As with mechanical industry, the first years of the computing revolution were characterized by an unprecedented level of generativity. The engines and motors of the previous era gave way to the enormous and free proliferation of software and peer-to-peer networks. It was feasible and even common for each person connected to the Internet to have a space to call their own: a small but autonomous area in which one was free to express themselves however they pleased.
Even when used for entertainment, a traditional computer is constantly prompting the human being for input. Touched or untouched, the presence of a keyboard is a continual reminder of the role a person has in its proper functioning. Yet in the course of technological development, the human being's ability to express themselves through technology as a means becomes a vestigial trait. To be "social" on the Web once required at least some knowledge of HTML. It now does not even require a pulse.
As the social Web developed of itself, the need for an individual to provide some input into what was ostensibly their own social life decreased. As such efforts become gradually entrusted to the machine, we see a natural metamorphosis and self-limiting of expression: the keyboard, a conduit for all of language, is channeled into an increasingly limited set of symbols, and finally two: a "like" or "dislike." With the perfection of artificial intelligence, it will soon need none at all.
Early critiques of film and television were replete with warnings against such a tendency toward passivity. While there is bound to be opposition -- as with the so-called "digital minimalists" today -- such attempts are doomed to fail. The hand that has guided us from thoughtfulness to the look of complete stupefaction with which the average person browses Facebook was only returning us where we've wanted to go all along: entertainment unto death.
The transition of human cultural activity to passivity, and finally to machine activity, was brilliantly elucidated by Marx in chapter 13 of the Grundrisse. As with his maxim "All that is solid melts into air," the famous "Fragment on Machines" has a direct and near universal applicability to understanding the development of social media:
The worker's activity, reduced to a mere abstraction of activity, is determined and regulated on all sides by the movement of the machinery, and not the opposite. The science which compels the inanimate limbs of the machinery, by their construction, to act purposefully, as an automaton, does not exist in the worker's consciousness, but rather acts upon him through the machine as an alien power, as the power of the machine itself1.
It is a truism that capitalist profit drives technological progress. But what is important to bear in mind is that it is human satisfaction in an abstract form that yields profit. Thus despite digital culture no longer requiring human intervention, it is necessary for it to appear as though a human being had some hand in its creation. We can witness this by studying the growth and continuing popularity of Instagram.
Those who remember a time before Instagram existed can recall its initial aura of dilettantism, being chiefly a place for the indolent photographer to apply a set of algorithmic filters on the pictures they shared. With perfect accuracy, each of these replicated a much more complex photographic progress. As the service grew in popularity, the original form of each of these filters was sublated into its imitation. It is now impossible to look at a historical, sepia photograph without thinking an Instagram filter has been applied.
As with any revolution in production, by being shared through networks like Instagram and to such an enormous degree, photography itself necessarily took on a form that could accelerate its conveyance as quickly as possible. The true hallmark of the "artistic" video is not a formal quality, but rather the technical impositions of the service: video length, file type, and size. Prior methods of finding value in a work of art are done in vain; what may have once been legitimate criticism has now become a discipline practiced by the most deft of academics and other obscurantists. The patina has settled, and all photography is now exactly the same.
This is apparent to us when considered dialectically, but this is not the case in everyday life. Even when "the truth" of the matter is lurking in the back of our minds, our first inclination is to consider the post, the share, and the comment as authentic opportunities for creativity. To us it does not matter that all of this is predetermined by an algorithm that is at every moment increasing in sophistication, just as it makes no difference that Instagram's parent company had a direct hand in human genocide. We notice when the service goes down, or changes its interface, and nothing further.
It is every person's duty to immediately and permanently cease participating in the dominant forms of social media. This is so pressing as to become a moral imperative. By doing otherwise one does not only consent to cultural and political atrophy: they affirm it. Yet this description is not an attempt to moralize anyone, but instead get to the procedural truth of the matter. The fact that I resist this development is only due to my disposition. To the progress of technology I am nothing but a "stick in the mud," a small obstacle that will be overcome in time. It makes no difference that my musical works are distinctly unmarketable, that I abstain from Facebook, and that I refuse to have a Google account. I will not live forever, and the future will come without me.
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