Facebook, Instagram, X, and Co: The New Platonic Cave
Social networks, from Facebook to Instagram, are based on the like-mechanism, through which users express their appreciation for images or comments posted by other users. Thus, the “likes” that populate social media establish the value of the “homo digitalis” in the electronic social market: each person is worth as many “likes” as they have obtained, that is, based on the amount of appreciation they have been able to elicit from other internet users.
It is not difficult to understand how such a mechanism generates forms of leveling and standardization, inducing each member to voluntarily adapt to the prevailing taste and eliminating any position or expression that might disagree with the communis opinio.
This is where the social proof mechanism lies: it induces young people to behave exactly like everyone else in order to gain their approval through the much-coveted “likes” on the network. The mechanism also mimics the comprehensive commercialization of everything and everyone: in fact, in pursuit of the goal of the “like,” the “homo digitalis” displays himself as a commodity, attempting to seduce the “buyer” by appealing to his tastes and attention.
This is all the more so because, in the liberal-digital civilization, more and more people boast of the new “profession” of influencer, which, as the culmination of the neoliberalization of the world of life, signals how the liberal-libertarian man no longer has a company, but has himself become a walking company. In fact, what else do so-called influencers do but sell themselves on the web, multiplying excessively the approval rating crystallized in “likes”? Once again, the dialectic of servitude and lordship coincides in the same subject, who exploits himself beyond all limits for the sake of profit, making his own person the commodity to be sold and from which to obtain surplus value. Knowing how to do is replaced by knowing how to be.
Apart from that, social media creates anxiety about always being up to date with what is happening in the world: we tend to spend all our time watching world events on our mobile phone screens, thereby giving up on experiencing the world firsthand. The paradox is that, in the perception of the younger generations, you are not living fully if you are “offline”—disconnected. Real life is increasingly identified with ‘online’ life, with “offline” being understood as a temporary interruption. Derealization is achieved through the abandonment of the real in favor of the digital, which is now seen as the truer reality: in the words of Nietzsche, “the true world becomes a fable,” debased for the benefit not of the Platonic “ideal world” or the Christian “paradise,” but of the new digital empire of telematic communities.
The paradoxical aspect which is that in which the i-Gen (the generation born after 1995) finds itself suspended, or at least those sectors still capable of perceiving the world in which they live as a problem, is that, on the one hand, they feel distressed by the idea of unlimited connection and, on the other, they feel literally terrified by the idea of losing it and remaining disconnected.
The film Disconnect (2012), by director Henry-Alex Rubin, masterfully describes the aporetic nature of the new virtual condition to which the younger generations are condemned. Always connected, the inhabitants of the network depend entirely on the Internet for every action and every thought. They perceive reality as unreal, finding full citizenship only in telematic spaces.
An increasing number of young people have openly chosen to live online, deserting real life, which has been degraded to the rank of offline existence. It is the paroxysmal imago of existence in the age of globalism: the homo cosmopoliticus coincides with a punctiform and uniform subjectivity, solitary but always connected, global but isolated, close to the distant and distant from the near.
“I am connected, therefore I exist”: this seems to be the theorem that sums up the meaning of being in the world of digital man, for whom the real world has become a fairy tale and the only dimension of authentic life coincides with the unlimited spaces of the Internet network. They are permanently online, working tirelessly (and very often without knowing it) for the platforms they use, providing data, responding to electronic correspondence, generating profits for the masters of the digital world.
In this way, not only do human relationships become digital and the boundary between free time and surplus value time evaporate, but, in a convergent manner, action is inhibited and the critical spirit is anesthetized: the time of existence is spent on the network, in the obsessive control of email and mobile phones, in attending to digital relationships and in the permanent reworking of one's own virtual profile as it appears on the social media stage. All existence is subsumed under capital.
What, back in 1995, the American psychiatrist Ivan Goldberg had defined as “Internet Addiction Disorder” has spread to such an extent that it has conquered, de facto, almost all the inhabitants of the cosmopolis in integral reification.
It is not difficult to understand how, by virtue of the proliferation of digital relationships typical of the virtual community, the new seductive power of technocapitalism has actually succeeded, in a conquering manner, in inhibiting real interpersonal relationships, effectively dissolving the basis for a collective revolt.
The i-Gen, or the hyperconnected generation described by Jean Twenge, is populated by a swarm of young people who are permanently online, always connected to the Internet and disconnected from reality and social bonds.
The paradigm of the individual start-up entrepreneur and self-promoter is also hegemonic in social networks. Sharing, which at first glance may seem like a communal activity, actually appears to be the apotheosis of individualism in the age of social networks.
The act of digitally sharing multimedia content is not dominated by a community spirit or altruism, but rather by the hypertrophic ostentation of the self and its activities; ostentation which, consistent with the new prevailing profile of “egomaniacs,” regularly results in the inappropriate invasion of other people's lives through the narcissistic display of the self. Such practices can only abstractly be called “shared use” of the network, since, in reality, they are the opposite of the gesture to which the verb “to share” properly refers. “To share,” in fact, means to subdivide anything one possesses, partially depriving oneself of it in order to allow others to participate in it.
But in the age of the Internet and compulsive egocracy, those who share do not deprive themselves of anything: they simply invade the lives of others with their own self, using others as a mere medium, as a mirror on whose surface they can contemplate their own self-sculpted image. The generation of the “selfie of the serf” lives narcissistically in the uninterrupted self-promotion of its own image, aspiring to that summit of alienation known as the influencer. This marks the triumph of the “culture of narcissism” described in his day by Lasch: everyone exhibits and promotes themselves as an auto-entrepreneur of a sui generis enterprise, coinciding with their own person reduced to a commodity among commodities.
As has been suggested, self-promotion is the new horizon of Anerkennung—recognition—in times of global alienation: in fact, the power of one's own image, advertised as a commodity, is now the main route to success; success that, very often, is measured by having a good image, thereby obtaining added value (think of the social network called Instagram). This reinforces, once again, one of the theses that sums up the new disordered neoliberal order: in its spaces, one does not “have” a company, but rather “is” a company. One becomes, so to speak, living capital or, as has long been customary to say, “human capital,” walking merchandise that self-values by promoting itself, in the full coincidence between seller and merchandise sold.
The Internet and the society of likes, with their ephemeral and superficial relationships, have fully earned the status of a new drug which, equivalent to the “soma” described by Huxley in Brave New World, compensates for the suffering and grievances of the real world, awakening the illusion of a more “authentic” community, projected into another dimension with respect to the traditional offline world. From this perspective, the considerations developed by Marx in relation to religious Opium des Volks could be applied to Internet society and its digital paradises, which he understood as a heavenly community devised as a false compensation for the distortions of the earthly one. To paraphrase Feuerbach, it could be said that the more man puts into the digital, the less he has in the real and in himself.
As we have seen, the digital community condenses within itself the essence of a society built on the non-social foundations of liberal cosmopolitanism: in the abstract, we are connected on a planetary scale without exclusions, and in concrete terms, each of us is alone with ourselves, facing our own screen and confined to our own digital cell. This is the falsely communal essence of what has been defined as the new “online society.”
Quick to form and break, selfish and attached to the exclusive norm of do ut des—I give so that you give—and often characterized by the uncontrollable outbreak of violence (from haters to cyberbullying), digital relationships appear to be a decisive moment in the post-human drift that accompanies the apotheosis of new globalized technocapitalism.
The very relationships that the digital community proposes are ephemeral and superficial, precarious and part-time: they are rarely structured in the form of a stable and lasting bond capable of giving rise to the traditional figures of friendship, love, and political struggle. For the most part, these are intermittent and provisional relationships that do not go beyond the ever-revocable instantaneity of the like.
To fully understand the true nature of digital social relationships, it may be useful to quickly review their main forms. There is, for example, the phenomenon of ghosting, which is when someone suddenly disappears (literally becoming a “ghost”) from someone else's life without offering any explanation, even if until recently the relationship seemed to be going well.
We also have the phenomenon of “breadcrumbing,” which is “feeding” a relationship with sporadic messages, keeping a window open and giving false hope to the other person. There is also the figure of the “bencher,” which involves “keeping someone on the bench,” that is, keeping the other person in a kind of limbo, always taking time and avoiding both interrupting the relationship and structuring it more solidly.
Finally, there is the phenomenon of “zombieing,” which could plausibly be understood as an evolution of “ghosting.” It consists of a kind of successive (and equally unjustified) “resurrection” after the disappearance with which the relationship had been abruptly interrupted.
This mixture of isolation and detachment from reality is blatantly corroborated by the emergence of the so-called “Hikikomori children,” a Japanese expression that refers to “children who have chosen to remain on the sidelines.” “Hikikomori children” are those who lock themselves in their rooms—for months, if not years—and, isolated from the real world, choose to live exclusively online. A Hikikomori is someone who secedes from reality to transfer themselves entirely to digital life.
The aporia of telematic relationships can be summarized as follows: not only do they weaken real relationships in the very act of promising to strengthen them, but at the same time, and synergistically, they contribute to the planetary leveling of identities, that is, to their replacement by the neutral “profile” of the dehumanized, post-identity man: with social networks, we have ‘profiles’ but no longer “identity.” The more time we devote to connections with the “profiles” scattered throughout the open space of the unified market world, the more we withdraw from relationships with real “identities,” with the prospect of never cultivating any again.
On the other hand, the Internet is the necessary beachhead for the infantilized mind and for the individual condemned to the role of eternal youth. It is a vast and boundless territory, where information flows relentlessly, while banners, pop-ups, and registration forms of all kinds attract and excite the mind, causing perpetual instability and continuous overexcitement.
Supported by the prior pulverization of traditional ethical communities, the consumerist socialization of the younger generations in integral capitalism and deprived of unhappy consciousness, finds its own humus in non-community digital communities: whose nomadic inhabitants, in liquid sociability, do nothing but publish self-referential posts to feel connected to the world and demonstrate to their neighbors, whom they will often never actually meet, that they are active participants in the process of conformist mass socialization.
The real community, with its ethical roots, is replaced by the digital non-place of the network and “imaginary communities” as an immaterial and deterritorialized space for the unreal relationship between consumerist monads that are falsely connected and specifically condemned to isolationism. Herein lies the essence of the generation that, with biting irony, could be defined as that of the “egomonsters” and the “selfie of the gleba,” children of a lesser Self.
By replacing real communities with virtual ones of solitudes connected via the web, profoundly redefining ways of thinking and acting, the “social networks” of the digital world neutralize the possibility of consolidating and sedimenting memory, rendering information and data, events and knowledge precarious, superficial, and fleeting: updated in real time, they disappear and are redefined every time the screen of one's own device is refreshed.
They turn each of us into a “connectionist,” a nomadic inhabitant of networks and volatile contacts, a deserter from real communities and bonds external to the virtual world, a lonely internet user connected relentlessly to everyone and no one. They promote unstable forms of identity and multitasking, attention deficit, and the erosion of real bonds. They strengthen weak bonds and weaken strong ones.