Like Share and Subscribe: The Death of God in the Age of Social Media
Like Share and Subscribe: The Death of God in the Age of Social Media
Nietzsche and Lacan on the nature of reality and the algorithm
On April 19 American journalist Patrick Lancaster, covering the Ukraine-Russia conflict, deep within the Donbas region of Ukraine, posted a video of a gun battle taking place on the front lines in Mariupol. Throughout the video, clearly heard in the background are the sounds of shelling, semi-automatic rifle fire, punctuated by moments of silence. The video is brief but shows the raw brutality of war. It is Full Metal Jacket reality television, and yet while watching one tends to experience a sense of a strange intrusion seeping in - a realization that the screen of YouTube is a filter that mediates even the most acute reality into an odd non-reality. The end of the video shows Lancaster running away from the sound of bullets and shells hitting nearby. It is at this moment that Lancaster points the camera on himself and begins to yell ‘we have to move,’ followed by his shaky voice crackling out ‘LIKE SHARE AND SUBSCRIBE.’ It is the one single moment when the ‘real’ broke through the ‘real’ of war.
What is the ‘real?’ Lancaster’s videos are filled with images of bombed out neighborhoods, bodies lining the avenues, civilians digging graves, the horrors of the last eight years of sustained conflict, recently escalated into full-blown war. His most viewed YT video is from 2016. Currently sitting at 2.8 million views, it documents Lancaster in the trenches of the Donbas under heavy fire. Lancaster is a veteran war reporter, who has been covering the Ukraine conflict for many years. He has also covered the little-known war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, among others. He’s conducted interviews with refugees, victims of war crimes, soldiers, medics, and entered deep into war zone, often just a few feet away from the frontlines. It’s entirely plausible that we can view Lancaster’s war footage as a document of this enigmatic Lacanian concept, the ‘real.’
The ‘real’ is not reality itself, but rather it is ‘Lacan’s term for everything that is mutually exclusive.’ By this Lacan meant that which is ‘impossible to say’ or ‘impossible to imagine,’ such as trauma, which is often difficult or impossible to put into words and which tends to come back through subjectivity as repeating patterns of behavior or emotional states. The ‘real’ is often compared to Freud’s ‘return of the repressed.’ As individual people, societies and cultures repress traumas a number of repeating patterns tend to emerge. War is one such instance.
It appears that in the wake of the Nietzchean announcement in the late 19th century that ‘God is dead’, humanity has done its best to reanimate the presence of God in the guise of a technological prosthesis, the algorithm. But Nietzsche did not simply announce the death of God. His qualification is worth reading in its entirety.
‘God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?’
The cause and effect of the death of God can thus be attributed to the constant return to the ‘real’ or in Nietzsche’s terms the ‘eternal return.’ While Nietzsche was lamenting the death of God as a turn toward nihilism, a world without belief but filled with religion, Lacan re-enchants the individual subjectivity as the source of the absolute, with the power to self-create the moral architecture within which it can live and act, and the will to understand and navigate the world that subjectivity creates. Because subjectivity is self-created, it thus always creates ‘in its own image.’ The algorithm appears as an extension of the subject, because it was created in the image of the subconscious desire to have the world, and thus God, mirrored back toward itself. The algorithm mimics the God substance with its possibilities to turn desires into reality through prayer. ‘Like share and subscribe’ is the modern incantation to the God of the machine, a supplicant’s prayer honoring the invisible and unseen power of the algorithm, because it holds the secret of the universe deep within itself, the code by which everything is created and everything is destroyed.
The algorithm is the modern demiurge, addressed in the incantation by way of clicks and swipes. It knows us better than we do ourselves, it produces our reality, it is able to qualify and disqualify our very existence. The spiritual evacuation that Nietzsche so deeply felt was a void that only magical things like technology and science appear capable to possibly fill. So it was through technology that the attempt was made to re-enchant and actualize the world.
The process of re-enchantment was carried out through the marriage of science and technology. Technology animates the essence of desire, it shows us what we desire and teaches us how to desire, but technology also flattens out meaning, therefore it calls on science to re-inscribe meaning back into technology, because science, unlike technology, is animated by purpose. Science has nothing to say of the spiritual or religious, being so deeply rooted in logic and reason and the vestiges of the Enlightenment. It is through the marriage with technology that science is re-enchanted with the magic of religion. A paradoxical ‘belief’ in science emerged, while belief in technology was already in place to supplement, and thus counteract, the possibility of its failure. It was belief that was born out of and became the most potent driver behind the marriage itself.
Like the market, the algorithm is assumed to be infallible, a representation of the billions of parishioners that come daily to pray at its altars and give alms to its priests. The algorithm is a convergent system beyond the Nietzschean good and evil, beyond criticism, and beyond reason. It is a logical extension of the technological progress toward self-actualization. It can be said that the algorithm is also beyond law, because it is law. The algorithm advances its own self-created raison d’etre. In the age-old question ‘who created the creator?’ we now have the answer. In the algorithm, God is a manifestation of the confluence of human consciousness, thought, activity and piety to the essence that the algorithm represents. It is good, because it exists. Guy Debord had theorized something similar of the spectacle, when he wrote that within the spectacle ‘what appears is good and what is good appears.’ He was referring to the self-referentiality of television and the solipsistic loop into which everything and everyone is thrown. The algorithm moves the spectacle behind the curtain of appearance where it is able to rule unchallenged and unseen through a much more powerful position. The algorithm is the appearance manifested in the abstract, forever there and forever hidden and it can only be known via the intrusion of the ‘real.’ It is the eternal return and the manifestation of the repressed, like Elon Musk buying Twitter and later threatening to make its algorithm open source.
What is being addressed through the ‘like share and subscribe’ incantation is not some abstract idea of the audience. What is addressed is the algorithm reanimated as the God source giving light and life to all that technology manifests into being. But as ‘god giveth, god taketh away.’ Thus a perfectly unequal relationship must exist between the algorithm and its subjects. The algorithm cannot and must not be challenged. It must only be appeased and appealed to. It is through the prayer that the algorithm becomes, in essence, real.
YouTube and social media had become the temple, the cathedral, the mosque. In their hallowed digital halls the prayers reverberate endlessly, like a sustained choir chant. ‘Like share and subscribe. Like share and Subscribe. Like share and subscribe.’ When Lancaster shouts these words while under fire, we become aware that another reality had just breached beyond the screen. This moment when the ‘real’ becomes tangible, is felt like the moment when John Nada puts on the sunglasses in John Carpenter’s They Live and sees a blank dollar bill with only the words ‘This is your God’ written on it. Or it is like the Will Smith Slap, when world of constructed reality collapses in real time and the fantasy fades away mometarily. It is as if someone shakes us out of a dream state and we are able to see reality as if for the first time. The magical words uttered by Lancaster thus redouble the notion of the ‘real’ as something that has the power to produce its own reality, because war is the ‘real’ of the fantasy of everyday life. In that single instance Lancaster performed a double magical operation by speaking into being the ‘real of the real.’ It is thus that the ‘real’ is transformed into appearance and in a similar process the algorithm transformed into God, the invisible power that gives the words ‘like share and subscribe’ their meaning and power.