Digital Socialist Deceleration

Discussion

Jamie Ranger:

"Digital Socialist Deceleration, I argue, ought to be considered an ideological (oppositional) deceleration, by way of an acknowledgement of structural and cultural inertia, which involves rejecting the supporting sociological claims[3]. Digital socialist deceleration rejects the view that we have rejected the end of history and sees this lack of utopian energies because of a collective poverty, or lack of acknowledgement of, radical political thought (with varying theories as to why). We have learned through Rosa’s analysis that there are circumstances where deceleration can be a dysfunctional consequence, such as instances where everyone using a new technology causes that technology to malfunction or slow down (think servers crashing on the release date of a highly-anticipated computer game), and there are even instances where deceleration is intentionally inscribed into a system for the purpose of further acceleration (my cynical example would be firms giving workers the weekend so that they are refreshed to be productive on weekdays). What does a socialist project look like under these supposed conditions of modernity? And what role does “modernity” seem to be playing in Rosa’s work when many would suggest that “capitalism” would be a more adequate descriptor?

What is modernity if it is not roughly the point at which capitalism began in the western world? What do we have to gain from ignoring the obvious fact that we feel the need to send off fifty e-mails in one sitting because there are external financial pressures beyond technological progress allowing for excess sociability? We are going faster because we must go faster, because we can go faster, because our bosses say that if we can, we should, and if we do not, we will be fired. Rosa argues that the merits of his theory of social acceleration includes its ability to explain “the transformation of the productive and consumptive regimes of modernity- from early modernity to “classical”, Fordist modernity and so on to “late modernity“ (Rosa 2010, 54). Rosa says that he does not claim that acceleration is the basis for society, rather a “dynamis, its driving force and its logic or law or change” (Rosa 2010, 54). Although I would argue that the profit motive serves as the primary engine of change, these competing explanations do not necessarily come into conflict during this paper’s analysis of social media. Nevertheless, it seems plausible that social media’s relationship to its platform capitalist modus operandi is the driving force behind the hypermodulation of the subject, and thus deceleration of social media will either be instantiated through an anti-capitalist ideological opposition, or interestingly, a functional acceleratory project; in other words, the growing marketplace for products and services that encourage “digital detox”. Capitalism attempts to solve the problem it creates itself: a cynical phenomenon exploited by the “happiness industry” (Davies 2015).

Rosa wonderfully articulates the contradiction at the heart of liberal democratic modernity, an individualist subjectivity that privileges autonomy of action and decision-making as paramount to what makes us human, and yet paradoxically diminishes our capacity for such prospective actions and decision-making, obscured by the systems of control that permeate and dominate our social structures. The socialist project argues that the capitalist mode of production obstructs the autonomy promised by liberal democracy, and as such, a transition to an alternative material state of affairs in concert with a more radical democratic culture will better serve the political goal of human emancipation.

Rosa observes that “in late-modern politics, it is no longer (if it ever was) the force of the better argument which decides on future politics, but the power of resentments, gut-feelings, suggestive metaphors and images” (Rosa 2010, 56), and it could be argued that this political discourse that Rosa considers a cultural consequence of social acceleration, is increasingly and more commonly articulated and circulated on social media." (https://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/1127/1334)