Leaching through the Lens
the semiotics of platform Capitalism
Leaching through the Lens
We communicate because we want to. This simple fact is easy to forget. Communication is like beer which, in the words of Homer Simpson, is both the cause and solution to all the world’s problems. Communication is also like love. If we break down the affects of love, we get a combination of meme-ing and magnetism, desire and fear.
Meme-ing: By your very symbolic exchange, you become like that with which you communicate.
Magnetism: Communication occurs between parties that recognize a kind of likeness and a kind of difference and are thereby attracted to one another. There is a seeking of bringing structural difference into equilibrium via symbolic exchange (memeing).
Desire: There’s something beyond the simple magnetism, something more complex, which drives us. Maybe desire is a bit like magnetism plus network effects. Or maybe we have to leave reductive explanations behind and just take it at face-value. Why must we experience that simulacrum of magnetism “as desire”? This is an open question. I can only say that it is self-evident that desire is its own unique entity and a feature of love. Thus, while I can affirm that we communicate “because we desire to,” I also can admit that I’m not sure what that simple sentence means.
Fear: Fear is the apparent concomitant of desire. It is the fear of the frustration of love. Again, any attempted reductionism only gets us so far. The content of fear takes on a life of its own, which may or may not be reducible to the other forces.
Love is the elevation of the mysterious/emotional features of an inherently mysterious process: the what, how, and why of communication. On the one hand, it’s easy to forget that there is a piece of attraction that is purely magnetic and memetic, that is pre-biological, that is pre-desirous. On the other hand, it is easy to forget that we communicate because we desire to. This is not to take something away from love, but to highlight the “loving” nature of all communication. We experience symbolic exchange as far more than simple inputs and outputs. The rich/textured nature of experience should not be ignored. It is precisely the content of life.
So communication is symbolic exchange, a symbol being an abstraction plus other stuff. The kernel of the symbol is the abstraction. Whatever is abstracted is reduced to something containing less information, but it is a useful reduction. It’s a mapping. For example, a map of the USA is generally an abstraction of our current sociopolitical system layered onto an abstraction of the country’s geography. The American flag is another kind of symbol containing another kind of abstraction.
But a symbol is not just an abstraction. It comes with other stuff too. It is an abstraction incarnate. This is part of what people mean when they say “the medium is the message.” The medium of the symbol is just as necessary to account for as the explicit/formal role of the abstraction itself. The “accidental” medium of the abstraction itself pulses with a host of potential meanings. When these potential meanings are not recognized as such, they are sometimes called noise. But then when the noise itself starts interfacing with other pieces of the system in a way we can construe as causal or somehow significant, we shift our model to attempt to account for the newly recognized signal. Even when not consciously recognized as such, the signal lurks in the noise, just as the noise lurks in the signal.
Everything evolves. An organism has potentials that only emerge after other mutations and environmental forces bring them to the fore. Even to the point of developing complex mechanisms ex-nihilo, as it were. This is noise-becoming-function. Just as vestigial organs are like functions-becoming-noise. This process creates a kind of continuum between what is perceived as necessary and what is perceived as accidental in the symbol.
Sense is protean. Symbols are never quite amenable to any one form of reductionism: biological, physical, psychological, or otherwise. Sense-making precedes all these. In the words of Levinas, the caress of love speaks prior to language. The potential abstractions implied by the symbol are legion.
Structuralists like Marcel Mauss and Levi-Strauss observed that all social interactions could be understood in terms of communication. Marriage, economic transactions, gift-giving, and of course natural language can all be interpreted as symbolic exchange. But today, what was only implicit to earlier modes of social organization has become explicit. Data structures, algorithms, and network topologies hide their existential significance in plain sight.
The epithet “information technology” is misleading. Symbolic exchange contains information, not the other way around. The internet is for communication, not the other way around.
Undeniably, so-called information technologies have not lived up to expectations. But few seem to understand the nature of the problem, or that there is even something to be understood. Often, the internet is talked about in terms of factors external to the system. Some of these externalities, like the socioeconomic context and the pernicious role of advertisers, are eminently relevant. Others, like the perceived critical thinking capacity of the population, are less so. But the internet, as a system of nested symbolic systems, already implicates enough ambiguities that it would be worthwhile to consider these mysteries on their own terms before venturing further afield into, e.g., corporate greed or Russian hackers.
Insofar as information technologies attempt to reduce a symbol to an abstraction, there is a proportional reduction in the human possibilities of such communication.
To be human is to create and play and love and think. It is the host of latent possibilities in the symbol that give it content, depth, texture, worth, what-have-you. An abstraction without content is worthless to a human. It’s food without flavor or sex without love. On all levels, an impoverished symbolic system reduces our ability to satisfy these basic existential needs/directives. It was a great breakthrough for structuralists to observe that a gift or a kiss is a kind of symbolic exchange. But these symbols and systems of symbols constitute so much more than just positions in a structure. Along these lines, the primary insight of post-structuralism was that symbols are not just negatively defined, but are positively pulsing with possible significances. A gift of bread can be abstracted into its “position” within a system of gift-giving, but it can also be eaten/savored, can also grow mold, can also be packed for lunch; it is constantly breaking out of any finitely-defined boundaries. A Facebook like, by contrast, represents a kind of mutilation; a gesture of approval denuded of any creative externalities.
There is an implicit justification for such impoverished systems, which resembles a kind of hardline descriptivism in linguistics. Namely, the implication that these systems are somehow equivalent. If a hug is just the sum of its fungible abstractions, then a social network can give you a hug. Even if this were true, which it is not, it would be highly inefficient, like saying there’s nothing one left turn can do that three right turns can’t.
A symbolic system like Facebook takes up existential space and chokes out other possible modes of social organization and satisfaction. As aggregators of human communication, they tend toward natural monopolies. Facebook’s image compression algorithm determines the resolution at which your visual memories are stored. Its sorting algorithm determines which of them you see. In all cases, so much is lost!
From the dizzying complexity of life, both the complexities of social reality and those of our inner emotional existences, these systems struggle to admit more than the grossest particles through its narrow aperture. A social media platform struggles with such perceptual experiences as:
Touching: carressing, cuddling, huddling.
Smelling. Teaching one how to smell. One experiences a kind of smell from a thick description of one, one can be taught to smell, by a word like sillage, or a mindful breath of mountain air, or the smell of a stranger.
Hearing. All the watery noises of a Tarkofsky film. The nightmarish droning of David Lynch’s bugs.
Seeing. Social media is manifestly first and foremost about seeing, but so are many other media: painting, sculpture, film, hikes. When hiking, one sees great things, but when surfing Facebook, one only sees what one already expected to find: a spectacle. When a Facebooker now hikes, she sees through the lens of the algorithms, her eye is forced to approximate the terrible compression algorithm, and that RGBist simulacrum of the visible spectrum, as a fitting caption percolates in her mind. Thus, the creative possibilities of sight are unceremoniously hacked out.
We ourselves become impoverished souls, not only within, but via the network. If an AI determines rank, then we make our sentences congruent with the AI’s reading level. If we post on Facebook or Instagram, we take our pictures in congruence with Facebook’s compressions algorithms. Per the meme-ing/magnetic nature of communication, the abyss inevitably stares back into us. We ourselves become like these impoverished symbols. SAD.
The line between volition and coercion, as with all good systems of control, is no longer relevant. The old “tree in a forest” problem again rears its head. If you don’t post a picture of what you ate, did you really eat it, do you even exist? Just as buying a commodity is the prosocial act of capitalism par excellence, documented consumerism has become the prosocial practice of the information era. Insofar as the mode of social organization does not allow for an experience to be expressed or savored, that experience becomes insignificant. As G.S. Trow prophesied: like this or die.
The essence of internet technology is gustation and summary. That is, the proliferation of myriad, abstracted desires.
If we were to map this affective milieu onto a Spinozist model, it would at first seem that desire would predominate. The impoverishment of these desires, however, points to the predominance of a kind of stupefaction: Spinozist pain or Hindu tamas. Consider the cult of critical acclaim surrounding the internet’s most obviously stupefying technologies: its digital streaming services. As Netflix struggles to scale to meet the demand of hundreds of millions of cheap eyes, even that fig leaf of aesthetic redemption has been stripped away. Style over substance, quantity over either.
Alongside the affective and the aesthetic, social media struggles with time. This goes back to my claim that it is the “noise” within a symbol–its apparently extraneous content–that provides the substrate for change or evolution, for developing into something new. The reduction of symbolic exchange to mere abstractions produces a largely static (synchronic) social structure, which has no patience for its nodes (us humans) to steal away, or remember, or gestate, or give birth.
Perhaps the signposts in one’s emotional life flash into and out of immediate experience in a relatively short period of time. Traumas and lessons alike. Maybe understanding a person is not a matter of summary, but of discovering and appreciating the unsaid, of mining those concealed, catalyzing experiences that turned a person into a wreck or an enemy or a stranger or a true love. But social media platforms simply have no time for such concerns. They are ahistorical: the existential role of both memories and dreams (as matters of emotional interiority) become increasingly irrelevant.
We already know that Facebook’s algorithms have a kind of sinister phenomenological awareness, e.g., you are worth more to Facebook supine than erect. In place of such a depressing affect logic, and against any calls for merely elevating joyful affects, we need technologies that explicitly encourage a balanced affective or somatic mode. As symbols are the forms of life, the richness of life that proceeds from the intermingling of joy, pain, and desire should be expressible via the symbolic system. Rather than merely elevating heart rates and creating a kind of paralysis, social networks should encourage calmness, hope, sympathy, conviviality, etc.
With the correct existential tools, we have a better foundation to judge and intervene in the externalities of the current system: the determining roles played by hardware, data structures, governance structures, political-economic exigencies, etc. Without such a foundation, we lack the language to even discuss the ills of the current ecosystem.
The best education for building a good social network can only be the practice of building a good social network. The best design principles for a good social network can only be to ask, with clear eyes and heart, what a good social network would look like. Most importantly, always, always remember the golden rule: we communicate because we want to.