As the dot-com bubble expanded during the late 1990s, a cadre of cyber-utopian theorists extolled the emancipatory potential of the internet. Digital technology would foster communication and collaboration: its decentralized networks would evade hierarchical authorities, unlock creative energies and spread radical ideas, rendering a vast field of information accessible and transparent. The more people became connected, the more freedom and democracy would flourish. Yet twenty years on, the Web has failed to deliver on these fantasies. Critics like Astra Taylor have shown how its ‘tendency towards monopoly’ allows corporations to circumscribe our online activity, undermining the McLuhanite ideal of free expression. In step with her analysis, a number of recent titles—Jonathan Taplin’s Move Fast and Break Things (2017), Siva Vaidhyanathan’s Anti-Social Media (2018), Shoshana Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism (2019)—have railed against the growing power of the tech giants and its deleterious effect on democracy. The psychological impact of our collective screen-fixation has been studied by Nicholas Carr, Sherry Turkle and Jaron Lanier, whose joint verdict is damning: the internet does not build horizontal communities; it engenders addiction and distraction, destroys sociability, encourages narcissism and diminishes our capacity for rational thought. Our cognition will be stunted if we don’t learn to unplug.

But if one writer is to put the final nail in the technophilic coffin, there is perhaps no better candidate than Richard Seymour. Raised in a dreary unionist stronghold on the outskirts of Belfast, Seymour moved to London in 1996, where he wrote his doctoral thesis on white supremacy in Cold War-era America. Since then he has pursued what he describes as his ‘dream of unemployment’. In the early 2000s he established a popular blog called Lenin’s Tomb—featuring sharp, often blisteringly polemical essays on a range of political issues—and became involved with the Socialist Workers Party, from which he eventually resigned in protest over its cover-up of rape allegations against a leading member. His previous books include eloquent takedowns of David Cameron and Christopher Hitchens, as well as an extensive study of Corbynism that aimed to counter ‘wishful thinking’ about the movement’s long-term prospects. In 2015, Seymour’s disdain for false optimism and disillusionment with groupuscule politics moved him to co-found Salvage, a quarterly journal of socialist commentary whose distinctive aesthetic—based on edgy, self-aware cynicism—is summed up by its tagline: ‘bleak is the new red’. In his latest work, Seymour turns this disenchantment on the miasma of social media, excoriating the belief that Twitter—defined as ‘the world’s first ever public, live, collective, open-ended writing project’—will instigate positive political change or democratize the means of communication. Following Taylor and Taplin, The Twittering Machine argues that this digital platform is irredeemably reactionary—that the consciousness it ingrains is indicative of a political toxicity that should dissuade the left from overestimating its value as an organizing vehicle or propaganda tool.

Seymour begins by asserting that the incredible popularity of the Twittering Machine (his shorthand for the online social industry) testifies to the degradation of social life under late capitalism. In his view, the basic function of Twitter and Facebook is remedial—to provide a stand-in for communities destroyed by decades of neoliberal rule—which means that digital platforms must be understood as a kind of dream-world: a site of instantaneous wish-fulfilment where we can retreat from the contemporary realities of hardship and isolation. Social media promises the limitless reign of the pleasure principle, and this fantasmal quality is what enchants techno-utopians. When they laud its capacity to connect people, this invariably attests to some failure of real interpersonal relationships; when they idealize its transcendence of the material world, this suggests an inability to tolerate that world, and a depletion of the will to change it. ‘Where society was missing’, writes Seymour, ‘the network would substitute’, constructing a shadowy ‘simulacrum’ populated by our innermost desires.

These desires—which can be expressed by actions as involuntary as hovering over an advertisement—are subsequently translated into data, which is bought by companies seeking to control our consumer choices (or influence our voting habits, as with Cambridge Analytica). ‘We write to the machine, it collects and aggregates our desires and fantasies, segments them by market demographic and sells them back to us as a commodity experience.’ The porous boundary between digital platforms and the unconscious allows capitalists to penetrate the psyche, turning its libidinous impulses into marketable products. Yet Seymour detects a contradiction in the Twittering Machine’s articulation of these subterranean energies. On the one hand, what we get out of social media reflects what we put in: the machine works like a mirror, or an echo chamber. But through this circular process our digital writing is simultaneously expropriated from us: when we post a tweet it ‘acquires a life of its own’, defying its author’s intentions, attaching itself to related text clusters, summoning responses and affecting the macro-calculations that data analysts use to measure and manipulate behaviour. In this sense, the online avatar—the body of writing which represents a person in cyberspace—is at once an intimate portrait (expressing desires so private that the user herself may be unaware of them) and an alienated one.

Seymour claims that this dialectic of intimacy and alienation gives Twitter an ‘uncanny’ atmosphere. A social-media profile reflects the idiosyncrasies of its creator, while also leading a strange, autonomous existence in which it is the plaything of corporate interests. And it is this tension, between the avatar as personal profile and as depersonalized proxy, that explains the platform’s abhorrent political climate. As Seymour observes, the Twitter user is mostly cut off from society—solitary, hunched over her computer screen, tailoring her digital identity and honing her ‘personal brand’. But she is concurrently participating in a mass collectivization of sentiment, as her tweets join with others (through threads, hashtags and trending topics) to form an ‘omnidirectional wrecking ball’ for which no single tweeter need take responsibility. The result of these collective outpourings, in which chaotic groupthink overrides the user’s conscience, is widespread harassment and abuse; as one popular Twitter mantra has it, ‘None of us is as cruel as all of us’. Thus, the antinomies of isolated individualism—a Foucauldian ‘entrepreneurship of the self’—and an anonymous ‘lynch mob’ mentality coexist in the Twittersphere. Users move between narcissistic self-promotion and ‘ecstatic collective frenzy’, in an oscillation which confines political discourse to vain virtue-signalling and bullying moralism.

Because it is a public platform, anyone on Twitter ‘can suddenly be selected for demonstrative punishment’ should they affront this labile mob. Seymour argues that the constant awareness of this possibility creates a ‘panopticon effect’ which enforces intellectual conformity, undercutting the claim that social media stimulates vibrant discussion. In place of solidarity amongst oppressed groups, the petty-bourgeois identity politics inculcated by Twitter’s individualizing technology boxes users into hermetic cultural categories in which they spend hours detecting and censuring political incorrectness. More importantly, however, it is this sense of being watched that makes Twitter so addictive. Every time a tweet is published, its reception—quantified in reshares and responses—either validates or reproaches its author. ‘In telling the machine something about ourselves, whatever else we’re trying to achieve, we are asking for judgement.’ For Seymour, tweeting is gambling: priming oneself for spectacular victory or crushing defeat. But, he reminds us, gambling addiction is not sustained by ‘positive reinforcement’: it is not a matter of ‘winning’ often enough to make the game worthwhile; rather, ‘everyone who places a bet expects to lose’. On Twitter we can never ‘beat the house’, never elicit an adequate number of likes to rescue our ailing self-esteem, and it is this pattern of perpetual, guaranteed failure that gets us desperately hooked. In the Twittering Machine’s ceaseless condemnation we find a ‘God’: a Big Other, an accusatory superego which highlights our inadequacy. And, to the delight of the data collectors, we cannot look away.

Our compulsion to call forth this digitized judgement is, Seymour’s account, an expression of the death drive. The practice of online self-promotion exhibits a will to annihilation, evidenced by the tragic teenage suicides associated with social-media use. To explain this morbid phenomenon, Seymour cites Rana Dasgupta’s work on celebrity culture, which asserts that to be a celebrity is to be ‘always-about-to-die’. When the celebrity projects her glossy public image outward, she launches an unconscious attack on her inner life, which is gradually eroded and replaced with a mirage. Celebritization is a form of self-harm that atrophies one’s authentic identity to cultivate a hollow and commodified substitute. With the advent of social media, this condition has been diffused on a gigantic scale. Millions of people (especially school-age children) are now engaged in a frantic drive for followers and fans, inflating the online avatar at the expense of the everyday self. The narcissism promoted by the Twittering Machine is an exceedingly ‘fragile’ variety which, upon close scrutiny, looks indissociable from masochism.