4.5.8. The Contradiction between Social Media’s Essence and Appearance
Social media ideology constitutes an antagonism between social media’s essence and appearance: the very essence and task of the media is to bring people together, capitalist reality is however that social media’s sociality fosters new forms of exploitation, commodification, individualism, and private property. Social media ideology makes social media appear as something purely positive, it splits of the negative reality of domination and exploitation from social media. It makes social media one-dimensional and is a form of reductionist technological rationality that justifies the instrumentalisation of humans’ activities for capitalist purposes by disguising exploitation as sociality, fun and play.
4.6. Herbert Marcuse, the Logic of Essence and Social Media
4.6.1. The Concept of Essence
Marcuse (1941a) has argued that the Nazis’ notion of essence that sees the Jews nature as being parasitic, greedy, and money-oriented is based on particularism and is therefore opposed to the Hegelian and Marxian notion of essence that assumes the existence of universal qualities of humans and society. For Hegel, essence is not a particularistic, but a universalistic concept. He argues: ‘The Absolute is the Essence’ (Hegel 1830, §112). ‘Essence is the ground of existence. The ground is the unity of identity and diference [...] It is essence put explicitly as a totality’ (Hegel 1830, §121).
In Marx’s philosophical writings, Hegelian essence is interpreted as sociality and co-operation. ‘The individual is the social being’ (Marx 1844, 105). ‘By social we understand the co-operation of several individuals’ (Marx and Engels 1846, 50). The implication of this assumption is that co-operation is something that all humans share, that capitalism alienates co-operative potentials, and that societal conditions should be created that allow all humans to participate, to have equally realised rights, and to live in equity. It is this stress on universal equity that led to the Nazis’ hostility towards Hegel and Marx. So, for example, in the main work by Alfred Rosenberg (1930), the Nazis’ primary ideologist, Hegel was opposed because for him the state was a universal concept. Rosenberg argued that Hegel and Marx’s writings were foreign to the notion of blood (‘blutfremd’) (Rosenberg 1930, 525), whereas he celebrated Nietzsche as someone who destroyed all values and stood for the breeding of a higher race (‘rassische Hochzucht’) (Rosenberg 1930, 525). Herbert Marcuse summarised the Nazi’s opposition towards Hegel’s universalism:
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Critical Theory of Communication