#56 The nightmare of social media w/ Richard Seymour

Richard Seymour joins me to discuss his new book, The Twittering Machine. The title is taken from Paul Klee's 1922 painting in which the the bird-song of a diabolical machine acts as bait to lure humankind into a pit of damnation. Richard argues in the book that this is a chilling metaphor for our relationship with so-called social media. We spoke about the nature of social media addiction, the way in which the platforms incite users into performing unpaid labour, and how we might conceive of repurposing the architecture of the internet to more useful and humane ends.