to spend time with and chose to do so because the people were worth the unpleasantness.

I've got family in California.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 12:22 AM on September 4, 2020 [2 favorites]

I think Read misunderstands the perspectives of Tristan Harris et al. He also quotes the book's references to Natasha Dow Schüll, whose analysis of casinos and gambling addiction is actually often quoted along with Harris et al.
posted by carter at 4:03 AM on September 4, 2020

I do two things to make my Twitter feed (on desktop) bearable for me:

1. I use the "Tweak New Twitter" extension which removes all the sidebar content (Trends, Who to follow, etc.), and forces the timeline to always be chronological, as well as a bunch of other UI improvements.
2. I make heavy use of the advanced muting options which actually are pretty good. My blocked words and accounts list are a sight to behold.

posted by jeremias at 4:14 AM on September 4, 2020 [3 favorites]

I think the crux of the review is in the penultimate paragraph:

The social industry doesn’t just eat our time with endless stimulus and algorithmic scrolling; it eats our time by creating and promoting people who exist only to be explained to, people to whom the world has been created anew every morning, people for whom every settled sociological, scientific, and political argument of modernity must be rehashed, rewritten, and re-accounted, this time with their participation.

aka reply guys
posted by The River Ivel at 5:03 AM on September 4, 2020 [8 favorites]

The problem with just unfollowing people on Twitter until you enjoy your feed is that 1. all it takes is one person you follow engaging with some giant mess of a Twitter fight to bring it into your timeline, and 2. extremely online Twitter people sometimes notice when you unfollow them, which is a problem if your Twitter is for work and you are trying not to cause drama in your small professional circle. Muting might work, I guess.

Subtweeting and censoring people’s names also doesn’t really do anything about the emotional temperature of a post, so the corrosiveness of Twitter is not just that you can’t talk about someone without also talking to them. The effect of a subtweet on a bystander is the same, maybe even worse because it creates more uncertainty and therefore anxiety.
posted by en forme de poire at 7:08 AM on September 4, 2020 [2 favorites]

The other problem with unfollowing people based on a single tweet or retweet is that you then become paranoid that other people might unfollow you for the same reason. Haha.

I've been corrected by a friend that the issue of spreading issues you disagree with to your own followers is bigger on tumblr than on twitter, because on twitter the original tweet and replies are all given the same weight (visually), so your reply might have as much weight as the original, disagreeable post. Therefore the culture that the best ideas will win out regardless of follower count (of course this is easy to manipulate).

I'm willing to cede this to people who use twitter more than me, I got this point from Jacob Silverman's Terms of Service.
posted by subdee at 7:26 AM on September 4, 2020

I don't use twitter so periodically hearing what folks say about how it all works out in practice is interesting. Thanks everyone.

I found the bit about social media feeding a compulsion to write incessantly interesting. I quit Twitter 3 years ago (I think, it's been a while) and I noticed right away that I kept mentally constructing tweets about things going on in my life selenized

I keep a work and personal journal and have a similar feeling about constructing journal entries. I wonder what the effects are of having to self-censor for public consumption.
posted by bdc34 at 7:35 AM on September 4, 2020

Compared to my experience with FB (where I know everybody I follow) and twitter (where I don't know anybody personally) - twitter is dream. A much more enjoyable thing to presue which is ass backwards but true.
posted by hoodrich at 9:03 AM on September 4, 2020

Pretty sure Twitter is not the first time in history people have had to go someplace unpleasant to spend time with people they wanted to spend time with and chose to do so because the people were worth the unpleasantness.

I'm having a hard time thinking of any examples, could you provide one or two?

I guess going to church maybe qualifies?
posted by some loser at 9:43 AM on September 4, 2020 [1 favorite]

oh nvm I got one now: Visiting people in jails.
posted by some loser at 9:44 AM on September 4, 2020 [1 favorite]

A well known saying is "Facebook is for learning to hate the people you know, Twitter is for learning to love complete strangers."
posted by fungible at 10:56 AM on September 4, 2020 [4 favorites]

Yeah, I spend too much time on twitter, but it has become a virtual replacement for actual human interaction this spring/summer, and I follow & talk to people I like. I follow about 300 people & I’m a heavy user of the mute & block buttons, so much so that I miss 3/4’s of the memes, but it makes it scrollable. Tweetbot might be a bit hobbled in the last couple of years, but it’s worth the few bucks I paid for it because there’s nothing recommended, no advertising, and the unread tweets in my timeline are unread until I scroll up and read them, so hello from 3 days ago, unless you’re a troll, in which case I’ll remain gladly and blithely ignorant of your very existence.
posted by Devils Rancher at 11:33 AM on September 4, 2020

On Twitter the mechanism for severing the "for clicks" thread back to the bad person is to use a screenshot of the tweet. I think it works pretty well at winnowing the audience for replies, better than the new feature of the tweeter restricting replies to people the tweeter follows.

Two edged sword - This can be irritating when you’ve muted/ blocked the person being screenshotted & the poster unwittingly circumvents your mute, putting someone’s content in your face that you’ve explicitly asked not to see.
posted by Devils Rancher at 11:42 AM on September 4, 2020 [3 favorites]

I'm having a hard time thinking of any examples, could you provide one or two?

Church, as you said. Bars. Parties. Keynote speeches. Hospitals. Airports. Small towns to be with your family when you'd rather be in a big city. Big cities to find people you want to be with when you'd rather live somewhere more rural.

Going somewhere or doing something unpleasant in order to meet people or be with people you care about is so common that the whole "Why do people Facebook or Twitter when these sites are so bad?" discussion seems really weird to me. Sure, talk about ways to make these places better or suggest alternatives, but don't pretend that putting up with a bunch of crap to connect with other people is some new, inexplicable phenomenon.
posted by straight at 11:44 AM on September 4, 2020 [1 favorite]

But... But the unpleasantness IS PEOPLE!
posted by Western Infidels at 11:50 AM on September 4, 2020 [3 favorites]

Pretty sure Twitter is not the first time in history people have had to go someplace unpleasant to spend time with people they wanted to spend time with and chose to do so because the people were worth the unpleasantness.

Isn't this what Thanksgiving is?
posted by srboisvert at 12:32 PM on September 4, 2020 [2 favorites]

Isn't this what Thanksgiving is?

I once asked an American friend what Thanksgiving was, and he replied "It's when we celebrate taking all the land from the native peoples, and then killing them."
posted by Cardinal Fang at 3:07 PM on September 4, 2020 [4 favorites]

"It's when we celebrate taking all the land from the native peoples, and then killing them."

That's definitely American Thanksgiving. Canadian Thanksgiving is a celebration of Parliamentary bureaucracy.
posted by Ashwagandha at 4:17 PM on September 5, 2020 [2 favorites]