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.
I don't want to be friends
I don't want to be friends
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.