Malte reviewed Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour
Review of 'The Twittering Machine' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
Richard Seymour should be most at home in the political economy side of this thing, but it was actually the existential and more speculative parts where his voice shined for me. The chapter on addiction was a kind of literary near-death experience, meaning both terrifying but also enlivening (making me want to do something about the addiction to spend "time on screen", and as the book convincingly shows, most of us by now are addicts). There's something of a bibliographic tone to the book, that some might find distracting. That is, it constantly references other authors, a bit how journalists write and it does make it seem less sincere at times. Ironically, as "more material" to plow through, scavenge for points, turn into productive writing and spit out a new commodity. Books like that tend to get forgotten very fast. I hope this one doesn't and do get a life …
Richard Seymour should be most at home in the political economy side of this thing, but it was actually the existential and more speculative parts where his voice shined for me. The chapter on addiction was a kind of literary near-death experience, meaning both terrifying but also enlivening (making me want to do something about the addiction to spend "time on screen", and as the book convincingly shows, most of us by now are addicts). There's something of a bibliographic tone to the book, that some might find distracting. That is, it constantly references other authors, a bit how journalists write and it does make it seem less sincere at times. Ironically, as "more material" to plow through, scavenge for points, turn into productive writing and spit out a new commodity. Books like that tend to get forgotten very fast. I hope this one doesn't and do get a life of its own, spawning better thinking tools to dream something else than viral content for the machine.
