Stephen

“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

“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

“The city, by storm light, looked far too malevolent. There were things he could recognize – columns and steps and archways and so on – but there were others . . . he shuddered. It looked as if people had once tried to add human touches to structures that were already ancient . . .”
― Terry Pratchett, Jingo

“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