Metricized mentions foment us-against-them battles, making it easy for groups of “friends” (in reality, loose coalitions of semi-anonymous users) to target enemies and flood them with abuse. With its structural enforcement of brevity and its openness to anonymous participation, Twitter is the perfect platform for new experiments in collective cruelty. Stiegler was writing before Twitter’s ascendency, but he effectively predicted its culture. Twitter might be regarded as another of these combat technologies. Certain technologies, primarily those associated with combat, from the blindfold placed on an enemy’s face to the first-person-shooter perspective in video games, allow us to overcome proto-empathic identification and perform (and enjoy) otherwise forbidden acts, such as the sadistic abuse of the powerless or the collective reduction of a given grayfoe to pulp. In a permanent stupor or state of shock, we sense that it is becoming increasingly difficult to empathize with one another.Īs philosopher John Protevi points out in Political Affect, proto-empathic identification - the capacity to feel with others, above and beyond the natural empathy we experience when exposed to spectacles of suffering - works via emotional contagion, like an infectious yawn at a dinner table. Instead he regards these technologies as reorganizing friendship in regressive and ultimately oppressive ways, erasing the barrier separating adults from children, and opening the floodgates to wave after wave of commercial stupidity. His concern is not that “authentic” encounters are supposedly being displaced by cascading flows of ones and zeroes. The new technologies of amity, philosopher Bernard Stiegler argues in “Five Hundred Million Friends: The Pharmacology of Friendship,” are evolving in tension with the ancient technologies of the self: the arts of dialogue and listening, the protocols of amorous love, the cultivation and maintenance of bonds of intimacy with friends and family. Strange as it may sound, social media platforms seem to be industrializing and automating friendship, introducing economies of scale to the business of sociality.
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