The Social Network Scam

On Facebook and Twitter, you are performing to attract people—you are dancing emotionally, on a platform created by a large corporation.

People's feelings bounce back and forth, ignoring and denying the system of power.

It's like Stalin's socialist realism.

Both Twitter and socialist realism are innocent expressions of the ideology of the time, which don't pull back and show the wider thing they are part of.

We look back on socialist realism not as innocent but as a dramatic expression of power; it expresses the superiority of the state, which was the guiding belief at the time.

I think sometime in the future people will look back at the millions and millions of descriptions of personal feelings on the internet and see them in similar ways.

This is the driving belief of our time: that "me" and what I feel minute by minute is the natural centre of the world.

Far from revealing that this is an ideology—and that there are other ways of looking at human society—what Twitter and Facebook do is reinforce the feeling that this is the natural way to be.