The Twittering Machine

Overview

'If you really want to set yourself free, you should read a book – preferably this one.' Observer In surrealist artist Paul Klee’s The Twittering Machine, the bird-song of a diabolical machine acts as bait to lure humankind into a pit of damnation. Leading political writer and broadcaster Richard Seymour argues that this is a chilling metaphor for relationship with social media. Former social media executives tell us that the system is an addiction-machine. Like drug addicts, we are users, waiting for our next hit as we like, comment and share. We write to the machine as individuals, but it responds by aggregating our fantasies, desires and frailties into data, and returning them to us as a commodity experience.Through journalism, psychoanalytic reflection and interviews with users, developers, security experts and others, Seymour probes the human side of this machine, asking what we’re getting out of it, and what we’re getting into.

Author Biography

Richard Seymour is a writer and broadcaster and the author of numerous books about politics including The Liberal Defence of Murder (Verso, 2008), Against Austerity (Pluto, 2014) and Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics (Verso, 2016). His writing appears in the The New York Times, the London Review of Books, the Guardian, Prospect and Jacobin.