Digital communication compulsion operates as death drive with banal content

Evidence

Practices ostensibly undertaken for work, even if they are performed on holiday or late at night, are not experienced simply as unreasonable demands. From a psychoanalytic point of view, it is easy to see why such demands — demands that cannot possibly be met — can be libidinised, since this kind of demand is precisely the form that the psychoanalytic drive assumes. Jodi Dean has convincingly argued that digital communicative compulsion constitutes a capturing by (Freudian/Lacanian) drive: individuals are locked into repeating loops, aware that their activity is pointless, but nevertheless unable to desist. The ceaseless circulation of digital communication lies beyond the pleasure principle: the insatiable urge to check messages, email or Facebook is a compulsion, akin to scratching an itch which gets worse the more one scratches. Like all compulsions, this behaviour feeds on dissatisfaction. If there are no messages, you feel disappointed and check again very quickly. But if there are messages you also feel disappointed: no amount of messages is ever enough. Sherry Turkle has talked to people who are unable to resist the urge to send and receive texts on their mobile telephone, even when they are driving a car. At the risk of a laboured pun, this is a perfect example of the death drive, which is defined not by the desire to die, but by being in the grip of a compulsion so powerful that it makes one indifferent to death. What’s remarkable here is the banal content of the drive. This isn’t the tragedy of something like The Red Shoes, in which the ballerina is killed by the sublime rapture of dance: these are people who are prepared to risk death so that they can open a 140 character message which they know perfectly well is likely to be inane. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1499

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Reading the WhatsApp/text-checking loop as death drive — not the desire to die but indifference to death — with the banal-content twist is a genuinely memorable reframing.
• XREF: Ties to earlier Fisher material on repetition/automatism (ch78 sampled voices as automatisms gripped by drives). — connects to: Chronic interest in communication signals a derangement of its models — James W. Carey, Communication as Culture- Essays on…, 222; Instrumentalizing communication has destroyed our sense of truth itself — James W. Carey, Communication as Culture- Essays on…, 378; The basic form of digital communication is command inducing chronic lag-anxiety — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2300 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• The basic form of digital communication is command inducing chronic lag-anxiety #complicates (0.78) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 2300
• Instrumentalizing communication has destroyed our sense of truth itself #complicates (0.75) — James W. Carey, Communication as Culture- Essays on…, 378
• Social media’s engineered feedback loops convert normal social comparison into compulsive anxiety #qualifies (0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1485
• Chronic interest in communication signals a derangement of its models #qualifies (0.72) — James W. Carey, Communication as Culture- Essays on…, 222