Within online communities, this produces a strong pressure towards conformity with the values and mores of one’s peers. But even peer conformity is no safeguard, because anyone can see into it. The potential audience for anything posted on the internet is the entire internet. The only way to conform successfully on the internet is to be unutterably

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

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.

Those who enjoy the social media platforms tend to like the fact that they give them a shot at being heard. It weakens the monopoly on culture and meaning formerly enjoyed by media and entertainment companies. Access isn’t equal – reach is bought and paid for by corporate users, PR agencies, celebrities, and so on, who also have better-funded conte

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.

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

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.

This is about a social industry. As an industry it is able, through the production and harvesting of data, to objectify and quantify social life in numerical form. As William Davies has argued, its unique innovation is to make social interactions visible and susceptible to data analytics and sentiment analysis.

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, h