THE TWITTERING MACHINE

In surrealist artist Paul Klee s The Twittering Machine the bird song of a diabolical machine acts as bait to lure humankind into a pit of damnation Leading political writer and broadcaster Richard Seymour argues that this is a chilling metaphor for our relationship with social media Former social media executives tell us that the system is an addiction machine We are users waiting for our next hit as we like comment and share We write to the machine as individuals but it responds by aggregating our fantasies desires and frailties into data and returning them to us as a commodity experience Through journalism psychoanalytic reflection and insights from users developers security experts and others Seymour probes the human side of the machine asking what we re getting out of it and what we re getting into