Photo by Kat Jayne
Social media is messy: a raucous collision of strident opinions, banal brunch pictures, trolls, nudes, reactionaries, revolutionaries, memes and boomers credulously reposting chain letters. This mess is part of the appeal. That’s what drew billions of users to these platforms. Yet we also hate the mess. Many of us even want to clean it up. Whether through shaming, dogpiling, doxing or some other tactic of social excision, a growing number of people have been pressing for the cleansing of the inherently messy spaces of the internet. Social media mobs all seem motivated by a need to purify.
Purity is a curious concept: defined by what it isn’t, characterised by absence, not presence. It is the state of being clear of dirt, pathogens and other undesirable stuff, untouched, uncorrupted. There are many practices and rituals associated with keeping treasured objects free from impurity and pollution.
In her book Purity and Danger, Mary Douglas argues that dirt is matter out of place. Pollution is not a matter of fixed attributes (dirt, soil and sand, for example, are not pollutants in themselves) but a matter of context (soil on your plate is dirty; soil in the garden is not). Purity is not a wholly religious phenomenon, as Douglas shows: we are just as concerned with purity in secular contexts, such as medicine, psychology and law. Pollution is an encounter with something that is in a place where it shouldn’t be:
In a chaos of shifting impressions, each of us constructs a stable world in which objects have recognisable shapes, are located in depth, and have permanence. In perceiving, we are building, taking some cues and rejecting others. The most acceptable cues are those which fit most easily into the pattern that is being built up. Ambiguous ones tend to be treated as if they harmonised with the rest of the pattern. Discordant ones tend to be rejected.
Julia Kristeva took Douglas’ ideas further, arguing that rituals of purification are inherently about the abject, which crosses borders, destabilising the boundaries between self and other, subject and object. The abject is often associated with—though not limited to—bodily fluids such as excrement, blood, pus, urine, semen and so forth. These things exist within us, but, once they pass beyond the body, they become monstrous and disgusting because they disturb our sense of system, order and civilisation:
[the abject is] radically separate, loathsome. Not me. Not that. But not nothing either. A “something” I do not recognise as a thing … on the edge of nonexistence and hallucination, of a reality that, if I acknowledge it, annihilates me. There, abject and abjection are my safeguards. The primers of my culture.
For Kristeva, then, purification usually involves avoiding or ejecting the abject. However, the predominance of digital culture complicates Douglas’ claims about “stable worlds” and Kristeva’s notion of the process of abjection. The internet surmounts physical and data processing limitations, to connect people and worldviews. National, physical and emotional borders are all breaking down. Worlds no longer hold stable, but the concern with purity remains.
When Web 2.0 emerged, many net utopians claimed that the internet offered a purer version of the marketplace of ideas, where people could be exposed to other worldviews, without the filters of traditional media. It has not turned out this way. Information and viewpoints are increasingly accessed through social media and search engines like Google, where these ideas are tailored to one’s existing commitments. These “filter bubbles,” as Eli Pariser calls them, “serve up a kind of invisible autopropaganda, indoctrinating us with our own ideas, amplifying our desire for things that are familiar and leaving us oblivious to the dangers lurking in the dark territory of the unknown.”
The filter bubble theory perhaps too heavily leans on a model of online navigation based on searching. But so much navigation on social media is based on scrolling. Often, we see things we don’t want or need to see. The algorithmic economy of social media relies on a certain amount of randomisation: you need to see things you haven’t seen before in order to provide data for engagement measurements that can be used for future advertising. The attention economy strategy par excellence, after all, is the clickbait article: the larger the number of clicks through the site, the greater the chance that users will be convinced to buy the advertised products that subsidise it.
But, increasingly, mere clicks are not enough. Ours is now an economy of reaction. Instead of simply clicking through to the latest bromide or banality—themselves often a reaction to something—we are increasingly encouraged to offer our own thoughts, feelings and opinions on the matter. We’re all reacting to reactions to reactions. The constant demand for liking, sharing, upvoting, retweeting and favouriting depends on an implicit moral framework centred on the seemingly unending self-expression of autonomous subjects always primed to react. This process of interpersonal communication ultimately serves the continuation of platform capitalism, which operates according to a logic of constant evaluative reactivity.
In such a system, the user is pandered to, encouraged to think of her perspective and vision as pure. Although dystopian and circumspect narratives about social media abound, there persists a celebratory idea that such communication technologies are democratic because they give everyone a voice, in accordance with the anarchic dreams of the net utopians, who hoped to bypass traditional media gatekeepers. But, in practice, the affordances of social media are much more banal. It gives people greater capacity to voice their opinions in public. Everyone has opinions—what an innovative insight!
The platitude that the internet is giving everyone a voice sounds empowering, but the idea also unwittingly celebrates atomisation because those millions of voices speaking their truths serve the reaction economy. This situation has rarely produced political change. From #metoo to the Arab Spring, political movements on social media have tended to fizzle out because, as Byung-Chul Han has argued, social media produces swarm movements, rather than mass movements.
The digital swarm, Hang claims, is a highly volatile pattern of collective movement. This movement differs from the sort of collective organising that enabled twentieth-century political change:
Organized labor is not a matter of fleeting patterns; it consists of enduring formations … only when a crowd is resolute about shared action does power arise. The mass is power. In contrast, digital swarms lack such resolve. They do not march. Because of their fleeting nature, no political energy wells up. By the same token, online shitstorms prove unable to call dominant power relations into question. Instead, they strike individual persons, whom they unmask or make an item of scandal.
Han’s critique of shitstorms (his term for social media mobbing) shows how outrage has been crowdsourced and decentralised via the mechanism of the digital swarm, which is a highly atomised form of collective. Han’s account is avowedly pessimistic, but insightful because it highlights how volatile, leaderless and amorphous political action and censure on social media tend to be. Such forms of organisation are too ad hoc to be anything other than politically inchoate. Such shitstorms bubble up and dissipate quickly, and—perhaps because they primarily occur on social media, where a particular idea of the individual is reinforced—the targets of such outrage tend to be individuals too. Han seems to be on to something here.
The shitstorm is aptly named. It does very little other than cause a mess and create a pungent stench that sticks to certain individuals. Ironically, in our attempts to clean up the inherent messiness of social media, lots of us are pointlessly flinging shit at each other.
Most social media platforms are designed for persons, not people. This distinction is not merely semantic. Under the guise of collectivist verbs like sharing and networking, social media privileges comfortable navigation of its platform, with a highly individualised subject in mind. But the social is not comfortable. Living with and alongside people is hard work. Social media makes one believe that it is as easy as flicking on your phone and sharing your thoughts. And to some extent it is. But being social isn’t just about putting things out there and offering up your voice: it is about the exchange of voices, it is about the risks to your self-conception when you encounter the other. Social media actually hinders the work required to be social. It’s less social and more me-dia, because it reinforces a moral and political model of a precious self, which must be protected from societal forces.
The desire for moral hygiene on social media, expressed through the many behaviours associated with cancel culture and shitstorms, is merely the logical extension of the pure self imagined at the heart of the reaction economy. Facebook asks you what’s on your mind? Twitter asks you what’s happening? Instagram invites reactions to your visual world: brunch, selfies, cityscapes, gym photos, stories about what you’re doing to which others can respond.
Regardless of whether the platform is visually based or not, you must be seen on social media. The more you express, the more you serve the needs of the platforms. Your preferences and passions are both demanded and shaped by this system. You are encouraged to produce content of value and to assess the value of everyone else’s content, thus contributing to the system and to the culture of the reaction economy. When you contribute free expressive labour to these systems, the reaction economy is making work you like a starving artist, while promoting the idea that you are a monarch in your own little corner of the internet.
You are the kind of sovereign who is both indulged and manipulated and thus manipulated through indulgence. In the solipsistic free-for-all of the reaction economy, outrage endures. Because a pure self can only react, a pure self cannot be self-reflective or engage with threatening ideas, a pure self must not risk the pollution of the social. Most damningly, because purity is only ever the lack of something, a pure self is a self in pursuit of its own emptiness.
3 comments
Pundits and critics often blame the Internet for spreading credulity, quackery, bigotry, pseudo-science, conspiracy-mongering, fake news, and junk information. They see it as a forum for racists, religious bigots, conspiracy nuts, cultists, unbalanced fringe religious fanatics, pseudo-scientists, health and medical quacks, and assorted cranks, crazies, and crackpots. They lament its lack of gatekeepers to help naive inquirers distinguish fact from fiction, gold from garbage. However, we should recall that books, pamphlets, newspapers, and magazines have been doing the exact same thing for centuries–and radio and television for decades, to say nothing of public lavatory graffiti! Computer technology has simply made it easier and more convenient for the cranks, cultists, quacks, and misinformation-mongers to reach wider audiences–but it did not create the cranks themselves, nor did it create their clientele.
Over the years, I myself have had encounters with a number of “cranks” and “crackpots,” as many people would undoubtedly call them, who were “doing their thing,” and doing everything in their power to spread their messages, long before there was an Internet. I could just cite here my own brushes in the 1960’s and 1970’s with William Hallgarth the “Son of Satan” and white male Gnostic Messiah of Belmar NJ, with the “Husband Liberationist” Henry Britton of Erie PA, with midtown New York’s Sylvia Kraus and her mimeographed warnings of Communist poison plots, and with the last surviving genuine Pennsylvania Dutch escapee from long-distance Nazi X-rays.
In 1962, as an undergraduate at Adelphi College in Garden City, Long Island, and a regular reader of FATE magazine educating myself in the paranormal and Fortean alongside my regular academic studies, I was intrigued by the classified FATE ads of one William Hallgarth of Belmar, New Jersey, selling his pamphlets for a dollar each. Hallgarth advertised his pamphlets, with titles like “I Shall Teach Thee Terrible Things,” “Strange Research,” and “The Sealing of the Forehead,” with tantalizing come-ons like “Religious faith destroys you” and “The butcher shops of outer space are filled with human flesh.” Out of titillated curiosity, I sent a few bucks to Hallgarth’s Belmar P.O. box, and a couple of weeks later got a few of his pamphlets in the mail. They just utterly blew my mind, as an unbeatably unsurpassable “ne plus ultra” of what a University of Virginia friend of mine was later to call “pig-hanging weird piss”!:=) :=)
William Hallgarth of Belmar NJ was basically an all-out latter day Gnostic in the tradition of the early Christian Era’s Basilides and Valentinus, and the self-declared Son of Satan! In Hallgarth’s cosmology as set forth in his pamphlets, “Jehovih” (the spelling of “Yahweh” or “Jehovah” he had borrowed from the 19th century American Spiritualist John Ballou Newbrough’s “channeled” Bible *Oahspe*), the creator of the material world and the God of Judaism and Christianity, was an evil, inferior demiurge, archon, or fallen angel in rebellion against Satan, the true High God. But this was only the beginning of Hallgarth’s astounding revelations! White males (like Hallgarth himself) were the only true humans created by Satan the true God–while women and Blacks were demons, minions of the evil demiurge Jehovih, disguised in the surgically reconstructed pseudo-human bodies of fish and reptiles! That’s right–women and non-Whites in Hallgarth’s cosmology were just evil spirits in the altered bodies of fish, snakes, and lizards! Practicing a Jehovih-worshipping traditional religion like Judaism or Christianity placed a true white male human in serious danger of being abducted and slaughtered, with his flesh then sold in the alien butcher shops of outer space! The eye of Satan could be seen peering down on His creation by looking at the Sun through a piece of smoked glass! Jesus Christ, the Son of Jehovih, was a false Messiah, while William Hallgarth was the son of Satan and the true Messiah! Hallgarth himself, as the son of Satan and the true Messiah, had been unjustly incarcerated in mental institutions by the corrupt servants of Jehovih trying to silence him and his message.
.
After receiving the pamphlets in my mail setting forth Hallgarth’s basic doctrines, I was on his mailing list for a few more months periodically getting updates on his revelations. I also discovered, around this time, that Hallgarth occasionally posted classified ads in the early 1960’s in an irregularly published Asheville, North Carolina “Big Mail” newsletter of “earn lots of money working at home through mail-order selling”offers and opportunities called the “Carolina Trade Winds.” He advertised his pamphlets in the “Carolina Trade Winds” with come-ons like “When Christ said, you cannot be born again unless you eat this flesh and drink this blood, was he speaking to living men or was he speaking to vampires”? and “When Christ said, I will make you fishers of men, was he speaking to men or was he speaking to fishes”? Obviously, Hallgarth saw orthodox mainstream Christianity as serving the interests of vampires and fishes! Incidentally, besides the ads for Hallgarth’s pamphlets, “Carolina Trade Winds” also carried ads for a re-mailing service, by which you could get your letters remailed with the Asheville NC return home address of Maria Beale Fletcher, Miss North Carolina 1961 and Miss America 1962! No doubt Hallgarth would see the remailing service customer as thereby putting himself in grave peril of being abducted and sold in an outer-space meat market as fish food! :=) :=)
On a few occasions in Washington, DC in 1971-1972 and again in New York City in 1973-1974, I ran into the “Husband Liberationist” Henry Britton, an unemployed and once psychiatrically institutonalized electrical engineer from Erie PA. Britton used to picket the White House and later to walk around midtown New York, carrying big signs and handing out mimeographed leaflets preaching his male-chauvinist anti-feminist gospel of “Husband Liberation,” “Husband Suffrage,” and “Stamp Out Women’s Lip,” basically demanding that wives give up outside jobs and commit themselves full-time to serving their husbands. The story goes that Britton was fired from his electrical engineering job for trying to unionize his Erie PA company in 1966, then supposedly kicked out and institutionalized by his wife, and then flew out of the cuckoo’s nest to France before returning to the USA. As I said, I myself encountered Britton at least once in Washington DC across the street from the White House in 1971 or 1972, and again at least once in midtown Manhattan in the mid-1970’s.
Another active, zealous New York street demonstrator whom I ran into a few times in the 1970’s was Sylvia Kraus, a homeless woman in her 50’s living in the Hotel Martinique (a once notorious midtown Manhattan welfare hotel) who had once run a fairly upscale “Carriage House” antiques shoppe on the Upper East Side. In the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, she spent her time on the streets of New York City and in New York’s Pennsylvania Station panhandling and passing out her endless mimeographed leaflets warning against Communist plots to poison everybody’s food and water, listing FDR, John F. Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, and John Foster Dulles among the many famous victims of Commie poisoning plots. JFK, too, she claimed, was really poisoned, his alleged shooting in Dallas by Lee Harvey Oswald just being an elaborate hoax! (I don’t know what if anything she thought or said about the Moon landing). New York sculptor and “installation artist” Paul Teck even created a sculpture, included in the Museum of Modern Art in 1965, based on one of Sylvia’s screeds about what she called “Hippopotamus Poison”! Teck reportedly meant by his Kraus-inspired “Hippopotamus Poison” sculpture to satirize what he saw as the paranoia pervading American culture.
Finally, I cannot leave without commemorating the last living authentic Pennsylvania Dutchman, whom I met and talked with one evening in New York City in the Summer or early Fall of 1975 or 1976. Arriving in NYC a bit early that evening to meet a friend, I saw this man busily scribbling away on a Marlboro cigarette poster on the wall of a building. At first, I assumed that he was no doubt a fanatical anti-smoking zealot denouncing the evils of emphysema and lung cancer, and the perfidy of the tobacco industry. However, circling the block and seeing him still busily at it scribbling away, I walked up closer to him. I now saw that his lengthy endless scribbled diatribe had nothing to do with tobacco, smoking, nicotine, or lung cancer, but instead went on and on and on about the Pennsylvania Dutch, X-rays, and Nazis! When I walked over to him and engaged him in conversation, he told me in a very calm, courteous, matter-of-fact way that he was the last authentic survivor of the Pennsylvania Dutch descendants of 17th and 18th century Amish and Mennonite settlers! All the real Pennsylvania Dutch except himself, he informed me, had been killed off by the Nazis during World War II by means of long-distance X-rays. All the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch now living in that area, he continued, were really transmigrated Nazi big-shots and storm-troopers reincarnated in the artificially resuscitated bodies of the Pennsylvania Dutch farmers killed off by the Nazi X-rays! When they were defeated in World War II, the top Nazis had all just psychically relocated to the Pennsylvania Dutch country on the USA! As far as I could make out, however, he didn’t seem to involve reincarnated fishes or reptiles in his mythos! :=) :=)
William Hallgarth, Henry Britton, Sylvia Kraus, and the self-styled last surviving real Pennsylvania Dutchman were all pre-Internet eccentrics or crazies whom I either met in person or on whose mailing list I found myself for a while (as in Hallgarth’s case), but there were also other pre-Internet cranks or loonies with whom I had somewhat more indirect contacts. Thus, a friend of mine and I spent one afternoon in 1993 visiting “Swannanoa,” a mansion in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, about 24-25 miles west of Charlottesville and the University of Virginia, maintained as a museum in memory of its one-time owner, the very largely self-educated painter, sculptor, self-styled “scientist,” and “New Age” philosopher Walter Russell (1871-1963), who sincerely but naively considered himself one of the greatest scientists and philosophers of all time and one of the very greatest artists of the 20th century.
Compared to William Hallgarth, to the last living Pennsylvania Dutchman, or to Sylvia Kraus’ “Hippopotamus Poison,” the “Birther” and “Pizzagate” rumors in comparison almost sound positively “mainstream” and “Establishment”! Barack Obama supposedly having a fake Hawaiian birth certificate concealing his alleged Kenyan birth is pretty tame stuff compared to suggestions William Hallgarth might have made that he is really a demon or alien in a reconstituted fish’s or lizard’s surgically altered body! The worst her opponents could come up about Hillary Clinton were the “Clinton White House Murder Plot” rumor and the “Pizzagate” pedophile ring story, but those again are pretty tame compared to allegations that she is really an alien in a surgically altered fish’s or lizard’s body–or that the children kidnapped by the “Pizzagate” pedophiles were sold as sirloin and T-bone steaks in the meat markets of outer space, maybe served with Hippopotamus Poison in lieu of Worcesteshire sauce? And who knows, maybe Donald Trump was actually killed 20 years ago by means of long-distance X-rays by Reptilian space aliens from Sigma Draconis whose leader now occupies his electrically resuscitated body! :=) :=)
Seriously, though, what people like William Hallgarth, Henry Britton, Sylvia Kraus, the last Pennsylvania Dutchman, and Walter Russell all show is the fact that we already had lots of wackoes and woo-woos among us in the print age, trolling the wild-and-woolly lower reaches of the Gutenberg Universe with the admittedly rather modest means at their disposal even back then when you were lucky to have access to a neighborhood print shop, a mimeograph machine, or the classified sections of a magazine like FATE or a “Big Mail” newsletter like the “Carolina Trade Winds” (who also advertised services for getting your letters remailed from Miss America’s Asheville NC home).
“Big Mail Offers” (nowadays sometimes also called “Co-Op Mailing Services”) like the “Carolina Trade Winds” that William Hallgarth (and the Miss America home address remailer) advertised in were a big “get rich from home” business back in the 1940’s, 1950’s, and early 1960’s–but are also still very much with us today in our Internet age, still promising a golden opportunity to make money with a work-from-home mail order business. A “Big Mail Offer” or “Co-Op Mailing Service” participant periodically receives a big envelope (the “Big Mail”) stuffed with circulars, brochures, newsletters, local newspapers, tabloid mail order newspapers, package insert programs, ad sheets, card decks, business cards, and other promotional materials from maybe 10 to 15 non-competing mail order businesses, for the recipient to mail out in turn to others he or she thinks might be interested. Such “Big Mails,” as one contemporary on-line promoter put it, promise the chance to “pull in an extra thousand dollars a month,” to “teenager or senior citizen–man or woman” alike, regardless of “your age” or “where you live,” interestingly also adding that “Some people–the dreamers and the lonely–like to receive Big Mails simply for the sake of having mail delivered to them every day.”
The admission that “Big Mails” appeal to “the dreamers and the lonely” who “like to receive Big Mails simply for the sake of having mail delivered to them every day” reminds me of Ray Bradbury’s 1952 short story “The Great Wide World Over There.” Bradbury depicted Cora Gibbs, an illiterate old Southern farm woman living in a secluded mountain valley, who longs to learn about the outside world and envies a neighbor who receives mail every day. One summer, Cora begs her visiting literate big-city nephew Benjy to teach her to read and write, so that she too can receive mail and learn about the great wide world outside her valley. Instead, they spend the summer ordering free samples from the classified ads in the back of a lurid pulp magazine. Her mailbox soon swells, with things like a Power Plus muscle chart, Magic List Numbers, a Correspondence Course in Sanitary Engineering, Giant Sunflower seeds, Flea Killer samples, and a “free Sealed Book all about the Knowledge that had been damned to oblivion.” The summer finally ends, Benjy leaves, and Cora still cannot decipher her own mail: “All the world and all the people and all the happenings, and me not knowing.” Bradbury’s story was admittedly set very much in a Gutenberg-era world of “snail-mail” and printed materials, but was yet also an uncannily prescient cautionary tale about the pitfalls of the Internet with its seductively easy access to dubious information, incredible claims, and doubtfully worth-while merchandise–as well as expressing Bradbury’s own affectionate appreciation for what one critic called “the poetry of cheap low-brow pulp.”
Who knows–if Ray Bradbury’s fictional Cora Gibbs had been real, had been alive in 1962 (a decade after the original publication of Bradbury’s story), and had gotten her nephew Benjy to actually teach her to read and write, she could have had her own letters remailed with Miss America’s home address, and learned the awful, mind-blowing, “pig-hanging” truth about Jehovih, Satan, true and false Messiahs, surgically altered fish and reptiles, and the butcher shops of outer space! That would have certainly beaten the Power Plus muscle chart, Magic List Numbers, Correspondence Course in Sanitary Engineering, Giant Sunflower seeds, and Flea Killer samples that Benjy ordered for her!:=) :=)
Social media is all too often anti-social media, and the further left and more authoritarian it becomes the less most people will take any notice of it, further strengthening the echo-chamber effect. I’ve never used or knowingly been abused on twatter, my farcebook use is to keep up with family and a few friends (mainly overseas), life has taught me to be cautious in sharing information, I don’t live my life on-line and the happiest young people I know are the same. “One Life-LIVE it”!
Social media: I used to think that social media was barely either (the shallowest manifestation of the former utilizing—“consuming”—the lowest materializations of the latter)—but now I’m pretty sure that the latter actually comes at the expense of the former; that it’s really the former that’s being consumed (digested, decomposed) by the latter. In the end, there might only be media; at the end, even worse.