In the emerging world, free labour is extracted from customers under the guise of ‘participation’ and ‘feedback’.

Jonathan Beller, the film theorist, has argued that with the internet, ‘looking is labouring’. It is more precise to say that looking and being looked at is an irresistible inducement to labour.

Since no one is pure, and since the condition of being in the social industry is that one reveals oneself constantly, then from a certain perspective our online existence is a list of exploitable traits.

On social media, you scratch out a few words, a few symbols, and press ‘send’, rolling the dice. The internet will tell you who you are, and what your destiny is through arithmetic ‘likes’, ‘shares’ and ‘comments’.

We write to the machine, it collects and aggregates our desires and fantasies, segments them by market and demographic and sells them back to us as a commodity experience.

No one forces us to be there, and no one tells us what to post, ‘like’ or click. And yet our interactions with the machine are conditioned.

The nuance added by social industry’s platforms is that they don’t necessarily have to spy on us. They have created a machine for us to write to. The bait is that we are interacting with other people: our friends, professional colleagues, celebrities, politicians, royals, terrorists, porn actors – anyone we like. We are not interacting with them,

We prefer the machine when human relationships have become disappointing.

It is as if the addictive relationship stands in for the social relationships that have been upended by the turbulence of capitalism.