The performative essence of the psychological theatre of contemporary social media is of a human subject that exists and persists as foundationally divided against itself in, through and as the production (and reflexive reproduction) of the remedial language and simplified visual grammars that maximally amplify this signal of uniqueness and individuality – even as the message of particular self-presentation undergoes diffusion into a bland porridge of normative sameness. Every assertion of identity, affiliation or belief is an aspiration towards the psychological and cultural closure of a meaning and purpose or direction that only carries any significance in as much as it is (and forever remains) in doubt.
An experience of such complex communications systems does not overnight translate us into gibbering, slack-jawed and smiling narcissistic morons – the unpalatable truth is that the technological edition simply optimises the transmission medium of our own behavioural vocabularies towards the revivification of this atavistic homunculus that frames our cognition and systems of desire, rewards and aversion. Who we are in social media is simply the signal of a confused psychological and symbolic network of representational chaos that we always and already were.
We are divided against ourselves by all of this recursively self-propagating complexity erase this is precisely the optimally concise algorithmic solution to the generation if pliable insecure individuals and communities of individuals through which both language and technology might facilitate their own endlessly stochastic (as uncertain, unbounded and creative) metamorphosis.
Image: Stable Diffusion.
Daedelus Kite 