![]() On social media, you scratch out a few words, a few symbols, and press send, rolling the dice. The true gambler takes a perverse joy in anteing up, putting their whole being at stake. In most cases, the answer is brutal and swift: you are a loser and you are going home with nothing. Every gambler trusts in a few abstract symbols – the dots on a dice, numerals, suits, red or black, the graphemes on a fruit machine – to tell them who they are. If social media is an addiction machine, the addictive behaviour it is closest to is gambling: a rigged lottery. For the social media bosses, this is axiomatic. Addiction is, quite deliberately, the template for our relationship to the Twittering Machine. W hether or not we think we are addicted, the machine treats us as addicts. As in the financial markets, volatility adds value. It doesn’t particularly matter to the platforms what the frenzy is about: the point is to generate data, one of the most profitable raw materials yet discovered. The regular sweet spot sought after is a brief period of ecstatic collective frenzy around any given topic. Meanwhile, hashtags and trending topics underline the extent to which all of these protocols are organised around the massification of individual voices – a phenomenon cheerfully described by users with the science-fiction concept of the “hive mind” – and hype. This is what people like about it, what makes it engaging: it is like texting, but in a public, collective context. The system of followers, and threading encourages sprawling conversations to develop from initial tweets, favouring constant interaction. The feed has an extremely rapid turnover, so that anything posted will, unless it “goes viral”, tend to be quickly forgotten by most followers. The protocols of Twitter itself, for example, encourage people to post quickly and often. ![]() The Twittering Machine thrives on its speed, informality and interactivity. It is the machinery of writers, writing and the feedback loop they inhabit. This is the Twittering Machine: not the infrastructure of fibre-optic cables, database servers, storage systems, software and code. We are users, much as cocaine addicts are users.Ī laboratory rat inside a ‘Skinner box’. An addiction machine, which deploys crude techniques of manipulation redolent of the Skinner Box created by behaviourist BF Skinner to control the behaviour of pigeons and rats with rewards and punishments. Part of what? The world’s first ever public, live, collective, open-ended writing project. The machine benefits from the “network effect”: the more people write to it, the more benefits it can offer, until it becomes a disadvantage not to be part of it. We write to it, and it passes on the message for us after keeping a record of the data. We are not interacting with them, however, but with the machine. The bait is that we are interacting with other people: our friends, colleagues, celebrities, politicians, royals, terrorists, porn actors – anyone we like. Social media platforms have created a machine for us to write to. Our lives have become, in the words of the author and academic Shoshana Zuboff, an “electronic text”.
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