Going Postal: A psychoanalytic reading of social media and the death drive

"If the punchy, claustrophobic anti-sociality of platforms in the first lockdown recommended a really black vision into the future, the Action for Dark Lives street uprising of the late spring felt like its wondrous opposite—a future in which programs were giving an answer to and being structured by the functions on the floor, rather than those events being structured by and designed to the requirements of the platforms. This was something value our time and loyalty, something that surpassed our compulsion to publish, anything that—for a moment, at least—the Twittering Device couldn't swallow.

Not that it wasn't trying. As people in the streets toppled statues and struggled police, persons on the platforms modified and refashioned the uprising from a road action to an object for the use and reflection of the Twittering Machine. What was happening off-line must be accounted for, defined, judged, and processed. Didactic story-lectures and photographs of effectively stocked antiracist bookshelves seemed on Instagram. On Twitter, the usual pundits and pedants jumped up demanding explanations for each motto and justifications for every single action. In these matter trolls and answer men, Seymour's chronophage was literalized. The social market doesn't only consume our time with endless stimulus and algorithmic scrolling; it eats our time by producing and promoting those who exist simply to be told, people to whom the entire world has been developed anew every morning, persons for whom every settled sociological, scientific, and political debate of modernity must be rehashed, rewritten, and re-accounted, this time with their participation.

These people, with their just-asking questions and vapid open words, are dullards and bores, pettifoggers and casuists, cowards and dissemblers, time-wasters of the worst sort. But Seymour's guide implies something worse about us, their Twitter and Facebook interlocutors: That we need to waste our time. That, but significantly we might protest, we find satisfaction in countless, rounded argument. That people get some type of fulfillment from boring debates about "free speech" and "cancel culture." That individuals find oblivion in discourse. In the machine-flow atemporality of social media, that appears like no great crime. If time is an endless resource, why don't you invest a few ages of it with a couple New York Times op-ed columnists, repairing all American thought from first axioms? But political and economic and immunological crises heap on each other in succession, around the background roar of ecological collapse. Time is not infinite. None of us can afford to invest what's remaining of it dallying with the stupid and bland."

Going Postal: A psychoanalytic reading of social media and the death drive

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