The Twittering Machine

by Richard Seymour

Overview

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?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781788739313
Publisher:	Verso Books
Publication date:	09/22/2020
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	526 KB

About the Author

Richard Seymour is a writer and broadcaster from Northern Ireland and the author of numerous books about politics including Against Austerity and Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics. His writing appears in the The New York Times, the London Review of Books, the Guardian, Jacobin, Prospect, and other outlets.

Editorial Reviews

What Susan Sontag did for photography, what Christopher Lasch did for the culture of narcissism, Richard Seymour has done for social media. I read it with a sense of recognition, and alarm.”
—Adam Shatz, contributing editor at the London Review of Books

“One of our most astute political analysts.”
—China Miéville, author of October

“A bracing tour through the social and political context and impact of Twitter and Facebook, exploring Gamergate to Isis to Trump’s Twitter presidency. He recounts horrifying miseries—suicides on YouTube, rapes on Periscope, streamed shootings on Facebook—created by people radicalised, or tormented by online peers, craving celebrity—all pushed to extremes by algorithms and monetised by tech companies.”
—Emma Jacobs, Financial Times

“The book is a thrilling demonstration of what such resistance can look like, by one of the most clear-sighted and unyielding critics writing today. We should all read it.”
—William Davies, Guardian

“Richard Seymour has a brilliant mind and a compelling style. Everything he writes is worth reading.”
—Gary Younge, author of Another Day in the Death of America

“A sophisticated critique of the age of social media.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Rather than wondering ponderously if this is ‘cancel culture’ or whatever, we might ask ourselves: Why were all these people tweeting? … This is not a book with an accompanying TED Talk, a ten-step program, or One Weird Trick to Fix Everything. Seymour’s pose here is that of a working analyst, not a confident diagnostician. He draws connections, he sketches notes toward a further diagnosis.”
—Max Read, Bookforum

“The Twittering Machine understands our world as it is: shaped for better or worse by sophisticated, online, social technologies that developed in the context of a long human history of other technologies.”
—Damon Beres, OneZero

“Seymour is wide-ranging in his analysis of the destructive effects of the ‘social industry’ on personal and political life … By the end, if you weren’t already, you will be on the verge of deleting your Twitter account. And yet Seymour himself is still on there, professionally compelled as a freelance writer to plug into the machine.”
—Matthew Sperling, Guardian

“A very brilliant deconstruction of social media and our death drive to engage with it … What’s so useful about the book is that it dispenses with the platitudes we tend to hear about social media, and takes a psychoanalytical approach to social media that feels fresh and freshly horrifying.”
—Los Angeles Review of Books

“Incisive … [The Twittering Machine contains] a number of penetrating insights into the nature and effects of social media.”
—Daniel Bessner, Nation

From the Publisher

2020-06-30
A sophisticated critique of the age of social media.

The term social media, ventures Seymour, isn’t quite right, “a form of shorthand propaganda,” since all media are social, tools that connect individual people to the world. “To talk about technologies is to talk about societies,” he continues, and the technology in question is one of the industrialization of the written word. In an argument reminiscent of O.B. Hardison’s now-30-year-old book Disappearing Through the Skylight, Seymour examines the code—the writing, that is—and the messages it generates in light of that social industry, whose titans have been rightly accused of hijacking expression to manipulate various untruths—and not just the fake news of Trumpians, but the compromised messages that say less than they mean. “The only way to conform successfully on the internet,” writes the author, “is to be unutterably bland and platitudinous.” All of this falls under the rubric of what Seymour calls the Twittering Machine, one that generates plenty of feeble noises. Some of the author’s arguments seem a little obvious, and some of the best bits are borrowed (with attribution) from critics of technology such as Jaron Lanier, who observes that the technology capitalists “don’t have to persuade us when they can directly manipulate our experience of the world.” However, Seymour dives deep to show just how that manipulation works, making us addicts of the machine—though, as he notes, the standard psychiatric diagnostic manual does not yet have a category for internet addiction—who crave the likes that a post or photo might bring. Indeed, the addition of the “like” button was practically as revolutionary as the internet itself. Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows is the more useful book in this regard, though it lacks the essayistic dimension that Seymour capably employs here.

Thoughtful reading for technologists and technology’s discontents alike.

Kirkus Reviews