the exposure paradox

how social media disorganises us

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been immersing myself in the work of British writer J.G. Ballard, a man equally famous for his controversial novel Crash—about people who find car crashes sexually stimulating—and his autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun, which was turned into a 1987 Spielberg movie starring a young Christian Bale. Ballard, one of the generation of writers who thought that science fiction should be more engaged with technology and its effects on the human psyche than stories of aliens and outer space, is now considered almost stunningly prophetic, having foreseen, as far back as the early 70s, the advent of social media, the use of ride-sharing apps and, unbelievably, the presidency of Ronald Reagan.

Ballard was obsessed with television, then with the consumer camcorder, and the changes both these things would bring about. In a 1982 interview with V. Vale, published in Extreme Metaphors: Interviews with J.G. Ballard 1967-2008, he basically foretold of Instagram, and the way that we would video and curate our whole lives for broadcast to the world:

Everybody will be doing it, everybody will be living inside a TV studio. That’s what the domestic home aspires to these days; the home is going to be a TV studio. We’re all going to be starring in our own sit-coms, and they’ll be very strange sit-coms too, like the inside of our heads.

What strikes me about this, more than anything else, is his understanding of the human compulsion towards what this technology—whether it’s the early 80s home video camera or the front-facing lens of a smartphone—would allow us to do. Given the incredible power of film recording, something previously reserved for movie directors or the makers of TV, Ballard knew that the vast majority of us wouldn’t be out making documentaries about nature or avant-garde films about rotting fruit. He knew that we would immediately turn that camera on ourselves—exposing ourselves, our domestic lives, our thoughts and feelings, and projecting that to everyone else.

More prophetic than any of this, though, is Ballard’s lesser known short story, The Intensive Care Unit (from his collection Myths of the Near Future). In this mini-world, individuals live their entire lives in front of a series of cameras. They date through the camera lens, they marry through the camera lens, they copulate through the camera lens. All human relations are done via technology, with the physical human bodies isolated from each other, to the extent that when one family—a doctor, his wife and their two children, who have been conceived through tech assistance—decide to finally meet up in real life, they are at first disgusted by the human physicality of each other, the reality without the blurring smudge of in-camera touch-ups. And then, when they try again, the outcome is much, much worse. By the end of the story you come to realise that the mediating hand of technology has not, as they thought, made all their interactions simpler, easier, less problematic; instead, it has removed their ability to deal with others, including their loved ones, normally, on a personal level. When it comes to actual human interaction, all they have left, it turns out, is violence.

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Ballard was not the only person making such harrowing predictions as the heady, hopeful days of the ‘60s disappeared in rearview mirror. In his 1970 book Future Shock (parts of which had been published in Playboy, a fact that makes me pine for a time when ‘lifestyle’ mags would pay decent money for serious writing), writer and futurist Alvin Toffler wrote about the threat to society when shifts occurs too quickly; when individuals and communities are ‘overwhelmed by change’. Like Ballard, Toffler was concerned with the effects of technological innovation without time for proper adaptation:

The acceleration of change in our time is, itself, an elemental force. This accelerative thrust has personal and psychological, as well as sociological, consequences… [This] book argues forcefully, I hope, that, unless man quickly learns to control the rate of change in his personal affairs as well as in society at large, we are doomed to a massive adaptational breakdown.

This hits differently in 2024 than it must have in 1970. The last 54 years have introduced social and technological change at a speed that perhaps even Toffler could not have anticipated. His concept of ‘future shock’ seems almost quaint, because now, our adaptability to change is never really discussed. We are the online generations; it is just presumed that we can handle everything shifting every couple of years, whether that’s watching the evidence of the climate catastrophe become clearer every summer or seeing our hard-won skills become obsolete as new tech sweeps the jobs market (or at least claims it can) within months of invention. Presidents and Prime Ministers are swapped out quicker than vegetables rot. Everything is on an acceleratory course; wealth, poverty, the climate, politics, even the internet. Especially the internet. Social media only really began when I was a teenager. Now, two decades after the widespread pick-up of Facebook, as its founder is one of the world’s richest men and everyone’s grandma has an Instagram account, we’re belatedly stopping and saying: wait a minute. Maybe all this wasn’t such a good idea? Maybe it’s changing us irrevocably?

There is perhaps no platform that makes this clearer than 2024 Twitter. If you, like me, are a person who used to use it heavily, but now only maintain an account for promotion of your work, then opening the site feels like that glimpse into hell from the end of Event Horizon: a bunch of former friends and colleagues eviscerating each other, maggots streaming from mouths, barbed wire across eyes, blood splattered across every surface, human flesh flayed for all to see. It is as if comrades have been left in a closed ship bound for hell, only left to take their worst impulses out on each other.

These days I only peer into Twitter; I can feel my heart rate increase just opening up the site. But a few weeks ago, I saw a (white) person I respect call a noted woman of colour a racist, via tweet, for the inclusion of one sentence in an entire speech, strongly denouncing the actions of Israel and calling for freedom for Palestinians. This woman is not a politician; she is a political artist. She has long been on the side of the oppressed, at great personal and professional cost. She is known for it, and greatly esteemed on the left. These two people are on the same side. These two people think and believe the same things, and both say them, publicly, often. But this one sentence, according to the white person, did not go far enough, gave too much to the other side, made the woman of colour—sticking her neck out on the public stage, risking her safety at the same time—an idiot, a coward, a racist. This person—safe at home—did not just think this; they tweeted it. Barbed wire across the eyes, skin flayed, body paraded for all to see.

This is not an isolated incident. It is constant. It is what we have evolved to do, in the last few years, in part because of the algorithms, in part because of the culture of the platform and in part because we are sometimes, at heart, snide little goblins; we just hide this for the sake of social cohesion most of the time. But there is no need for social cohesion on Twitter; there is no one there facing you as you call them a racist or a cunt. It is only a screen that you face, a deep abyss, and if some response does come from it, all this happens through the mediating, deadening form of the screen. A few weeks ago, when a reprehensible MP nonetheless made a statement full of truths about another reprehensible politician, many people retweeted it stating that it was indeed full of truths. Many more people retweeted these tweets, calling them the worst kinds of names for daring to agree for the briefest of seconds with the MP, for saying correct things; the person I saw most strongly criticised for this was a black man. Again, it is people of colour bearing the brunt. All people involved, once again, are on the same side.

We think nothing, these days, of publicly stating that the people standing shoulder to shoulder with us on 99% of issues, including the ones most important to us, are fucking idiots, are turncoat scum, are whatever name we think up in the half-moment between feeling and tweeting. I think we have forgotten that today’s social media is public. The things we say on it are permanent, and they have an effect: at the very basic level, if you publicly berate your ally, your shared enemies benefit. This doesn’t mean that we should not voice concerns or raise issues; what it means is that we should be thoughtful about how and when we do this publicly, if we do actually value the overall leftist project. The algorithm, however, does not encourage us to be thoughtful.

The currency of today is criticism; we talk often of solidarity, but we don’t seem to notice that we drop ours at the slightest provocation, when we are momentarily annoyed or irked by a minute error that someone close to us has made. It would be so easy, in these moments, not to comment; it would be vastly better to remain silent than to give the opposing side more grist for their mill. The moments of disagreement are fleeting and inconsequential, in the grand scheme of things; a sentence we don’t like, a single tweet we disagree with. But we simply cannot keep quiet. The dopamine hit of condemnation wins out. We no longer know when to keep our opinions to ourselves, for the sake of public-facing unity. What this means is that coalition is next to impossible. You cannot build an effective movement with people who will, at any moment, turn around and publicly call you the worst things under the sun from deviating, however briefly, from what they think you should do or say. Not because you are engaging in a sustained campaign of behaviour that is antithetical to the overall project, but because one sentence you said isn’t to their liking; because you did not respond, once, as they wanted you to. But this behaviour is what Twitter has taught us; critique, opine, destroy. Faceless criticism is distracting, but it is seductive. Social media, in this way, is fundamentally disorganising. It may once have been a place to build momentum, but now, instead, it breaks any potential coalitions down before they’ve even begun.

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I have been thinking a lot about political movements of the past, and the extent to which this did and didn’t happen before. Of course, fragmentation and fallouts have always happened; the People’s Front of Judea sketch didn’t come from nowhere. It has always been difficult to keep people on the same page, and the betrayals that feel the most brutal are the ones that come from the people closest to you. Of course its our closest neighbours and allies that we stab in the back. They’re the ones who are right there.

But there is one major difference, I think, between those times and ours: exposure. Now, we are constantly invited, and incentivised, to put every single thing about ourselves online: every part of our lives, every opinion, every action, every choice, every feeling. To tweet is to make constant endless public statements of our (often unconsidered) thoughts or reactions. When I think about people whose politics are close to mine but who I do not like, it is often their personal choices that have irked me, not their politics. I did not ever need to know these things about them; I did not need to know their every thought and feeling. But they shared it, and I judged it. As Ballard foresaw, we take the bait of modern technology; the self-facing camera is irresistible. We all live in a media studio now.

What this means is that we all know so much about each other—and on Twitter, there are so many of us. On closed platforms, you will only see the intimate content of people you actually know. On Twitter, or Instagram, or TikTok, there are hundreds of millions of us, constantly posting, constantly broadcasting. Much has been written about the fact that this level of personal engagement is exhausting and overwhelming, but less discussion has been given to the fact that we used to fragment ourselves. Toffler touched on it when he discussed the ‘modular man’, or the way that we previously didn’t engage with the entirety of a person, just the ‘module’ that we needed to see. To you, your postman was a postman; you didn’t need to know about his personal life or politics. Your colleague was a colleague, your shoe salesman a shoe salesman; to their loved ones, they were so much more. But for you, they didn’t need to be.

What Toffler posits is that this was a way of coping with the interconnectedness of urban and modern life. We are around and entwined with so many more people than we used to be. You simply don’t have the capacity to hold the entirety of every person. There are some who say this leads to alienation; Toffler disagrees (italics mine):

The very same writers who lament fragmentation also demand freedom—yet overlook the unfreedom of people bound together in totalistic relationships. For any relationship implies mutual demands and expectations. The more intimately involved a relationship, the greater the pressure the parties exert on one another to fulfil these expectations. The tighter and more totalistic the relationship, the more modules, so to speak, are brought into play, and the more numerous are the demands we make. In a modular relationship, the demands are strictly bounded. So long as the shoe salesman performs his rather limited service for us, thereby fulfilling our rather limited expectations, we do not insist that he believe in our God, or that he be tidy at home, or share our political values, or enjoy the same kind of food or music that we do. We leave him free in all other matters—as he leaves us free to be atheist or Jew, heterosexual or homosexual, John Bircher or Communist. This is not true of the total relationship and cannot be. To a certain point, fragmentation and freedom go together.

There are limits, I think, to this way of thinking. I do want the people I interact with regularly to not be racists, sexists, xenophobes, etc. I would rather go to a barber with sound politics than one who attends fascist marches on the weekend. But it is untenable to think that everyone you have a relationship with—and I use that term to mean that you know them, and they know you, and you interact in some fashion regularly; your bus driver, your customers, your children’s teachers—must be on your terms politically, socially and personally. They can’t be. They won’t be. And even if they were, they might change; we all do.

I think of the conversation around the often-used word ‘community’, and those who have pointed out that your ‘community’ is not actually just your friends and the people you like. It is your neighbours, your colleagues, the stranger in the street. It is the people who are around you, many of whom you will not like or agree with. When we talk about community we have to take them into account too. You cannot curate your entire life experience; some of it will involve people whose views—or simply opinions or choices—you don’t share or condone. To build something, you do have to engage with their needs, as human people. You have to understand what has led them to think the things they think.

Online, a lack of modularisation/insistence on total agreement is even more untenable. We interact, in some way, with thousands of people; on my personal instagram I follow 1400 accounts; on my slightly more curated professional one I follow over 400. My Twitter account follows 2,400, and whenever I use it I am shown content from many more accounts that I have never chosen to follow. The same is true of my Instagram feed now too. The algorithms expose us to more people than we have ever wanted to know; the platforms encourage us to expose more of ourselves than we ever thought we would. The net result of this is millions of people, putting their lives, their thoughts, their actions online. All these people, to some extent, are our online ‘community’.

To use Toffler’s term, we do ‘modularise’ the vast majority of these people. I don’t know or care about the life of the person who posts cat videos and nothing else. I modularise them and they modularise themselves, on that platform at least. But anyone who we even vaguely know, or come to know through their internet goings-on—those, we take completely. We are invited, and incentivised, to comment and critique on what these people broadcast; every thought, every feeling, every action they take. Someone who I followed originally off the back of a good recipe they posted—well, now I know their kids’ names, whether they get their dogs from a breeder or a rescue centre, how they vote, what they say about current issues. They post, I follow; I respond, on a personal level, to what they’ve put out. And if it ended there, it would be fine; overwhelming, but fine. But what we’ve been groomed into doing is not to leave it there. We’ve been convinced, through positive reinforcement, to publicly respond. To show our approval or disapproval of what they say and do. A snappy comment or public support; either will get engagement, so for the platform itself, either will do. But the nature of humans is to be louder in our criticism than our praise. And so, we criticise, we push ourselves away from them publicly. And everyone sees.

What results, then, is a massive network of people all pushing away from people who are, in many ways, the closest to them. When we are trying to build a political front, it is no longer a case of standing next to someone one a single issue and holding that line with them; instead we pick them apart cell by cell. In a spontaneous action, where people do not know each other, there is solidarity. But when this tries to turn into something more sustained, more towards gaining power? This seems increasingly doomed to fail, because we all come to know so much about each other, and there is no person with whom you will agree wholly. And we cannot help but give in to the platform; we comment, we publicly criticise. In the face of the criticism we are emotional, and we respond emotionally in that same public setting. Small spats become enormous and dramatic. More connections are broken. Real issues, and the ways we might come together to solve them, are drowned by a tide of largely inconsequential disagreements.

Social media encourages both constant critique and near complete exposure of the self. These two things cannot co-exist without destroying the way we communicate. It feels counter-intuitive, but one to some extent because we are unfragmented, we therefore are unfree. Peering in to Twitter, as someone who increasingly stays away from it, it’s very easy to be convinced that we have been swept away by the technology; we have suffered, as Toffler would put it ‘adaptational breakdown.’

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When it comes to political action and its outcomes, what suffers here is, of course, strategy. The well-trodden strategic pathways of the past rely on holding the line, on solidarity, on people coming together on a single issue, towards a defined goal, and staying in step on that one thing. It can’t work in the face of relentless nitpicking and constant public slandering over the smallest thing. There is, and must be, space for critique, for course-correction, for disagreement. For voices to be raised when abuse has occurred, when intra-community structures of justice and equality have failed. But that is not what the vast majority of us are doing on Twitter. Not in the year 2024.

There’s a famous 1944 disorganisation manual published by the CIA (or as it was then, the OSS), which was released a number of years ago by the CIA itself, called The Simple Sabotage Field Manual; in it, the agency discusses the best way that saboteurs can work against organised groups from the inside. This was something different from counter-insurgency; the manual itself states that simple sabotage “is executed by an ordinary citizen” with a “minimum danger of injury, detection or reprisal.” It goes on:

A second type of simple sabotage… is based on universal opportunities to make faulty decisions, to adopt a non-cooperative attitude, and to induce others to follow suit… A non-cooperative attitude may involve nothing more than creating an unpleasant situation among one’s fellow workers, engaging in bickering, or displaying surliness and stupidity.

This type of activity [is] sometimes referred to as “the human element…”

The human element, of course, is what Ballard was talking about whenever he wrote about technology; it wasn’t just about what we might create, but how we might interact with it, and what it might do to us. The human element is often the most disruptive, the most egregious. The human element might sabotage a project without even knowing it; might give in to the most base, the most divisive ways of behaviour without recognising it has happened. It might not operate with the intent of what’s described above, but it might bring about the same outcome.

At some point we are going to have to take responsibility for how we all act online, and the splintering of movements this causes. Spending so much time in fundamentally disorganising spaces is affecting us, it really is. It is far from the only issue facing the contemporary left, but it is part of it; we are precluding any possibility of sustained leftist success because of how we behave, and the speed with which everything is disintegrating around us makes it even more pressing that we get our shit together and start to take power from those who have it, and currently wield it with such graceless, sociopathic, genocidal malice.

Are we all suffering from future shock? Perhaps that is not quite the correct term for the fundamental moment. We have been changed by these technological spaces, that much we can say. Maybe it’s time to step back and look at what’s working for us and what isn’t; to see where we are self-sabotaging, and how we might stop.

To give the last word to Alvin Toffler:

For while we tend to focus on only one situation at a time, the increased rate at which situations flow past us vastly complicates the entire structure of life, multiplying the number of roles we must play and the number of choices we are forced to make. This, in turn, accounts for the choking sense of complexity about contemporary life.

Moreover, the speeded-up flow-through of situations demands much more work from the complex focusing mechanisms by which we shift our attention from one situation to another. There is more switching back and forth, less time for extended, peaceful attention to one problem or situation at a time. This is what lies behind the vague feeling noted earlier that "Things are moving faster." They are. Around us. And through us.

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My next novel Carrion Crow—a dark, physical book that ‘deduces an unutterable Gothic horror of class and gender from the pages of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management’—is forthcoming in Feb 27th 2024. You can support me, and this substack, by pre-ordering it here: