Belly Button Lint

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Tag: social media

  • Theme:

    Authenticity Rewired

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    1–2 minutes

    The notion of individual authenticity was once aligned with the idea of a motivating inner truth. Today, “authenticity” is enmeshed with social media and external signaling: to be who you project to be.

    We are constantly working on “our self” to align with the “data self”: The projected media self is not internally generated but externally manufactured, integrated, and then re-transmitted as an increasingly curated, co-evolved, drift into a commodity version of the “wisdom of crowds.”

    The new authenticity is complete subsumption; to be owned is non-contradictory, and to have no internal truth is never to betray yourself but always to be a victim when the crowd turns.

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    gentrified artists (graffiti)

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    1–2 minutes

    In an art magazine Instagram post the editor complained about a lack of graffiti on walls as a sign of artists being gentrified.

    Perhaps. Perhaps the art world has been entirely packaged and purchased. Maybe art was only briefly a transgressive modality and (with the help of this magazine) has returned to propping up transcendent naval gazing (religion or commerce).

    Interestingly, this sentiment was pasted on a digital wall, where outrage amplifies more readily than sloganeering on physical barriers. The internet is a better modern tool, as is money to convert graffiti into a mural.

    As well, to call artists "gentrified" for not vandalizing (bemoaining the loss of rebellion) undermines the succesful inclusivity work the artworld has done to grant all fringe practices space inside rather than out. The point of graffiti (for artists rather than taggers) has been rendered mute.

    I will concede: Defacing the real world is becoming passé. Cluttering my feed with inane observations and advertising is the new trash that concerns me.

  • Theme:

    social media captures leisure, which is us

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    1–2 minutes

    Labor used to be bodily work with limits, meaning your leisure time was yours while your labor time created capital through products and services.

    Sociologists once thought the only way to know someone was by what they did in their free time; at work, they were compromised.

    The miracle of social media is how it has converted “disposable time” into fixed capital; the mechanics of capture bypass physical labor limits to consume thoughts, style, and representation, altering it into material, structural wealth.

    The machinery of capture has ensnared us, but we have gone willingly out of awe and fear. Beginning with industrial bodily factory ballet and permeating to our mind and time, we are now devoted to the mechanics of the algorithmic desire.

    “but this is the art of the machines—they serve that they may rule.” Samuel Butler, 1897

  • Theme:

    Keep joy for yourself (social media)

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    1–2 minutes

    Pleasures do not need to be advertised.

    We tend to think what we like is who we are: we identify with our joy.

    However, to broadcast your joy is to move the internal to the external, from which the external representation parasitizes your glee: the outer "image of identity" affects your actions (amplifies) by feeding upon your emotion for social reification.

    In an odd contradiction, the external image of you is fixed (flat, unidimensional) yet must continually expand. Once enough of your joy has been extracted into the proxy "image of identity" you are reduced to joyless reactive motion where you now mirror your social image, it does not reflect you.

    In social media, this is when your passion is converted to content, your content then drives your action, which you are no longer passionate about, but you must simulate joy to maintain identity.

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  • Theme:

    social media is performative, it is anti-social

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    1–2 minutes

    Social media is not social: it is performative. It is a theater (platform) to entertain an audience.

    Social media is (arguably) anti-social because it encourages politics and morality plays.

    (first sentence from Naval)

  • Theme:

    reputational policing

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    1–2 minutes

    To consider your online reputation as worth defending only encourages others to take perverse pleasure in denigrating it.
    This is not the fault of social media; it does not divide us or make us worse.
    The capitalist system we are in plays out as subversive competition on social media. Enjoyment through dissidence is encouraged, where trolling builds a reputation by destruction, which converts the troll into a king, who then must be subverted or torn down in turn.
    In short, to consider the online self as an extension of your reputation (worth defending) is the trap into which we must not fall.

  • Theme:

    Incentives and Algorithms

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    1–2 minutes

    Social media is to blame because it perpetuates drama. If success is time-on-platform, not thoughtful engagement, triggering base impulses (shock and popularity) is expedient.

    Yet, corporations can alter algorithms to maximize time-on-platform by feeding in-depth conscientious debates.

    A contemplative public may have a higher price yet is worth incentivizing. Parading stupidity (until we live in an idiocracy) will be considerably more costly in the long run.