This was being written in 2023, just after the Great Resignation — and discourse was on Burnout in an era of post industrial Information Age and uses Han’s Psychopolitics as a framework (which I will review soon).
Psychopolitics is not merely psychology applied to politics but a stage of politics where power is exercised by the absence of an overt force, but allowing individuals to exploit themselves. A dictatorship of Emotion.
The endlessly self optimizing agent who cannot form relations absent of value is what we are all turned into which can be measured by a mental health crisis (anxiety, depression, bipolar, insomnia, adhd).
Increasingly, the convergence of this psychogovernance is upon Big Data as a way to quantify the moods and emotions (see Technocracy), and the major psychogovernmental breakthrough was the Infinite Scroll — timelines moving from being chronological to algorithmic and a major shift in the culture of social media.
“A while back, I stumbled upon an essay written in 2017 on a website called Graphite Journal. In it, an anonymous user writes, “the internet is larger than any one metropolis, but browsing it today feels like walking down a narrow circular hallway.”” — or a recurrent throughline for me is that it is no longer Cyberspace, the astral metropolis, but the MetaVerse — a corporate simulation of reality.
Guy Debord noticed something similar when he studied some Parisianers and found them trapped in the same triangle of space. He proposed the Derive — a stochastic movement through the urban that opened new timelines of possibility.
“It is high time that we develop a dérive for the internet.”
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