The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour review – our descent into a digital dystopia

A stark polemic argues that social media may have unleashed an age of nihilism from which there is little hope of escape

Back in the blissed-out 1960s, Marshall McLuhan evangelised for the new electronic media by instructing us to "serve these objects, these extensions of ourselves, as gods or minor religions". It was a prophetic glimpse of a future that has now arrived. People today are the slaves of their fetishised, deified smartphones; the religion is no longer minor, and, like the discredited cults it replaced, it doses the faithful with opium.

Technology, as Richard Seymour says, always boasts of possessing superhuman powers, which is why it arouses our wary paranoia. In earlier times, industrial engines seemed like monstrous Molochs that gobbled up workers; nowadays we are unsure whether the magical gadget we hold in our hand is "a benevolent genie or a tormenting demon". The twittering machine, as Seymour calls it, has no innate morality, but it preys on our weaknesses to monopolise our attention and modify our behaviour. We are left jangled, needy, constantly alert for the chirp that announces some new and unnecessary missive, ever ready to resume our chore of clicking the "like" button, surrendering to the advertisers who gather up the personal data we so guilelessly provide.

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