Techniques of Self-Isolation
When I think of the typical social media user, I tend to draw heavily from my own dysphoric self-portrait: I see myself, invariably alone, looking at a screen in an otherwise empty room, usually in search of a viable excuse to extend my procrastination — some article to read, some Twitter thread to expand and unspool, some relaxing rhythm of images to scroll through. It doesn’t matter what the content is; I just want “distraction” in itself. I see myself in an elevator, searching the screen for a plausible reason to avoid greeting anyone who steps in. Or I might imagine myself at the bottom of a well, like some displaced Haruki Murakami character, and I’m shouting things up to the surface, cries for help disguised as haphazard observations, yet passersby simply drop crumbs of attention on my head every now and then, possibly by accident.
It’s not surprising, then, that I’ll write about the phone as the well shaft that sustains the unbridgeable distance between me and other people even while it puts them ostensibly within reach. I’ll note how the experience of online connection seems to collapse space, but that doesn’t mean it seems to bring things closer together; rather it suspends the rules of extension so that the various points we occupy become incommensurate. No one can come together because there is no space to move through. When in The Twittering Machine, Richard Seymour notes that “any culture that values connectivity so highly must be as impoverished in its social life as a culture obsessed with happiness is bitterly depressed,” I recognize myself as both a part of that culture and someone likely to reflexively make that same critique. When I feel isolated, I want to blame apps and platforms for catering to that isolation, engendering it, pushing me to find ways to hold people at a distance and depend on that as a kind of convenience, as if defeating reciprocity were the key to hanging on to my ego.
But I realize that other people don’t experience online connectivity this way, necessarily as an isolating process of alienation. I don’t even actually experience it that way most of the time, when it resides in the background as a taken-for-granted aspect of going about everyday life. Seymour worries that the more online connectivity “expands and colonizes our daily lives, the more the lines between ‘excessive’ and ‘normal’ behavior are blurred,” and perhaps I’ve fallen victim to that, though I don’t think there is a blurring so much as an oscillation: Sometimes I see my social media usage as normal and other times it seems excessive, and I wish I could feel more normally about it. I tend to cling to my idea of “the social media user” as compulsive, isolated, and narcissistic to rationalize those feelings and neutralize my culpability for them. If I am honest with myself, I know that I am no more alienated or antisocial now than I was in the 1990s. My actual use of social media and my phone is fairly mundane, more routine than compulsive. I am probably led astray more by its suitability as a scapegoat, as though the internet’s sheer ubiquity makes it responsible for everything.
Because I’m so preoccupied with my vision of the isolated “social media user,” I tend to have confused reactions to articles like this one, by Alfred Ng, about how some teens are using collective Instagram accounts to try to muddle the site’s algorithms and data collection. The point of this is supposedly “keeping their accounts private from Instagram,” but that makes no literal sense because the accounts are on Instagram. Rather, the idea is that this tactic will protect the teens from being tracked as individuals because their usage data will be muddled with other people’s. But I’m not sure if that gets it right — it also seems like it boils down to convincing someone else to run an Instagram account for you from their phone, so that they will bear the brunt of whatever implications may be drawn from it. For the purpose of the article, the nuts and bolts don’t matter because the upshot of it is that kids are savvy users of social media sites and not the passive dupes of them.
I don’t doubt that “teens really care about privacy,” as lots of people in my feed were relieved to note, but it seems naïve to me to believe that you can manage your privacy unilaterally through a series of ad hoc schemes, especially given the absolute opacity of how companies collect and concatenate data. Of course, Instagram could easily make a few tweaks to its log in protocols to eradicate the practices the article describes, but I doubt it cares enough to bother. They are not oppositional. These kids are still using Instagram, probably at a far more intensive level than the average user, and the data they are generating is not “poisoned” so much as recombined. It’s not pouring sugar in the algorithmic gas tank; it’s just more fuel.
Also, tactics like these aren’t effective as protection so much as ideology: They express how deeply the teens have absorbed the idea that “privacy” is personal rather than relational, that the data firms collect is harmful only if it can be associated with your name. When I first saw people tweeting about this article, I wanted to imagine that the teens were waging a war against the whole idea of an individual profile, maybe the whole idea of possessive individualism, and were subverting the tendencies of platforms to invest us in the “capital” of the data we generate through using them. As Will Davies argued in this LRB column, everyone from millennials on down are “are now habituated to an economy organized around rents, which they experience not just as tenants but through the dubious opportunities afforded by the ‘sharing economy.’ Work space, spare bedrooms, cultural ‘content’ and vehicles aren’t things to be owned, but hired on a time-limited basis ... A young person comes to view him or herself as a rentable asset, which finds its price on the market. This is the logic that underpins Instagram-based celebrity as much as it does cycling for Deliveroo.”
Posting to multiple accounts or to collaborative group accounts on Instagram seems like a way to combat against the hegemony of human capital, but that’s not how it comes across in Ng’s article, where it is all framed as privacy hygiene, a way to protect the individual’s “real life” human capital from online trespass. The teens he talks to seem primarily concerned about college admissions, not establishing fluid communistic selves beyond the iron cage of property relations.
Efforts to secure privacy at the individual level may seem like an act of resistance toward a “social credit system” that tracks and regulates our behavior, but it’s more or less consistent with it, sharing the same logic. Our behavior is our property, a performance to which we own the rights. Tracking systems offer opportunities for negotiation, for gaining leverage or competitive advantage. The capacity for evasion becomes an another proof of status; vulnerability to tracking proves a lack of it. When you gain by winning at privacy, why would you want end the tracking game? You are far more likely to be the sort of person who’ll install a Ring camera.
But as Davies points out, the likeliest outcome is fatigue: “Having to view oneself as a business venture means that no time can be enjoyed or gratuitously wasted without considering how it contributes (or doesn’t) to one’s earnings and future security. As many young people can attest, one of the dominant symptoms of these economic conditions is a feeling of utter exhaustion.” There’s nothing like being continually tracked to make you aware of the stakes of every single moment.
***
In her 1859 novel Adam Bede, George Eliot incorporates a mini-essay on the fate of leisure as the industrial revolution was unfolding. “Leisure is gone — gone where the spinning wheels are gone, and the pack-horses, and the slow wagons, and the peddlers, who brought bargains to the door on sunny afternoons,” she writes. “Ingenious philosophers tell you, perhaps, that the great work of the steam engine is to create leisure for mankind. Do not believe them: it only creates a vacuum for eager thoughts to rush in. Even idleness is eager now — eager for amusement: prone to excursion trains, art museums, periodical literature, and exciting novels: prone even to scientific theorizing, and cursory peeps through microscopes.”
Eliot goes on to contrast the new technologically enabled leisure that takes the form of an idle thirst for information with “Old Leisure,” which was apparently only possible within the settled society of an earlier rural way of life.
Old Leisure was quite a different personage: he only read one newspaper, innocent of leaders, and was free from that periodicity of sensations which we call post-time. He was a contemplative, rather stout gentleman, of excellent digestion of quiet perception, undiseased by hypothesis: happy in his inability to know the causes of things, preferring the things themselves. He lived chiefly in the country, among pleasant seats and homesteads, and was fond of sauntering by the fruit-tree wall, and scenting the apricots when they were warmed by the morning sunshine, or of sheltering himself under the orchard boughs at noon, when the summer pears were falling.
Old Leisure didn’t need Twitter. He didn’t even need Peach. Just an apricot tree.
Read out of context, the passage seems to apply readily to our current moment. Her point about eager idleness reminds me of that contemporary need to capitalize on every moment and direct leisure time toward marketable forms of cultural mastery. One could assimilate it to complaints about how the internet accelerates cultural consumption, and how objectors adopt “slow” or outdated approaches to things in response: slow food, slow TV, slow reading, slow travel, slow fashion, slow living. It could also be read as a comment on the dubiousness of “keeping informed” as a general principle, and how mediations of events and things alienate us from the concrete satisfactions of real reality. If only each of us were “happy in his inability to know the causes of things, preferring the things themselves,” maybe we’d be immune to disinformation campaigns and fake news and all the other contrived media events liable to confuse us simple folk that are detailed in this recent Atlantic piece. E.M. Forster had it wrong: Only disconnect.
In The Country and the City, Raymond Williams quotes that passage to make a point about Eliot’s ambivalence toward the rural working class. He grants that it is an ironic skewering of a certain type of self-satisfied country gentlemen: Old Leisure is ”a class figure who can afford to saunter, who has leisure precisely in the sweat of other men’s work.” But he also points out that the narrator’s analysis is itself complacent to the point of being self-deceptive; it elides the exploitation, poverty, and suffering that Old Leisure is built on while seeming to acknowledge it. “This foreshortening, this selection, this special indulgence are all characteristic of what has become a main form of the modern rural retrospect,” Williams writes.
It seems characteristic too of some tech criticism that focuses on the beneficiaries of technology and scolds them (all the people who are overconnecting or disconnecting or becoming stupid or lazy or antisocial because of phones) but doesn’t always see the underlying forms of exploitation. As what I writing here makes plain, I am certainly prone to this sort of foreshortening. I can’t see past the distorted version of myself I project as the “typical social media user,” and I become preoccupied with the sorts of critiques that are pitched at the level of what a principled individual should choose to do to be an ethical social media user or whatever. I’m sympathetic to wanting to retreat from an overmediated, hyperaccelerated world into a more slow and “genuine” relationship with nature and society, earned through a patient engagement with what’s “really” there in a place where one makes a focused effort to be fully present. But I also feel like they turn me into Eliot’s narrator, a bit complacent in my point of view. I see the wrong victims of technology — I am preoccupied with the people more or less like me who are too addicted to the convenience or distractions of their phone, and not the inequality that makes that world of frantic inattention and fatuous nostalgia possible.
Pastoral escapist fantasy is an old reaction to industrialization, and as Williams argues, it paints a false vision of there being some unmediated way to experience nature (usually one that can be learned through a nostalgic misinterpretation of the past). He is especially bracing when he shows how the aristocratic classes have used that nostalgia to generate sympathy for “the old ways” and the country houses that emblemized their power and made it seem natural and uncontestable. These rebuilt country houses were visible emblems of the triumph of exploitation and the futility of resistance. Williams notes that their current status as tourist attractions, their attractiveness and coherence as aspirational spectacles, should not distract visitors from their history as impositions of power. “Stand at any point and look at that land. Look at what those fields, those streams, those woods even today produce. Think it through as labor and see how long and systematic the exploitation and seizure must have been, to rear that many houses, on that scale. See by contrast what any ancient isolated farm, in uncounted generations of labor, has managed to become, by the efforts of any single real family, however prolonged. And then turn and look at what these other ‘families’, these systematic owners, have accumulated and arrogantly declared.”
These houses are not only testimony to how much “robbery and fraud there must have been, for so long, to produce that degree of disparity“ but also a demonstration of accumulation wrenched out of the scale of what can be built up by “ordinary human achievement.” They announce “an established and commanding class power,” meant to cow those who beheld them into submission.
On social media platforms, we’re often are confronted with similar disparities, images whose content testifies to and tries to glamorize grotesque inequality, even as they participate in a distribution system that is putatively democratizing. The fact that anyone can post things to the same site in the same way serves to excuse the disparity in time and resources and celebrity that is imported and reproduced and enhanced. But beyond merely reproducing existing inequality, social media operate at a scale that, like globalizing capitalism from the 18th century on, “represents a spectacular increase in the rate of exploitation,” as Williams put it. The platform amalgamates all the accounts that operate as metaphoric country houses and offers this constellation as a fantasy about proximity to power — I can see glimpses of their personal life! — but this proximity only serves to undermine even the cold comfort of “the mutuality of people living at the edges or in the margins of a generally oppressive system.”
The platforms purport to be quasi-commons but they are obviously mechanisms of enclosure, the hugest country houses the world has ever known, organizing their tenants into ever more exploitative relations with each other and the platforms themselves. They play on the pastoral fantasy of a community built on order, mirrored in the coded order of the sites, rather than shared struggle.
The effects of this fantasy aren’t limited to the delusions of those who believe in it; it also distract skeptics and establishes dubious parameters for their critique of technology, as if what is at stake is the appropriate kind of “leisure,” as in Eliot’s passage. Williams argues that this “way of seeing” tends to lead to a defeated individualism, typified by novels that end “with a single person going away on his own, having achieved his moral growth through distancing or extrication.” Twain’s Huck Finn is a 19th century American example of the dream of “lighting out for the territories” for a better society; it also reveals this inclination as fundamentally juvenile.
My attraction to strategies of personal refusal when it comes to technology and social media boils down to this kind of individual extrication. What Williams describes as the “knowable community” — a social existence that is tolerable and explicable from the individual’s point of view — is relegated to the past, which for someone my age means the time before screens. To enable my self-aggrandizing exits from technology, I depend on and naturalize a vision of society that tech companies have developed, in which everyone is already an atomized user who can afford a phone and take advantage of all its conveniences. To fuel my more short-sighted critiques, I accept that view too, as though the central issue were the people who enjoy what technology brings them rather than the people systematically excluded or dispossessed.
Later in The Country and the City, Williams diagnoses the problem of seeking an abstract sense of universal community through the indulgence of an “intense subjectivity” — of unilaterally willing a “community” into being without the trouble of presence, reciprocity, or negotiation.
Given the facts of isolation, of an apparently impassable subjectivity, a 'collective consciousness' reappears, but in an altered form. This is the 'collective consciousness' of the myth, the archetype; the 'collective unconscious' of Jung. In and through the intense subjectivities a metaphysical or psychological 'community' is assumed, and characteristically, if only in abstract structures, it is universal; the middle terms of actual societies are excluded as ephemeral, superficial, or at best contingent and secondary. Thus a loss of social recognition and consciousness is in a way made into a virtue: as a condition of understanding and insight. A direct connection is then forged between intense subjectivity and a timeless reality: one is a means to the other and alternative terms are no more than distractions. The historically variable problem of 'the individual and society' acquires a sharp and particular definition, in that 'society' becomes an abstraction, and the collective flows only through the most inward channels. Not only the ordinary experiences of apparent isolation, but a whole range of techniques of self-isolation, are then gathered to sustain the paradoxical experience of an ultimate collectivity which is beyond and above community.
I wonder about my own “techniques of self-isolation” and what I have invested in them, and all the technologies on which they now depend. What made me think isolation was an escape?