GEERT LOVINK - Sad by design
‘Solitary tears are
not wasted.’ René Char – ‘I dreamt about autocorrect last night.’ Darcie Wilder
– ‘The personal is impersonal.’ Mark Fisher – ‘Swipe left and move on.’
Motivational speaker – ‘I’m easy but too busy for you.’ T-shirt – ‘Why
don’t you just meet me in the middle? I am losing my mind just a little.’ Zedd,
Maren Morris, Grey – ‘As the spirit wanes, the form appears.’ Charles Bukowski
– ‘I don’t care, I love it.’ Icona Pop – ‘Percent of riders on Shanghai subway
staring at their phones: 100%.’ Kevin Kelly – ‘When you get ignored long enough
you check peoples ‘last seen’ status to make sure they aren’t dead.’ Addie
Wagenknecht – ‘I don’t feel like writing what I have just written, nor do I
feel like erasing it.’ Kierkegaard – ‘The very purpose of our life is to seek
happiness.’ Dalai Lama.
Try and dream, if you
can, of a mourning app. The mobile has come dangerously close to our psychic
bone, to the point where the two can no longer be separated. If only my phone
could gently weep. McLuhan’s ‘extensions of man’ has imploded right into the
exhausted self.1 Social media and the psyche have fused, turning
daily life into a ‘social reality’ that – much like artificial and virtual
reality – is overtaking our perception of the world and its inhabitants. Social
reality is a corporate hybrid between handheld media and the psychic structure
of the user. It’s a distributed form of social ranking that can no longer be
reduced to the interests of state and corporate platforms. As online subjects,
we too are implicit, far too deeply involved.
Social reality works in a
peer-to-peer fashion. It’s all about you and your profile. Likes and followers
define your social status. But what happens when nothing can motivate you
anymore, when all the self-optimization techniques fail and you begin to
carefully avoid these forms of emotional analytics? Compared to others your
ranking is low – and this makes you sad... read more:
