The internet and the social life under capitalism: alienation, fear of abandonment, surplus-enjoyment and "meta-objectification"

 

            In this article, I will attempt to provide an outline, framework or “long summary” of my theory of how capitalism morphs our social relations and social life, particularly through the introduction of the most developed form of long-distance communication: the internet. I plan on later developing this article into a book, so think of it as a “book-summary before the book was written”.

 

I: LONG-DISTANCE COMMUNICATION AND ALIENATION

 

            When Karl Marx linked capitalism with alienation, we must not only think of it as alienation between the worker and their product, but also as capitalism’s way of alienating workers themselves (or people in general). To understand this, we must understand the difference between alienation and separation.

            To separate two objects, two people or two ideas means to isolate or segregate them, removing any means of communication between them. Two nations or two people that are separated have no means of interacting with one another. Prison can be thought of as the separation from an inmate to the outer world as long as we assume that the inmate will not have much access to television or the internet. Two entities that are separated do not exchange information between each other in any way.

            In a very “meta” way, the very concept of separation itself separates the concepts of distance and closeness. Two entities are separated if they are at a very far “distance” one from another. The closer the two entities get, the less separated they are. Separation strictly maintains the distinction between “far” and “close”.

            Alienation is the dialectical reversal of this dichotomy between distance and closeness. Alienation means to be close at a distance and to be distant when you are close. Alienation is precisely that concept that blurs the line between this “close/far” distinction.

            Long-distance communication is one useful product of capitalism’s accelerated technological progress. The only form of long-distance communication before capitalism was hand-written communication on paper. When this communication was “private” or “one-to-one”, it took the form of the letter. When this communication was “public” or “one-to-many” / ”many-to-many” it took the form of the book. This was the only form of alienation pre-capitalism, the one way to “keep close at a distance”, and it of course comprised a very simplified and inefficient form of communication compared to the face-to-face interaction: many details are lost (clothing, body language, facial expressions, tone of voice, etc.) and it was much more time-consuming.

            Capitalism very rapidly created more forms of alienating long-distance communication: first the phone, then the mobile phone, then the internet. The internet itself progresses at a very rapid speed such as to mimic face-to-face interaction more and more. The telephone call introduced the dimension of the tone of voice into long-distance communication. Texting introduced the affective dimension of face-to-face interaction with the introduction of emoticons/emojis. Pictures and selfies and other forms of media could be shared between people, and the more technology progressed, the more efficiently they could be shared. Video calling was later introduced which mimicked real-life interaction almost directly. Just as the form of communication became more and more similar to real-life interaction, so did its accessibility: phone plans are becoming cheaper, the internet is accessible to way more people. Whereas in the early 2000’s the internet was stuck to the computer, now we have it in our phones who are in our pockets so it is way more “mobile” as well.

            Long-distance communication is still progressing because capitalism did not end yet: the next step, after the internet, is virtual reality, thus having long-distance communication “mimic” real-life interaction even more.

            “One to many” communication evolved as well – the limiting functions of the book, that is time-consuming to write and can only communicate words (and sometimes pictures) evolved into the “social media profile” which conveys more information. Many-to-many communication evolved as well: a book written by several authors and read by multiple people is way more limiting than the functions of an online public forum.

            Slowly, capitalism’s alienating function increased: two people who are very far apart physically (at other ends of the globe) can suddenly be “close” with the aid of the internet.

            The reverse is also true. Two people who are right next to each other are suddenly far more apart. People watch concerts through the screen of their phone. People next to each other prefer to stay on their phone instead of talking face to face. An anecdote: at the place where I currently work, it is a hybrid-remote tech job where, even in the cases where I go at the office, we still communicate through Microsoft Teams. We never have face-to-face meetings since we also have to include our colleagues from other countries, and thus, our office is a bunch of programmers who are sitting next to each other and talking to the person next to them through a laptop & headphones.

            Alienation is a double-edged sword because just as it connects two entities that are “far apart”, so does it “distance” two entities that are very close. It is not only “closeness in distance” but also “distance in closeness”. Hence, there is always a price to pay.

 

II: PRIVACY, INTIMACY, ABANDONMENT AND THE THERAPIST INTERNET FRIEND

 

            Fear of abandonment is a symptom caused by long-term communication. The way most “mental disorders” manifest is only through the filter of our economic system, so while you could make an argument that the same “illness” or “cause” still existed in previous systems (debatable, but let’s assume it true for the sake of argument), the way it manifested itself was way differently. The symptom of “fear of abandonment”, for instance, couldn’t have existed in feudalism since there was barely any abandonment in the first place, social relations were fixed, stable and long-term: the fear was the opposite, that you were stuck with the same spouse/landlord/serf/etc. for life. The presence of so many options of social relations inside capitalism, through the introduction of long-distance communication, makes the durability and stability of them way more fragile. The more capitalism advances, the more fast-paced everything is and the more our attention spans shorten. The newest popular social media always involves a shorter attention span than the previous one: we moved from online forums with long walls of text to Facebook, from Facebook to Instagram, from Instagram to TikTok. Watching 30 minute Youtube videos turned into 30 second “Vines” and “TikToks”. Albums and songs are getting shorter. Books are getting shorter.

            Social relations are becoming way more fragile as well. The availability of so many options for friendship or romantic and sexual relationships through the internet accelerates the fear that you may be abandoned once your other has found someone who is better to replace you.

            This is why one necessary condition for the sexual revolution and the liberalization of sexual relationships was not only the invention of more efficient contraception (ex: the condom) but also the invention of more efficient long-distance communication (ex: the internet). The internet allows us to have access to more potential partners and thus the very quality of “a relationship” in general is degrading and its average lifespan/duration shortens. Notice the similarity: both condoms and the internet are two forms of alienation, since the condom is a way of “touching our genital organs without really touching”, to keep “distant” when we are actually close.

            The possibility of abandonment introduces a positive element too, however. In short-distance/real-life communication, we only deal with the dimension of separation and thus, intimacy and privacy are inversely related and they are a function of time. The more time you know someone for, and the closer you are to them, the more you can share “intimate” details about your life to them (personal problems, childhood trauma, sexual life and concerns, etc.). This is because in real-life communication, people are tied to the context in which you interact with them. Hence, the possibility of abandonment is low on both sides: if you tell something personal to your coworker and it goes wrong, you will be forced to either continue seeing them every day or quit your job (more likely you will choose the former). Thus, sharing personal details about your life involves trust and being comfortable with the person, and hence, the less time you know someone for, the less details you share.

This is not the case on the internet – there, the less you know someone for, the more you can share details about your life. The internet is not tied to context but it is the creator of virtual, temporary contexts. You can find a stranger on the internet for the sole purposes of venting about your life to them, now there is no hesitation because you have nothing to lose, if something goes wrong, you can just abandon each other. This is how the internet created a third category of people: other than the stranger who you are forced to interact with (high hesitance to share intimate details) and the person you are close with who you are also forced to interact with (medium hesitance to share intimate details); now you have a third category: stranger who you are not forced to interact with (low hesitance to share intimate details). On the internet, psychological distance is reversed: the longer you know someone for, the more hesitant you are to share intimate details with them, since the stakes are higher and abandoning them has a higher price after you have already built a friendship. On the internet, the more someone is a stranger, the more “personal” you can be with them, paradoxically. The dialectic of the internet (and alienation in general) is that the closer you are with someone, the less close you are with someone. Hence, the internet has distorted the very way we view the concepts of intimacy, privacy and psychological distance, considering how its alienating function overlaps “close” with “far”.

Before the invention of the internet was the invention of psychotherapy. We usually joke about how our internet friends are our therapists, but what if we reverse this and say that the therapist was the first “internet friend”? What if psychotherapy itself was a precursor to online relationships? After all, this was Jacques Lacan’s point when he said that the therapist should position themselves as what he called the “objet petit a”, that object that you only want because you can’t obtain it, and once you do obtain it, you throw it away as if it was trash. You are close to your therapist only insofar as you are “far”. In therapy, you share personal information because they are a stranger, not “in spite of” – in case something goes wrong, you can just leave them and never see them again because you won’t interact with them or any of their acquaintances in any other context.

The internet is the creator of “empty contexts”, contexts with form deprived of content – virtual spaces with a specific, designated purpose that can be easily abandoned once that designated purpose goes obsolete. Psychotherapy was one of the first such empty contexts, you are interacting with a stranger that you’ve never met for a specific purpose and that you will never meet again outside of this context. Hence, the therapist and their patient are not “close” nor “distant” psychologically, but alienated.

 

III: ESSENCE VS. SURPLUS-ENJOYMENT IN SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS

 

            Here I am going to use “essence” in the Aristotelian sense where it also designates purpose as well as definition. For Aristotle, the essence of an object is that thing without which it wouldn’t be that object anymore. Any social context as well as any social interaction has an “essence”, a thing that it has or promises to create, without which you would abandon that social space. Other than the essence, there are also a lot of other “secondary gains” of socializing under that environment, which correspond to what Lacan and Zizek may call “surplus-enjoyment”. They are secondary for two reasons: on one hand, if they were gone, you would still socialize in that context. On the other hand, even if they remained, you would still abandon the context as long as the essence is gone.

            For example, you go to work in order to work and receive a salary. Banter with your coworkers is only secondary, it is a “surplus-enjoyment”. If you stopped receiving your salary, you’d stop going to work, despite the fact that there would still be some secondary gains here and there. The essence of a social context is what we think of as its purpose.

            This is important to keep in mind in order to understand the effects of technological alienation upon our romantic relationships. There's an infinite number of ways to classify the way that romantic relationships start, but one possible "dichotomy", let's say, is whether love was an essence of the encounter or a surplus-enjoyment. To say that the potentiality of love is the essence of two people means that a person would stop talking to you if the potential for you to become their romantic partner would drop to zero. In other words, I can talk to a girl only for the sake of trying to make her my girlfriend, but once I realize that the probability of this tends to zero, I will cut contact with her. I argue that this was the exception before the internet - it was very hard to do this because people met by a shared context, they were not able to intentionally alienate themselves: you met your partner though a common circle of friends, at work, at school, through a shared interest, so even if they rejected you or something, you were still indirectly forced to have some contact/interaction with them. In those situations, I say that love is a "surplus-enjoyment": you have other reasons to chat up the other person other than the potential for love, and if love happens, it is a surplus, an "extra", a "bonus".

            Then came the rise of Facebook and other types of social media (Instagram, etc.) which made this "love as an essence" become easier: people put profile pictures, you could chat someone up just for that purpose and stop talking to them once you realize they are not interested in you, it is not worth it, etc. since you did not have any other things that tied you together. After social media, even later, came the rise of dating apps like Tinder who were designed to create addiction and short-term gratification: so now it's like Facebook but on steroids – on dating apps, we interact just for the sole purposes of creating a romantic relationship, and once the chances drop to zero, we abandon each other, and we cannot even pretend that we do not do this, like it was the case for Facebook and so on.

            Of course, even before long-distance communication, it was still possible to have social relationships just for the sole purpose of initiating a romantic relationship (pick-up artists, etc.), but it was way rarer, because you met most people through a shared context in which the essence was a different one. Now the balance is starting to shift and it’s becoming more the rule than the exception. I'm reminded a bit here as well of what Viktor Frankl had to say on the subject, the man who invented existential therapy: "It is the very pursuit of happiness that thwarts happiness." - he used to say, in regards to happiness and success, that you cannot gain it if you intentionally look for it, but you must have some sort of higher meaning or "purpose" and then let success and happiness come as a side-effect (as Zizek’s “surplus-enjoyment”). I wonder how much of this applies to love as well, whether you only find it when you do not look for it specifically.

            This dialectical reversal of essence and surplus-enjoyment is not only inherent to social relationships, it happens in most products that are sold on the capitalist “free” market and it is a process that Slavoj Zizek calls taking the substance out of substance. Examples: beer without alcohol, coffee without caffeine, soda without sugar, expensive watches that you can’t read the time from, smartphones that you can’t call from (“tablets”), etc. In each of these products, the essence and the surplus-enjoyment are reversed and what was formerly “the purpose” disappears and what was formerly “extra/bonus” is now “the new purpose”. If love is a commodity to be bought and sold under capitalism then we would expect it to behave like all these other products.

 

IV: OBJECTIFICATION AND OBJECT-ORIENTED PROGRAMMING

 

            To return back to my previous point, notice how the meaning of objectification changes under capitalism. To objectify someone involves the potential for abandonment. The “classic” form of objectification that has existed in previous economic systems as well is when you treat someone like what psychoanalysis calls a “part-object” – something that they possess (ex: a body part, clothing, wealth, propriety, etc.). To say statements like “I’m in a relationship with you just because of your money” or “I’m in a relationship with you just because you are fit” implies their negation: “If you lost your wealth, I would break up with you” or “If you gained weight, I would break up with you”. Hence, the close tie between objectification and (potential) abandonment.

            This sort of objectification is slowly getting replaced by a newer form, one that I may nickname meta-objectification, for a lack of a better word. Here, the person is not valued for a part-object that they possess, but for the potential of obtaining or generating a certain part-object: thus, they are abandoned not when they lose something current that they have, but once they lose the potential for obtaining it.

            Hence, let us return to the statement in the previous section: “I am talking to someone only for the purposes of initiating a romantic relationship, and once this probability drops to zero (ex: they find someone else), I will cut off all contact”. This is exactly what I mean by meta-objectification – the person is abandoned not once they lose something they currently have, but once they lose the potential of having or becoming something.

            It should be clear how this is an invention of capitalism – isn’t this the precise way in which the employer objectifies their worker? To say “I employed you only because you are able to produce surplus-value, and once you stop being able to work, you will be fired” is not to “classically” objectify them, but to meta-objectify them. To value someone only for their labor means not to value someone for something they currently have, but for the ability to produce or obtain something they could have. Better yet, it would be said that meta-objectification is not to value someone for something that they own, but for the potential to produce something that they will not own. The capitalist values the worker insofar that the worker can produce something that they could theoretically own but that they will deliberately not own, because it will be given to the employer.

            This relationship between employer and worker is the primordial relationship upon which all other relationships are based upon inside capitalism: to say that “I talk to you only for the chance that you might become my boyfriend/girlfriend and I wouldn’t have talked to you otherwise” means not to talk to someone for something that they own, nor for something they could potentially own, but for something they could potentially not-own, for the potentiality of “non-being”, for the potential that they could conform to my inner fantasy and ideal of what a “boyfriend” or “girlfriend” should be and behave like.

            In a sort-of ironical way, the tool upon which alienation is based (the internet, technology, etc.) is based on computer code, and exactly in computer code we find the same principles of alienation inside capitalism. What a coincidence!

            I will try to explain object-oriented programming in a simple way for the non-programmer. Object-oriented programming is a paradigm inside programming (a “way” to organize your code) based upon the concepts of classes and objects. Classes are abstract descriptions or “recipes” of what a certain piece of data should contain while objects are the actual instances of that class. For example I can have a class “car” which generally and abstractly describes what a car is/has (the class variables – car name, date of purchase, brand, model, engine power, price, etc.) as well as what a car does (the class methods: StartEngine(), StopEngine(), ChangeSpeed(), Accelerate(), SteerLeft(), SteerRight(), etc.). Then I can have multiple instances or objects of the car class: various, individual cars that are developed upon that general model.

            This provides a good analogy on the two forms of objectification. “Classical” objectification based upon part-objects means to treat someone like a programming object (an actual, individual, present “thing” someone has – for instance: an individual, actual car that exists). This “meta-objectification” inherent to capitalism is to treat someone like a programming class (an abstract set of rules describing how an object should look like and how it should be created in the first place): in other words, to meta-objectify someone means to value someone for the potential to turn into an object. The “car” class has the potential to create multiple objects of the ”car” type (multiple individual cars). The “worker” class has the potential to create multiple objects of type “surplus-value”, and so on…

            The slang that characterizes common concerns and anxieties in our relationships changed to accommodate this new form of “meta-objectification” created by the internet’s alienation. In the “classic” form of simple objectification, we try to stay clear of “gold diggers” or “men who only want one thing and it’s fucking disgusting”. In our era of technological alienation and meta-objectification, we are worried about “the friendzone”, or the opposite: people who pretend to be your friend only to get romantically/sexually involved later. The concern inside the era of meta-objectification is not concern about the content of a “class” (someone’s wealth, someone’s body parts like breasts and ass, other possessions), but the very abstract description of that “programming class”: the confusion stems from the tangling up of the very signifiers that we use to describe our relationships. People fight about how to define marriage in order to include or exclude sexual minorities, about how we should define a relationship in order to include or exclude polyamory and open relationships, they worry about the friend-zone, and so on. The anxieties reside at the “meta” level, the level of the signifiers that we use to label our relations in the first place (spouse, lover, friend, friend with benefits, “one-night stand”, etc.) – since, as I previously explained, alienation blurs the line between “people who you are close with” and “stranger who you are distant with”, so does it imply blurring the distinction between all relationship-signifiers (“labels”).

            It’s the same case when “sex” does not refer to “intercourse” but “man and woman”. Feminism inside early capitalism, dominated by simple/classic objectification, was concerned with the rights of individual women, about “individual objects of the woman class”, so to speak, to continue the analogy with programming. In late-stage capitalism, we worry not about individual, specific women, but the very definition of the word “woman” itself – so it is like a programmer who is changing the very definition of the classes themselves, not with the particular instances/objects of the class.

 

V: ECHO CHAMBERS AND THE “FREE-FLOATING” CONTEXT OF INTERNET SPACES

 

            Just like the essence/surplus distinction becomes either blurred or dialectically reversed when it comes to love-relationships, so it does in regards to political debate and discourse. The introduction of virtual spaces that people use for the sole purpose (“essence”) of finding a relationship (dating apps like Tinder) coincided with the introduction of virtual spaces that people use for the sole purpose (“essence”) of debating politics and other social issues. Just like it is becoming less common for people to treat love as a surplus-enjoyment (you interact with someone in a shared context for another reason – at work, school, etc. and if you fall in love it is a ”bonus” but not the main purpose of interaction), it is also way less common for people to treat debate as a surplus-enjoyment (you interact with someone in a shared context for another reason and if the conversation tends towards politics, you debate that too, even if that wasn’t the main purpose).

            The internet’s alienation has created “safe spaces” that are ideal for people with thin-skin who need protection from various forms of (physical or emotional) danger. Dating apps are a “safe space” for people, and especially women, in the sense that:

1.     The treat of physical violence is lower to non-existent

2.     You open and close the app whenever you want, so you can never be taken by surprise and you are always psychologically prepared for the interaction

3.     There is an increased ability to end the conversation abruptly, if you don’t like the person, without paying the price of the awkwardness in looking impolite if you were to do that in real-life

4.     Social anxiety and shyness is way lower since everyone is there for the same purpose, so it takes way less “balls” or “courage” to do it – there is way less uncertainty about people’s motives and you do not have to initiate a conversation in a separate context and have the job of changing the context/”mood” itself on your shoulders anymore (in other words, the dating app does “the first move” for you)

            So are echo-chambers similar “safe spaces” for political debate. You intentionally look for virtual spaces with people with the same political opinions as you, and the algorithm also recommends you videos and posts of things you already liked and watch, feeding into an infinite positive feedback loop. If dating apps protect you from “emotional damage” by reducing the anxiety in initiating a conversation as well as by reducing the pain in rejection (especially in the one doing the rejection), then echo chambers protect you from “emotional damage” by reducing the people who disagree with you or who hold other views that might “offend” you.

            As you can see, just like psychotherapy was one of the first “offline” empty contexts, so is the internet now full of virtual empty contexts, of virtual spaces that have specific, designated purposes – purposes that were almost exclusively a “surplus” in offline communication. Activities that produced enjoyment only in contexts where they weren’t the “main purpose” of being there (political banter in the break at work or school, dating and flirting in a context where you were there for something else, etc.) now produce “non-surplus” enjoyment (to use a play of words on Zizek’s recent book title) by being the essence of an empty virtual context created just for that purpose. Remember that the concept of “purpose” is inherently tied to the concept of “abandonment”, in the sense that if a social interaction loses its purpose/essence, you abandon it – a question for further research is: how does this alienating feature of capitalism and the internet modify the way in which fear of abandonment manifests in people diagnosed with various “disorders” (borderline personality disorder, etc.)?

            With echo chambers, again, we are not dealing with a separation of political views, but with an alienation. People who only spend time in echo chambers are not separated from people with other political views, they are alienated, because they still view the opinions of other political camps, just only through the “filter” of their political ideology. Leftist forums still post news and articles about popular right-wing takes and vice-versa, just biased articles that were already reviewed by a leftist/right-wing writer, respectively. With echo chambers, you are constantly exposed to the opinions of other people, but only after they were filtered with the confines of your own ideological biases, hence why we still speak of alienation and not separation. To make a visual analogy: you can imagine various echo chambers as different rooms in the same house that are separated by windows, and you can only view your political “opponents” through these windows – only that these are windows that distort the way in which you view what is behind them (they bend and shape the image behind the window).

           

“Digital communication redirects information flows in a way that undermines the democratic process. Information is distributed without passing through public spaces. It is produced in private spaces and is sent to private spaces. The internet is therefore not a public sphere. Social media intensifies this communication without community. Influencers and followers do not add up to a political public sphere. Digital communities are commodified forms of community. In reality they are commodities. They are incapable of acting politically.

(…)

On a meta-level, our crisis of communicative action can be explained by the fact that the other is disappearing. The disappearance of the other means the end of discourse. It robs opinions of their communicative rationality. The expulsion of the other strengthens the autopropagandistic compulsion to indoctrinate oneself with one’s own ideas. This self-indoctrination produces self-referential info bubbles, which impede communicative action. With the development of the auto-propagandistic compulsion, discursive spaces are increasingly replaced by echo chambers in which the only voice one hears is one’s own. Discourse presupposes that I can distinguish between my opinion and my identity. People who do not have this discursive ability hold fast to their opinions because they feel that their identities are threatened. Any attempt to persuade them to adopt a different opinion is therefore doomed to fail. They do not follow the other; they do not listen. Discourse, however, is a practice of listening. The crisis of democracy is first and foremost a crisis of listening.”

(Byung-Chul Han, “Infocracy – Digitalization and the crisis of democracy”, Chapter 3: The end of communicative action)

 

            The “freedom” to choose your own “suited” virtual space is a false freedom when you realize that the algorithms that are controlling those virtual spaces are tools of the private entity that is owning them, and thus, conform only to the rules of capital. The algorithm (regardless of whether it’s the algorithm of Reddit or of Tinder) will not give you what is best for you, it will give you whatever sells. There are no moral or ethical laws here, the only law is the law of supply and demand. If the dating app can get you addicted through variable-schedule reinforcement (the same psychological mechanism behind gambling addiction) then it will make more profit. If the Reddit or Youtube algorithm can get you “addicted to your own suffering” by giving opinions that offend you in a particular way, but not too much, it will do that. Whatever will get them most clicks.

            Hence why I bring this up again: the oppressive formula of late-stage capitalism is not “You will do whatever I say regardless of how you feel” (like it was the case in feudalism and maybe early capitalism), but “You will do what I say out of your own free will”. In capitalism, we are encouraged to “be ourselves”, to “follow our dreams”, and so on, in other words, to do whatever we want. The next step is for capital to change our desires (through marketing, advertisement, etc.) in order to give us a false sense of freedom. Capital is like a dictator that say “You can do whatever you want as long as I am the one controlling what you want”. Virtual “safe spaces” like dating apps and echo chambers are oppressive precisely because they give us what we want, because they activate that short-term gratification and tickle our short attention spans with a tiny hint of dopamine, leaving us addicted in the end.

            The privatization of all political discourse is a threat to democracy and freedom of speech as well. The idea that a few major corporations control major social media sites like Facebook, Reddit and Twitter implies that a few major corporations have control over the narrative and over the results of the next election. The argument “if you don’t like Twitter, you are always free to leave” does not work because social media has become such a large component of our lives that banning someone off of all social media is equivalent to banning someone from Town Square and telling them “If you don’t like the new rules of Town Square, you are always free to create your own Town Square”. The politically correct liberal-left argument that if you don't like a social platform that censors you, then you are always free to leave ("because it's a private corporation and it can do whatever it wants") is like the capitalist-employer right-wing argument that "If you don't like how your employer treats you, you are always free to quit your job and look for work somewhere else (and starve in the process)" - it does not take into account externalities such as the network effect or, more simply, that you are indirectly forced through the lack of alternatives.

 

VI: CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

 

            There is much more to say, including the role that priests and the church played between feudalism and capitalism, the priest as the precursor to the psychotherapist (“the first stranger you are close with”), the relationship between big data and the ruling ideological narrative, the relationship between the principles of capitalism and the four principles of object-oriented programming (encapsulation, inheritance, abstraction, polymorphism), the difference between smooth and striated spaces in Deleuze’s philosophy, the “be yourself” culture of faux authenticity, the online internet persona vs. the real-life persona, the commodification of love and the relationship between dating apps and the Lacanian “big Other”, etc. The article is getting long so I will leave the rest for the book (if I ever write it). I will end this with another quote by Byung-Chul Han:

 

“The influencers on YouTube and Instagram have internalized the neoliberal technologies of power. Whether they peddle travel, beauty or fitness, they constantly invoke freedom, creativity and authenticity. Their advertisements are not seen as annoying because the products are cleverly embedded in the influencers’ self-presentation. Whereas people use ad-blockers to remove conventional advertisements on YouTube, they intentionally seek out the influencers’ ads. Influencers are worshipped as idols, and this gives their presentations a religious character. Influencers claiming to be motivational coaches present themselves as saviours, and their followers, their disciples, take part in the influencers’ lives by buying the products the influencers pretend to consume in staged scenes from their everyday life – a kind of digital Eucharist. Social media is a church: like is ‘amen’; sharing is communion; consumption is salvation. The repetition that influencers use as a dramatic tool does not bore; rather, it gives the whole affair the character of a liturgy. At the same time, influencers present consumer products as means of self-realization. We consume ourselves to death while realizing ourselves to death. Consumption and identity become one. Identity itself becomes a commodity.

We imagine that we are free, but in reality our entire lives are recorded so that our behaviour might be psychopolitically controlled. Under the neoliberal information regime, mechanisms of power function not because people are aware of the fact of constant surveillance but because they perceive themselves to be free. Whereas Big Brother’s telescreen is untouchable, the smart touchscreen makes everything available and consumable. It thereby produces the illusion of a ‘freedom we have at our fingertips’. Under the information regime, being free does not mean being able to act but being able to click, like and post. For this reason, there is little resistance to the regime. It need not fear revolution. Fingers, by themselves, are not capable of genuine action. They are only an organ for making consumer choices. Consumption and revolution exclude each other.”

(ibid., Chapter 1: The Information Regime)