I don't want to be friends
The cultural theorist Lauren Berlant passed away earlier this week. Basically anything they wrote is worth reading, but their concept of "cruel optimism" — an attachment to something that is "an obstacle to your flourishing," often an object that perpetuates what one ostensibly hopes it will remedy — has proved especially useful for understanding social media, which are structured precisely to produce such attachments. The "stuckness" of being caught in an infinite and recursive pattern of scrolling through feeds, for instance, smells like cruel optimism: The optimism is in hoping for something that will be worth seeing, that you need to see; the cruelty is that we often end up preferring the scrolling itself, the stuckness, compulsive drive, to anything specific we might come across.
Berlant argues in the introduction to Cruel Optimism that optimism "might not feel optimistic" — that "one of optimism's ordinary pleasures is to induce conventionality, that place where appetites find a shape in the predictable comforts of the good-life genres that a person or a world has seen to formulate." One might think of "social media platform" as one of those places where appetites take shape: "good-life genres" characterizes a lot of Instagram content; algorithmic feeds are premised on idea of generating "predictable comforts." What platforms capitalize on is giving shape and direction to inchoate dissatisfaction, boredom, or loneliness without actually resolving them; the usual critique is that platforms exacerbate those conditions in us that are ultimately profitable for them.
But part of Berlant's point, as I read it, is that there is also comfort in having those inchoate feelings made concrete or seemingly manipulatable — we gain a sense of control and relief from that, a sense of (unfounded) optimism from the momentum it seems to give us when we are actually spinning in place. As Berlant writes, one ends up "bound to a situation of profound threat that is, at the same time, profoundly confirming." We are kept "in proximity to the scene of desire/attrition" by cruel optimism, and being forever close can feel safer than possibly getting there, wherever that is. "The continuity of its form" — the form of a bad attachment, the endlessness of the scroll, the permanence of a profile, the chance of notifications — "provides something of the continuity of the subject's sense of what it means to keep on living on and to look forward to being in the world." Your phone is always there for you.
With respect to social media, knowing they are "addictive" or "inauthentic" and so on is part of the comfort they provide — we are aware of where we stand, at least — and that knowledge doesn't undo the attachment. To some degree, critique offers an alibi to keep doing what you've criticized. The failure to escape is experienced as a consolation, a chance to do better next time, that there is clear way to be better. The cruelly optimistic attachment holds "the space open for the good-life fantasy," Berlant writes — spaces that the critique is trying to close without necessarily providing viable alternatives, other plausible fantasies we can immediately act on concretely. The "best life" depicted in lots of social media content is of course a distortion, but no less compelling because of that. It's more compelling as a fantasy than as reality. So, perhaps, is the fantasy of quitting social media.
"Cruel optimism" could also be applied to the subject of Brendan Mackie's essay for Real Life this week: parasociality. In "Why Can't We Be Friends" he explores why "parasociality"— the illusion of intimacy and friendship with celebrities, a feeling conspicuously generated by podcasts and vloggers and streamers and a host of other "online" forms of media — "promises to satisfy a need that it can only make more acute." It stages a relationship in which mutual recognition is always implied (and exploited) but never actually realized. "Fans often want their one-sided relationship to be reciprocal, for the content creator to recognize them as an individual who, like a friend, isn’t just useful but is loved for themselves," Mackie writes. "But because of the scale of internet culture, to the creator, fans can never be in aggregate more than an anonymous mass of fluctuating metrics."
One could understand the parasocial relationship to be an obstacle in the way of "real sociality" or genuine reciprocity, or one could see it as a consolation that has become more treasured than the supposed prize. Actual friendships require work and can be depleting, and the institutions and structures of belonging have depredated by socioeconomic conditions. Making time for friends is challenging; making time for podcasts just requires a commute.
The asymmetrical nature of parasociality, and the disappointment that cyclically generates, is always at risk of tipping over into hostility, which could manifest as cancellation campaigns against celebrities who have betrayed or neglected their fans, or as a search for scapegoats who can be held responsible for the celebrity's remoteness or who can reinvest the fan community with a sense of mission. But Mackie points out that fan communities themselves are characterized less by agency and mutuality than by more parasociality: "What look like thriving fan communities are, in reality, parasocial relations within parasocial relations: Most people participate by passively consuming the performed enjoyment of a select few. Lurkers passively consume super-fans’ fan-art, fan-criticism, and love, just as they consume the creator’s personality."
In fact, assimilating constant passive connectivity through social media platforms into our lives has meant that any kind of sociality with peers can be rendered parasocial: We can "broadcast ourselves" instead of having conversations and hanging out. "Social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook tend to flatten interactions with even our friends to parasociality," Mackie writes. "We scroll through all these images of the people we know doing stuff while we are idling or waiting or sitting alone, not doing stuff."
That is not to say that we are all doomed to parasociality, to alternating between being a "fan" of our friends and pretending to be a "celebrity" for them. But communication technology has made it far easier to default to talking at people than with them. We now have to actively resist falling into that structure of (non-)belonging and becoming attached to its illusions.