every relationship is parasocial now.

why you feel estranged from your friends (it's not just the phones)

“As general Eisenhower explained in all candor, the present economic system can be rescued by turning human beings into consumers, conflating them with the largest possible number of consumable values.”

Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution in Everyday Life

If it is true that we’re a generation of sleepwalkers then it’s also true that we’ve lost our ability to wake up. Whatever this anxious dream is, this is now where we live. The keys have been lost inside a trunkful of toys, a vacuous sea of the odds and ends of a branded Lego set without any of the pieces you could use to build anything new; the keys must have been tossed out a car window onto the interstate, — maybe they’ve made it safely into the grass. Worse than this: do we really want to find them anymore?; what would finding our car keys get any of us but merely having the keys?

What is there outside these minute distractions that keep ourselves in a constant scramble, a state of temporal survival, except a deep, sinking humiliation about being in this world in this time, being a part of this generation in which humanity fully descends into a slow climate death like a fat monopoly man lowering himself into a hot tub full of boiling water, to be a part of this generation that’s given this ragdoll existence. It’s hard to think of what is actually within our power, — The Fight For the Climate Is The Fight For Our Lives was signaled throughout history textbooks, — but it’s not terribly easy to imagine what’s within our power either. It’s not only the fact that we don’t even have the power to “fight the power, man,” but the strange truth of the matter is we’re not given the power to do much of anything at all. Everything feels muted out by its sheer distribution, spread out like too little paint juggled between hands. The power in this world, — or, I should say, the power to commit to anything for ourselves in our day-to-day lives in this world, — is increasingly given over to mediators, AI machines, online streaming portals, and online shopping, and through this process, whatever offline power we would need to take to change things in our day-to-day lives are being taken from us by this medium in our pockets. It’s not just the phones. It’s how the phones are used.

“The Medium is the Message,” Marshall McLuhan said and sure, that quote is overquoted, yeah, I know, *maybe I should edit this out,* but Marshall McLuhan was right, at the end of day, he seemed to have predicted the internet. He was more futurist than philosopher.

Concert tickets and consuming media are now deeply tied up themselves with consumer technology. Consumer technology has even tried to convince us they can take the power of squeezing juice from bags away from us and thereby creating a power that did not exist before, a very incredibly stupid power. Juicero was stupid. It couldn’t convince us that it could do it better, but it wasn’t a real task. The climate catastrophe will be great for content, that seems all we have to settle our nerves.

That’s to say: this shared digital ballroom is more enticing than the blunt feeling of survival we have been actually feeling since 2016. It wasn’t Trump, though his election was a symptom. Something more broad in the world shifted that year. Now this strange banal cybernetic survival is our hand of cards. But survival is the real enemy of a lived life. I find it hard to imagine any of us here in the mixed media reality of our moment is really, truly living a life. Rather it seems like an across-the-board enhanced survival which we (uh) would prefer to sleepwalk through, day to day, dreaming this wide dream of ours, this nihilistic dream: this drudgery of keeping ourselves alive, keeping ourselves afloat, keeping ourselves sane and moving on and on and on and on. There is so much to be done every single day even even when there’s nothing to do, — how couldn’t it drive a person insane? Does any of it truly make you feel like a person? We’re paralyzed from our feeling, and with it our ability to connect. Could we even launch an attack against these paralyzing mechanisms to free ourselves? Or would we even know how?

Togetherness is barred by our having become objects, consumables, trading cards on the world wide web, producers, consumers, essential and nonessential linkages in the marketplace of marketable ideas because endless surveillance also entails endless performance. Every act in our lives has become quantitative, calculated as more or less effective, more or less statistically sound, more or less healthy, more or less life affirming. But what kind lives are these calculations even affirming? It is tough, — it is a tough thing to argue that our lives are not blunt calculations but it’s an easier thing to argue that none of our possible comprehensions of blunt calculations, or mathematics in general, can ever truly match the full weight of understanding of a life as it’s lived.

Our lives are choreographed by not by ourselves but by the brute weight of online marketplaces, ranging from social media to amazon to dating apps, to fit into the only molds we can recognize while underneath our feet the rug has been pulled so completely that it took the ground along with it. And here we are spiraling.

For the first time in history, power sees the individual in its international economic web, an individual along an x-, y-, and z- axis with the z- being not your age measured in years, but age measured in the number and the amount of monetary and social exchanges you’ve made and those which you’re expected to make in the future.

Every text you send, every tweet you post, every purchase you make, makes you older in the eyes of this power, another step along your railway which it has developed to predict your wants and your behaviors; all of it is logged and stashed away in a vast interconnected framework underneath the surface of our social reality. And this power, perhaps not authoritarian in a twentieth century sense, is no doubt cohesive and coercive in its complete surrounding shroud, its confusion, its fog of animosity. There is no high master, no feudal king, no politburo, only a disconnected deep state which is itself ignorant of what it has become.

Unlike the alliances to the state which defined authoritarian power in the twentieth century, our mandatory allegiance is to the marketplace itself, to pure and seamless monetized exchange: the giving up of our feeling, our thought, our expression, our labor, and our data, while at the same time encouraging others to do the same (you and I, reading and writing this on a platform funded by such exchanges make a great example, don’t we!), — “you should start a substack!,” I’ve told people before. The recent emergence of cryptofascism makes perfect sense too, in terms of allegiance to online entities as if they are national. Online entities are becoming vaguely nationalistic, of course such a nationalism would reach its extremes at some point.

“Given the rate at which economic imperatives gobble up feelings, desires and needs, and pay cash to corrupt them, people will soon be left with nothing but the memory of having once existed. History, in which we shall live retrospectively, will be our sole consolation for our condition of survival. How can real joy exist in a space-time that is measurable and continually measured? Not so much as a hearty laugh. At best, the dull satisfaction of the person-who’s-got-his-money’s-worth, and who exists by that standard. Only objects can be measured, which is why all exchange reifies.”

Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

The broad goal of cyber-neoliberalism is the transformation of individuals into objects. Its purpose, encouraged by the fading American hegemony in the face of China’s ascendency is to transform all social interaction into commodity as to remain the top dog of the global economy. It makes perfect sense according to a gross nationalistic calculation; it’s a good bet for a country that loves to gamble, I should say. We may not be able to compete with China’s material production but maybe we can compete in terms of immaterial production, or so they think: posts and media, exporting our culture increasingly unsure of itself, the transformation of people into objects that can be broadcast internationally to increasingly middling results. The United States is going to lose this battle to China eventually, it’s clear, as it can be seen in TikTok and RedNote’s sudden uptick in the United States, even the United States’ own citizens are increasingly unsure of what the United States’ "project” is. What the United States actually “stands for.” Whatever morality is ascribed to the US, supposedly since its founding, feels less and less accurate to the situation at hand. It’s hard to ignore the genocides of the past fifty years, especially when compared to like a John Adams type figure from the eighteenth century.

The project, on the other hand, of cyber-neoliberalism, is the squeezing the population of a country like a sponge, — “produce, produce.”, or “you should aspire more to be like the guy from whiplash than you do boy meets world.”, or “please clap.” — all our relationships, including those we have with ourselves, have become transactional, parasocial in an acute way. There are not enough American goods to buy to furnish the American economy in the face of the market abroad so we have sold ourselves and all our moments shared with others have become performances of moments through the mediums available to us. Our daily actions and moments, thoughts and feelings, reaching-outs and shared connections, have become mere gestures to be packaged, bought, sold, or put down on a digital ledger revealing that “a consumer was here,” or “two consumers shared a phone call,” or “125 text messages were shared between two consumers in the AT&T ledger.” If this isn’t a comprehensive claim on the real powers of the surveillance state in 2025, it will certainly be more comprehensive by the time 2030 arrives.

This isn’t merely about a situationist dystopia as described by writers like Vaneigem and Debord, but rather this is about its aftermath. We’ve already been through the situationist dystopia, — it’s the world the situationists described, the world they saw around them. Rather here we are in the post-apocalypse of humanity itself and we’ve been reduced to an assortment of objects to be bought and sold by dominant market forces until we expire of old age. Here we will make our stand, whatever that will look like. I don’t doubt the capabilities of my generation or generations to come, I’m just not sure what these capabilities would even look like. We will probably be in our homes for most of it I would imagine. Speaking of…

Why are we staying home more and more? If the 2020 pandemic plays the part of nexus then where are we now? I would argue that we are staying in more and more because every relationship is parasocial now.

This technological ability to market (as in, deliver to market) our small acts throughout our day-to-day has applied to them a capitalist sheen, an encouragement of sharing the signifier. Who would have guessed that “sharing is caring” would be the subliminal rallying cry for a techno-capitalist dystopia? There is another side to this but we’ll get more into that at the end of this post.

Think about how you reach out to others. Unless they’re in your immediate presence, the people you know and the people you love are behind a profile picture and behind a contact card for most of your interactions, most of your shared moments. Your vision of them is not them themselves, but them as transfigured through the medium of a text or a like or even a phone call, — that’s to say if they’re in your wireless existence, they don’t have full, entire agency in any way in terms of how they’re presented to you or you to them. There’s a small dash of the parasocial in every single relationship, I do believe.

Why do I feel so disconnected from the people I keep in touch with?, I sometimes ask myself. It could be my own neuroses. But the answer I continue to come back to is that most of the people I know and keep in touch with through the disparate means of the internet I really, actually don’t know like I know the people who are around me. Almost every relationship I have with others is a mix of nostalgia, memory, and a parasocial present promising a past and a future.

Some of the more shrewd social media posters market their catalog of photos, tweets, and posts as mysterious portals into a social lif overflowing with energy, electric like neon or static for the eye to see and the ear to hear, but the more successful accounts on instagram frame themselves alone, as if they exist by themselves in an HD landscape perfectly encapsulating their frame. What kind of account is more honest? I think; I wonder. The optimist in me says the former, — to live a social life is to be human, — but the pessimist in me says the latter, that none of our lives are truly social in a human way anymore.

It’s a hard, blunt truth that our relationships to one another have been tainted through and through by parasociality, — I’m imagining a medieval alchemy scale for each of the relationships in your life where on one side is the weight of the real in-person, human, interactions, and on the other side of the scale are the interactions shared in this relationship that are on the world wide ledger. You can take any of the relationships that make your life what it is and weigh them accordingly. It’s a little startling how parasocial some of my relationships actually are once I started to think about it. There’s a bit of the parasocial in all of them, wouldn’t you agree?

So if our relationships are parasocial now, we should acknowledge this to be true and really try to shake off these shackles. Otherwise there’s no deciding what to do next for ourselves (and for our planet because the stakes are truly very high); because otherwise there’s only abiding to the flow of things, to the ending of history, that final wellspring of hope that one day we will have made a difference in our lifetimes. The truth is, and I think this is part of why the killing of Brian Thompson was so shocking, is we really don’t need to abide by these changes. We can reach out beyond the screen to fight back. It was a shocking event, and shocking to see the moment of celebration following. While the news hosts continue to bemoan the event there’s a strange feeling in the air that we’re maybe not as helpless and passive as they want us to be. It was an act that didn’t deny the reality of our existence here, at not least in the United States, with our abhorrent healthcare system. We cannot change if we keep denying the reality of our situation, or if we keep biding our time in this most meager state of survival, hoping the world changes back to the way it once was.

“These absolutized fragments are all quite interchangable. Detached from one another, — and hence separated from human beings themselves, — the moments of survival follow and resemble one another just like the specialized attitudes that correspond to them, namely roles. Making love or riding a motorcycle — it’s all the same. Each moment follows a stereotype, and fragments of time carry off fragments of human beings into an unalterable past.”

Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

Okay well, you think. I guess I’ll go to more parties then, concerts? Go out to Eat? Get drinks? But wait! Not so fast, — have you been to a concert recently? Have you seen all the phones held vertically? The marketplace of content doesn’t stop exchanging its monetized documentation even when the lights go down and the act begins to play. The same for house parties and bars, too, where corners become conduits for Instagramable photo opportunties. The same goes for movies, more and more phones, taking pictures of Willem Dafoe. It’s harder than ever to escape the web of content. It finds its way into every space, nook, and cranny; balmy and incomplete.

I can’t help but imagine historians of the future looking back on our sorry lives and seeing nothing there of substance, skimming over to the next period, to whatever comes after this stagnation. They’ll see millions of people treading water, attempting to survive the best they can while keeping a good face, a face that tells the cameras they’re well aware of how important the time they’re living in is. We’re not that important. No more than any other generation.

Beneath the quiet mask of our times is not sorrow but a confused humiliation, a brute survival within a vacuum of meaning, and survival remains the enemy of a fully lived life. I can’t imagine, to the historians looking back, that they’ll see any signs of life here. Humanity, as is being gradually deconstructed into spare parts, marketable snapshots, appears to be winding continually to a close, time and time throughout the centuries. Whatever came before is closed now, — now we must turn to resurrection, which can only happen once we’ve stood up to our own trepidation to release our real revolutionary power. I don’t think it is possible to keep power out of humanity’s hands. And this is a good thing but a terrible thing. Things are (um) interesting in the world right now; I would bet on them getting more interesting with time. It’s high time to start thinking on them while we tread water in our survival, our enhanced survival.

We live lives of quiet abstraction. So have our relationships to one another become unknown and unknowable because of the abstract ways in which we’re organized, mediated by data collected or siphoned off wholesale. Our instincts made us into capable producers of content, but let us not distrust our instincts entirely: let us take our parasocial lives as they are and try to trust them trust our instincts to their natural ending, — the arc of the internet has barely begun. If we took a clear head to our issues and realized that the light of our unmediated interactions with one another do, in fact, shine brighter than those which we have shared through any sorts of digital mediation, those on the online ledger, we could reassert humanity as new and spontaneous. I am not here writing this to be a luddite but rather to ask for a reevaluation of balance between digital and non-digital life.

Because I love the people around me, I love feeling close to them. Maybe hell is other people but heaven is too. To look beyond the facsimile backlit selves that fill our understanding of ourselves and others in a natural way, to see the people you know for themselves, to understand that every one of them is as deserving of a future outside the shadow of this techno-neoliberal hellscape as you are, is to make revolutionary progress.

We can and we should journey out from the shadow of this techno-neoliberal hell which we’ve been placed in, or at least savor our interactions that actively do it harm by their nonparticipation in its horizon-to-horizon attention machine.

Our hand of cards is our hand of cards. But hands of cards are not fate; the game has not ended yet and as far as I can tell, we haven’t fully cashed in our chips yet. We can keep our memories up our sleeves. There is no need to contribute them to the game that is being played. If the house always wins, why not cheat?

“The day pure exchange comes to regulate the modes of existence of the robotic citizens of a cybernetic democracy, sacrifice will cease to exist. Objects need no justification to make them obedient. Sacrifice is no more part of the programme of machines than it is of the diametrically opposed project of the whole human being.”

Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

I think it’s fair to say that, as we enter the halfway mark of the 2020s that we’ll begin to figure out what revolutionary communication would look like going forward. Our moment in history is sorting out this new deck and trying to figure out what its anarchic symbols mean.

Revolutionary art is art which takes a well treaded format, — be that Novels, Films, Newsletters, — deeply aligned with power and twists the formats until they break free and provide an opposition. The formats we have in our hands have been and will continue to be twisted in opposition to institutional power. I find this hopeful.

If every video or every piece of text created or written by human beings is pointing towards anything, it’s pointing at the abolition of itself. This is not Freud’s Death Drive, but rather this is a drive towards not having the need to write anymore, damnit! And this comes from having written what I feel like I need to have written. This goes for every inauthentic mode of communication ranging from text messages to hinge messages. The goal is to eventually not send hinge messages anymore, to not have as many text messages because the person you were texting with is now within earshot.

Similarly, the goal of any writer of words worth their salt is the eventual emancipation of themselves and the reader from written language entirely, — once everything that can be written is written, what’s left behind but experience itself, the wholeistic text of the universe? This is also why I think the best part of any movie is the twenty minutes which follow it.

But what is to be done? If we are to sacrifice anything, — the Christian doctrine of sacrifice still prevailing as the bread and butter of choice according to popular American morality, — in favor of rediscovering a life well lived, let us sacrifice our digital egos, our digital altars, those which feed the hungry muzzle of commodification, sacrifice our digital selves in favor of togetherness, humanity, art, sharing understanding and not symbolic gesturing, loving. Feeling that exists beyond the digital ledger of our actions are still important, take your social media activity to sites free (relatively) of advertising instead of those actively preying on its users. Take your actions away, move them into your life. Keep them away from prying eyes because there are alternatives. In terms of the structure of power today, we can remain forever young if we avoid its eyes and its collection agencies. We have our own eyes here and now; all I’m asking is you use them. Make art for them alone. We don’t need to leave everything for history. Live, don’t suffice to survive, so that your eyes may see here and now instead of, one day, backwards.

If we have to reach for each other as humans through the machine, let’s find the best ways to do it. Let’s transform every text and every phone call into a reaching out rather than a symbolic keeping in touch. Let yourself be replaced by the mystery of the heart.

xoxo,

briffin

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P.S. The book that inspired this post, The Revolution of Everyday Life by Raoul Vaneigem, is available from the PM Press for $20. It’s a wonderful read. I’m filling mine up with blue ink, likely while you are reading these words.

P.P.S. If you haven’t yet, you should really give the voiceover to this article a listen. The guitar, piano, and bass was all recorded by yours truly in my bedroom.