Tell me are we unhappy?
Are we unhappy?
Are we unhappy?
We could be happy too.
Jam City aka Jack Latham, Dream a Garden
You don’t hate Mondays, you hate capitalism.
Facebook meme
Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If the hedonic use of social media is driven by the emotional compensatory patterns I have described in the previous chapter, that would suppose that many of the 1.18 billion people who, at the time of writing, check Facebook every day, for instance, are in enough emotional distress of some form that they need the emotional regulation that I have argued social media provide. But is this likely, and how can we be sure? Even if only half of social media users consume social media content according to this pattern, there are still important questions to ask about what these hundreds of millions of people are escaping from. We all have our bad days, but what could be making so many people seek the compensatory emotional regulation I have described, and to such a degree? There are more potential answers to these questions than can ever be sensibly analysed together in one chapter of one book, and anyway, doesn’t everybody who experiences emotional distress, be it loneliness, depression, anxiety, or similar, have their own personal reasons why that may be the case? Yes and no. While this may be true on the surface, the distribution of emotional distress also follows societal and cultural patterns that are helpful when drawing a bigger picture of how people compensate for these feelings, whether with retail therapy, opiates, or social media. This chapter is about those patterns.
On a 2013 episode of US late-night TV show Conan, US comedian Louis CK said:
You know, underneath everything, in your life, there’s that thing, that empty… forever empty… [to Conan O’Brien] you know what I’m talking about? […] There’s that knowledge that it’s all for nothing and you’re alone. You know — it’s down there. […] And sometimes, when things clear away, […] you start going “oh no, here it comes, that I’m alone…” Like, it starts to visit on you. You know, just this sadness. Life is tremendously sad just by being in it. (September 20th 2013)
Perhaps we so often need to hear the most poignant and important things from comedians precisely because this role gives them a greater license to point out gently the most serious truths of all, but for most people it will be very difficult to read these words and not have any idea what Louis CK is talking about. It just isn’t easy being conscious and mortal. Beyond this nearly universal feeling, known as abjection, life in most early twenty-first-century societies can consist of quite a few other negative emotional experiences for which we might be compensating.
Before speaking about the emotional reality of society or culture, especially in relation to technological features of life such as social media, some clarification is needed: Which society are we talking about? While internet access is obviously not as easy in some regions of the world as others, social media are a global phenomenon, used by people from virtually every country, and from many different backgrounds. As a major global study published by anthropologist Daniel Miller and colleagues at University College London in 2016 has shown, it is a mistake to assume that the use of social media in all these societies is the same or has identical motivations (Miller et al, 2016). This is also true of emotional distress, and one can’t just talk about “people,” “society,” or “culture” in general, especially when the number of potential people involved runs into the billions. A firm analysis of the connection between negative emotions and any type of media use is far more likely if people are grouped together by what they have in common in fairly large groups. If there are certain societies having significant aspects of their cultural and political life in common that also show similarities in how social media are used, then that is a far more useful and instructive outcome.
The arguments advanced in this book will therefore aim to situate compensatory social media use in relation to specific forms of emotional distress that are common in the most developed, industrialised countries, such as those in Western Europe and North America — what economist J.K. Galbraith (1999) called the “affluent society”. The reasons for this focus will become clear, but nonetheless it should be stated explicitly before going further that this emphasis is not born of disinterest in or disregard for other regions; nor are other regions imagined to use social media significantly less. In fact, according to research agency We Are Social, the country with the top Facebook usage penetration rate in 2015 (percentage of population) was the Philippines, followed by Mexico and Turkey. Rather, this focus is because, as we will see, there is a relationship between exactly that predicament of being what we could call an “overdeveloped” society and the particular emotional states that drive the variety of compensatory media use I have suggested.
The idea that life in wealthy, industrialised societies might impact our mental and emotional health negatively is one that many people find counter-intuitive. One of the many myths about contemporary life on planet Earth that we are repeatedly asked to accept is that since life in the developing world is often a grim struggle for daily survival, life in the developed world must be pleasant, easy, and happy. The #FirstWorldProblems hashtag from which this chapter takes its name, an open conversation that satirises the overprivileged gripes of first-world inhabitants, is primarily a communication of exactly this idea: There are no problems in the so-called “first world” except #FirstWorldProblems such as: “There’s too much food in the fridge and no space for my almond milk,” “Sorry I’m late. I missed my subway stop because I was busy working on my dog’s Instagram page,” or “Pokémon Go deleted my account :(” (all real examples).
Life in much of the developing world can indeed be grim; according to the World Health Organisation, half the developing world still does not have access to basic sanitation, and 1.1 billion people don’t even have access to clean drinking water. A report from the World Bank estimates there are still over a billion people living on 1.25 dollars per day or less, and according to a report by Oxfam in January 2016, the richest sixty-two people on Earth own as much as the poorest half of the world’s population. The injustice of this situation is so obvious it barely needs pointing out, but acknowledging this urgent and horrific state of affairs does not mean that the so-called “first world” can’t also have problems. To put it another way, critiquing aspects of life that are related to exactly the forms of “development” that the developing world is said to lack does not mean that there aren’t issues in the developed world that are not only serious, but which — as we’ll see below — are caused by the very conditions that constitute being part of the “first world.”
Admittedly, people do whinge regularly about relatively trivial aspects of first-world life without remembering that they are altogether nice problems to have, and this failure to recognise one’s own privilege may indeed merit merciless satire, but we should not let these daft utterances or the running joke we have at their expense convince us that living outside of the developing world limits your right to critique the conditions in which you live, or that these are the only problems that occur there. There are #FirstWorldProblems and then there are real first-world problems, and yet it may be that the true first-world problems simply don’t have a name, because we don’t expect to find them or are encouraged by first-world culture not to look for them.
Many people in the developed world survive psychologically by using aspects of the material conditions in which they exist to convince themselves they are happy and contented with their lives. You’ve got an iPhone or a relatively new car — how bad can life be? In an age where depression is amongst the most-treated health conditions (UK) and opiate addiction is widespread (USA), we need to ask whether we’re as happy as we want to believe we are. To understand how and why aspects of life in the developed world might be implicated in emotional distress, and how in turn these feelings may drive social media use, we need a good picture of what the emotional reality of so-called modern life really is.
These are often unpopular questions to ask, but there is genuine emancipatory potential in asking honestly whether there might be broader features of our day-to-day lives in the developed world that cause the long-term emotional health of our societies and cultures to suffer. Instead of the types of problem satirised by the #FirstWorldProblems hashtag, what this chapter will therefore outline are some of the genuine issues of life in the over-developed world and how they might create forms of emotional distress that directly drive people towards pathological rooms of media consumption such as compulsive social media use.
When we think of so-called “first-world” life, what do we think of? Besides increased consumerism and a greater level of material comfort on the whole, answers tend to relate to a strong social contract, such as democracy, welfare (to varying degrees), literacy, technology, and a free press. As Swedish development researcher and professor Hans Rosling has reminded us (2007), the ideas we have about what development, or lack thereof, actually means aren’t always accurate. Philosophers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2001) also take issue with the idea of “development,” arguing that it suggests a destination towards which “developing” countries are moving (or should move), while “developed” countries have arrived. As we will see below, their theory is useful, and the differences between the “developed” and “developing” regions of the world are far more complex and far less teleological.
Be that as it may, our systems of government and the political health of our societies are generally implicated in our everyday mental wellbeing. There is a reason why self-determination, the freedoms of speech, conscience, thought and religion, and the rights to privacy and due process of law are all considered to be human rights and not luxuries (although too often they become luxuries). Without the security that these bring, we suffer existential anxiety and fear, and studies show that factors such as low crime rates and universal access to healthcare are positively correlated with good mental wellbeing.
To equate only basic social and political position with the overall psychological wellbeing of a society, however, would be to say that societies where people are relatively assured of these rights and freedoms are likely to be psychologically healthier, but it is not as simple as that. Sigmund Freud wrote famously in Civilisation and its Discontents that the repression of more animalistic urges (such as murder, rape, incest) that is required in the building of a safe and secure society actually produces psychological tension in itself. Obviously we find these actions morally deplorable, but as has been written about at length in the field of psychoanalysis and critical theory, the realms of what we want to do — usually oriented around reward behaviours such as sex, food or drugs — and what we are actually allowed to do by the social structures and conventions around us, exist side by side. As the threshold between them shifts incrementally in one direction or the other over time, the tension between them is exacerbated. Even in the case of lesser behaviours that may be pleasurable to some whilst deplorable to most others, almost every society has created rules about what can or cannot be enjoyed or disdained. Social acceptance and respectability arguably remain dependent on achieving the correct balance, even in an age of far greater cultural relativism: Enjoy or disdain the wrong things, and you will quickly be jailed, ostracised, or have your Instagram account suspended.
“The stock market is founded on greed and fear,” British investor Mark Goodson said in an Open University documentary about the moment the so-called dot-com bubble “burst,” but the reverse is also true, and economics play a major factor in our emotional wellbeing. In economic downturns, for example, people lose their jobs and begin to commit suicide in significantly greater numbers. A study of fifty-four countries, published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), showed that in the economic recession of 2008–09, suicide rates increased significantly and were correlated with the levels of unemployment that resulted from the recession (Chang et al, 2013). Interestingly, the study found that this was more likely amongst men, young people, and in places where there had previously been low levels of unemployment. More worryingly still, a linked analysis of the same study, also published in the BMJ, found that “this increased risk [of suicide] may have been carried forward in later years to the next age band — that is, that there was a ‘cohort effect’” (Hawton & Haw, 2013). In other words, the increased risk of suicide that correlates with recession does not simply go away when the economy returns to growth; it may last longer than the actual recession. As the study says, this is particularly concerning given the already increased impact on young people.
Government policy and economic conditions are not necessarily separable sources of causation when it comes to emotional wellbeing either. It will not come as a surprise to many people that governments and markets do not occur in parallel universes. Government measures taken in response to economic recessions can have significant knock-on effects on how the recession affects a given population, including on the number of people who take their own lives. The second BMJ study quoted above remarks that:
It seems that where governments choose austerity measures to tackle national financial debt the [suicide] impact [of recessions] is worse. In contrast, active programmes to keep as many people in work or other meaningful activity and to support community healthcare and benefits can reduce or even fully counter these effects. (Hawton & Haw, 2013)
Not only do some governments not take such active steps to mitigate the psychological toll of recessions, they sometimes implement policies that make it much worse. In Britain after the last recession, the UK government’s Department for Work and Pensions introduced sanctions on some of the country’s poorest people in an attempt to coerce them off benefits and into the workplace, leading to suicides in many of these cases too. Giving people “meaningful activity” to do does not mean forcing people to work when they may not be able to, or suitable jobs may not be available.
Economics, it should now be clear to see, are not only a concern for people in suits. It is without doubt then that global recessions, government policy in response to them, and their correlation with suicide or poor mental health are clearly matters for concern when it comes to the emotions of the public, but this pattern may in fact be the proverbial “tip of the iceberg” because it is more noticeable than other forms of emotional distress. In all sorts of ways, economics affects the background against which everyday life occurs for ordinary people. The extent to which economics affects everyday life goes well beyond economic downturns and fiscal policy, and turns out to have a much more far-reaching qualitative impact on our way of life.
To start with economics or culture and end up with widespread emotional distress may seem like a big jump, but their connection is by no means tenuous. These aspects of our lived experience have a far stronger impact on the emotions of their subjects than we realise. Such connections are not in themselves a new argument, and the role of culture or the economy in producing emotional distress has been outlined elsewhere, such as in the work of Mark Fisher (2009), Oliver James (2008), or Erich Fromm (1955), whom James quotes at length. While these arguments may not be original in themselves, they still need to be communicated and built upon until they are well understood and commonplace beyond specialist circles. Without wishing to reinvent the wheel, the next part of this chapter will be a brief account of the various ways that life in capitalist culture can be emotionally distressing, and how these combine to create an emotional “void.”
The relationship between employer and employee is changing in ways that are highly relevant to emotional wellbeing, and the workplace therefore serves as one of the most useful and instructive means to understand the processes that large numbers of people have in common about the way they live.
It will barely need pointing out that in any contract of employment, any given worker is almost always more expendable than the employer. This gives rise to a power imbalance, because where workers can’t afford to lose their livelihoods, the loss of a given individual, unless a highly sought-after executive, makes little long-term difference to the employer. This is a dynamic that has intensified over time, and the terms on which we are employed have come to favour our employers ever more.
At one end of the scale, an increasingly common employment basis known in the UK as “zero-hours contracts,” but also prevalent in the United States and other countries, ties workers into agreements whereby they are not guaranteed any work at all week-to-week. Any hours they are assigned must be worked, or the worker will likely be dismissed or sanctioned, yet these contracts sometimes contain “exclusivity clauses” that forbid the worker from taking on any other employment, even when no hours are offered by the contracting employer. This sort of arrangement is obviously cheaper and more flexible for employers, but for workers it means lower pay and most crucially of all, more pressure and less certainty.
While governments are often happy to boast about any fall in unemployment, the statistic they frequently fail to mention is the one that relates to underemployment. If you are employed on a zero-hours contract, you count as employed, even if you didn’t work any hours this week or last week, and may not do so next week either. While unemployment has indeed fallen on paper, the number of people precariously underemployed, whether on zero-hours contracts, in part-time work, or freelancing, has grown, and in a culture that tends to blame and stigmatise poor people for their own misfortune this change has quietly affected record numbers of people, and especially those aged eighteen to twenty-four.
To some extent, our culture is happy to accept the fiscal poverty of the young and the unskilled, seeing it as an “incentive” to work hard and consequently avoid poverty. Hard work is not an automatic ticket out of poverty, however. In December 2015, an investigation by the Guardian found that workers at UK sports-equipment retailer Sports Direct, despite working long hours, were often being paid at an effective rate below the minimum wage. The company, whose shares feature in a number of UK-based pension funds, was so worried about theft that employees were subjected to rigorous and often intrusive security checks. Since there were long queues and delays during these checks, and they took place outside clocked hours, they effectively extended the amount of time at work and correspondingly lowered the effective hourly rate, saving millions of pounds on the company’s wage payments over the year. Workers were also reportedly so terrified to take time off work that they would send their children to school when ill, or not be at home when their children returned from school.
Another Guardian investigation in 2013 detailed shocking conditions at a “fulfilment” centre for online retailer Amazon in Swansea in the UK. As I write this I consider the irony that you the reader are reading criticism of Amazon in a book you possibly ordered from that same company. If you bought this book from Amazon, thank you all the same for buying it, and now let us spare a thought for the human being who so lovingly retrieved it from a box, placed it in a cardboard wrapper, and sent it on its way to your letterbox or doorstep. Amazon warehouse employees, who earn minimum wage, often work shifts up to fifty hours per week, and are reportedly sacked if they take three sick breaks in a three-month period — something the company denies. Employees are warned when they start that they may walk up to fifteen miles per shift, the warehouse being a quarter-mile long. Amazon also operates what Carole Cadwalladr, the journalist who carried out the investigation, calls an “apartheid” between different classes of worker. Permanent workers, who have a blue lanyard, receive a higher hourly rate of pay and are given share options in the company after two years. Temporary workers, who have a green lanyard, are kept in a precarious state. One employee told Cadwalladr:
I worked there from September 2011 to February 2012 and on Christmas Eve an agency rep with a clipboard stood by the exit and said: “You’re back after Christmas. And you’re back. And you’re not. You’re not.” It was just brutal. It reminded me of stories about the great depression, where men would stand at the factory gate in the hope of being selected for a few days’ labour.
Both the Amazon and Sports Direct exposés are worth reading fully, but they are by no means isolated cases of employers imposing the harshest possible terms of employment on their workers in ways that reinforce their position as highly precarious and disempowered, and intensify the fear and emotional distress that accompany this situation. UK food delivery venture Deliveroo, who treat all workers as self-employed contractors and pay them well below the living wage, even colluded with the UK Home Office in July 2016 to check the immigration papers of all delivery staff at the Islington training centre, leading to the removal and arrest of three of their own trainees. The Guardian reported that in the same month, UK hamburger chain Byron “trapped kitchen staff in an immigration sting by calling for a meeting about cooking burgers.” (O’Carroll & Jones, 2016)
Cases like these illustrate the capacity for work to be at once precarious, uncertain, highly pressurised, and above all, emotionally distressing. This type of shift has not only happened in so-called “unskilled” proletarian labour either; university lecturers (“professors” in the US), might once have been thought of in their ivory towers, but they have been increasingly subjected to a set of processes over the same time period that are analogous to what happened at Sports Direct. In fact, after an investigation by the Guardian into the use of casualised labour in UK universities, some of the UK’s most prestigious universities were accused by union leaders of “importing the Sports Direct model” (Chakrabortty and Weale, 2016) In 2015, a video called “Professors in Poverty” highlighted the increasingly commonplace situation of individuals in the United States who hold advanced postgraduate degrees and teach at universities being paid so little that they needed to be on welfare in order to make ends meet.
At the time of writing, universities across the UK have been locked in a dispute with their employees for several years over pay stagnation and increasing casualisation. Literary scholar Marina Warner, writing in the London Review of Books in 2015 about the transformation of university life, quoted a letter she had received from a professor who had resigned from a Russell Group university:
The incessant emphasis was on cash: write grant applications rather than books and articles in order to fund one’s research … accept anyone for study who could pay, unethical as that was especially at postgraduate level, where foreign applicants with very poor English were being invited to spend large sums on degrees … Huge administrative duties were often announced with deadlines for completion only a few days later. We had to spend hours filling in time-and-motion forms to prove we weren’t bunking off when we were supposed to be doing our research and writing during the summer “vacation” … It was like working for a cross between IBM, with vertiginous hierarchies of command, and McDonald’s.”
Again, we see less certainty and security, and more pressure, both in the actual work and in life more generally as a result of the decreased certainty. Across the board, in countless industries, the expectations placed on workers have gone up, while pay has often either stagnated, decreasing in real terms, or actually been cut. What seems like good business sense for the employer — flexibility and reduced costs — creates emotional distress for workers, and there is often no sense that workers are anything other than resources, there to be mined and exploited. This doesn’t just concern conventional matters such as pay either. Particularly in the case of female employees, sexual identity is a common aspect of how workers are degraded. A 2014 survey of five hundred managers, reported in the Guardian in 2014, found that 40% avoided hiring women of childbearing age so that they could avoid the statuary requirements around maternity leave, despite this hiring practice also being illegal (and grossly unethical). In October 2016 it was reported in the Evening Standard that a London recruitment firm specialising in roles such as flight attendants and receptionists was even specifying requirements for female applicants such as attractiveness and bra size. One advertisement stated that applicants should have “a classic look” and “brown long hair with b-c cup.”
The fact that post-internet technology-based businesses like Amazon are often best placed to implement such changes to the terms of employment should be no surprise. Amazon’s experimentation with drone-based unmanned delivery was as predictable as Uber’s investment in the use of self-driving cars. As Harry Braverman famously wrote in Labor and Monopoly Capital (1974), the role of technology itself in the way work has changed is a significant one, and developments in technology are often driven by capitalist demand for new or different forms of labour, dehumanising and degrading the worker more and more. Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild’s account of hiring practices in Silicon Valley, quoted by Zygmunt Bauman (2007), illustrates the early history of how technology businesses made more demands on their employees:
Since 1997, a new term – “zero drag” – has begun quietly circulating in Silicon Valley, the heartland of the computer revolution in America. […] More recently, it has come to mean “unattached” or “unobligated”. A dot.com employer might comment approvingly of an employee, “He’s zero drag”, meaning that he’s available to take on extra assignments, respond to emergency calls, or relocate any time. According to Po Bronson, a researcher of Silicon Valley culture, “Zero drag is optimal. For a while, new applicants would jokingly be asked about their ‘drag coefficient’.”
Businesses like Uber or Deliveroo exemplify the ways in which the smartphone, the database, and technologies such as GPS can be combined in the service of more customers, more profits, but never for happier or healthier employees. Karl Marx argued repeatedly that the more the capitalist mode of production advanced, the more impoverished workers would become. In the incorporation of new technology into the workings of business, we see exactly this tendency played out. Work in a capitalist economy is always a process of extraction and exploitation; even so-called “workplace wellness programs” that help workers stay fit emphasise the physical health of workers in the belief that this will make them more productive, but few questions are asked about whether the long hours, more accurate metrics and improved organisation that such technologies enable (and that such businesses expect) are actually good for the mental health of employees.
One emotional aspect of the quality of everyday life most profoundly affected by work, and by the technology of work, may be the so-called “work–life balance,” since sources of happiness such as partners or family, holidays or hobbies, are exactly the “drag-coefficients” that were explicitly — at least in the above instance referred to by Arlie Russell Hochschild — unfavourable to employers.
Sociologist Judy Wajcman (2015) has argued that, precisely because of how technology serves capitalism, the increased dependency on technology to mediate aspects of our lives has mostly added to a sense of what she calls temporal impoverishment, rather than making us more efficient and thus freeing us up to enjoy more of our lives. More interestingly, this is the case across lines of class, even if the experiences of time impoverishment are different. “The key to understanding the fraught and complex relationship between technology and time is the concept of temporal sovereignty, the ability to choose how you spend your time,” Wajcman says. Time sovereignty, she argues, is a matter of social justice, and is “a significant measure of life satisfaction and well-being.”
When the work–life balance tips too far in favour of satisfying the requirements of work, family life suffers, and the toll is emotional. In her other work, Hochschild (1997) has found from interviewing working parents that the importance of home life decreases as professional level increases, and the direct tension between them is reminiscent of the parents working at Sports Direct who are so scared of losing their jobs that they neglect aspects of their children’s lives. As psychologist Oliver James has found in his book Selfish Capitalism, it is a feature of capitalism that children receive less attention from their parents, causing emotional damage to the children as well as the parents (2008).
Another source of wellbeing cut down by time poverty is sleep. As Jonathan Crary (2013) has written, capitalism frequently demands that we sleep less than we need to. It is common for people to “humble brag” about how little sleep they get by on, and perhaps it is no surprise that British ex-prime minister Margaret Thatcher was said to get only four hours per night during her heyday of wrecking Britain. Sleep deprivation has been linked to immune-system suppression, weight gain, and psychiatric distress. Sleep deprivation also makes people far more emotionally vulnerable. In a study by psychologist Matthew Walker at the University of California, Berkeley, test subjects who had gone thirty-five hours without sleep had a far stronger response to mildly distressing images, such as those of burn victims, than test subjects who had slept. An article on the study in Scientific American reports that:
In normal participants, the amygdala seemed to be talking to the medial prefrontal cortex, an outer layer of the brain that, Walker says, helps to contextualize experiences and emotions. But, in the sleep-deprived brain, the amygdala seemed to be “rewired,” coupling instead with a brain stem area called the locus coeruleus, which secretes norepinephrine, a precursor of the hormone adrenaline that triggers fight-or-flight type reactions.
Taken together, what these issues underline is that where people are faced with a choice between undermining their financial survival or undermining their personal and emotional wellbeing, people seem to be choosing the latter. This is indicative not only of growing desperation and precarity, but of a culture in which emotions are often not explicitly valued; we are expected to “handle it,” to “be strong,” or to “pull an all-nighter,” while the emotional pressures we experience slowly intensify.
In his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Karl Marx wrote of the concept of alienation. Alienation is a far broader and more multifaceted philosophical concept here than in his subsequent works, but is used to mean the variety of ways in which the relations entailed in labour affect the emotional reality of the worker. Workers being considered only as a cost, for instance, rather than as people, has implications for how they are treated in the workplace, and thus for their emotions. Shouting at employees over a PA system to work harder and faster, for example (as mocked in the Daft Punk song), is like something out of a dystopian film, yet it is exactly what happens at Sports Direct, according to the report mentioned above. The fact that the things we make, or the services we provide, even when doing something as important as educating people, are immediately claimed as the product or service of our employer is also a form of alienation. Whether from passion or from fear, it is not hard to see how putting everything into doing your job as best you can, only to find that the output of this labour belongs entirely to the same employer that is reducing or deferring your pay and treating you like a layabout or a common thief, would be emotionally taxing. Working such long hours or unusual shifts that you do not see your family or friends, or are not home for your children when they return from school, alienates you from the important people in your life. All of these are different aspects of alienation, and what is important about this concept for our purposes is precisely that the various effects of being a worker are acknowledged to all go beyond the material circumstances of the worker and also impact the individual in an emotionally significant way. Ron Roberts has gone so far as to argue that alienation is a far better concept for understanding the common emotional experiences of life under capitalism than anything in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or DSM. It is getting easier by the day to see what he means.
For those who seek to love their work, the pressures and uncertainty referred to above are not much better, especially for younger people. In an article for openDemocracy, Angela McRobbie (2015) outlined the alarming process by which recent graduates, determined to work in the so-called “creative industries,” are happy to be exploited by low pay and long hours in the belief that this will lead to a glamorous professional life working creatively in fashion or the media. Somewhat ironically, perhaps their insistence on “creative labour” is indicative of the emotional distress they perceive to be likely should they perform less creative forms of labour. In some sense, they would be right; creativity entails a connection with the work you produce that in capitalism is broken by the process of alienation. As soon as the work is finished it is not your work anymore, you will receive no credit, and now you have to move onto the next task which will culminate in exactly the same outcome. Some young people do receive credit and plaudits but it is rare, as I have seen teaching passionate young journalists. Assuming they can even get a job, they usually take a few more years before they get a “byline,” or their name at the top of an article. Creative labour for “the man” is as alienated as any other form of labour, and unfortunately, is far from guaranteed to be as enjoyable as expected.
Distinct from the alienation of Marx, German critical theorist Herbert Marcuse spoke of an artistic alienation, born of making “romantic” artistic work in a society that is at odds with the truth that the art expresses; but my young students, and those referred to by McRobbie, are alienated in yet another way: Rather than expressing themselves, or some otherwise inexpressible truth, they want to do creative work that is almost entirely in keeping with the dominant values of society. This is entirely understandable given the cultural pressures to which they are subjected, but what makes it a different form of alienation is the desperation to do creative work that is more about where they, as the creators of such work, belong in that society as a consequence. The desire to be publicly credited for your work in glamorous areas such fashion, music, advertising, or design is therefore not solely a desire to avoid the emotional distress and boredom of other forms of labour. In an age where most young people want to be famous, it often represents a highly individualised form of upward social mobility as well, and this is a reflection of wider issues that also come into play emotionally.
What is Instagram, but the ability to share an image with a caption to “followers”? Mechanically it is little more, but while its users have made it into a platform of many uses, one of its chief uses is for those looking to become famous. From food bloggers to photographers to musicians to models, the idea is the same: Show who you are and what you can do to enough people and the rest will happen. Do a search for “how to get famous on Instagram” and you will find pages of blog posts and videos, all without a hint of irony, offering tips on how to “get popular,” “make it,” or at least “get more likes.” Here, as so often with social media, we see that a platform launched speculatively is being carried by the specific cultural uses that its users bring to it; and that technologies are a reflection of the cultures in which they are used, rather than determinant of those cultures.
The widespread desire to be famous, especially amongst the young, could be interpreted as an inverse manifestation of exactly the emotional fragility that is entailed in daily life. It is the hyper-valuation of what has been called the “personal brand”; your name, your appearance and body, and/or the work you are known for (if any). To be famous is imagined to be constant validation and adoration, financial security, ample sociality, unalienated, creative work, and the means to afford regular novelty and stimulation. From appearance to self-worth to talent to the very fact of having a future at all, fame appears to be a means to avoid every fear that a young person might have, all at once. Intense identification with famous people, seen in magazines like Heat, in programs like The X Factor, or in the Daily Mail’s “sidebar of shame,” is precisely because of the “lucky escape” that these individuals have managed. Of course, while the desire to be famous is itself mainstream, the precise form that fame is imagined to take need not always be the same, and can vary widely with class and background; but the function of fame as a fantasy is the same — it is a coping method. Reading fame as such therefore allows us to identify a number of other areas of postmodern life that are fraught with emotional distress, or the potential for it, and not just for the young.
The irony here is that the pressure to have a “personal brand,” rather than a means of security and stability, is a way in which the emotional toll of postmodern culture can be intensified, and its pressures increased. Even for those less interested in fame itself, the same culture of intense individual evaluation in every area of life does not evaporate. Even the search for what else might have been written about the idea of the personal brand is instructive: Besides countless blog posts, what seem like hundreds of scholarly articles unreservedly promise to provide insight on the various uses of personal branding, while the more cautious voices are rather harder to find. It seems the desire to be famous is not just a young people’s thing after all. From an article by three academics at the University of Utah in 2005, I learn that the idea of the personal brand was coined in 1997, the same year that Silicon Valley was going on about “drag coefficients.”
One of the most important changes to have taken place in the culture of capitalism is the incorporation of the economic logic of capitalism into all areas of life, inside and outside the workplace. Often, the term used for this scenario is neoliberalism, and the idea of it is that market logic should be the only logic for assessing value. Political scientist Wendy Brown has summarised this tendency well. In neoliberalism, she says, “all conduct is economic conduct; all spheres of existence are framed and measured by economic terms and metrics, even when those spheres are not directly monetized” (2015). In a similar vein, writer George Monbiot has said that “Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. […] It maintains that ‘the market’ delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning” (2016b). Neoliberalism is UK supermarket Waitrose forcing the charities it supports to compete with each other for a greater proportion of funds, by appealing to the public to place little green tokens in one box or another; it is the obsessive comparison of the percentage of completed passes or goals per game in football, instead of focusing on questions of playing style; it is the insistence that university lecturers be rated by students on how enthusiastic they are about the subject matter they teach.
People often hear the word “neoliberalism” as a catch-all stick with which to moan about capitalism, but its effects are serious and numerous. The obsession of (some of) my students with their grades, for example, is no longer a healthy desire for brief feedback and then self-improvement; it is treated as an evaluation of who they are, often with frantic results. It frequently feels like marking a student essay in the neoliberal age is seen as more akin to assigning an Uber driver a rating out of five stars for their service, or swiping left or right on Tinder, than providing a person who is being educated with information about how well they are undertaking that process. It is hardly surprising that student feedback has been subsumed by neoliberalism in this way; the idea that we are all measurable, and all in competition with each other on the basis of these measurements, is widely accepted, and superficial measures of quantification and assessment are easy to spot.
As disturbingly portrayed by UK comedian Charlie Brooker in the 2016 series Black Mirror, the quantification, rating, ranking, and scoring of individual human beings, while of cultural origins, is further enabled and amplified by networked, digital technology. Klout, a so-called “social media analytics service” promises to evaluate how authoritative you are overall in your online social-network usage, assigning you a single number from one to a hundred known as your “Klout score.” The platform uses data from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and other platforms, essentially to determine your value. The logical extension of this would be the idea that your very worth as a person is quantified, and in 2015, despite a major backlash, a service called Peeple was launched that would allow people to rate you generally as a person. In 2014, a supposedly “alternative” artist known as MLV even created a set of downloadable stencils that would allow graffiti artists to leave rankings and ratings on their physical environment, such as bathroom stalls and water fountains, seemingly without seeing the need to subvert this way of thinking at all.
The quantification of “friends,” as a cornerstone of social networks, and most notably Facebook, is an especially interesting imprint of this culture of quantification. How many friends do you have? Most people know, but pretend not to. It is understandable that social networks allow us to connect socially — and as we will see in the next chapter, it is essential to their strategy — but specifically the quantification of friends, and the overt display of this information on every user’s profile, is an opportunity to observe one of the many ironies of this culture as a whole. Despite the average woman having 164 friends on Facebook at the time of writing, and the average man having 144, most people would turn to no more than five individuals for support (Dunbar, 2016). What this may confirm is that such personal quantifications are, like much of the digital self, often performative, and do not tell the whole story. When credit ratings, grades, Airbnb ratings, TripAdvisor ratings and reviews, “friend,” “follower,” and “likes” counts, and even the secret attractiveness ratings that services such as Tinder and Clover calculate about you are taken into account, and when competition on this basis is constantly affirmed and demanded, it is hardly surprising that neoliberalism places enormous individual emotional strain on those exposed to its workings. Whether or not you are invested in getting good grades, rankings, or ratings, being constantly evaluated in very narrow terms is not psychologically healthy, yet this is everywhere in our culture. By quantifying aspects of who you are that are not in any way quantitative and that cannot justly be represented by a number, it adds pressure precisely in areas where we are most vulnerable. Obsessive focus on individual performance objectifies and commodifies the self in the same way that society encourages the objectification of others. Experiencing yourself as a commodity alienates you from yourself — yet another form of the alienation Marx described. Such metrics are also frequently a means of comparison to people with whom competition is wholly unfair; the people society has made richer, decided are hotter, more intelligent, or more talented.
Whatever the frenzy of online social connection, with friend counts soaring, many people are nevertheless lonely and socially isolated. Adding friends on Facebook may be a futile attempt at compensation for some degree of social isolation, rather than an affirmation or retrenchment of existing social networks. The continuity between the neoliberal quantification of social capital on social networks and the social isolation of neoliberalism is more than coincidence. As George Monbiot has remarked: “Perhaps it’s unsurprising that Britain, in which neoliberal ideology has been most rigorously applied, is the loneliness capital of Europe. We are all neoliberals now” (2016b). According to Loneliness by neuroscientists John Cacioppo and William Patrick (2009), “roughly twenty percent of individuals — that would be sixty million people in the U.S. alone — feel sufficiently isolated for it to be a major source of unhappiness in their lives.” Later on, they write that over the last five decades especially, “Western societies have demoted human gregariousness from a necessity to an incidental.” The steady transition from rural to urban living that has accompanied both industrialisation and then the subsequent transition to the postmodern world is also linked with social isolation. Oliver James (2008) has gone so far as to demonstrate the role of this urbanisation in greatly exacerbating more extreme forms of emotional distress and mental illness such as schizophrenia. San Francisco journalist Lauren Smiley wrote in 2015 of what she called the “shut-in economy”: Socially isolated people, working from home in luxury San Francisco apartments, ordering everything to their door from the internet, including meals. Perhaps it isn’t just the Amazon or UberEATS employees who are miserable — it would seem as if their customers are too. Could the very popularity of such businesses be related to urbanised social isolation? Isn’t the whole point of ordering a meal or a book or a new gadget from the internet and having it brought to your door that no human contact is required? Of course, if society were lonely, wouldn’t people seek the human contact replaced by such affordances? Not necessarily. It is more likely that the same processes of social isolation in the city produce the shut-ins, the loneliness, and the schizophrenia.
One of the aspects of postmodern life that Oliver James identifies as particularly conducive to poor emotional wellbeing is materialism. Specifically, James refers to what he calls “relative materialism” — the kind of materialism that occurs when people already have necessities such as food, shelter, adequate drinking water and a means of subsistence. Relying heavily on the work of psychologist Erich Fromm, and echoing Marx, James argues that by living to have, rather than living to be, people set themselves up for anxiety and boredom, because material possessions are not, and cannot be, emotionally fulfilling. Expecting them to be, in the ways that consumerism encourages, means constantly mismatched expectations. A new car, new laptop, new dress may make us feel happy momentarily, but there is a big difference between hedonic happiness, associated with pleasure, and long-term fulfilment, known as eudaimonic happiness. The hedonic pleasure and the feelings of pride from the novelty of obtaining some shiny new possession invariably subside, and if eudaimonic happiness was missing before, it will still be missing. Over time, the repeated experience of getting used to a new product and going back to the same life you had before is one that, if you expect products to make you happy, even subconsciously, will make you feel emptier than ever. As author Alfie Bown (2015) has written, capitalist culture emphasises the aspects of itself that are there to be enjoyed, be they a Netflix series, stuffed-crust pizza, Pokémon Go, or a cruise holiday. But many people are constantly left behind by this emphasis on material or hedonic comfort, unable to afford the enjoyment in which they are subtly told they must participate. Even if the having of the hedonic pleasures afforded to some of us will not make us happy, the constant feeling of not having — of missing out — will also build anger, resentment, and a feeling of injustice, that all take their toll. Psychologist Barry Schwartz has also famously shown the emotional toll of choice. Beyond a certain threshold, the greater our expectations and the number of options we can choose between, the less satisfied we are with our choice.
Connected with consumerism, boredom is another widespread and distressing feature of capitalist life. Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman noted in Consuming Life that
for the properly trained members of the society of consumers, all and any routine and everything associated with routine behaviour (monotony, repetitiveness) becomes unbearable; indeed, unliveable. “Boredom”, the absence or even temporary interruption of the perpetual flow of attention-drawing, exciting novelties, turns into a resented and feared bugbear of the consumer society. (2007)
The problem of how workers can be kept working and prevented from becoming bored is one of capitalism’s oldest problems, and as we will see it is directly connected to the use of social media alongside other subjective and emotional distress. People experience boredom to varying degrees, but anyone who is chronically unstimulated or whose life consists of too much monotony, whether from work, poverty, materialism, or otherwise, will be well acquainted with boredom. Many forms of work are boring, from working in a call centre to marking pile after pile of essays to helping customers try on clothes that neither they nor you can actually afford. As a crippling symptom of many societies in its own right, boredom also has a range of other emotional effects. According to science journalist Anna Gosline, “Easily bored people are at higher risk for depression, anxiety, drug addiction, alcoholism, compulsive gambling, eating disorders, hostility, anger, poor social skills, bad grades and low work performance” (2007). Alongside alienation, the fear and uncertainty that come from precarity, and social isolation, boredom is at epidemic levels, largely because — as we will see below — we look in the wrong places for the solutions.
Lest this long list of ways people commonly experience emotional distress in so-called modern life appears to be nothing more than me looking for things that make people unhappy, let me clarify: This is exactly what it is. And such elements to life are easier than ever to find and identify. We do not all need to agree with, or have experienced, all of the issues outlined above, but almost all of us will have experienced some of them.
There is something else that all these factors in our emotional distress have in common too, as may have already become obvious. All of the forms of emotional distress described above are derived from aspects of how capitalism now operates. When aspects of capitalism are remarked upon, these arguments are often heard by those unused to such critiques, as if capitalism were only an economic system. To criticise capitalism in this light is therefore to pose it in relation to other economic and political situations such as communism in its various historical forms, feudalism possibly, or the plain old “state of nature” in which philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and others imagined our ancestors living. Since these alternative economic systems to capitalism are at this point mostly historical, thinking of capitalism as though it were purely an economic system also tends to mean hearing such critiques of it as though they were a desire to return to these historical states that preceded it. Familiar and simplistic arguments are then rehearsed about the numerous shortcomings of Maoist China or the Soviet Union, after which another “alternative” is demanded.
Such arguments are a distraction, because capitalism is not only an abstract set of rules about how to organise an economy, or a way to make money. Indeed, when only these aspects of capitalism are present, many of the problems to be described below disappear. To give one example, two close friends of mine run a business in a small English city, employing approximately twenty-five people and turning over something not far short of a million pounds per year. They provide their staff not only with generous pay, but with a wide variety of perks and surprises, ample (and equal) maternity and paternity leave, paid holiday far in excess of the statutory minimums, and opportunities for training, development, and promotion. Business ideas suggested by workers are often incorporated into the workings of the company, and so far as possible employees are given the maximum degree of autonomy in how they fulfil their duties. The business has a strict code of ethics, reduces its ecological impact in every area from transport to energy consumption to recycling, and sponsors a number of community initiatives, particularly around young people at the nearby university. However far to the left you are, this is one version of capitalism that, on a practical basis at least, it is difficult to criticise. It is an example of what psychologist Oliver James (2008) calls “unselfish capitalism.” Of course in a Marxist sense these workers are still technically “exploited,” and the business does still make a profit from such exploitation, so there is no doubt that this is still “capitalism.” But while these may still be doctrinal problems, even if their effects are ameliorated away to nothing, the pedantic arguments that plague the left in respect of these philosophical problems in the abstract are arguably a hindrance to the establishment of exactly the proletarian unity that Marx urged. All of the people working for this company are as vulnerable to capitalism as any other individuals, yet ironically, this vulnerability is not to be found so much at their current workplace as outside of it. The “capitalism” that must be addressed in relation to social media is therefore one that operates at a far broader scale — that of society itself.
To achieve its ultimate ends, capitalism must be the culture of those that live under it. Rather than rehearsing the arguments of critical philosophers in this area such as Louis Althusser, Fredric Jameson, or Stuart Hall, let it suffice to say that even if capitalism began as an economic system that was imposed on the world by those who had the power and inclination to do so, capitalism is now a culture that determines how our society should work, rather than the other way around. If there occurs some aspect of how corporations conduct their affairs that deserves critique, such as sub-prime lending, children mining tin from the ground to make components for iPhones, or the extraction of vast profits from selling arms to murderous world leaders, these kinds of workings within what is more conspicuously identifiable as the capitalist system are simply the manifestations of the culture of capitalism, rather than the reverse. The same is true of the ways that our emotional distress is implicated in capitalism: It is the product of capitalism as culture.
At risk of deploying “capitalism” as some sort of fixed, structuralist signifier — a uniform source of all economic and social ills — it should be noted that capitalism is not one fixed, inflexible system. The subjective experience of life in capitalist culture is different for each person, and exactly where capitalism begins and ends is by no means stable or certain. Even when only its economic logic is discussed, its workings are subject to constant and often radical change. However, the very point of identifying capitalist economics and capitalist culture as one inseparable and ultimately cultural system is precisely that we can better understand the radical, constantly changing nature of capitalism, and adapt our critiques to the forms that it assumes, especially in relation to what else is happening in the world at any given time. The capitalism of the 1950s and 1960s, for example, was different to the postmodern form under which we live today in at least one important respect: While as an economic framework capitalism is the only system on offer today, capitalism in 1960 had to contend with what were considered rival systems — chiefly communism. Despite many shortcomings, it had to be something that people would prefer to be included in over communism. The emphasis of this capitalism was modernity: Space programs, electric guitars, cars with fins on them, new types of food from novel production processes or from faraway exotic places. Of course, there were exploited, alienated workers, unemployment, and poverty in this capitalism too, since capitalism needs these elements to exist, but the cultural life of this capitalism was very different. After the end of the Soviet Union, and particularly once Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan ushered in their distinctive form of free-market economics, the culture of capitalist societies began to change too. Perhaps one could say it changed from a capitalism that was functional in some way to one that is not, or maybe this is too simple; but it did change from a capitalism that did not produce as much emotional distress to one that does rather more, and for reasons that we will see below, eventually from a capitalism that didn’t have — or need — social media, to one that does.
This change from a capitalism that needed on some level to prove its legitimacy with modernism and innovation to a capitalism that did not is often called late capitalism or postmodernity, and has been widely remarked upon. Political scientist Francis Fukuyama famously referred to this moment as the “end of history,” but it was more the end of the future. Once capitalism as a system of economics, politics, and culture was without any alternatives, the role of politics in imagining or fighting for the future began to change. As Adam Curtis has said in his 2016 film HyperNormalisation, the end of the Soviet Union “symbolised the final failure of the dream that politics could be used to build a new kind of world.” Whatever we may think of the “end-of-history” idea, the change had significant cultural impact. Mark Fisher, building on the work of various philosophers, most of all Fredric Jameson, has argued powerfully for an understanding of this postmodern, late capitalism as being defined precisely by its feeling of there being “no alternative,” as Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party repeatedly said during the 1980s. Fisher calls this “capitalist realism.” After the fall of the Berlin Wall, he says, “Fukuyama’s thesis that history has climaxed with liberal capitalism may have been widely derided, but is accepted, even assumed, at the level of the cultural unconscious.”
This change has had far-reaching cultural, and eventually emotional, consequences. Most famously, Fredric Jameson identified “postmodernism” (as distinct from the broader historical era, known as postmodernity) as the ways in which this change to late capitalism was inflected at the cultural level. The invention of new styles in art and other forms of culture had become impossible at this point, he argued:
In an era in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks and with the voices of the styles in the imaginary museum. But this means that contemporary or postmodernist art is going to be about art itself in a new kind of way; even more, it means that one of its essential messages will involve the necessary failure of art and the aesthetic, the failure of the new, the imprisonment in the past.
There are many things that have been or can be said about this moment, and reading both Jameson’s and Fisher’s work is highly recommended, but for present purposes one of the most important strands is in Fisher’s concept of capitalist realism, outlined above. Here we are interested in emotion and psychology, and capitalist realism is significant in a discussion of social media because it recognises the mental-health impact of living in an intensified capitalist culture from which there is no escape besides temporary distraction.
The potency of this feeling of no escape has been well illustrated in the popularity of politicians such as Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn. Both have captured the imagination of millions of people because, particularly in Corbyn’s case, they were able to articulate a vision of a country or even a world outside capitalist realism. While people may not have been consciously aware of their hunger for an alternative, as soon as one was dangled, its resonance was immediate and entirely predictable. Equally predictable was how the establishment in the countries of both men — the guardians of the capitalist realism — immediately attacked them for being “unelectable,” of all things. The press, largely the subservient watchdogs of capitalist realism, for the most part also undermined these candidates.
In a political context, Mark Fisher outlines convincingly the relationship between political agency and capitalist realism with what he calls “reflexive impotence.” Fisher argues that the political disengagement of British students, for example, is because “they know things are bad, but more than that, they know they can’t do anything about it. But that ‘knowledge’, that reflexivity, is not a passive observation of an already-existing state of affairs. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy.” A year after Fisher’s book came out, British students did fight back, to fight the controversial rise in tuition fees announced by the then-newly-elected coalition government. What happened? Thousands and thousands of young people were kettled by the police — imprisoned in the cold and dark for hours. They were mocked in virtually all the newspapers. Most of all, their pleas for change and for inclusion in the political process were completely ignored, no doubt confirming the reflexive impotence of the students who have followed, paying the higher tuition fees.
If you believe that nobody listens to you, including the people for whom you have voted, that you have no clear future over which you are in control, and that nothing you do will make difference, what is your next step? Detailing the emotional impact on young people by recounting his experiences of teaching in a further-education college in London, Mark Fisher tells us that: “Many of the teenagers I worked with had mental health problems or learning difficulties. Depression is endemic.” In July 2016 James Meikle reported in the Guardian that prescriptions for antidepressants in England had doubled in a decade. According to a study by the UK’s National Health Service and the University of Leicester, reported in the Guardian, “between 1993 and 2014 there was a 35% rise in adults reporting severe symptoms of common mental disorders.” These symptoms are more acute in younger people, and particularly in women. An enormous 26% of women aged eighteen to twenty-four reported having had symptoms of common mental disorders in the previous week (Campbell & Siddique, 2016). As George Monbiot (2016a) has asked: “Is it any wonder, in these lonely inner worlds, in which touching has been replaced by retouching, that young women are drowning in mental distress?” Mark Fisher tells us that “Being a teenager in late capitalist Britain is now close to being reclassified as a sickness.” He continues:
This pathologisation already forecloses any possibility of politicisation. By privatising these problems – treating them as if they were caused only by chemical imbalances in the individual’s neurology and/or by their family background – any question of social systemic causation is ruled out.
Indeed, Ron Roberts argues that the very purpose of psychiatry as a science has its roots in serving the ruling class by diagnosing and then controlling those who stepped out of line, and is thus not likely to help us draw political connections with psychiatric issues. Psychologist Oliver James similarly takes issue with the notion that emotional distress is caused solely by private or personal factors such as genetics, arguing that it is far more likely to be caused by environmental factors.
Now that we have seen some of these environmental factors — anxiety, boredom, loneliness, and depression — and their environmental causes within the broader society of labour, disenfranchisement, materialism, and so forth, the question becomes: How do they play out? This brings us back to the compensatory patterns outlined in Chapter Two.
Mark Fisher makes a very important point about how his students behave, and introduces the concept of depressive hedonia. “Depression is usually characterised as a state of anhedonia,” he writes, but depressive hedonia
is constituted not by an inability to get pleasure, so much as by an inability to do anything else except pursue pleasure. There is a sense that “something is missing,” but no appreciation that this mysterious, missing enjoyment can only be accessed beyond the pleasure principle.
The importance of the concept of depressive hedonia cannot be overstated for the purposes of comprehending social media in the way I believe is necessary. Having outlined the compulsive, pleasure-seeking, and above all emotionally driven nature of social media in the previous chapter, and hinted at the compensatory role that social media may provide, it is now possible to argue more explicitly how that pattern fits within a broader emotional and cultural landscape. As in the Louis CK quote at the beginning of this chapter, there are reasons to feel empty almost as soon as you are conscious of your own existence, but as we have seen above, there are a myriad of ways that the emotional pressures of life in a late-capitalist consumer society add to this. When these forms of emotional distress combine, like bright colours mixing to become brown, our sense of exactly what we are feeling, or why, is often unclear. Instead, the common sentiment is simply a feeling of unexplained emptiness and tension; a dull malaise. The worst part about its indistinctive, bland character is that while the feeling may be strong, it does not clearly push in one direction or another, and this is why the “something” that is missing is mysterious. As with many forms of emotional distress, sometimes we may deny to ourselves and to others that we feel bad at all. Psychologist Erich Fromm also observed this, asking: “Are people really happy, are they as satisfied, unconsciously, as they believe themselves to be? Considering the nature of man, and the conditions for happiness, this can hardly be so.”
This sense of an ill-defined unease which has no name or clear origin, and may not even be consciously realised at all, but which can be temporarily satisfied and remedied with hedonic activity, is an old theme that has been recognised in a number of other contexts that are helpful for understanding social media. One encapsulation of this idea is in the German adjective ersatz, meaning the inferiority of a replacement. An ersatz experience is chosen because it is the closest option to replace some superior, but unavailable experience. Along similar lines, French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan wrote of the concept of “l’objet petit a,” something constantly sought after and desired, but which can never be obtained and enjoyed. For Lacan, this feeling was an intrinsic quality of how humans are motivated to relate to and desire aspects of their environs, originating deep in their psychological development, rather than something precipitated primarily by external cultural circumstances like those described above. Nevertheless, so far as the social media timeline is a consumption architecture, and consumption is — as sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has argued (2001) — driven by desire, the concept is still very much applicable.
The distinct notions of ersatz, l’objet petit a, and depressive hedonia all provide valuable, overlapping insights into the psychology of compulsive social media use, and the role social media play when, as Mark Fisher says, “something is missing”. When taken together, the emotional distress of life under capitalism, the ersatz compensatory role of hedonic media consumption, and the consumption-centric orientation of social media reveal that that compulsive social media use is driven by the desire to soothe and to be distracted from the generalised emotional distress and malaise of everyday late-capitalist life. I refer to this behaviour as filling the void.
The generalised malaise of late capitalist life has therefore been met by social media’s promise of a generalised solution. But it is a cruel, unkept promise, and an ineffective solution. We are seeking that “something” to make us feel better in a place we will never find it. As much as social media may be “hedonic” while a user consumes them, they cease to provide any lasting benefit from the moment the session finishes, and ironically can even make users feel worse — more unhappy from moment to moment and more dissatisfied with their lives generally (Kross et al., 2013). Ultimately, all they can provide is distraction. This harsh irony typifies a circularity that is essential to the workings of consumerism. As we have seen in this chapter, the experience of late capitalism appears to be implicated in making its subjects miserable. Yet within that system of capitalism, specific enterprises also derive wealth and value from promising temporary reprieve from this exact same emotional distress, even if they have no effect or make things worse overall. When, as with social media, the solutions on offer feel pleasurable at the moment they are consumed, consumers fail to identify when these ineffective solutions have the result of making them feel worse, meaning they have no problem going back for more.
James Davies (2011) has argued that what he calls “negative models of suffering” turn our emotional distress into something that must be treated and anaesthetised, in a way that is ultimately “socially and individually disadvantageous.” For any industry that is looking to sell us solutions, however, this desire to anaesthetise our distress is highly advantageous. One industry has harvested gains more proximate to our misery than any other: the pharmaceutical industry. The enormous growth in the prescription of antidepressants, referred to above, is not simply an indicator of a corresponding growth in depression and anxiety; it is also a major business opportunity, despite the evidence of their effectiveness being mixed at best, and many traditional SSRI drugs such as Citalopram often causing intolerable side effects (Drugs.com, 2000). A study from 2006, before the most recent explosion in antidepressant use, showed that 56% of the three hundred panel members who oversee the American Psychological Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) had financial interests in the pharmaceutical industry, and recommended greater transparency (Cosgrove et al, 2006).
But there are also other ways the markets can end up appearing to be the solution to our unhappiness, and in one way or another this has been a part of how capitalism has worked for decades. As management scholar Mats Alvesson reminds us, increased consumption “is paralleled by a continual growth in demand without any increase in satisfaction” (2013). The founder of cosmetics chain Revlon, Charles Revson, once reportedly said that “In our factory we make cosmetics. In the store we sell hope.” Communicated in this sinister phrase is an understanding that people who are starved of fulfilment or hope will give you anything if you make them feel hopeful again. As any drug dealer knows, the same is true of pleasure, even if the costs and drawbacks are high. The basic premise of consumerism is to confuse one with the other. If people are unhappy, insecure, disenfranchised, lonely, horny, or whatever it may be, you can sell them things far more easily, even if these “solutions” are anything but. The combination of emotionally distressing features of postmodern, late-capitalist life that I have outlined above makes for very fertile ground to do exactly this.
Versions of this pattern exist everywhere. In capitalism’s search to extract surplus value from anywhere it can be found, the market has long claimed legitimacy in the right to sell us hedonic or addictive things that aren’t good for us. Many of the hedonic pleasures described in Chapter Two, such as tobacco, sugar, and junk food, have been part of this pattern. Businesses such as UberEATS, Deliveroo, and Just Eat in the UK, and US equivalents such as Grubhub and Delivery.com, exist solely for the purpose of bringing you food from restaurants. They seem like a mere practical service until we recall that most people who can afford to use these services are not starving, and are capable of cooking food themselves. Such businesses derive their value from delivering more enjoyable, hedonic food. According to research carried out for HBO’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, sugar is a five-billion-dollar industry, and the average US American consumes 75 lbs (34 kg) of sugar every year. As Sanjida O’Connell has shown in her book Sugar: The Grass that Changed the World, sugar can give you an emotional “buzz” from dopamine and serotonin. Some researchers, such as David Ludwig, argue sugar affects the brain in the same way as street drugs such as heroin or cocaine. O’Connell quotes neuroscientist Candace Pert, who states that: “I consider sugar to be a drug, a highly purified plant product that can become addictive. Relying on an artificial form of glucose — sugar — to give us a quick pick-me-up is analogous to, if not as dangerous as, shooting heroin.” A 1969 industry ad for sugar in Time magazine even proclaimed: “If sugar can fill that hollow feeling, I’m all for it.” Sound familiar?
Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram may be free, but they are still corporations that make money from your using them. Whatever their original form, they have evolved to encircle and exploit the unhappiness of capitalist subjects while providing them with depressive hedonia in the form of the timeline. Emotions, once considered worthless, have now become a site at which value can be mercilessly extracted for commercial gain. As social media incorporate themselves ever deeper and into more intimate aspects of our lives, they become the fastest, cheapest way of filling the void, and it is their strategy to do exactly this to which the next chapter turns.