There's been a certain kind of phenomena at work in the present that I can't quite put my finger on. It inspires a sense of nagging disquietude towards the current state of affairs. Granted, it seems obvious that there is much to be concerned about, what w/ the world perpetually on the brink of WW3, allusions towards civil war in the United States, the lingering economic aftereffects of the COVID-19 lockdowns, all of the nonsense surrounding Trump and the U.S. presidency...it's exhausting, really. However, this particular sense of dread is far beyond these wordly concerns; if only it were so, then at the very least there'd be some comfort in being able to clearly identify its origin. Yet, in no other context does this unease become more strongly felt than when reflecting on social media and the Eldritch horror it has metamorphosed into. What started as a Frutiger Aero, techno-optimistic endeavor to forge new connections with others, keep families in-touch, and preserve fond memories of a night out devolved into a terrifyingly alien and runaway process that is dissolving not only social fabric but identity and reality itself as it integrates and asserts itself more and more into quotidian life. During those halcyon days of its inception, circa the late 00s/early 10s, I don't think any of us could have imagined what was to come from social media in the following decade.
In truth, I don’t much care for that phrase, ‘social media’. It isn’t technically wrong or misleading, but I do think that it woefully understates the family of technology that forms its foundation, primarily that being the Internet and its attendant conceptual frameworks. A more appropriate phrase—albeit some readers of William Gibson’s may think it too preemptive and thus rudimentary—would be ‘cyberspace’. Towards the approval of this nomenclature, I offer two points for consideration. First, the Internet prior to the advent of social media (during the 90s) is commonly referred to as Web 1.0; largely read-only whereby users could only look up and search for information broadcast by businesses. The Internet in its current state, Web 2.0, has the defining characteristic of user-generated content. No longer are users merely limited to requesting and reading information from servers, but they are also now able to write and publish information to those very same servers as well. Write functionality is, as you might’ve figured, largely mediated by social media sites. This importance of this singular characteristic of the Internet cannot be emphasized enough, as it formally establishes a feedback loop that enables interactivity: a user generates and publishes content and responses to said content determines how the user behaves in the future. Second, the term cyberspace is inspired from the word cybernetics, coined by the American mathematician Norbert Wiener who founded the technological field of the same name. Cybernetics stems from the Greek word κυβερνᾶν, which translates to ‘steersman’ or ‘governor’. Much like the aforementioned Web 2.0, an integral concept in cybernetics is that of the feedback loop, particularly in the context of communication and control in biological/mechanical/electrical/informational systems. Considering that Web 2.0 is a space that is defined largely by the content generated by a user in response to feedback from other users, the term cyberspace is a very apt fit.
As mentioned earlier, the advent of Web 2.0 established a feedback loop between users, mediated through content. For instance, someone may make a post on a BBS forum dedicated to, say, Japanese anime and other users that share that same interest may read that post and respond should they choose to. People may respond positively to that post or negatively—with the result being a ‘flame war’ in the latter case. Either way, in the early days of Web 2.0, cyberspace was more of a frontier wilderness where people carved out niche communities and had to actively seek out like-minded people that shared their specific interests. Furthermore, users could expect feedback for any of their published content from pretty much only other users. Depending on this reaction, a person could titrate their behavior to produce a more favorable reaction and gain popularity or notoriety. As cyberspace matured and became more sophisticated—the advent of social media—that information-seeking behavior and accompanying user-user dynamic was disrupted and displaced for favor of a user-algorithm mechanism whereby information is no longer actively sought after, but automatically curated based on previous engagement. In kind, the user-user dynamic was replaced w/ a user-algorithm dynamic where behavior is not ultimately determined via direct response from other users, but rather through reward via increased visibility and promotion to the (now centralized) site-wide userbase. The sum result of this departure is that content became amplified in its extremity. Originally, the negative aspect of the incentive structure was set such that it was to any user’s benefit to conform to the community he or she subscribed to, for communities that catered to your particular interests were scarce and difficult to come by. The risk of becoming a pariah and being ousted from your community served as a sort of regulatory check to ensure published content wasn’t too disagreeable. Additionally, any published content was seen only by an immediate, local audience and their approval was the reward. In this new social media paradigm, the scarcity of community became an obsolete issue as soon as the algorithm was able to suggest pages and groups to join and like-minded people to befriend or follow. Burning bridges w/ other users effectively became of little consequence. The second part of the incentive structure, the reward, shifted from audience approval to content visibility, ensuring that largely only the most outrageous content made it to virality due to our animal psychology orienting us towards threatening, negative stimulus. Thus, in a self-reinforcing, runaway cybernetic loop, a user posts shocking content that naturally provokes a response from most people but goes viral b/c the algorithm disperses it far and wide. That reward in the form of engagements only serves to further incentivize the user and others to post yet still more shocking content, which in turn goes viral, garners engagement, and the cycle continues and builds upon itself.
What are the outcomes of these self-reinforcing, runaway cybernetic loops? Surely there are plenty of ramifications for culture and society at large, but I’d like to highlight three case studies in which this phenomena is having real, visceral effects on our human biology and psychology. Namely, the proliferation of transgenderism, the Elsagate YouTube phenomenon, and the TikTok NPC meme.
The trans question has always been a contentious one, not in the least b/c of the difficulty that exists in determining its etiology. Several theories exist as to what causes transgenderism; some are biology-based and hold that genetic anomalies or estrogenic compounds in the environment are the culprit. Others support the notion that it is reaction to psychological trauma and/or sexual abuse. In that same category, some claim that it is an outgrowth of homosexuality or other psychiatric dysfunctions. The more surprising theories are the recent, sociological ones that find that it is actually caused by social media. Here, transgenderism acts as a social contagion--a process by which an attitude, belief, or behavior propagates among members of social groups w/o conscious thought--following the dynamics akin to an infectious disease. It is through this very mechanism that we're finding women, particularly young girls, far more adversely affected by social media than their male counterparts, since they are the more socially/emotionally intelligent of the two sexes and thus more amenable to social dynamics. Lending credence to this thought is the phenomenon by which women are developing eating disorders and body dysmorphia through comparison of their figures to their touched-up and filtered peers on Instagram. Additionally, there exists entire Facebook groups and communities on Tumblr, comprising mostly of women, committed to wallowing in their depression and anxiety, going so far as to glamorizing suicide. Unsettling still, the incidence of specifically female-to-male (FtM) transgenderism is exceeding that of male-to-female (MtF) transgenderism; something that has never occurred before, as prior to the social media age transgenderism predominantly affected males. The entire transgenderism phenomenon is fascinating in the paradoxical manner normal society treats the issue. On one hand, it is treated w/ such levity—afterall, its epistemological basis is found in gender theory, which anyone w/ a modicum of good sense can immediately recognize that it is utter nonsense peddled by leftist charlatans. It is something that is deserving of mockery as its so-called victims are nothing more than special blue-haired snowflakes who’s narcissistic tendencies resulted in the endless navel-gazing over sexuality and self-identification that has become endemic in the Millennial generation. Yet, all the while, despite the phenomenon being an epistemological disease who’s vector of transmission is the exchange of bytes across content delivery networks, the consequences of true belief in this understanding of the world has non-trivial and far-reaching effects on both corporeal and social reality. For one, children who undergo hormone replacement therapy (HRT) are rendering themselves sterile, actively contributing to the population collapse that is threatening to overtake the West. Worse still, those that elect to have sexual reassignment surgery (SRS) are mutilating their bodies to render their anatomy more congruent w/ what their theories dictate. This can include, in the case of MtFs, the penis and scrotum being inverted to form a neo-vagina—in the more extreme cases where there is inadequate penile tissue (due to early disruption of puberty via HRT), a section of the large intestine may be removed to form the neo-vaginal canal. In FtMs, double mastectomies and grafting of forearm or thigh tissue to the genital area to form a neo-penis. These gruesome surgeries are performed w/ zero net positive health benefit to the patient, but only towards the fulfillment of narcissistic desire brought on by belief in a faulty epistemology.
If belief in trans ideology is dysgenic, chrono-abortion of future generations, then Elsagate is the case of strangling the current generation in the crib. For those unaware, Elsagate is the phenomena that emerged circa 2016 in which a flood of disturbing videos made their way onto the YouTube platform, particularly on the YouTube Kids part of the site. These videos, both live-action and animated, feature characters from popular childrens’ franchises such as Elsa from Frozen and Spiderman engaging in sexually suggestive, violent, and/or outright bizarre behavior. Impregnation, kidnapping, rape, urination/scat fetishes, grievous bodily injury, injections, and even trypophobia are common, reoccurring themes. The number of channels providing this content on the platform numbered in the hundreds, with hundreds of thousands of videos, w/ several having upwards of 20 million views. The dispersal and proliferation mechanism here is particularly nefarious; the creators of this content purposefully included popular characters from franchises that appealed to children in order to manipulate the algorithm to bolster views, towards the end of collecting ad revenue. Worse still, these videos were uploaded to YouTube Kids; a service that most parents would leave their child watching on autoplay and unattended, assuming that the content would be age-appropriate and safe. Once these abominations were released into the corpus of children’s content, the algorithm would, via tagging, introduce them into the stream of ordinary content along w/ other videos that are tangentially related. The result is a nightmarish, algorithm-mediated fever dream stream of loosely-associated concepts. What might be a perfectly innocuous episode of Peppa Pig teaching the ABCs may be followed by a safe but knock-off Peppa Pig animation featuring a nursery rhyme, which would then be followed by an animation featuring the same nursery rhyme but w/ Mickey Mouse doing Tai Chi w/ a bikini-clad Hitler. Naturally, given the disturbing nature of the content and concern for the well-being of their children, many parents complained and YouTube took several of these channels down. The purge revealed that most of these channels were ran by human content creators, either motivated by depravity or money. One of the more interesting theories behind this entire phenomena is the possibility that, at least a subset of these videos, were actually algorithmically generated. Lending credence to this theory is the fact that many videos seem to recycle the same animation assets, music, and storylines. While the theory largely holds for the production process of this content, I’d like to extrapolate just one step further and entertain the idea of such tools being used for concept creation. That is, using an algorithm to determine the subject matter of the content. It isn’t too far-fetched to suggest, as whatever human agent is looking to maximize their profits through ad revenue would have to similarly maximize their content output. The most obvious way of doing that is to automate the process, from start to finish. I believe this to be the case, as exemplified by the previous video: an algorithm likely aggregated the top 1,000 or so tags on YouTube, which include popular, child-friendly subjects such as Mickey Mouse and nursery rhymes, but also included popular yet not-so-child-friendly such as bikinis and everyone’s favorite Führer. In an effort to maximize its visibility, a video was then created using these disparate yet popular subjects/concepts/themes. This theory offers tremendous explanatory power as to why these videos are surreal in subject matter and presentation. Ultimately, an automated, inhuman process is amalgamating what the collective human psyche (i.e. the Internet) finds fascinating—including what is harbored in its darkest recesses—and feeding it back to us. Such potent, unvarnished distillation of humanity proves too much for some adults to stomach. The long-term effects on children is yet to be seen.
Perhaps we wouldn’t have to wait long. Not long ago, a strange new trend cropped up on TikTok, known as the NPC (non-playable character) trend. To summarize the phenomenon, TikTok has a feature by which users can buy little digital doodads such as coins, crowns, and ice cream cones and ‘gift’ them to their favorite content creators while they are live streaming. These gifts could later be redeemed for actual cash payment. Some enterprising content creators tailored their streams around this mechanism, carrying out a specific, stereotyped motion and/or scripted utterance whenever a gift of a certain kind is given. The sum result being streams where, in bizarre fashion, hundreds to tens of thousands of viewers spam giving these gifts and the streamer would tirelessly repeat these canned actions ad nauseam in eerie, precise fashion. Because the streamer is effectively under the control of the audience, and the responses are predictable as well as limited to a subset of actions/utterances, the streamer effectively surrenders his or her own agency, becoming an NPC. The appeal of such content is theorized to be anything from an exercise of some perverse control fetish to the alleviation of widespread anxiety through perfectly predictable social interaction. In any case, it isn’t unusual for the more popular content creators to host hours-long streams of this activity and generate five figures per month. To be sure, commoditization of the self is nothing new; it is one of those by-now painfully cliché tropes that is attendant to the modernist problematic. Such commoditization has resulted in moral hazards and decay of social fabric; one can easily consider the normalization of sex work as a ready-at-hand example. However, never before has society gone in the direction of commoditizing human agency for profit. This can be thought of as an overreaction, as the phenomenon is merely the visage of surrendering agency; the streamer is no more a puppet than an actor acting his or her role for a film. At the end of the day they are still a person and retain their agency. Fair objection, however what may delimit the TikTok NPC from the film actor is that all-too-important feedback mechanism. In the actor’s case, there is no immediate response from the audience of a film, for it is largely a prospective endeavor. Contrast this to the TikTok NPC where validation/gratification is immediate and in real-time, offering an intense, potent dopaminergic hit to both the NPC and audience. This bi-directional and immediate positive feedback is self-reinforcing and promotes the continuation of behavior. This microcosm of events taken in the singular may not amount to much, but when they are repeated several times a week, consistently, for months? As any good student of Aristotle may know, self-definition is what we practice every day. If someone acts as an NPC frequently enough, they essentially are an NPC. Furthermore, since TikTok is the major cultural disseminator of our time, this phenomenon is being dispersed far and wide, the underlying idea of non-agency being seeded into the collective culture and therefore psyche. What may result is unknowable, given the dizzying complexity of cyberspace and its culturally-mutagenic potential.
In sum, it has become apparent to me that Nick Land and his forebearers Deleuze and Guattari were awfully prescient in their theories regarding the relationship of man and capital. For some time capital was seen as something inert, some instrument to be wielded and used by man to further his own material gain—the industrial age comes to mind readily when thinking of this paradigm. Here, it holds that capital is nothing more than plants, factories, assembly lines, raw material, and workers themselves. With time and evolution, capital has come to encompass more of that last item: man. Man is now absorbed into capital, but far more profoundly than one might think. It is not simply the case that man instrumentalizes other men towards his own ends, but that capital itself instrumentalizes other men towards its own ends. This became far more of a possibility during the information age, where capital expanded its repertoire to include information. With the addition of information, the capture of culture by capital became a foregone conclusion. Of course, capital had always exerted influence on the human psyche: the Fordist method of production gave rise to ‘9-to-5 culture’ which shapes the perception of our daily lives, afterall. However, the information age, armed w/ the advent of the Internet, enabled a far more direct and speedier throughway towards this kind of manipulation—the previous case studies highlight how ruthless and efficient this capability is. The preeminent question now becomes: towards what end? One could speculate endlessly, though a couple of certainties emerge: humanity as we’ve defined it until now is at its twilight, and we haven’t been in the driver’s seat for some time, perhaps never. As Land puts it1:
"Wiener is the great theoretician of stability cybernetics, integrating the sciences of communication and control in their modern or managerial-technocratic form. But it is this new science plus its unmanaged escalation through the real that is for the first time cybernetics as the exponential source of its own propaganda, programming us. Cyberpositive intensities recirculate through our post-scientific techno-jargon as a fanaticism for the future: as a danger that is not only real but inexorable. We are programmed from where Cyberia has already happened...Whilst scientists agonize, cybernauts drift. We no longer judge such technical developments from without, we no longer judge at all, we function: machined/machining in eccentric orbits about the technocosm. Humanity recedes like a loathsome dream."
1Nick Land, Fanged Nourmena, pg. 299.