The Twittering Machine

by Richard Seymour

A brilliant probe into the political and psychological effects of our changing relationship with social media

Former social media executives tell us that the system is an addiction-machine. We are users, waiting for our next hit as we like, comment and share. We write to the machine as individuals, but it responds by aggregating our fantasies, desires and frailties into data, and returning them to us as a commodity experience.

The Twittering Machine is an unflinching view into the calamities of digital life: the circus of online trolling, flourishing alt-right subcultures, pervasive corporate surveillance, and the virtual data mines of Facebook and Google where we spend considerable portions of our free time. In this polemical tour de force, Richard Seymour shows how the digital world is changing the ways we speak, write, and think.

Through journalism, psychoanalytic reflection and insights from users, developers, security experts and others, Seymour probes the human side of the machine, asking what we’re getting out of it, and what we’re getting into. Social media held out the promise that we could make our own history–to what extent did we choose the nightmare that it has become?

Genres: Nonfiction, Technology, Politics, Philosophy, Psychology, Sociology, Theory

250 pages, Paperback

First published August 29, 2019

About the author

Northern Irish Marxist writer and broadcaster, activist and owner of the blog Lenin's Tomb.

Seymour is a former member of the Socialist Workers Party.

He is currently working on a PhD. in sociology.

Reviews

[Craig · Rating 4 out of 5]

More like about 3.5. I’m of two minds here, and trying to be fair to this actually rather good book and avoid faulting it for ultimately failing to be something it doesn’t actually set out to be:

On the one hand, this is an excellent account of how we got into the predicament we’re in online, with so many of us vainly and desperately shouting into, and listening for congratulatory echoes from, the great void of social media—what Seymour, borrowing a phrase from Paul Klee, calls the “Twittering Machine” in which we are all noisy parts: “immense, impressive, playful, polyphonic, chaotic, demotic, at times dread-inspiring.” In a series of short chapters (which, to my eye, actually grow a little weaker as the book proceeds), Seymour shows with compelling evidence and a light but forceful rhetorical touch how We Are All, to one extent or another, Connected, Addicts, Celebrities, Trolls, Liars, Dying, and—a term that ends up playing a less central role in Seymour’s claim than it seems at the outset—Scripturient: “possessed by a violent desire to write, incessantly.” It’s another jeremiad about the catastrophic psychological, cultural and political disease that is the “social industry,” the companies that comprise and dominate the regnant regime combining Nick Srnicek’s “platform capitalism” (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) and Shoshana Zuboff’s “surveillance capitalism” (Google, Amazon, Facebook again, etc.). And unlike Zuboff’s magisterial and heartily recommended book, which is far more readable than it looks but is also intimidatingly massive and shrouded in footnotes, this is more like a handful of digestible think-pieces on related themes. Its readership is still likely to be the choir, the same flock of converted souls that are reading Zuboff, Lanier, O’Neil, McNamee, etc., but because it’s so much more approachable, it might well reach a much bigger choir.

On the other hand, as persuasively as it makes its case about the problem, it has no real suggestions for solutions. Any one author can of course be forgiven for this, especially one like Seymour who traces these problems to deeper and more pervasive forces and ultimately argues that our addicted, antisocial, narcissistic, polarizing tendencies on social media are symptoms rather than causes of a greater psychological disease:

The Twittering Machine may be a horror story, but it is one that involves all of us as users. We are part of the machine, and we find our satisfactions in it, however destructive they may be. And this horror story is only possible in a society that is busily producing horrors. 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. Twitter toxicity is only endurable because it seems less worse than the alternatives. "No addiction," as Francis Spufford has written, "is ever explained by examining the drug. The drug didn’t cause the need. A tour of a brewery won’t explain why somebody became an alcoholic."

It is telling that the book as a whole, like many of its paragraphs and sections, ends not with a statement but a question: “What if our reveries were not so productive? What if, in deliberate abdication of our smartphones, we strolled in the park with nothing but a notepad and a nice pen? What if we sat in a church and closed our eyes? What if we lay back on a lily pad, with nothing to do? Would someone call the police?” This is agreeable stuff for the choir who come to this kind of book already on side for a bit of twirling in the park with our notepads instead of rage-tweeting and doom-scrolling. But this kind of suggestion is bringing a dull little knife to one of the biggest gunfights of our age. Won’t it take something much more than high-minded appeals like this to counter the forces of these hypnotic, brainstem-weaponizing forces of addiction and psychological corruption? Pace Spufford’s point about what does and doesn’t make a drug addict, all the same, what actually stands a chance of unmaking one? Imagine arguing a similar case in other all-too-closely-related contexts. “Heroin addicts, what if, instead of shooting up, you strolled in the park with nothing but a notepad and a nice pen?” “Radicalized white supremacists, what if we just said no, and meditated our way out of this racist reverie?”

Something so much bigger is needed, and with increasing urgency. Again, it’s not as if Seymour isn’t allowed to write about the problem unless he’s got a practicable solution to propose. But someone’s going to have to find a way of reaching many more people, of unifying and mobilizing governments who might be able to bring regulatory force to this, etc. Books are probably just a small part of the way forward, given the tiny choirs they tend to reach—but even the massive Netflix viewership that showed up for The Social Dilemma didn’t come away with much more than high-minded appeals to self-determination, Thoreau-style deliberate living, and the advice to switch our phones to greyscale mode.

One of that documentary’s producers, Tristan Harris, was asked on camera if we could actually solve this problem. His answer? “We have to.” No kidding. That we do. I hope we’ll soon start to see suggestions for how. Alas, engaging and compelling though it is, this book hasn’t got any either.

[David M]

What we call addictions are misplaced devotions; we love the wrong things.

We keep {our smartphone} close, charged at all times. It is as though, one day, it’s going to bring us the message we’ve been waiting for.

Not alarmist but deeply melancholy, this book is the best thing I’ve yet read on the subject.

[Murtaza]

Completely escaping the influence social media use is not really possible or necessarily desirable for most people today. What we should do however is use these platforms thoughtfully and with full understanding of their biases and the imperatives of their creators. What tech companies seek is engagement, nothing more and nothing less. It doesn't really matter if people are using their platforms out of rage, depression, or joy – all that matters is that they use them. Studies show that negative emotions might even drive more engagement, and, if so, all to the good. The platforms was deliberately designed to mimic the dynamics of slot machines and casinos, keeping you hunting for some sort of symbolic rewards and trapped in a virtual zone insulated from the flows of natural time.

This doesn't mean that you shouldn't use social media or that there is no benefit, there clearly is. But it's good to keep in mind what you're doing while doing it, especially when considering the clearly stated motives of the platform designers. I plan to write a larger review of this book at a later date. It was a bit dark and maybe even went overboard on some counts but the reminders it contains are in themselves useful for all of us living in a connected world.

[Richard Derus · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Publisher Says: A brilliant probe into the political and psychological effects of our changing relationship with social media

Former social media executives tell us that the system is an addiction-machine. We are users, waiting for our next hit as we like, comment and share. We write to the machine as individuals, but it responds by aggregating our fantasies, desires and frailties into data, and returning them to us as a commodity experience.

The Twittering Machine is an unflinching view into the calamities of digital life: the circus of online trolling, flourishing alt-right subcultures, pervasive corporate surveillance, and the virtual data mines of Facebook and Google where we spend considerable portions of our free time. In this polemical tour de force, Richard Seymour shows how the digital world is changing the ways we speak, write, and think.

Through journalism, psychoanalytic reflection and insights from users, developers, security experts and others, Seymour probes the human side of the machine, asking what we’re getting out of it, and what we’re getting into. Social media held out the promise that we could make our own history–to what extent did we choose the nightmare that it has become?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: The author, a trenchant leftist social and political analyst, refers in his choice of title for this book to artist Paul Klee's watercolor painting, "Twittering Machine," from 1922:

Art critics have deeply divided opinions and interpretations of this small MoMA-owned piece of paper infused with artistic imagination, ink, watercolor paint, and gouache. Biomechanical pastoral, oppressive and unnerving enslavement of nature to the machine, triumphant use of machine for nature's purposes...it's not clear to anyone (except the Nazis who labeled it "degenerate art") what we should make of this cool-blue musically evocative strangeness.

In many ways, Author Seymour couldn't have chosen a better image to hang his leftist social analysis of social media on. The facts of modern social life are such that we're enmeshed in the internet to a greater degree than even when he was working on this book, or even when the publisher brought it out in September 2020...the middle of the crisis times of COVID-19's ongoing plague. I literally can not interact with the bureaucracies that control my life without internet access. My assisted-living facility has always provided wi-fi access and a bank of desktop computers...recently they've upgraded our wi-fi to better serve an increasingly online population of elders. This is the best time to think about the issues surrounding social media's impact on the societal world we all, regardless of age or level of active participation, live in.

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’.

It is this weird truth that dictates our modern media landscape. It is a symptom and a cause, simultaneously. Gamblers don't gamble because gambling is available, they gamble because they must. Addicts aren't getting high, in whatever way they do so, because the means to do it exist; they do it because they must.

The Twittering Machine may be a horror story, but it is one that involves all of us as users. We are part of the machine, and we find our satisfactions in it, however destructive they may be. And this horror story is only possible in a society that is busily producing horrors. 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. Twitter toxicity is only endurable because it seems less worse than the alternatives. "No addiction," as Francis Spufford has written, "is ever explained by examining the drug. The drug didn’t cause the need. A tour of a brewery won’t explain why somebody became an alcoholic."

What this book does, and does well, is present the case that the social media landscape, while it requires social media to exist, doesn't exist in a vacuum but in an economic system that needs growth of use and therefore numbers of users to make its owners as powerful as they desire to be. The platforms offer us a digital space that enables connection and rewards separation from all but those we most want to be like.

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.

What I enjoyed about this read was the sense that, in detaching his analysis from blaming Social Media™ and attaching it to the capitalist profit-motive driven mindset, he validated my sense that it's all, au fond, about greed...theirs for money and power, ours for meaning and purpose. The result is, as Elon Musk tweeted after his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter was completed last week, a situation in which a capitalist says that Twitter "...cannot become a free-for-all hellscape." I quibble with "become" in that sentence:

...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.

How this Brave New Twitter will cope with the simultaneous free-speech absolutism of Musk, the capitalist need to growgrowgrow , and the social need to reduce harm to the people who make up the ailing Body Politic will be a fascinating collision to watch. Armor yourselves against the smaller pieces of social-fabric shrapnel with the wise words of a man of principle, intellectual clarity, and a powerful communication style.

I'll leave the last words to Author Seymour at his most openly anti-capitalist (thereby closest to my heart):

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?

[Donald · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was an early adopter of online discussion boards and toiled away in relative obscurity in the nihilistic take mines. The pseudo-financialization of Twitter helped train me to game the metrics to reach a much wider audience. I always thought of this benign trolling as a mild form of monkeywrenching. That was a self-serving view. Anyway, it's an achievement to write a good book that includes the word "meatspace".

[Laurence · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love the ideas under this book, which the author describes as an essay. The clever approach to references gives confidence that the foundations on which the conclusions are based can be verified, but the text is not littered with footnote markers.

Key points for me:

The twittering machine (social media and more generally digital communications between people) has been consciously constructed as an addictive time sink.

The whole three ring circus - celebrities, influencers, presidents, trolls, fake news, evaporating irony ("the transition from pure irony to zero irony is fast and fritcionlsess") - is a chimera which gives participants a short-term stimulus.

This excess of information actually reduces knowledge and meaning - participants have no capacity to think, assess or do anything above the noise. (I liked the fact that this point referenced Shannon's theory of communications, which was a foundation of my masters studies). the social industry has stolen our capacity for reverie.

The overall effect is like a long drunken conversation which creates enlightenment in the moment and a vacuum in hindsight (my analogy, not the author's); but the conversation never ends and the result is a "hollowing out" of social relations and identity.

He also makes a fascinating point that we are collectively writing more than ever before (more content, more literacy, and a change in what writing consists of) - actually a democratisation of what was once a class-based privilege.

He castigates Facebook for saying that depression and anxiety from social media use can be solved by more engagement. "No addiction" as Francis Spufford has written "is ever explained by examining the drug. A tour of a brewery won't explain why somebody became an alcoholic"

The diagnosis is crystal clear, the options for change are hinted at. This is a reasonable place to land given the chaos that has been unleashed - it seems that we have finally arrived at the information revolution. There is no going back, but the challenge of forseeing the future is of a similar magnitude to predicting the impact of the printing press, the industrial revolution or the telephone as they were created.

[Jesse · Rating 2 out of 5]

There are some really good, fascinating, thought-provoking ideas in this book--there just aren't enough of them (to the point at which i gave it up), particularly compared with the bad ideas, and the truly mediocre ideas. I came to this after a friend posted a particularly trenchant passage that reframed my understanding of social media in terms I'd previously never considered. On the strength of that passage alone I ordered the book, and perhaps expecting to spend the whole book being as blown away as I was by that particular paragraph placed me in a position of unreasonable expectation. But still.

I finally gave up on this book at the halfway point, after which my marginal notation had gone from noting good points (certainly a few) and weak points (many more), and noting to myself why I felt Seymour's arguments fell short, to simply writing "oh fuck off" in the margin.

From my perspective, this book enters its phase of critical failure in the second chapter, "We Are All Addicts." The first chapter held me rapt enough, but the problem with the second chapter is I know a bit about addiction--and clearly a bit is a good deal more than Seymour knows. According to his bibliography, he appears to have read three books about addiction prior to premising his second chapter on it. The books he read--by well-regarded experts Bruce Alexander, Marc Lewis, and Stanton Peele--are all excellent starting points for study in addiction, yet Seymour appears to have treated them as end-points skimmed hastily while primarily aiming to generate commentary on social media. He doesn't engage with the reality of addiction as a post-traumatic human phenomenon (I've spent 11 years doing in frontline outreach with people on the street and cannot see it first as anything else) but he also doesn't engage with the academic study of addiction beyond the three authors he quotes. Certainly, Alexander, Lewis, and Peele have made serious contributions to understanding what addiction is and how it works. Yet they represent one part of an enormous body of scholarship on addiction that considers many factors--few of which interest Seymour, since he has no apparent real interest in addiction.

Seeing an author turn complex human trauma into a metaphor for a consumer trend he finds unpleasant is distressing; seeing an author as engaged with ideas as Seymour abandoning study the moment he's confirmed his existing beliefs is really dispiriting. I flew into this book excited by its ideas and expecting to be carried away by it only to arrive at the second chapter with the chilling realization that, when it comes to addiction, Seymour has very little idea what he's talking about. Startlingly, he makes a detailed discussion of addiction and "addicts" the core of his second chapter without acknolwedging most or all recent scholarship converges on the idea that addiction is a response to trauma, primarily trauma in early life. Seymour would rather turn this into a lesson about capitalism (were he a better writer, he could easily draw obvious conclusions about trauma and capitalism, but he doesn't bother), which indicates to me he cares as little about addiction as he knows. And worse, he sincerely had the opportunity to learn but his bibliography makes clear he didn't take it. Seymour wants to make a point about the failure of behaviourism and the study of addiction seems to present him primarily with the opportunity to make that point, not to learn or understand the actual human problem of addiction both to drugs and alcohol and to behaviours that become maladaptive.

Seymour's framing of addiction--and "addicts" and "junkies" as he calls them, though virtually no one doing research into addiction and certainly no one involved with harm reduction in the last decade or more has been comfortable with those terms--is simplistic and insulting to people who use drugs. But as a critical failure early on in the book, his simplistic, binaristic reading casts into doubt the entirety of the rest of his scholarship. I don't know very much about BF Skinner, but having watched Seymour mangle conclusions about the study of addiction, I started worrying Seymour was as self-serving and wrong about Skinner... and everything else?

Certainly Seymour is wrong in his choice to present descriptions of both suicide and sexual violence in sensationalist and exploitative terms that help him hammer home the moral of his jeremiad. Having reported for over a decade on Indigenous communities in which risks of suicide are sometimes advanced due to particular traumas, I have been forced to learn a lot about how to report responsibly on suicide so as to avoid suicide-contagion (those who want to know more about this should google "suicide reporting guidelines for media"), which Seymour acknowledges as a problem even as he resorts himself to the kind of lurid terms as sensationalize suicide and exploit the trauma of sexual violence for the cheap victory of winning some ideological, theoretical point. Watching Seymour acknowledge concerns about reporting on suicide even as he flouts those concerns (perhaps imagining his learned readers must be intellectually immune to suicide?) is galling. He clearly knows better, but finds no compulsion to hold himself to an ethical standard even in a book of arguments about ethics. It’s fucking baffling.

That would be morally questionable to begin with even if Seymour's theoretical points were all as trenchant and profound as the one my friend shared that caused me to buy this book. But more frequently they're vague and aphoristic generalities he fails far too often to adequately support or defend, such as "The 'like' button seems to have facilitated a form of detached involvement in spectacular cruelty." Statements like these are less effective in circumscribing the moral concerns Seymour wants to raise and become more about Seymour presenting himself as a confrontationally verbose teller of deep truths, yet too often the weakness of his argument never makes it seem that Seymour has actually arrived at any truth in particular beyond finding some dramatic statement to yell.

There's an edge of moral panic, albeit Marxist moral panic, in Seymour's concerns about social media. One of this book's most painful ironies is Seymour's indignation over trauma such as streamed suicides and rapes (which he describes in disturbing, prurient detail) "[producing] floods of monetizeable attention" for platforms like Facebook. This would be easier to take were Seymour not choosing exploitative language with a similar sensationalism to sell rhetoric. Many survivors of sexual violence or addiction, or those who've lost loved ones to suicide, may argue reducing their traumas and tragedies to commentaries on consumer behaviour will always be callous and unforgiveable, but it's somehow worse when the conclusions simply aren't profound or intelligent enough to merit the author's returning over and over to sensationalist language to prove his point. Seymour seems to think it's very bad when Facebook derives corporate profit from human misery, and I happen to agree with him. But don't think it's that much better when one more white guy with an opinion to share highlights the garish details of human tragedy not to foster empathy but to get you to agree more forcefully with the declarations he’s making in the printed consumer commodity he’s selling (i paid CDN$36 for mine).

When I learned the author wasn't a scholar but rather a blogger, it made sense of it: this book has the hasty, slapdash misreadings and failures of argument we're used to from the social medium of blogs (which Seymour hadn't managed to include much in his critiques of social media by the time I gave up on the book). Like many blogs, this book presents argument without believable evidence, and seems to stand above all for its author's presentation of himself as a great thinker rather than of the great ideas he's thought. I came into this with high hopes and exited it halfway intent never to read Richard Seymour again.

[Ryan Denson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Utilizing the titular metaphor based on Paul Klee's painting, The Twittering Machine (1922), Seymour delves into many harmful aspects of modern social media. This well-written essay looks a considerably wide range of internet phenomena from the celebrity culture of Instagram influencers to psychological and sociological consequences of online trolling to the social media algorithms that have aided the alt-right.

The underlying focus though is the highly addictive nature of modern internet platforms. Addiction though is rarely ever an isolated force that can be examined by only looking at the supposed addictive substance. Seymour, therefore, goes further in looking at psychological and sociological patterns of why we are drawn to such platforms. What is it within ourselves and our culture that make these online escapist routes so attractive to begin with?

In taking a more nuanced position, Seymour is able to outdo the deluge of the popular articles that have been written on this same subject. He further avoids a trap of becoming a neo-Luddite critic, which also plagues other authors of the subject. Through looking at the example of the French Minitel system, he is able to show that there was a possible alternate path for the internet to take and that the blame for the addictive nature of modern platforms rests on all of us, not just the physical technologies.

The framing of the proliferation of the internet as a new stage in the evolution of writing is also noteworthy for linking it to a historical context. Whereas writing was once a skill known by only a few and used for only things deemed essential, it has now become commonplace in many societies and used for even trivial things. As Seymour puts it in contrast to the drought of writing centuries ago, now "we are swimming in writing. Our lives have become in the words of Shoshana Zuboff, an 'electronic text'" (p. 23). Such a change has, of course, impacted the way humans now perceive reality. For people now learn and experience things through the medium of writing at greater degree than at any other point in history. This is why the harmful impacts of social media have a more profound impact on society than most would think. Overall, this is an fascinating read that manages to combined an informed and relentlessly thorough examination with a lively and entertaining writing style.

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Twittering Machine is a very readable polemic on the subject of social media's social, political, and individual psychological harms. It is well-structured and synthesises a lot of material to make some solid points. Seymour is good at raising big questions that he cannot answer. As I've read a fair bit on this topic, I didn't so much find fresh ideas as pleasing new articulations of familiar concepts. I think breadth rather than depth is the strength here. This point about the costs and benefits of social media for marginalised groups is particularly nicely put:

The Twittering Machine invites users to constitute new, inventive identities for themselves, but it does so on a competitive, entrepeneurial basis. It can be empowering for those who have been traditionally marginalised or oppressed, but it also makes the production and maintenance of these identities imperative, exhausting, and time-consuming. Social media plaforms engage the self as a permanent and ongoing response to stimuli. One is never really able to withhold or delay a response; everything has to happen in this timeline, right now, before it is forgotten.

I also liked the extended discussion of addiction, which compared social media with casinos:

The Twittering Machine, as a wholly designed operant conditioning chamber, needs none of the expedients of the casino or opium den. The user has already dropped out of work, a boring lunch, an anxious social situation, or bad sex, to enter into a different, timeless, time zone. 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. There is no need to block out the windows because that is what the screen is already doing: screening out daylight.

And it manages time differently. For gamblers, the only temporal rhythm that matters is the sequence of encounters with destiny, the run of luck. For drug users, what matters is the rhythms of the high, whether it is the 'stationary' effect of opium or the build, crescendo, and crash of alcohol. The experience of platform users, on the other hand, is organised in a trance-like flow. The user is plunged into a stream of real-time information and disciplined to stay constantly ahead of it. Twitter highlights not the time and date of posts, but their age and thus currency: 4m, or 12h, as the case may be.

Another notable comment concerns how the internet crowds out reverie and also sleep, an argument made in 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep.

The ideological power of our interactions with the machine derives from the way that the conditioned choice, be it the compulsive selfie spiral or the angry 3am thread argument, is experienced as freely and pleasurably chosen. From games to feeds, our capacity for reverie is riveted to a wholly designed dream space, our free-floating attention guided down channels strewn with reinforcements that we often don't even notice.

The Twittering Machine is most radical and original on the topic of information overload:

The problem is not the lies. It is information reduced to brute fact, to technologies with unprecedented and unforeseen powers of physical manipulation by means of information bombardment. We naively think of ourselves as either 'information rich' or 'information poor'. What if it doesn't work that way? What if information is like sugar, and a high-information diet is a benchmark of cultural poverty? What if information, beyond a certain point, is toxic? [...]
The crisis of knowing has roots which run deep into the institutions from which authoritative knowledge has hitherto produced. The Twittering Machine didn't cause this crisis, but it is its current culmination. The Twittering Machine is a furnace of meaning.

I think this idea deserves a deeper analysis than it gets here. Notably, it seems even more relevant in the age of Chat-GPT, which produces reams of pseudo-information that only coincidentally contain any meaning. The Twittering Machine was written before generative AI, so assumes that social media is about humans writing, not humans reading sludge produced by predictive text on steriods. In the context of 2023 the focus on writing/posting over passive reading/listening/watching is perhaps misplaced? Nonetheless, The Twittering Machine is a thoughtful synthesis containing well-expressed ideas. At the end Seymour tells you to go outside and touch grass, which I found quite amusing despite being sympathetic to his point:

What would happen if we applied Delany's strategy of 'stupidity': that is, of only taking in as much information as we could put out? What if we were not in the know? What if our reveries were not productive? What if, in deliberate abdication of our smart phones, we strolled in the park with nothing but a notepad and a nice pen?

I mean, you can just take your keys to stroll around in the park without writing or posting about it. That's also an option. I'm definitely an advocate for unproductive reveries, though. For further reading on social media, I recommend The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, Revolutionary Mathematics: Artificial Intelligence, Statistics, and the Logic of Capitalism, and The People Vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy.

[Jake · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's a growing collection of anti-tech / social media literature and this work is indispensible. It situates social media's emergency in terms of variety of political, social-psychological, and capitalist forces. It very much delves into examples which illustrate the more abstract claims in Byung-Chul Han's Psychopolitics, another important read on contemporary capitalism. By making a significant exploration of the psychology of social media addiction, Seymour explains the mechanisms of capitalist control in the emerging Psycopolitical regime with a distinctly human bent. Seymore is a Luddite, properly interpreted - lamenting the machine's ascension to being our master, rather than serving as the technological foundation that uplifts humanity. Deeply insightful, synthetic in how it fills in interstices of preceding tomes, and (as many other reviews point out) deeply melancholic.

[8stitches 9lives]

Queued.

[Puck · Rating 4 out of 5]

Instead of watching the sensasionalist move The Social Dilemma I recommend reading this instead. Sometimes I feel like it goes in circles or doesn't reach a conclusion, but in a way it feels apt as a parallel to the dark spiral that is social media. Some of the insights here are very interesting and it gives me the takeaway that engaging with social media with hopes of changing anything is not the way to go. Social media often shows our worst facets. A good reminder to log off every once in a while and to always enter the social-verse thinking of it as a casino. You probably won't win anything but at least you might get a kick out of it and meet someone on the way.

[Ivar Dale · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mind-expanding stuff. Makes you want to quit social media.

[Carolina Silva Rodé · Rating 2 out of 5]

No es lo que pensé que era y no es lo que estoy buscando. Medio all over the place y nowhere for long enough. Capaz para gente que no entra habiendo saturádose ya pensando en estas cosas. Hay cosas lindas en los primeros capítulos, aunque la decisión de postergar las notas bibliográficas hace que todo parezca medio vibes. No sé cuánto puedo creerle a un random cuando habla pseudocientíficamente de adicción, por ejemplo. Es todo medio vibes, y eso funciona pero hasta cierto punto. Y eso es lo que yo querría leer pero abordado capaz con un poco más de rigor científico.
Por otro lado cómo se nota cuando un libro es de antes de la pandemia, jaja. Vienen siendo unos años tan llenos de cosas que todo obsolesce en cuanto se publica.

[Scott Neigh]

There is practically an entire industry devoted to churning out think-pieces, studies, books, and articles expressing concern about the impacts of social media and the broader spectrum of information technology of which it is a part on our lives and our world. It comes in lots of flavours, many neither convincing nor useful, some downright eye-roll-worthy, though others identifying real problems even if their analyses are often ultimately unsatisfying. But the fact that so much of that writing fails to say much that is useful does not negate the fact that there *are* lots of reasons to be concerned about the impacts of social media. This book, I think, is a useful preliminary step in developing ways of thinking and talking about social media – or, the social *industry*, in Seymour's terminology – that begin to capture, in materialist ways, what it is all actually doing.

A key element of this book's approach that I think is a great insight and that also meshes well with ways of thinking about the world that I already hold is his analysis of the social industry as being primarily about us *writing*. Yes, we consume endless amounts of online media, but that is part of the bait or the reward, and it is our writing that the system really wants. Some of this is writing in an easily recognizeable sense – the data about ourselves that we give up each time we update Facebook or even send an email, for instance – but it also includes every mouse movement, every checked box, every click, every filled form that we do not necessary think of as writing, but that gets stored away on some distant harddrive. Creative or not, comprised of words or not, all of those are enduring inscriptions, and we give them up to institutions that, in all sorts of ways, rule us. Which means that ruling regimes know far, far more about us today than the mass bureaucratic systems of the 20th century, and so mechanics of ruling are shifting accordingly. The book also explores themes recognizeable from other work on social media, smartphones, and so on, like the way in which the social industry deliberately cultivates our addiction, the way it has created frightening new opportunities for collective cruelty, related changes in our knowledge and our knowledge systems, and shifts in our politics. (He argues that it is much too early to pronounce in a definitive way on how all of this will impact our political systems, but certainly lays out plenty of evidence that those of us on the left are no doubt mostly familiar with that the early returns are far from encouraging.)

I don't agree with everything in the book, of course. It is careful in how it words such things, but it seems to me like it under-values the role of some manifestations of collective online rage as forms of speaking/striking back at power by oppressed people. I am also not a huge fan of psychotherapy-derived theory, which some on the left seem to like, and while there isn't too much of that in here, there is a bit. I also think there is a lot more to say about the ways in which different organizational forms in movement contexts have used the tools presented by the social industry, with varying levels of success – I can't help but think Seymour's Trot past might have something to do with his scathing take on horizontalist forms, for instance, for all that he does make some excellent points. I could probably flip through the book and find lots more that I would quibble with. But while I might differ on specific details, overall I think the book is thoughtful and very useful. As well, I have always enjoyed Seymour's writing, and this book was no exception. So I would say that it is definitely worth a read if you are trying to think about social media and the ways it is shaping our world. And I think I may read it again in a couple of years – it is relevant to a writing project that I have been vaguely contemplating, and if I do end up committing to it when I'm done writing my current book, then I will come back for another go at this one.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant essay on what we are really doing when we scroll through social media feeds. Seymour gets into the philosophical side of the proliferation of 'writing' through smartphone technology, and even 'writing' our data as we scroll and scroll, and the creative/metaphysical nature of words. Social media and the data behemoth is described as the 'twittering machine' that we feed our lives into, with its constant need to consume our time and attention as its fuel. It is designed to be addictive, to use extreme reactions to material to increase our engagement

I just think this book is vital for many to read in this age. It should make the blood run cold of anyone who works in comms, media, marketing, or political campaigning - all rely on the cynical use of this twittering machine. Anyone who spends hours a day scrolling through feeds (most of us) and who tries to find something interesting to get people engaged in our posts.

One part that stood out is that we are so busy crafting our online identities that we forget to live life itself. At the end, his proposed solution is not more monitoring, regulation, or alternative networks - it is to deprive the networks of our time, to take a walk in the park without our phone, to lie on the grass, and just stop for a bit.

Also kudos to Seymour for avoiding falling into the trap of making it all about Cambridge Analytica and Trump.

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is excellent, even if it trends toward a certain amount wishing to put the genie back in the bottle. It does a good, if not exhaustive, job of explicating how social media manipulates our interests and gathers our data, while pumping us fuller and fuller of content.

I think the notion, often mentioned here but only occasionally considered at depth, of social media and the internet making us all writers is a smart and interesting one.

I did blanch at times of a tendency toward ludditism and what feel like over and re-heated takes on cancel culture, including referencing Fisher's Vampire Castle essay. It's not that these takes are wholly incorrect but that they are clearly incommensurate to the challenge they painstakingly recount.

Regardless, ironically, this is all a lot of useful data that I will gladly add to my personal algorithm of considerations toward modern life. As such, I can wholeheartedly recommend it.

[Sarah :) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think I've read too much on the subject, but I wanted something more out of this. It's by far the most readable of Verso's books, but I think it could have actually benefited from being slightly longer.
Too much time is spent on the symptoms of social media. I know it makes you an addict, I know it's destructive. I wanted to know why. The end provides some insight into this, but it's not entirely enough. Why is social media like this? How can we improve it? Is it possible that it can be improved? Ultimately, too much time is spent on the symptoms of social media addiction and not enough spent on an examination of why capitalism and society have built such a product.

[Katie C. · Rating 5 out of 5]

THIS. THIS IS THE BOOK I'VE BEEN WANTING TO READ. This is the smart, intelligent, theory-filled book I wanted on social media/technology/industry. Fuck your how-to's on deleting social media, give me all the why's and questions of why we're so addicted in the first place.

[Alyson Podesta · Rating 4 out of 5]

scary stuff for the most part, but felt pretty spot on in most ways.. warning for lots of discussion of real-world violence and suicide

[Archita · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book on why you should quiet quit social media ASAP. Recommended for everyone.

[Enzo · Rating 4 out of 5]

the internet could’ve been so great

[A · Rating 4 out of 5]

A horrible and amazing read.

[Bradley · Rating 4 out of 5]

“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?”

[Souli Boutis · Rating 4 out of 5]

forswear social media and all such thin potations !

[Arjun Ravichandran · Rating 4 out of 5]

'The Twittering Machine' by Richard Seymour begins with an interpretive difficulty  ; named after the painting by Paul Klee, wherein loosely-sketched birds of song are yoked to a mechanical crank-shaft, the question is whether the pure yearning of human fulfillment leads us to an algorithmically-mediated doom - or whether the birdsong in itself is, contrariwise, not a pristinely simple tune, but a 'cyborg roar'? 

The answer, as it turns out, is a bit of both. The lure of the birdsong makes us glide to the proliferation of screens, because it beckons to a poignant hodgepodge of lack, nestled in the human breast. This is what the book has in common with Sherry Turkle's 'Alone Together' - toxic relationships are a two-way street after all. We are entranced by the screens of platform capitalism because we wish to be simultaneously connected, yet anonymous - we seek salves for the dull pain of embodied and bitter creatures. 

This much is true - where the author puts his cards on the table, is by focusing on the hand that turns the mechanical crankshaft. That the technology of modern-day platform capitalism answers to a lack is obvious; its unprecedented success is proof of that. But could it be that our lack has been isolated, extracted, streamlined and commodified? That the unspoken ideology behind the workings of an agnostic algorithm might be responsible for the concomitant perversion and expansion of this lack? That the cruel and faceless roar of social media is the result of the profit-driven agglomeration of all-equal alienation? 

The author stems from a Marxist background; he therefore shares the traditional Marxist suspicion of grand pronouncements regarding human nature. This suspicion has its roots in the expectation that such theories of human nature are used to justify contingent socio-economic epochs and the culture arising therefrom - so much for the plethora of hand-wringing regarding trolling, online hate-speech, and various other epiphenomena arising from the perverse cruelty of anonymity; and so much too for quasi-nihilistic denunciations of the human nature revealed by the massification of social media. 

For the Marxist, human nature - like labour-power itself - is essentially plastic, and takes the form of whatever avenue it finds itself applied to. The extraction and streamlined commodification of certain aspects of human being, to the exclusion of others, is precisely what the author argues that social media has done. In a telling substitution, he refuses to refer to the complex by its accepted name, and calls it instead the 'social industry.' Media- in its ideal, which shadows every term - is a neutral conduit of information proceeding from sender to receiver with little to no distortion.

Industry, by contrast, is a complex phenomenon ; and one need not be a classical Marxist to intuit that ideology - simple questions of what is produced, to what purpose, and to whose benefit  - underpins the raison d'etre of any industry.  

The book is therefore, simultaneously, an examination of the unspoken ideologies sustaining the silent agnosticism of the algorithms, as well as their dialectical relationship to the human needs which provide the raw material for the working of these algorithms. In a savage boomeranging leitmotif, Marx's 'Frankenstein monster' returns, feeding on needs only to spit them out again, demanding more. The algorithms, the author seems to suggest, are only the latest version of the machinery that feeds on labour-power in necessary proportion to the immiseration of the labourer.

With every tap, click and like, we must tap, click and like all the more to maintain a rapidly-degrading semblance of physical and spiritual homeostasis.  Hence the miasma of wide-spread ennui midst the fields of digital plenty. 

Each chapter therefore begins with a Schopenhauerian denunciation : 'We are all liars', 'We are all addicts', 'We are all trolls'. We are all trolls, not because of the immutable perversity of human nature. One trolls because trolling - the pleasurable take-down of self-righteously interpreted hypocrisy - is a behaviour extracted by the contextualizing incentive of the social industry. We are all trolls, because of the massification attendant on the self-expanding logic of 'computational capital'.

The chapter's title therefore betokens the double-headed approach of the author - an identification of a behaviour, and an examination of its dialectical manifestation twixt the machine and man;  and that this manifestation is engineered by an unshared ideological consensus is laid bare. 

There is an underlying ambiguity, however - is the monstrous tumult of the social industry merely due to the technocratic agnosticism of Zuckerberg, Dorsey et al? Or has there always been this collection of unpleasant human behaviours that the algorithm has merely brought into the limelight? The author notes that while social media represents a massively quantitative difference in human affairs, it is not a fundamentally qualitative difference. Trolling, witch-hunts, Schadenfreude, addictive behaviours, and nihilistic compulsions towards endless distraction,  are hardly new phenomena. Rupert Murdoch is 50 years older than Mark Zuckerberg, after all. 

I personally picked up on a distinctly Nietzschean phenomenon of ressentiment - corralled and intensified under the aegis of social industry, no doubt, but (if one were to hew to the Nietzschean theme) hardly a surprising facet of human behaviour. 

Nonetheless, the author - like all card-carrying 21st century Marxists - carries his thorough disillusionment like a badge of honour, and leaves this ambiguity to fester. Algorithmically determined ugliness, or neutrally platformed ugliness - the question is moot. This is what we have now, with hitherto dramatic consequences on politics, society, individual flourishing and mental health - and undoubtedly more to come. The State, which was classically defined as the bulwark against precisely this sort of anarchic devolution of resentment and self-aggrandizement is being overwhelmed - and the individual himself, algorithmically suspended in a tranquilizing nihilism, the 'Twittering Machine', disappears further and further into inconsequence. 

Finally, the author throws his hands in the air and resorts to the already-materializing cliche with regards to our potential solutions : get out of the house and go for a walk. It is a depressing end. 

In conclusion, I found this to be a remarkable book. It is quite a thorough synthesis. The author is clearly an intellectual of considerable proportions - and I felt that this effort was distinct from some of the other books dealing with the same issue. We have already had psychological investigations into the effects of the digital age (the aforementioned Turkle, as well as Nicholas Carr and his deep treatment of The Shallows), sociological extractions  (Jean Twenge, with the trials and tribulations of iGen). But, while those books had sidestepped the genesis and sustenance of the social industry, bracketing it in a sense, so as to deal with their respective areas of competence, this was the first book that I had personally read, that did not dispense with the social industry as simply the latest iteration of things-as-usual, but dove deep into its dark underbelly of ideological motivation. 

Very strongly recommended - and the bibliography is quite interesting too, if you would care to do some further research. 

[Elaine · Rating 1 out of 5]

Extremely disappointing. I am not sure if this even qualifies as a book or would it be better described as a bibliography, so often does Seymour start a sentence with "in the words of ....". The book is a directory of people who have discussed the issues of data, society and social media better than Seymour has and much of his analysis are tired, milquetoast takes read in the voice of a very annoying first year philosophy student. Using the word hegemony or ontology frequently does not elevate this book above what it is, which is basically a Guardian article from 2012. The book does little to analyse the political context from which it draws its conclusions and simplifies many parts of the left/right divide beyond recognition. One in particular is calling Tommy Robinson part of the "Intellectual Dark Web", an affiliation i have never seen before given Robinson is a white supremacist and the defining feature of most of the Intellectual Dark Web is that they are at heart, leftists. A google search reveals that this book and one tweet are the source for this comment.


To boot, several sections of this book honestly verge on plagiarism. Significant parts of the chapter on trolling are pulled directly from John Ronson's "So you've been publicly shamed" or in other sections, from James Bindle's "New Dark Age", which are both far superior books to this one. Read one of those, don't waste your time on this.

[Jacqueline Nyathi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maybe 3.5. Quite interesting; occasionally a little shrill :)

[rabble.ca]

Review by Cristina D'Amico:

Once upon a time, the left was briefly but strongly enamoured of the radical potential of social media. This author counts herself among the enchanted -- the opportunity for collective organizing and political movement seemed immense. Yet nearly a decade after the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, social media has little to show for itself in terms of its ability to facilitate material change. Even more unsettling, those groups that have tended to fare best in the online environment support the worst forms of right-wing, reactionary and misogynist politics.

Has something gone wrong, or was there a flaw in the machinery all along?

In The Twittering Machine, author and broadcaster Richard Seymour offers a compelling response to this question by taking into account the economic, structural and formal mechanisms of social media.

Keep reading: https://rabble.ca/books/reviews/2020/...

[L L · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Twittering Machine is ambitious in its scope, attempting to develop a language for describing what is happening in our world with social media. It treads alot of familiar ground, referencing ideas from Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism and recent research on social media, happiness and addiction. The Twittering Machine is the name of a 1922 painting by Paul Klee, where a small row of birds on a mechanical axle lure victims to the fiery pit below them. A metaphoric image of our relationship to social media-- it draws us in willingly to our own demise.

The Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma came out while I was reading this book, evidence that its central critique of social media capitalism has growing popular support. Social media lures us in with the illusions of connection and importance-- dopamine hits in the form of Likes, and the promise of fame. Rather than being our liberation, social media traps our attention through its addictive mechanisms, so that our uncompensated labor of "electronic writing" can be data-farmed and transformed into a marketable product. While we may be tempted to think first of the classic saying "If you're not paying for the product, then you are the product", Roger McNamee on the Social Dilemma corrects this thinking. It is neither us, nor our attention that is the product: "It’s the gradual, slight, imperceptible change in your own behavior and perception that is the product." And that is the true threat of social media to democracy and freedom, one that Zuboff strongly warns us of. This gradual reprogramming of our behavior shapes our habits, often without our knowledge, or in some circumstances, in such a way that we happily consent, as an easy fulfillment of our consumerist desires. (That is all too telling from my own "Recommendations from the Kindle Store" feed on Amazon)

Buying books and more ethically produced clothes seems like a benign outcome, a natural extension of previous forms of advertisement, justifiable by the economic benefits of satisfying demand and increasing global unity. The Twittering Machine, however, easily drives people to darker actions in the real world, by drawing people into their own echo chamber, through its profit-driven algorithms. The proliferation of information contributes to a skepticism towards a consensus on truth. The initial success of ISIS in drawing recruits, the rise of the alt-right, Pizzagate, growing incidents of mass-shooters motivated by social media, are all evidence of this. Seymour draws a direct route from the current state of social media to fascism. His chapter "We are all Trolls" is particularly strong, with a cultural analysis of trolling, and highlighting parallels between mostly right-wing trolling and public shaming tactics of the left.

Seymour's most valuable inquiry is into the concept of writing, which he broadens to include our production of all sorts of electronic text (e.g. scrolling, lingering over an image, Like buttons, emojis). For most of human history, writing was a tool to oppress and exclude, as few people were literate, and the printed word was a way to control which perspectives actually got elevated and propagated. With social media, we are both writer and reader, and the proliferation of content suggests that there is an underlying desire to write-- an impulse to express ourselves, to shape the world, and to connect to others.

From the book: "Language is mysterious’, writes the religious scholar Karen Armstrong. ‘When a word is spoken, the ethereal is made flesh; speech requires incarnation – respiration, muscle control, tongue and teeth.’ Writing requires its own incarnation – hand–eye coordination, and some form of technology for making marks on a surface. We take a part of ourselves and turn it into physical inscriptions which outlive us. So that a future reader can breathe, in the words of Seamus Heaney, ‘air from another life and time and place’. When we write, we give ourselves a second body."

We have a desire to write. And that desire has been captured by attention capitalism, so that we labor extensively, without much joy, and say alot, without saying anything meaningful. Seymour asks: "The question is what, collectively, would such a reinvention look like? How could we acquire new and better habits, better ways of writing to one another? If we’ve written our way into this situation, how can we write our way out of it?"

While Seymour offers promising possibilities, he doesn't go in depth, perhaps because we as a society have yet to fully imagine it. But his theoretical framework atleast recognizes the limited redeeming outcomes of social media-- greater connection and voice for marginalized voices, a key tool in the emergence and growing acceptance of several social justice movements (#BlackLivesMatter, #metoo), perhaps the ones that drove our initial optimistic and utopian hopes for the medium. The problem is not the machine itself, but rather that we have allowed the machine to control us, rather than for us, to control the machine. And reasserting control over the machine requires not just individual behavior shift, but collective re-imagination and political change.

This book is a valuable addition to existing critique on social media. I'd recommend this book for anyone interested in a deeper cultural meditation on social media. For a legal and political commentary and history, Zuboff's books is the best. And for practical guidance on how to manage your own social media practices, I'd recommend Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism.