We are grappling with what it means to utter things as authors, as potentially always stand-ins for some much broader cultural debate. And with that we are stuck in the fundamental paradox of being a subject: that to other subjects, we are at best only ever an object, a thing to be placed in the appropriate context despite whatever objections we may exclaim.

Captured in that phrase “I like to know what’s going on in the world” is actually a statement about the position of oneself in relation to that world: that to know what is happening is to better be able to situate oneself, to understand how one fits into the larger ebb and flow of this first draft of history.

There is warmth in the feed of images: a steady cavalcade of tiny, precious detail, a gentle flood of affection for both others and ourselves. For the lonely, sitting by themselves in quiet rooms and apartments, it represents an emergent social field, a kind of extra-bodily space in which one communes. The modal shift of ambient intimacy from text to the image is itself a minor analog of the broader one, from mass media to the network, from the body to its holographic pairing.

Over time, one’s interaction with a phone becomes a series of muscle-memory patterns accompanied by visual and aural confirmation that, after a while, become almost Pavlovian. One might talk of interfaces as tool-like, or even ideological, but perhaps at root they are not merely mechanisms of interaction, but ways of channeling affect — of giving shape to the emotional dimensions of information.

To use Twitter is to become both its consumer, but also its bureaucrat. We propagate and internalize the logic of the platform, hundreds of millions of us performing these new behaviors in lockstep, beckoning each other to join in. It is a kind of auto-colonization: adopting the notion that a public digital self is a way to temporarily exceed the body, and embracing the personal brand as a mode of existence. We bend to the imagined Other like plants craning to maximize their exposure to sunlight.