If you know me, then you know that my skepticism for digital idealism developed alongside the first wave of social media, that technological novelty which I had the misfortune of coming of age along with. This was a contrarian perspective at a time of boundless techno-optimism.
Now, in 2023, with the country balanced on a razor’s edge before another wretched season of division, the absence of virtue at the social media companies seems to be apparent to all. There is revisionist thinking even among those with a stake in the system. And as for the possibility of corporate space providing a freedom worthy of democratic ideals, Jill Lepore gets it with concision and force:
This is flimflam. Twitter never has and never will be a vehicle for democratic expression. It is a privately held corporation that monetizes human expression and algorithmically maximizes its distribution for profit, and what turns out to be most profitable is sowing social, cultural, and political division. Its participants are a very tiny, skewed slice of humanity that has American journalism in a choke hold. Twitter does not operate on the principle of representation, which is the cornerstone of democratic governance. It has no concept of the “civil” in “civil society.” (link)
Lepore here points to the media’s infatuation with the rapid and stilted discourse of these platforms as the locus of larger social breakdown. But it is not as if only certain thought leader’s could wrench themselves out of the echo chamber, the situation would be abated. It is also the widespread adoption of these products that seems to have thrown up structural interference with our capacity to function as a polity of even nominal cohesion. As I see it, the logic of social media wants to colonize all modes experience and bring them under the sway of their measly products. This is what is meant by an attention economy. The logic of which is not only operational in the active consumption of the digital flow, but also when life habitually takes shape according to its dictates. Demolishing the concept of a private domain, social media encourages its users into the constant objectification of exchangeable tokens of experience (most often in the form of photographs). Ideally there is nothing that would escape such a system, yet it is disconcerting living publicly, instantly, at all times.
This week, Ta-Nehisi Coates acknowledged such feeling while speaking on WNYC about his upcoming programing at the Apollo Theater. While the broader context of this comment concerns the expectation of organized efforts to tear down Black intellectuals who rise to public prominence in this country, Coates addresses a personal anxiety associated with social media, and how these platforms feed into a contemporary mass delusion of free expression:
My way of dealing with it myself has always been-- this is really sad. I just try to restrict how much I talk and when I talk. I try to make sure that it's around something that I really feel like I'm standing on…
I'm not on social for the exact reasons that I just stipulated. It's funny. What I eventually realized is everything you say, you're giving people a target. There's a weird, if I'm honest with you, dynamic by which they eat off of you. You say something and there are people who are not in the mode of creating anything, but basically, wait for somebody else to say something and then point out, in the harshest possible terms they can, why that's wrong.
He describes a cynical and parasitic discourse. By standardizing an abbreviated and clipped format, these platforms provide users with the feeling of having produced distinct and meaningful statements, but in such a system, content for the algorithmic sausage is indistinguishable. Still as Lepore states, the tacit obligation to partake in this debasement of culture is pervasive among those very same individuals who profess to be the producers of culture. The adoption of these technologies is so widespread that their critique is considered bad form.
Yet, digital tools are remarkable, their power is thrilling, and putting them to use seems necessary if one is to attempt crafting a truly contemporary art. Last year, my long-running and much beloved Indexhibit web portfolio finally crashed. My own bandwidth had been exhausted elsewhere, and rather than wrestle with the coding, I have switched to a new service that has offered me this posting platform.
I am going to call the text that I build here, Synthetic, as it will be made from disparate sources, a collage of notes that I habitually make while reading, and almost never revisit. The word Synthetic is antithetical to organic, and suggestive of a denatured and inhuman thing. But our character is nothing if not synthetic, a melange of inherited traits and received wisdom pieced together from here and there, contradictory and containing multitudes.
Capitalism calls it a business plan, a hypothesis with science, while artists make a proposal. None of these apply here as the logic of the thing is entirely pragmatic, therapeutic. If it serves a purpose it will find that purpose in in the process of its making, without recourse to external metric. My hope is that the self imposed pressure of making it public will lend the practice a fresh rigor, helping me better trace themes that develop over time. With the contemporary conditions of technology, so much goes by everyday that I feel at risk of losing the possibility of adherence to Benjamin’s dictum that “Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.” An aide to thought, not a distraction from it. Principals of form will be ad-hoc.
jbm 9.2023