Some random thoughts about online vulnerability and transparency.

On Byung-Chul Han’s "Psychopolitics."

I know how it goes by now. When it is opening week of the NFL, and the season is full of theoretical possibilities for success (my New England Patriots, who are projected to be the worst team in the league, pulled off a surprising/stunning 16-10 victory over the Cincinnati Bengals), getting me to focus on chores or anything productive on my Sundays is like chasing a disobedient corgi struggling with a dog show obstacle course. Against all odds, however, I discovered an ability to play the Patriots game in the background while cleaning my apartment and food prepping for the week, and I even squeezed in a grocery run and an actual run for good measure. To further add to my heroic triumph over single-task brain, I finished reading Byung-Chul Han’s Psychopolitics and came across his idea of the Dictatorship of Transparency.

Today’s edition of This is a Newsletter! isn’t the typical brand of shitposting, as my joint 10-part Best 100 Albums project with

Kevin Alexander

essentially has me writing a 3,000-word essay every week for over two months—which has me a bit preoccupied. But I am obliged by the arbitrary posting schedule that I subject myself to, so I must refill the troth with content slop with sort of a book/vibes discussion to kick off the week.

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In a post-industrial neoliberal political economy, “information” has become a form of productivity, thus creating the desire in all of us to spread as much information about ourselves as we can—even the random photo dumps of you at the beach. But the type of sharing that’s encouraged in this dynamic preferences exchangeability. The same fetishization of the object occurs, as Karl Marx describes in Capital, but now these are fetishized symbols of your personality. It just alienates and fractures the self. In certain circles, there’s a subtle arms race to humblebrag about our disadvantages—a neuro quirk, a childhood trauma, a bespoke gender or sexual identity—so we don’t come across as out-of-touch or tone-deaf, but this just reifies what may be a small part of our lives into a defining characteristic. Or, we may not be BRAT, but just a person who feels the desire to express ourselves as BRAT. We could, of course, be both, but the self-fetishization loses awareness of the self beyond this embellished identity. Vulnerability overlaps. There is a vulnerability in sharing who we think we are, but if the fragmented self loses track of who we are, how can we be truly vulnerable?

Politicians also feel the need to be more transparent, and the ruling class doesn’t need to hide what they’re doing to stay in power. In 2024, the cancel culture narrative is either context-dependent at best or obviously facile at worst, as we are subjected to a deluge of facts, information, and noise every second. But all this information has become commoditized and rendered into content. Time is a finite resource, as is the human brain’s relative capacity for understanding the present moment. So while it is true that politics is easily legible for those with the eyes to see and the lucidity to make sense of it, this aligns with the fact that we are little monads in the great sea of churning information that exists in the modern, intellectual media landscape. Governments are broadly more transparent about their motivations, but it is equally true that one government source saying the quiet part out loud is buried beneath 10,000 other bits of commentary, posting, books, and factoids that bury whatever truth can be gleamed under a pile of garbage. The truth might be right in front of our eyes, but it requires a lot of digging to get there.

I understand Byung-Chul Han’s framing of “dictatorship” to impart the narcissistic and paranoid self-consciousness created by having five-ish influential Silicon Valley megacorporations design social media platforms whose primary function is to facilitate mass shaming campaigns. Most of the shit we see on these networks is designed specifically to stoke outrage and impart a sense of both moral superiority and constant victimhood. That’s the product. Go to the front page of Reddit or the Discover tabs on Instagram or TikTok and count how many posts are spread through that lens. We have erected a centrifuge that algorithmically serves up whatever is most likely to keep us online, which are mostly posts about people who are Wrong, who must be Owned, who need to be Held To Account. The internet just gave us a playground with seemingly no rules to let our craziest bullshitters run wild. Just like how 24/7 cable news didn’t invent the “Right/Left Divide,” the internet only revealed what was always there. Now we are struggling to deal with how incredibly childish we are as a group.

The internally relevant parts here are threefold:

1. It’s a living nightmare to be pissed off at everything and everyone for every perceived slight. This mindset will turn you into an insane zealot. You will become addicted to looking at a tiny screen that will either tell you that M&Ms are woke or that the Barbie Movie is the greatest piece of feminist art that was ever created. Years of your life will vanish and you realize you’ve been awash in either Trump or Hunter Biden laptop headlines for a decade.

2. It’s SOCIAL media, which means there are non-zero odds that you could have your life ruined. Some dickhead could approach you for a man-on-the-street interview while you’re drunk outside the bar and you say something embarrassing, or you have an “incorrect” opinion, or you do have the “correct” opinion but you didn’t express it with the “correct” language. It’s always happening to someone, the engine of social shaming campaigns aims its Sauron eye at you, and all you can hope for is that you have woke enough language at that moment to not be the next milkshake duck—or even worse, the Hawk Tuah Girl.

3. The internet is addictive and free, so everything you could ever want to do has to compete with scrolling and posting. You spend all your time alone, even in public, getting pissed off, dragging people online, and watching people get dragged for pissing other people off online. This creates palpable fear and animosity in people already predisposed to loneliness. This is compounded by the fact that the vast majority of people don’t have, or never had, a Twitter account. Even if they’re on the Hellsite, 90% of the users are just lurkers. The internet isn’t reality, but if the majority of people with influence decided it’s real, then maybe it supersedes the grass. In this unreal reality, @catturd2 and Jordan Peterson are like Lebron and Jordan—very few people can be that insane every day for years.

The dictatorship is something with material components and internal ramifications. There are some companies in real buildings inflicting this insanity on the world and many politicians are allowing it to happen, but this has a real battering effect on the human psyche. There’s some deeper reason why everyone is afraid to answer the phone. It all kind of rhymes with Marcuse, in the sense that, if we’re going to build a world free of this dictatorship, it might be best to start by freeing everyone psychically from social media—which, on balance, is turning humanity into a writhing orgy of insane, venomous cowards obsessed with status and achievement. That’s where a real vulnerability—one that is premised around sharing the burden of suffering, mortality, and transience—might come into effect.

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