Richard Seymour > Quotes

“If the social industry is an addiction machine, the addictive behaviour it is closest to is gambling: a rigged lottery. Every gambler trusts in a few abstract symbols – the dots on a dice, numerals, suits, red or black, the graphemes on a fruit machine – to tell them who they are. In most cases, the answer is brutal and swift: you are a loser and you are going home with nothing. The true gambler takes a perverse joy in anteing up, putting their whole being at stake. 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’.”
― Richard Seymour, The Twittering Machine

“There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People. Umberto Eco, ‘Ur-Fascism”
― Richard Seymour, The Twittering Machine

“Yet, we are not Skinner's rats. Even Skinner's rats were not Skinner's rats: the patterns of addictive behavior displayed by rats in the Skinner Box were only displayed by rats in isolation, outside of their normal sociable habitat. For human beings, addictions have subjective meanings, as does depression. Marcus Gilroy-Ware's study of social media suggests that what we encounter in our feeds is hedonic stimulation, various moods and sources of arousal- from outrage porn to food porn to porn- which enable us to manage our emotions. In addition that, however, it's also true that we can become attached to the miseries of online life, a state of perpetual outrage and antagonism. There is a sense in which our online avatar resembles a 'virtual tooth' in the sense described by the German surrealist artist Hans Bellmer. In the grip of a toothache, a common reflex is to make a fist so tight that the fingernails bite into the skin. This 'confuses' and 'bisects' the pain by creating a 'virtual center of excitation,' a virtual tooth that seems to draw blood and nervous energy away from the real center of pain.

If we are in pain, this suggests, self-harming can be a way of displacing it so that it appears lessened- event though the pain hasn't really been reduced, and we still have a toothache. So if we get hooked on a machine that purports to tell us, among other things, how other people see us- or a version of ourselves, a delegated online image- that suggests something has already gone wrong in our relationships with others. The global rise in depression- currently the world's most widespread illness, having risen some 18 per cent since 2005- is worsened for many people by the social industry. There is a particularly strong correlation between depression and the use of Instagram among young people. But social industry platforms didn't invent depression; they exploited it. And to loosen their grip, one would have to explore what has gone wrong elsewhere.”
― Richard Seymour, The Twittering Machine

“We prefer the machine when human relationships have become disappointing.”
― Richard Seymour, The Twittering Machine

“One distinction, perhaps, is that trolls, unlike most users, are fully aware of, and exploit the cumulative impact of, hundreds of thousands of small, low-commitment actions, like a tweet or retweet.”
― Richard Seymour, The Twittering Machine

“Silicon Valley mythology holds that Minitel failed because it was too dirigiste, too state-directed. As Julien Mailland points outs, however, both Minitel and the internet were the products of different quantities of state investment, private capital, and thriving cultures of amateur enthusiasts and experts improving the technology and proselytizing for it.

Both Mintel and the internet show that there is no 'free market' without substantial pubic-sector intervention and backing. The internet's history also shows us that when we rely on the private sector and its hallowed bromide of 'innovation,' quite often that will result in technical innovations that are designed for manipulation, surveillance and exploitation.

The tax-evading, offshore wealth-hoarding, data-monopolizing, privacy-invading silicon giants benefit from the internet's 'free market' mythology, but the brief flourishing of Minitel shows is that other ways, other worlds, other platforms, are possible. The question is, given that there's no way to reverse history, how can we actualize these possibilities? What sort of power do we have? As users, it turns out, very little. We are not voters on the platforms; we are not even customers. We are the unpaid products of raw material. We could, if we were organized, withdraw our labor power, commit social media suicide: but then what other platforms do we have access to with anything like the same reach?”
― Richard Seymour, The Twittering Machine

“Firstly, disaster nationalism does not provide its adherents the release it promises.“ No amount of killing or performative cruelty will finally scratch the itch.” Adorno is quoted as saying that the fascist cannot sleep “until he has transformed the whole world into the very same paranoid system by which he is beset.”

Seymour continues: “But no amount of violence can staunch the anxiety, just as no amount of killing spiders will cure arachnophobia because the spider is not the real source of the fear. The more the enemy is crushed, the less it appears to solve, and the more helpless one is in the face of anxiety.”
― Richard Seymour

“There’s always a danger in human tragedy of confusing the pleasures of aggression with virtue...”
― Richard Seymour

“This situation is completely without precedent, and it is now evolving so quickly that we can barely keep track of where we are. And the more technology evolves, the more that new layers of hardware and software are added, the harder it is to change. This is handing tech capitalists a unique source of power. As the Silicon Valley guru Jaron Lanier puts it, they don’t have to persuade us when they can directly manipulate our experience of the world.”
― Richard Seymour, The Twittering Machine

“The Twittering Machine is a horror story, even though it is about technology that is in itself neither good nor bad. All technology, as the historian Melvin Kranzberg put it, is ‘neither good nor bad; nor neutral’.1”
― Richard Seymour, The Twittering Machine

“One of the most common religious ideas is that of being in the world but not of it - a perfect motto for all militants...”
― Richard Seymour

“... attentions are intentions, since to give anything sustained attention is to form intentions toward it...”
― Richard Seymour

“... attentions are intentions...”
― Richard Seymour

“A 2015 study looked into the reasons why people who try to quit the social industry fail.21 The survey data came from a group of people who had signed up to quit Facebook for just ninety-nine days. Many of these determined quitters couldn’t even make the first few days. And many of those who successfully quit had access to another social networking site, like Twitter, so that they had simply displaced their addiction. Those who stayed away, however, were typically in a happier frame of mind, and less interested in controlling how other people thought of them, thus implying that social media addiction is partly a self-medication for depression and partly a way of curating a better self in the eyes of others. Indeed, these two factors may not be unrelated.”
― Richard Seymour, The Twittering Machine

“We need bread and butter. It's a good thing, but we don't love it. If you love your children, you don't love them because they increase your free time and energy and money. They absolutely do not do any of that. They do the opposite. The things that people love are the things that they sacrifice for. And so, essentially, we've got to think about what is it that people are prepared to sacrifice for.”
― Richard Seymour

“Addiction occurs through choices, but somehow it also happens behind our backs. No one consciously sets out to devote themselves to the machine, to become its addict. Its veto power over all other possible attentions takes place, cumulatively, through every apparently free choice made as a user. We drop into the dead zone, the ‘ticker trance’ of feed addiction, by increment. The way the chronophagic machine fights for our attention recalls what Eastern Christianity used to call the demon of acedia. This was a predecessor of the modern concept of melancholia, and it was used in monasteries (those ancient writing machines) to describe an affliction of the devoted. In the original Greek, ‘akedia’ meant ‘lack of care’. In the Latinized Christian use propagated by Evagrius of Pontus, it described a lack of care about one’s life; a listless, restless spiritual lethargy. The condition left one yearning for distraction and continual novelty, exploiting one’s petty hates and hungers. It dissolved one’s capacity for attending, for living as if living mattered, into a series of itches demanding to be scratched. Ultimately, it was dehumanizing, corrosive of meaning: it was spiritual death.”
― Richard Seymour, The Twittering Machine

“But as the cyberpunk writer Bruce Sterling points out, connectivity is not necessarily a symbol of affluence and plenty. It is, in a sense, the poor who most prize connectivity. Not in the sense of the old classic stereotype that 'the poor love their cellphones': no powerful group would turn down the opportunities that smartphones and social media offer. The powerful simply engage differently with the machine. But any culture that values connectivity so highly must be as impoverished in its social life as a culture obsessed with happiness is bitterly depressed. What Bruce Alexander calls the state of permanent 'psychosocial dislocation' in late capitalism, with life overrun by the law of markets and competition, is the context for soaring addiction rates. It is as if the addictive relationships stands in for the social relationships that have been upended by the turbulence of capitalism.

The nature of this social poverty can be recognized in a situation typical of a social industry addict. We often use our smartphones to take us away from a social situation, without actually leaving that situation. We develop ways of simulating conversational awareness while attending to our phones, a technique known as 'phubbing.' We experience this weirdly detached 'uniform distancelessness,' as Christopher Bollas calls it. We becomes nodes in the network, equivalent to 'smart' devices, mere points for relay for fragments of information; as much extensions of the tablet or smartphone as they are of us. We prefer the machine when human relationships have become disappointing.”
― Richard Seymour, The Twittering Machine

“The Luddites were also excellent trolls. They were, like the movement that was massacred at Peterloo a few years later, a prototypical class insurrection: but they carried it off with tremendous elan. The very name ‘Luddite’ deliberately evoked a fictitious leader, Ned Ludd, a product of legend and fantasy, fear of whom had British authorities and spies searching high and low for sign of him. His supporters decided that Mr Ludd lived in Sherwood Forest, home of the equally legendary Robin Hood, and signed their letters, ‘Ned Ludd’s Office, Sherwood Forest’. They cross-dressed and marched as ‘General Ludd’s wives’.”
― Richard Seymour, The Twittering Machine

“As William Davies has argued, its unique innovation is to make social interactions visible and susceptible to data analytics and sentiment analysis”
― Richard Seymour, The Twittering Machine

“Horkheimer famously said that ‘Whoever is not willing to talk about capitalism should also keep quiet about fascism.’ Poulantzas offered a useful addendum: ‘Strictly speaking, this is incorrect: it is he who does not wish to discuss imperialism who should stay silent on the subject of fascism.”
― Richard Seymour

“For those who are curating a self, social media notifications work as a form of clickbait.22 Notifications light up the ‘reward centres’ of the brain, so that we feel bad if the metrics we accumulate on our different platforms don’t express enough approval. The addictive aspect of this is similar to the effect of poker machines or smartphone games, recalling what cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han calls the ‘gamification of capitalism’.”
― Richard Seymour, The Twittering Machine

“The social industry has created an addiction machine, not as an accident, but as a logical means to return value to its venture capitalist investors.”
― Richard Seymour, The Twittering Machine

“Yet, we can’t bypass these emotions. The strategic question is how to selectively provoke resentment, bring it to consciousness, or rather bring shame to conscious and transform it into resentment, and educate it in the direction of a more sober, slow-burning, impersonal class hate, one that is patient, rigorous, humane, pluralist, anti-Manichaean and constructive. I think of how Bernie Sanders campaigns in the United States, linking resentment toward billionaires and the rich with demands like a $15 minimum wage, and contrast it ruefully with the priestly pieties of “the politics of kindness” and “they go low, we go high”.

Not that kindness and the high road are undesirable, and not that we could or should imitate the Right’s relentless nihilistic war on decency and truth. But we must start with the dark materials, the labour of the negative, if we are to get there.”
― Richard Seymour

“A self is a fantasy, an image of ‘what I am really like’ by which we represent ourselves to the world. Selves are more-or-less skilful diplomats; they’re what we have to stop us from ripping each other to pieces. This is why Winnicott described the ego as a ‘false self’; but he also argued that it allowed for a ‘third’, transitional space to be created between ego and unconscious which could be the locus of creative freedom.”
― Richard Seymour

“I think paranoia is an unavoidable moment in the discovery of truth for a variety of reasons. First, you could say that paranoia is the structure of 'knowledge' as a chain of signifiers: S1 --> S2 --> S3, etc. That is, just as knowledge works by perpetually adding new signifiers, so paranoia is characterised by the endless work of adding new connections. In McCarthyism, we discover that x is friends with y who has a business in z which has been the recipient of Soviet bloc investment. Or that a is a supporter of the Palestinian cause which often also gets the support of b who is friendly with c who has said antisemitic things. That's the logic of paranoia. And it's why you might find it difficult to argue with conspiracy theorists however absurd their claims are because, as soon as you knock down one part of their argument, they can invoke dozens of other supports which don't have to hang coherently together.

Second, perhaps you could say that paranoia is a moment in the discovery of truth in the Cartesian/Augustinian sense: to arrive at certainty, you have to suppose that everything you perceive is the result of deception by an evil demon (of which the contemporary equivalent is the Matrix, or better yet the Truman Show). Or, at a stretch, in the sense Hegel discusses in the Phenomology: there is a moment when the object appears to have a deeper 'essence' that is not accessible in its appearance. In a manner of speaking, you feel the object is deceiving you, until you press forward and discover the the indecipherable 'essence' is actually in the form of the object's appearance. But this suggests that the "labour of the negative", as Hegel calls it, necessitates a moment of solipsistic despair, panic, the sense of being at the centre of an entirely simulated reality that is motivated by some nefarious Other's bad libido.

[...]

So, [in society today] paranoia might be unavoidable. But obviously it's a very, very bad place to get stuck. Politically, the logic is most often turned against the Left by its opponents, and within the Left usually appears as a disintegrative moment, when it starts operating as a circular firing-squad, and you get practices of snitch-jacketing or ill-founded 'calling out'. But more fundamentally, it's bad hermeneutics. Being stuck in paranoia means fortifying oneself against doubt, so that all evidence essentially becomes evidence for a delusional structure of certitude. It means that we lose the capacity for critical thinking, for the labour of the negative through which any lucid totalisation might be possible.

The reparative moment comes when we stop making 'connections', and instead introduce the cut, the disconnect. That's when we say, "look, this argument might often be used for bad purposes, or it might be wrong in its current articulation, but there are ways to think with it to make a better argument." Or, "x might be friends with y, but that doesn't mean x approves of or was complicit in anything wicked that y has done, and actually everything we know about x makes such complicity racingly unlikely." And so on. The cut is reparative because it militates against the tendency toward social decomposition. The cut is the starting point for a critical procedure that takes all of the reasons for paranoia into account, fully acknowledges their force, but then integrates them into a strategy for repairing the social link.”
― Richard Seymour

“Class politics, in itself, clearly constitutes an antidepressant of some sort.. [but] anyone relying on the vicissitudes of political struggles to keep the dogs at bay, is essentially sacrificing their mental health to forces beyond their control. At worst, becoming dependent on the feeling of victory, they will be pulled to the right in dark times.”
― Richard Seymour