Ainda sobre a empatia

Sabemos todos que a pervasividade das redes sociais na nossa vida é nociva. Mas saberemos até que ponto?

Algorithms serve the capitalist process of producing consumers in its image and instilling in them the desire for the kinds of standardized culture it can reproduce profitably. As a result we are isolated and controlled through the permission to consume when we are no longer compelled by our inability to afford it. Through forms of media, selected for us by ever more responsive algorithms (the human editors that once programmed us giving way to automated systems), we internalize certain patterns of pleasure and behavior that valorize convenience and efficiency and condemn the complications of interpersonal relationships. Media provide emotional experience on a commodity basis, decontextualized and abstracted from the fabric of social relations. They induce a compulsive passivity that simulates autonomy with none of the responsibility.  

 As much as I agree with all that, and the critiques of “animalization” and “proletarianization” and “depersonalization,” the terms remain off-putting. Who wants to think of themselves or anyone else as “systemically stupid” or somehow less than human? Would you trust what such critics had to say about the world? In recounting these theories, I’m wary of their implications that there is a correct way to consume — a non-stupid way to do it like a “human.” Critiques of consumerism often play as disavowals, as pleas for individual immunity from the snares that caught all the ordinary “stupid” people. But everyone is essentially complicit in a libidinal economy that is fully subsumed by capitalism. Empathy is on its terms.  

Rob Horning, "I Write the Songs", aqui.