Letter From the Editor
Rethinking the ‘Social Industry’ Problem
Our interactions with technology are much more complex than many critics acknowledge
I’ve been reading a new book called The Twittering Machine. Written by Richard Seymour, it examines and complicates the clichéd narrative that social media companies are enacting a kind of mind control on a naive populace, forcing us to engage and post like we’re struck by the tendrils of a zombie fungus.
There’s no denying that social technology has changed us, and the book explains many of the ways it has done so, but technology is not some alien force: It shapes and is shaped by people. We who toil on these platforms — Seymour categorizes them under the label “social industry” rather than “social media” — are implicated in its problems as well.
Or, as Max Read put it in his review, “Mark Zuckerberg is not pointing a gun at anyone’s head, ordering them to use Instagram — and yet we post as though he is… rather than asking what is wrong with these systems, we might ask, ‘What is wrong with us?’”
From the book’s foreword:
If the Twittering Machine confronts us with a string of calamities — addiction, depression, “fake news,” trolls, online mobs, alt-right subcultures — it…
