Emma

“At the march itself I realized after seeing several signs featuring Princess Leia that despite the term’s historical usage in political theory and activism the resistance arose because it was a feature of Star Wars, and Carrie Fisher had just died. You could argue that its usage in Star Wars comes from political theory and activism, but even so the real significance is muted. If you don’t know something is a reference you don’t fully understand it; this is the great humiliation of allusion.”
― Lauren Oyler, Fake Accounts

“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

“Our pleasures are not lost, nor do they disappear; in another way, they mark us as much as our pains. The one among them which seemed to have vanished forever will save us from a crisis, will plead, unknown to us, against one of our disappointments, against some temptation to abdicate, to surrender; it will create in us new links of which we are not conscious, and reinforce a heap of little hopes which will counterbalance that tendency of our memory to preserve only vestiges of the atrocious, the terrible. For our memory is a venal thing: it sides with our pains, it has sold itself to our sufferings.”
― Emil M. Cioran, The Temptation to Exist

“I knew anything I said to the chuckling men at this point would be used to taunt me, that they would support each other’s claims in order to push me closer toward humiliation, alternately patronizing me with exaggerated agreement and through more traditional teasing. But at the same time I hated them and wanted them to know. What would Ursula K. Le Guin do?”
― Lauren Oyler, Fake Accounts