{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","title":"Crowds and Party","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781781686942","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","id":"e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","uuid":"e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","title":"Crowds and Party","normalized_title":"crowdsandparty","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781781686942","isbns":["9781781686942","9781781686720","9781781687666"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":183,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Crowds%20and%20Party","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc/search"},"page":{"printed_page":39,"pdf_page":38,"physical_index":38,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"c2b84be13352364370362518e65e9fcca0256e646f9217d14f9ab4c015e414b0"},"chapter":"CROWDS AND PARTY","content":"The pressures are also psychological, as we have already seen. Franco Berardi highlights the “conquest of internal space, the interior world, the life of the mind” endemic to communicative capitalism.<sup>38</sup> Informational intensification and temporal acceleration saturate our attention to “pathological levels.” Berardi associates panic, aggressiveness, depression, and fear with this saturation. He finds symptoms of it in waves of suicide, escalating Viagara use among those with no time for affection, tenderness, and sexual preliminaries, “millions of boxes of Prozac sold every month, the epidemic of attention deficit disorders among youngsters, the diffusion of drugs like Ritalin to school children, and the spreading epidemic of panic.”<sup>39</sup> People respond to overload with drugs and technology, trying to do more, be more, keep up and on top, but the pressure is relentless. The more they do, the more they are expected to do. Swamped under the overproduction of signs, the human receiver is overloaded to the point of breakdown.\n\nI agree with much of Berardi’s description, but I want to suggest an alternative approach to the psychopathologies he observes. Drugs, depression, ADHD, and panic are not merely pathologies. They are also defenses. The real pathology is the individual form itself. Drugs attempt to maintain it, keep it going. The individual is pathological in the sense that it is incompatible with its setting, incapable of responding to the pressures it encounters without pain, sacrifice, or violence (psychoanalysis stems from this insight, hence the primacy of castration). The problem of contemporary subjectivity arises not from the extremes of a capitalism that has merged with the most fundamental components of communicativity. It’s not that the saturated, intensified, and unbearably competitive circuits of communicative capitalism are making us depressed, anxious, autistic, and distracted and that we need to find ways to preserve and protect our fragile individualities. Depression, anxiety, autism, and hyperactivity signal the breakdown of a form that has always itself been a problem, a mobilization of processes of individuation and interiorization in a reflexive inward turn that breaks connections and weakens collective strength. The individual form is not under threat. It is the threat. And now it’s weakening.\n\nIn Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, Sherry Turkle documents some of the ways social media provide relief from individualist expectations. To be sure, she does not describe her findings in terms of such relief. Rather than construing the individual form as a problem, she presents it as a vulnerability in need of protection. So she echoes dominant injunctions to individuality. Nonetheless, her explorations of “networked life and its effects on intimacy and solitude, on identity and privacy” open up paths she doesn’t follow, paths to collectivity.<sup>40</sup>\n\nReporting on her interviews with teenagers, Turkle describes young people waiting for connection, fearful of abandonment, and dependent on immediate responses from others even to have feelings. For example, seventeen-year-old Claudia has happy feelings as soon as she starts to text. Unlike a previous generation that might call someone to talk about feelings, when Claudia wants to have a feeling, she sends a text.<sup>41</sup> Turkle reports the anxieties people express about face-to-face interactions as well as about expectations associated with the telephone, that is to say, about speaking to another person in real time.<sup>42</sup> The multitasking inseparable from contemporary communication, the fact that people may be texting and talking simultaneously, looking at something else while ostensibly listening to their interlocutor, implants an uncertainty as to whether another is even paying attention. Combined with pressures for immediate response and the knowledge that the “internet never forgets” (most of us are unable to eliminate all traces of our digital identities after they’ve been uploaded, archived, and shared), our new intimacy with technology, Turkle demonstrates, is affecting the kinds of selves we become. We experience solitude, privacy, connection, and others differently from how we did before.\n\n39","previous_page":38,"next_page":40}