Max Read wrote a great book review not too long ago where, among other things, he suggested that scrolling through social media (and even posting!) were manifestations of the death drive, peculiarly modern forms of self-annihilation that, for insidiousness and profitability, probably beat booze and heroin. After reading that, I checked my own responses. Reading twitter really did make me feel dead, like Max said. There was a sacrifice, even a potlach of time: whole hours disappeared. And during those hours my consciousness sort of dissipated. I was relieved of the obligation to think; the web thought for me.
Hard to square with those observations is the day-long sense of anxiety and outrage that I feel after being “online” for a while. Something’s happening to something there: the feeling of being dead corresponds with a continued life, the unwelcome and persistent ability to feel. So annihilation can lead to a kind of undeath online, one where you’re made to feel like your ego is under threat by mysterious agencies even as, in fact, you surrender it to the feed.
That experience helped me understand something from Arya-Surya’s garland of past lives, a great catalog of self-annihilation (since they’re all past lives, the Buddha dies at the end of each episode; I hope to write on here sometime about the one where he’s born as a rabbit, then cooks himself to feed a guest). After a particularly good run, the Buddha gets an exit interview with Indra, who offers him a couple free wishes. The Buddha says, “May I never know Indra! May I forget him, may I never see him again!” And Indra is understandably a bit insulted.
Well, the reason – which Buddha is too polite to say – is I think this: that knowing Indra makes it impossible for Buddha to find the zero-point of self-annihilation that he must reach from one life to the next. And Indra stands in for the whole metaphysical system, the thing that, in effect, makes Buddha what he is. Awareness of Indra, awareness of the structure, is paralyzing. It puts a stop to the cycle of rebirth, not by ending it through the annihilation of all reality, but by freezing prematurely. No knowledge can exceed this.
Social media works that way too. It’s a machine for producing the feeling of annihilation, among other feelings. We know the machine’s there and the machine is working on us. So nothing changes; we annihilate ourselves, then revive just like we were, only angrier and also worse in probably other ways. Unfortunately, no knowledge can exceed this.
The zombie ego, still subject to programming even after the annihilation of consciousness, has been a genre trope ever since Romero’s Dawn of the Dead with its hordes of decaying mall-shoppers. A new ego has to follow the end of the old one; otherwise, as the ad-funded rise of social media has demonstrated, nothing is more profitable for capitalism than ego-death.