The invention of the smart phone wasn’t revolutionary because it offered a particular practical benefit for human communication. It was revolutionary because it offered a therapeutic-hypnotic modality. The scroll is the contemporary prayer. It is a psycho-technology. The difference is obvious, however. A prayer—in the traditional sense—is connected to a transcendental entity. The scroll is connected to your idiot neighbour or cousin.
By this, I mean that scrolling though social media is a form of social ‘participation’. Well—in reality, it is a form of non-participation. Yet, it gives the scroller the illusion that they are involved. They are ‘in the know’. They are ‘aware’ of the various talking points, social fuax pas and happenings that are moving about the digital zoo on that given day. Their prayer is a death of God form of prayer, in the sense that it is a religiously charged communion with the trivial and provincial. Ritualistically, the scroll is a satirical eulogy to God’s death.
On a more practical note, I have recently decided to stop scrolling. Rather than entirely quit the use of any social media—I have instead decided to negate the one pathological and degenerate activity which this technology consciously demands: to scroll. If one thinks back to the days when phones had buttons on them and a webpage had a top and a bottom, we see a virtual architecture which was entirely distinct on spatial grounds. Before the smart phone, with its flat topography and its allowances of quasi-erotic rubbing and touching, the button-phone had a more concrete spatial design. It had fixed buttons that allowed one to navigate a limited webpage. The era of phone-masturbating physical habits corresponds directly to a peculiar similarity to prayer. Prayer communes with the eternal—and phone rubbing communes with the seemingly eternal virtual realm of infinite choice.
When one scrolls, they pray to the limitless market place of consumer choices, trivial social concerns and audio-visual stimulations. It is quite clear that the effect this behaviour has is deeply hypnotic. It resonates with a peculiar sense of ease and focus; an ease and focus which the scroller cannot acquire in almost any other activity.
There is also a cognitive and emotional function to scrolling. It outsources the experience of thinking and feeling onto a virtual hive mind. If I feel the existential anxiety of boredom or depression, I can be hypnotically synchronised into the virtual-eternity of a webpage with more cat videos than I could ever possibly watch. The fact that—unlike an online article or essay—the page has no end to it, the scroller is offered this comforting release from the presence of limits that normally invokes anxiety of boredom — or more importantly; disappointment. How can one ever be disappointed when there is literally no limit to the choice of audio-visual stimulations?
I find myself falling for this quite often. Frustrated by my bad job—or bereft of meaningful experiences on a day to day basis—to simply scroll through Twitter or Youtube seems to offer a perverse form of comfort. Yet, this comfort usually steals the moment from myself. To actually overcome such realities and existential anxieties we must see and live where the limits are in order to overcome them. There is a frequent conservative critique of such observations which might be tempted to demand a restriction of choice. Although, I feel this misses the point. The eternal-virtual is a therapeutic management of the very real loss of meaningful choices. The economic servitude one finds themselves in under capitalism. The lack of meaningful social relations. The lack of historical participation with their own societies. The lack of political authority or participation caused by neo-liberalism. All of these very real limits are to be cheaply contained and managed through the hypnosis of scrolling.
It may seem trivial—but having spent just two days on a no-scroll detox, I suddenly feel sobered and worlded by the cognitive and emotional confrontation with real limits. I really am bereft of many meaning things. I really don’t like my job and so on. There’s no clear answer to these problems—and they may again seem trivial (first world problems ect.). Yet, the refusal to participate in the therapeutic management of these limits is necessary to orientate oneself enough to think of a meaningful response.
Above all, to scroll through the hypnotic infinite of the contemporary digital architecture, offers a replacement for a deprived experience or goal. Perhaps my own personal psychology is not a standard to make claims about the universal nature of mankind by—namely because of excessive desires for historical participation(deprived by the post-historical situation). Nonetheless, even very moderate forms of participation are quickly being replaced by the smart phone prayer rituals of our time.
On a very basic existential level, even the choice of which song I will listen to while I do some chores or edit this article, is increasingly something that I cannot attain without the infinite choice of Youtube’s homepage. It ‘knows’ what I want to listen to. At least, this is the propagandistic belief of those who encourage this sort of cognitive outsourcing.
Yet, I don’t really know what I want to listen to—so how could the algorithm? It is entirely untrue that these algorithms and data collecting monstrosities ‘know us better than ourselves’. They simply offer us something we want. They don’t ‘know us’ because they offer us a few similar albums or products that we have not yet thought of using or buying. The offering of a practical thing (such as a song) is not the prize of these technologies. Its power lies nowhere near the fact that if I searched a Deftones song, the vulgar algorithm can make the banal assumption that I might like to listen to another Deftones song. Or if I buy some gym equipment the supposedly hyper-intelligent date-processor, just might take a guess that I may be inclined to buy another piece of gym equipment an few weeks later. This is not intelligence. The constant overstating of the magnificence of AI, for example, reveals nothing more than the sycophantic, submissive and spiritually crippled rhetoric of the bug-man who has developed such an infantile emotional attachment to the (idea) of technology, if not the reality of technology. No—this is all embarrassingly stupid. The real offering of such algorithmic powers lies in the benefit of offering me a way out of having to choose—even the most banal of choices, such as which song to listen to while I wash the dishes.
Once one stops scrolling, they begin to exercise the now atrophied muscle of decision making on an existential level— and not simply a rational level. One will perhaps relate to this next observation. If you scroll through the homepage of an algorithmically selected set of choices, you will suddenly—once you snap out of the hypnosis—realise you have wasted 20 minutes staring at a screen, having not chosen anything at all. Far from maximising human agency (which is a dubious end to begin with) a honest look at the human using the technology—and not the screen itself—will show the opposite evidence to what is stated by the scroll addicted bug man: A total loss of agency.
This technology does not help us gain something we want. It helps us avoid something we don’t want : to not make decision or simply encounter a certain limit, disappointment or loss on an existential level. It’s power is negative, not positive. And we have all fallen for this trick. If the Bug-man were to apply an honest compliment to this technology, it would not be by way of labelling it a helpful intelligence to compliment the supposed stupidity of humans. It would be noting it as a jester; something which has turned our own aversion to the confrontation of limits into a profitable enterprise. That is its power.