The Twittering Machine

'''Seymour, Richard. The Twittering Machine.''' London: The Indigo Press, 2019.

From the publisher's description: In surrealist artist Paul Klee’s The Twittering Machine, the bird-song of a diabolical machine acts as bait to lure humankind into a pit of damnation. Leading political writer and broadcaster Richard Seymour argues that this is a chilling metaphor for our relationship with social media.

Former social media executives tell us that the system is an addiction-machine. We are users, waiting for our next hit as we like, comment and share. We write to the machine as individuals, but it responds by aggregating our fantasies, desires and frailties into data, and returning them to us as a commodity experience.

Cf. and contrast people engaged with social media with the image of most of humankind underground, in a machine, in E. M. Forster's "The Machine Stops."

Reviewed usefully in TLS in "Don’t @ us: The Problem with Tweeting," which see, along with the entry for Paul Klee's artwork, Die Zwitscher-Maschine.

RDE, Initial Compiler, 30Nov19