Compatibility, the paradox of intimacy, political correctness and woke capitalism in the era of the INTERNET

 

I: INTRODUCTION AND RECAP

 

            This article serves as a sequel to my previous article about the internet’s effect on our social lives which addressed issues regarding alienation, fear of abandonment, surplus-enjoyment and objectification. This is a “part 2” in which I try to address the issues of compatibility and political correctness and their relationship to the internet, as well as return with some new insights on psychological distance and this dialectic of privacy/intimacy. Reading the first part is not absolutely necessary to understanding this one, but would still be beneficial.

            To sum up the main points of the first article:

1.     The internet is a technological product of late-stage capitalism whose function is to increase alienation. Alienation is not the same thing as separation. Two people/groups who are separated have no contact. Two people/groups who are alienated are “close at a distance” and “far when they are close”. The internet allows us to keep in touch even when physically we are very far apart.

2.     This alienating function had massive consequences in our understanding of privacy, intimacy and psychological distance. Issues that are “private” (sex life, mental health, childhood traumas, etc.) are those that we do not share with strangers, but only with people who we are “close” with. We do not trust strangers, so we can not share intimate details with them, because if something goes wrong, we will be forced to interact with them. The internet warped this dialectic because we can now meet strangers on the internet and open up within the first minutes of talking to them about extremely personal stuff, because in case something goes wrong, we can just stop talking to them and nothing in our life changes. This is how alienation, “intimacy/privacy” and abandonment are all three inherently linked.

3.     The internet creates empty virtual contexts that are created for a particular purpose, a purpose which has before the internet almost always been a “side-effect” or “consequence” of a context for another purpose. Two examples I gave were political echo chambers and dating apps. Political discussions and the formation of romantic relationships, before the internet, were usually started in context/situations in which you were there for another purpose, and their initiation was only a “bonus”. We see a reversal between purpose and side-effect/bonus in internet spaces. These spaces also function as “safe spaces” in which people can be way less inhibited because of the following reasons (and more): decreased consequences for inadequate behavior, decreased consequences for abandoning the entire context (virtual chatroom, in this case), decreased likelihood of being taken by surprise by the other (and therefore higher predictability, you can mentally prepare yourself before opening up your phone, etc.).

4.     Instead of thinking about our internet friends as our online therapists, we should instead think of the psychotherapist as “the first internet friend”. Psychotherapy was the first “empty context” established just for a certain purpose, and you can open up to a stranger so quickly about extremely personal stuff precisely because you can abandon them if something goes wrong, with minimal consequences upon your life.

 

II: THE ANTINOMY OF INTIMACY AND “COMPATIBILITY” AS AN IDEOLOGICAL CATEGORY

 

In the Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant noted down four “antinomies” of reason: paradoxes inherent to logical reasoning itself that result from taking an abstract concept and “pushing it to the logical limit” until you reach two contradictory conclusions about reality (metaphysics) or knowledge (epistemology). For example: the universe is both finite and infinite in space and time.

Later German idealist philosophers, like Georg Hegel, would later take up these antinomies and further develop their philosophy of the transcendental, the absolute, etc. Kant’s antinomies were Hegel’s main inspiration for his theory of the dialectic. To quote Beiser:

 

“For all his agreement with Kant, Hegel differed from him on several crucial points. First, he criticized Kant for discovering only four antinomies; in his view, there are many such contradictions, which are omnipresent in reason. Second, Hegel also drew very different lessons from the antinomies. They show not that the understanding must remain within the confines of the finite, but that it must go beyond the finite. They show that the understanding is self-transcending, that it destroys of necessity its own limitations and goes beyond them.”

(Frederick Beiser, “Hegel”, Chapter 7: The Dialectic)

 

Kant’s antinomies, and Hegel’s theory of the dialectic, were my main inspiration to deduce the fact that relationships and social interaction in themselves are also full of such “inherent contradictions” and I set up a task for myself to discover as many as possible. I argue that each economic system (feudalism, capitalism, etc.) as well as each of their “sub-stages” has a different way of orienting humans around these antinomies. I will present only one in this article: the antinomy of intimacy. It goes as follows:

“On one hand, I need to know intimate/personal details about someone in order to decide if I want to get close to them (thesis). On the other hand, I need to first be close to them in order for us to be comfortable to even share those details in the first place (antithesis).”

Before the rise of the internet, this was the main problem in all relationships, especially romantic relationships. On one hand, I need to know intimate and personal details about the other person (sexual preferences, personal problems, etc.) in order to know whether I want to get close to them or not in the first place, but on the other hand, I need to first get close to them in order for us to have these conversations in the first place. The tragic predicament was that the two people would meet, they would get attached to each other or even fall in love, and only after they fell in love, they would discover the incompatibilities in regards to the very personal stuff. The irony is also that the more personal something is, the more important it is for compatibility. Then, love became less of a manner of finding compatibility and more of a manner of how to manage or find a way to live with unforeseen compatibility.

The solution before the internet, in typical Freudian fashion, was a “compromise formation” based on interpretation. I cannot know intimate details about a person’s life because we are still strangers, so they will not share personal stuff with strangers (by definition of “personal stuff”), and therefore, I must find a way to guess. Pop-psychology was full of shitty ways of interpretation (“if they tie their shoes this way it means this about their sexual preferences”) and the main paradigm in academic (“serious”) psychology was psychoanalysis which was fundamentally based on interpretation in psychotherapy (none of the patient’s speech is taken at face value, instead we try to find the “deeper meaning” behind someone’s words in the unconscious).

So was this “compatibility” signifier a pure ideological category subjected to changes in the material conditions of society. Before the alienating function of the internet, compatibility was again a product of some sort of interpretation, not of communication. All popular typologies came with a promise for assessing “compatibility” between two people based on their personality type: horoscope/zodiac signs, MBTI, Socionics, etc.

The internet’s alienating “safe spaces” allow us the opportunity to open up to strangers we have just met, and therefore compatibility is now put on a pedestal, elevated to the status of not just any signifier, but a master-signifier around which everything else revolves around – relationships are now fully immersed in the consumerist, objectifying logic of compatibility, and are no more a manner of how to manage incompatibility. The status of this word is the status of a master-signifier because it is no longer “below in hierarchy”, submitted by a “superior” signifier (such as “interpretation”). Before the internet, society saw a last desperate attempt at keeping the “compatibility” signifier in the “chains” of another signifier, so to speak, that signifier being interpretation. That is, interpretation decides compatibility, not the other way around. The internet now allows us the possibility of no inhibitions and no resistance to strangers we just met, and therefore, it is not that compatibility is a product of some other, “higher” signifier, but it is that other signifiers now are the “tool” or “object” of compatibility. It is compatibility that “decides” other things (including interpretation), not interpretation that decides compatibility (even if it’s a shitty interpretation, like zodiac signs or trying to guess someone’s sexual fetishes based on how they tie their shoes).

The logic of compatibility perfectly fits the consumerist attitude of late-stage capitalism. People are no longer free subjects that can decide their own characteristics, they have certain pre-existing essential characteristics that they cannot change, and thus they are obliged not to become themselves but to “be themselves”. This slogan, to “be yourself” is ideology at its purest in its attempt to mask prohibition (“you should be yourself” = “you are not allowed to be someone who you are not” = “you have a pre-existing mold you have to fit in that you cannot change”) as emancipation, giving the subject the illusion of free will. Compatibility and “be yourself” go hand-in-hand: other human subjects are products on a market, they have certain proprieties and you must rationally and “logically” choose who to marry based on those characteristics. Anyone else who “is not themselves” is inauthentic and fake, they are not sharing private details about their life that you would not share with strangers (under normal circumstances) and thus they are hiding something. If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. The rise of compatibility is the death of privacy.

The death of privacy in the realm of intimate relationships mirrors the death of privacy in the political level. Long gone are the days of forced surveillance, like the KGB in the Soviet Union (or “Securitate”, or other equivalents for each country) and its collaborators, in which you fear that you might be spied upon and listened to, trying very hard to avoid this possibility. The trick of late-stage capitalism is to convince the subject to oppress themselves by their own free will. Surveillance is sold to us as a product that we must pay for, and we are obliged to enjoy it as well (the infamous super-ego “compulsion to enjoy” of Lacanian psychoanalysis), this surveillance monitoring us constantly, recording the data and selling it without us getting our money back.

Socialist economist Yanis Varoufakis makes a very great point when he says that the alienation between worker and capital is at its maximum in late-stage capitalism (what he calls “techno-feudalism”, in which the entire digital market (Amazon marketplace, Facebook marketplace, etc.) is owned by one single individual): before the internet, you would go to work, be exploited, and come home and take a break from the exploitation. Now, your labor is being sold 24/7 by the selling of your data, and therefore, by your very everyday life, you are constantly being profited upon without getting the fruits of this labor (for example, you are contributing to Google Maps data by the sheer fact that you walk around with your phone in your pocket – all the profit goes to Google).

Our public personas have seen dramatic shifts with the rise of the internet. In online spaces, the persona is “thinner” in written/verbal communication and “thicker” in visual communication. That is, there is way less inhibition or “bullshit” in what you say, but way more “bullshit” and filter in how you present your looks/appearance (think of the difference between real-life and online dating). You can view the evolution of the online persona with the evolution of social media websites. The ultimate point of this commodification of the privacy/intimacy dialectic is in the newly created “BeReal” mobile app. The idea is that you may be doing anything - outside, at school, at the mall, at work, at home, maybe you're in the shower, maybe you’re taking a shit, maybe you’re having sex, this app gives you a two-minute interval in which you have to take a picture of whatever you were doing at that exact moment and share it with your other friends on that platform. There is no other reward, no "catch", people use it just for the sake of it.

These are the master-signifiers of late-stage “virtual/digital” capitalism: authenticity, “be yourself”, “be real”, “compatibility”, “communication”, etc. It is the final version of the oppressive message of mass surveillance “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear”. In this case: “You will be spied on, and you will enjoy it!”.

 

III: THE EGO-IDEAL: POLITICAL CORRECTNESS, EROTICISM AND SURPLUS-ENJOYMENT

 

      Any social context has a certain set of unwritten rules deciding communication. By context, I am referring to the reunion between three things:

1.     The (physical or virtual) space of communication

2.     The people who you communicate with

3.     The history of all the previous conversations inside the current space and/or with the current people

The meaning of a message inside language changes depending on context. The “meta-rules” for how to change the interpretation of a sign inside a context are usually followed unconsciously by most people. When people say that “I don’t think when I socialize, I go by vibes, but what feels right”, these vibes and gut feelings are precisely the product of the unconscious. In doing so, our entire personality changes depending on context. This is what Jung discovered with his concept of the persona, that we have different “masks” we put on depending on the situation in which we are in, but his mistake is that he was not radical enough (relevant reading on this topic).

Not only does the meaning change qualitatively, but also quantitatively in terms of affective intensity. How “intense” a message is changes depending on context. The difference between playful flirting and creepy sexual harassment, for instance, depends on context. The exact same phrase that you could very well say in a club or pub might get you a slap on the face in a library. Sometimes, it can be a conscious and intentional decision to shape the “intensity” of our words (and thus, the content of our “persona”/mask) in order to adjust to the context, but usually we do it unconsciously (ex: we just “feel” when a remark is inappropriate or rude in a circumstance, a remark that we would usually make in another circumstance).

The zero-point threshold that “sets the bar” for this “limit” is what Jacques Lacan called the ego-ideal. Anything under the ego-ideal, and you get a feeling of craving or emptiness, that you must have done or said “more”. If you are right on the ego-ideal, you are at the “neutral” point of homeostasis. Anything over the ego-ideal and you produce what Lacan called surplus-enjoyment, an intense feeling that is usually a mix of pleasure and pain (“jouissance”, in French).

If there is one lesson that we must remember from Freudian psychoanalysis is that there is no eroticism without some sort of prohibition. Sexuality can not be “liberated” in the true sense that we have certain desires that society prohibits us from expressing, and only if society would be more permissive then we would be “free”. Quite the opposite, the lesson of psychoanalysis is that sexuality is a byproduct of the very act of repression itself. What makes something “kinky” or “sexy” is precisely that it is at least slightly “wrong” or that it breaks some sort of taboo. If everything is permitted, then there is no eroticism. Eroticism is a form of surplus-enjoyment, it is precisely that subtle art of trying to go over the threshold set by the ego-ideal, but just a tiny bit. If you cross the limit of the ego-ideal too much, you are a jerk, an asshole, creepy or even engaging in sexual harassment. If you don’t cross it enough, it is just plain boring with no effect.

This threshold of the ego-ideal is decided by context, as I said. Before the internet, real-life contexts would usually provide a linear measure between psychological distance and the ego-ideal: the more you know a person for, the higher the ego-ideal is and therefore you can “say more” or “be more direct” without the fear of being creepy or crossing the line. The real question is now – what are the unwritten rules of the internet? Can we even speak of such a thing? In real-life we often socialize by “vibes” and “gut feelings” where we “just know” if something is right to say or not – does the same hold true for the internet, and if yes, what replaces facial expressions and body language?

I argue that in online spaces, the bar of the ego-ideal is set way higher. Therefore, it is the space of permissiveness and lack of inhibitions. Not all online spaces are equal however, the ego-ideal is proportional to expectations. That is, the more people expect you to say something, the less of a surprise it is when someone actually says it, and therefore, the less likely it is that it “crosses the limit”. Online dating is the best example of this. The already-present function to decrease inhibitions in social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram is taken to the extreme in dating apps such as Tinder: since there is an expectation inherent to the very purpose of the app, there is less inhibition. A random example: most people would consider it a bit rude or at least confusing to find out that you’re going to have a new classmate next semester that you will see in real-life soon, find them on Facebook first and ask them their height during the first conversation. Not on Tinder, there, you implicitly give your consent to be “probed for compatibility” and thus it is “normal” to ask a man’s height after you just met him. All expectations are circular (because the ego-ideal is circular and self-referential in Lacanian psychoanalysis): people expect others to be asked their height because people are more likely to ask their height on a dating app, and people are more likely to ask the other’s height because they are expected to, ad infinitum. This is a positive feedback loop.

The very idea of a space/context designed for the sole purposes of dating and nothing else perfectly fits the consumerist logic of the “compatibility” master-signifier. Offline, the main problem is that you might “cross the limit” (of the ego-ideal) too much, resulting in creepiness, sexual harassment, etc. Offline interaction is viewed as prohibited, you must be careful not to say too much, etc. Online interaction is the other side of this: the problem is not that you said too much, but that it is always too little, it is never enough. This is the main logic behind addiction. If you have a context designed for the very purposes of, say, dating, and especially if it’s a “safe space” protected by the fact that you’re behind a screen, the feeling produced is that you are too often below the limit of the ego-ideal, that you can never say something so provocative and shocking that it’s creepy, quite the opposite, there is no taboo, there is nothing that is “wrong”, and therefore, there is no eroticism. Sexuality is “beyond the pleasure principle”, like Freud said, it is the product of breaking a prohibition, of going over the limit “just a tiny bit”. Everything is permitted on a dating app, so there is no eroticism. It is just a plain-old consumerist, cold and “business-like” transaction. The feeling produced is not embarrassment or shock (as when you cross the limit too much or act “creepy”), but instead, the feeling of always being under the limit is the feeling of emptiness, a constant craving that you are not quite there but that you “are close” to that sweet ego-ideal (“chasing the high”). This is designed to create addiction and to keep you on the app. Therefore, the mechanisms of addiction inherent to online dating are not only the behaviorist “variable-schedule reinforcement” that is also present in gambling addiction. To this we add the feeling of emptiness produced by the very fact that they are too permissive.

So, we have two mechanisms designed to keep you addicted, to keep you in “chasing the high”: variable-schedule reinforcement and all-out permissiveness, both combined. This is only a logical consequence of the profit-incentive of dating apps (which by the way, are almost all owned by the same mega-corporation), to design a system that would keep you in continuing to use the app, not to get in you in a long-term relationship and then stop using their app.

To recap: the ego-ideal is the bar or “limit” that creates surplus-enjoyment one you cross it. Contexts like work or the church have a very low ego-ideal, there the fear is that you might say “too much” and go “over the limit”, and there is an expectation in those spaces for you to not do something. Contexts like bars and clubs have a more or less “neutral” ego-ideal: there is no expectation for you to flirt or to not flirt with anybody in particular. To this we add dating apps: not only that there is an expectation for you to not date, or no expectation, but there is an expectation for you to date, and therefore, the problem is not that you will be above, but that you will always be below the ego-ideal. To use a play of words on Zizek’s famous book: if at work there is always something “off” or “wrong” about dating, and in clubs and pubs there is “nothing” wrong, then on dating apps it is less than nothing wrong.

The ego-ideal is analogous to the concept of “tolerance” in drug-addiction. If you consume a quantity of the drug below your “biological ego-ideal”, you feel withdrawal symptoms. If you consume exactly the ego-ideal, you feel nothing or “normal”.  If you consume a bit over the ego-ideal, you feel high. If you consume too much over the ego-ideal, you overdose. The metaphorical equivalent for a dating app is like if love was a drug and no matter how much you’d consume, it would still not be enough, you would constantly feel withdrawal symptoms.

We see the same logic of the ego-ideal not only in seduction but also in the art of playfully making fun of your friends. It is the subtle art of crossing the limit set by the ego-ideal, but only by a tiny bit. If you cross the limit too much, you are rude, an asshole, etc. If you don’t cross it, you are just boring. The difference between a rude remark and playful teasing is determined by the ego-ideal which itself is determined by context. Online contexts are contexts with a very high bar for the ego-ideal, and thus, there are little to no inhibitions here as well: you wouldn’t have in real-life the heated arguments you have in online comment sections.

It is from this premise that we can understand real-life political correctness as simply “the return of the repressed”, in psychoanalytic logic, in the same way that in psychoanalysis the repression of some content of consciousness in the unconsciousness is always simultaneous with the “return of the repressed” as a symptom to replace it. This is the properly Marxist/materialist way to view political correctness: as a symptom of the material conditions of society, not as simply a bad idea that someone has, that initial person telling their friends who themselves told their friends and so on (like most conservatives assume)… My theory is this: the higher the ego-ideal is set online, the lower the ego-ideal is set in real life. Thus, political correctness is “when the pendulum swings back”. The permissiveness and lack of inhibitions created by online, virtual “safe spaces” creates people with a thin skin who become hyper-sensitive when the context changes. Hence the dialectical tensions inherent in society as such: on one hand we have extreme permissiveness in online political debates, on the other hand everyone is offended at any disagreement offline. On one hand we have very little inhibitions in online dating, on the other hand any flirting is sexual harassment offline.

Marx was right in properly noting that culture is driven by market forces. Ideas, beliefs and political ideologies are another commodity to be bought and sold. The ideology of radical feminism is nothing but a product of the market forces, since it is profitable. Economic “right-wing” libertarianism (Mises, Hayek, etc.) takes some out of context examples of what the state/government did wrong and generalizes to the black-and-white conclusion that we should abandon government intervention in the economy altogether. So does so-called “progressive” or “feminist” social libertarianism love to take a few examples of bad social skills and generalize into thinking that we should drop a certain type of social interaction altogether (ex: a few creepy pick-up artists get popular => pick-up artists shouldn’t exist => approaching women on the street is harassment in general). The subtle agenda that is pushed by radical feminism is that any sort of dating shall be prohibited as too “offensive”, “harassing” or “violent” unless we have a designated online “safe space” for the sole purposes of doing only that. If you label any sort of “unwanted” approach as sexual harassment, then it only logically follows that the only “non-creepy” approach is one in which the other person implicitly gives their consent by logging into the dating app. And who would profit more from this if not the mega-corporations owning dating apps like Tinder, Bumble, etc.? We see here the worst combination of ideological and corporate oppression, then it is no surprise that apps like Bumble try to seem as “woke” as possible, to cater to the same ideology that drives their profits up (a sort of indirect “lobbying” so to speak). Thus, political correctness is nothing more than woke capitalism.