The Marketplace of Squirrels

Trapped in a perpetual now

In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman described how societies are shaped by their communication medium, with technological advances affording new ways to organise society, transmitting information with greater fidelity, more rapidly, over longer distances, or preserving it in ever more accessible forms for future generations.

With the advent of television, not only have we become fixated on news-as-entertainment, but the transmission of information has become bound up with the seductive disinformation of advertising. The commercial realities of broadcasting dictate the content, and not the quality or truth of the information presented. What grabs eyeballs and sells products is what survives in this marketplace. The medium and the message are inseparable, with the kinds of communication possible defined by the medium, which also governs the way that information is perceived, promoting new ways of thinking.

What social media presents to us is a continual stream of new, distracting information, all competing for our attention. I’ve critiqued previously what social media is and how it works, as a mechanism for provoking engagement and meaningless interaction, constantly generating a frothing sea of novelty to be used by the platform to steal ever more attention from its users. What governs the “Success” of this information has nothing to do with its worth as a concept, its quality, its ability to enrich human understanding, but simply how effectively it can grab the attention of our fallible, limited ape brains.

Squirrel!

For the unfamiliar, in the Pixar movie “Up”, Doug is a delightfully friendly golden retriever, who is regularly distracted mid-sentence at the possibility of having seen a imaginary squirrel.

Social media is a medium for presenting to every one of its users a continually optimised marketplace of squirrels, a constant stream of distractions, generating actions that can be used to distract other users, generating further distraction, and all of it built on the necessity of new information. It is governed by the same commercial realities as television before it, monetising our attention more directly and precisely than ever before.

The immediacy of this experience is perhaps most representative of how society has become structured around these communication media. Our constant craving for new distractions is reflective of how capitalist logic has become invisibly ingrained in our understanding of the world, with its constant need for growth and expansion. We need new products to replace the old. We need new distractions once the old ones wear off. We need new knowledge, because the old is outdated, fusty, deprecated, supplanted. And that knowledge is tied up, via the unconscious appeal of advertising, with those aspects humans find irresistible: youth and beauty.

We demand novelty, mistaking it for progress. We defer to the next generation as those bringing in the better, cleaner, version 2.0 knowledge that will supplant the old, bug-ridden mistakes of the past.

Perversely, as the amount of information humanity produces has increased and our capacity to store it permanently has become effectively infinite, our communication media has become ever more ephemeral. Knowledge has lost permanence, replaced by news, and comment, and ever more news and comment, until all there is is a mindless repetition of slogans, polarised conflict kept perpetually "fresh" by the roiling sea of instantaneous newsfeeds.

Our context-free, on-demand communication media has created a permanent now. While in 1984, Big Brother controlled the past to control the future, here we are descending into a seductive immanence, a perpetual presentism, with the past denigrated and ignored and recast at every moment to service whatever immediate attention-seeking gratification is required, while the future is always one emotional tantrum, one impotent howl at the injustice of the world away from being brought into being.

It has always been the case that, if your perspective isn't written down and preserved and cited, it doesn't exist. Now, it needs not merely to be recorded, it needs to be repeated, and repeated, and repeated, lest it drop out of sight. We have somehow gone from an oral history, to a written one, full circle to an oral one again, with social media the campfire we tell each other wild tales around, believing them to be true in the moment. Things which go without saying, go unsaid. They don’t make headlines, and they aren’t published or preserved in academic journals. They have to be stated and restated over and over or they don’t appear in our newsfeed, becoming less fresh, less new, less attractive, less true. They corrode over time, not transformed into established wisdom, but old news. Not something to be built on, but something worn out to be replaced.

Our communication systems are built to give us the most up to date information, what’s new, what’s popular, what everyone else believes. The top sponsored search results and nothing else. The first response to a question from an AI trained by looking at this already flawed view of ourselves. Our sophisticated technology allows us simultaneously to record everything, while remembering none of it. As we revert to an oral tradition, perhaps AI will become our Shamens, the keepers of the definitive stories, letting us know what is true today, reshaping a past we have no commercial use for to reinvent our present.

This is an issue that goes far beyond simply social media, or phones, or any other of the convenient scapegoats for the state of society, but is I think now deeply embedded in how we now understand and make sense of the world.

Perhaps we can find a way to communicate ideas regardless of how attractive or commercially viable they are. Communication systems that aren’t built to determine truth by popularity and engagement. An academic discipline dedicated to the speaking of unspoken truths, a repetition of that which doesn’t bear repeating, just to remind us that nothing has changed. A journal of Stating The Bleeding Obvious.