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Will our avatars have better lives than us and will we be able to live vicariously through them? Will our avatars be economically more productive than us? And will our avatars eventually abandon us to live their own lives? 

When we consider the virtual realm or the digital realm we see ourselves, our field of vision moving ghostlike through a CGI landscape. We see a character, an avatar that is imbued with something of us – a vessel for our agency and autonomy in a digital realm. When we turn off the screen, common logic is that the avatar disappears but in truth it steps through the screen and comes into the real world, traversing a world of organic matter through us. The image representation of us is now us because we exist to ourselves as an image representation of an idea of who we could be, but are not. There is an endless stream of who we are floating ahead of us into the future, always different than what we are now. The figure, although you feel is you, is untouchable - your hand runs through holographic light as you try to grasp them. Through a convoluted myriad of images and contradictory inner-stories we are left with the conceptual basis of who we are, reflected back to us, in a permanent dream-state. 

As an illusory sense of self, commodification of everything and social media are interdependent and continually inform each other in a feedback loop. Once the algorithmic expectation or pattern of behaviour is conditioned/programmed into the social media user, they begin to commodify themselves, delving unconsciously deeper into a virtual ectoplasm. In this vague new world, social media is as real as real life. The digital realm becomes more culturally significant and begins to inform life despite being essentially a word and picture game of avatars. 

Prime Twitter player Donald Trump’s presidency was crystallised within the commodification of life clearer than any other event in history. It was impossible for the United States, founders of consumerism and exporters of the American Dream, to separate reality from fiction, or to detach passive entertainment value from the seriousness of its situation. The undoubtedly incompetent Trump commodified both sides of the political spectrum because consumer capitalism indiscriminately consumes everything. Trump received wildly disproportionate media coverage because he was great TV, gold-standard content for the left and right. Nobody could believe what was happening – hairs tingled with disbelief and excitement about the possibility of something as crazy as Trump becoming president. Trump’s whole campaign and even presidency has been “like a movie!” and “stranger than fiction”. The hysteria from the left, people screaming in despair across American streets was as equally representative of the spectacle unfolding as those who had voted for him. Political ideology, truth, fact and fiction were secondary to the event as a commodified version of life.

The biggest danger of believing that social media is analogous to real life is that the user can begin to accept a worldview as is presented to them through targeted adverts and on their respective timelines. Who you are, what you are, and why you do the things you do are not separate from the environment you live in, or from every person you interact with and every piece of information that you come into contact with. As well we know, social media arranges, curates, and manages interactions with people and the information you see in a different way than any other form of human interaction that has come before it. We have been educated about algorithms consolidating biases and showing us whatever piece of information is most likely to keep the user on the platform for the longest possible time (a term grossly named “stickiness”). The ability to analyse and then act on data collected about people has only intensified as the scope and use of social media has grown and computers have developed in sophistication. 

When applied to a “free to use” app, the transparency of the transaction between customer and user is murky at best. What does a user give for what they receive? The value of people’s engagement on apps like Twitter and Instagram is difficult to quantify and as the platforms become more ubiquitous to daily life, the motivations behind users engagement within such platforms is obfuscated further. The platform absolutely needs the user to have any value, but social media has been successful in creating a paradigm shift where the world now needs social media in order to function. The users sense of self is dictated by and distorted through these systems. 

` Suicide rates amongst girls and women aged 12-24 has grown by 94% since 2012, rising in direct correlation with social media use. It is depressing that the reason these changes have occurred are just bi-products, bio-waste and polluting symptoms of using algorithms to make social media as addictive (or as sticky) as it possibly can be. The consequence of this for many people is a shrinking view of themselves and of their environment – an endless nudging down a path until it becomes a static conceptual framework. It can be summarised as a simplification of what a human mind is capable of in order to be more predictable to a linear numerical logic. The benefit of this to a social media company is simple, it makes the user easier to predict and therefore easier to advertise too. It is a predator prey relationship and a trap. 

Zooming out and looking at the consumer landscape we live in, advertising and marketing is subversive. There is an inherent strand of exploitation in the relationship between the consumer and product. Although the outcomes of social media are unequivocally damaging in its unrivalled influence over the world’s population, it is likely not the intention of its developers and founders for it to be so. Social media platforms are not the same as they would be in the hands of somebody like Donald Trump. Social media companies actually show restraint by simply operating within the rules of the consumer capitalist playbook. Meta, Twitter, Instagram, Tik Tok is consumer capitalism taken to its end conclusion – total commodification of life and the self. We would have to address the entire principle of consumerism, advertising and market driven capitalism in order to make a meaningful change to social media. Social media is a reflection of us in this respect, although not exclusively – a super computer sits behind a manufactured two-way mirror, watching and documenting our every interaction with the distorted avatar reflection of ourselves before using that information against us. 

As things stand, the brand is king on social media. It is why politics and individuals adopt the terminology and behaviour of brands in order to communicate their perspectives. Currently on social media platforms, disinformation campaigns use the core principles of PR to spread and share information and the individual does the same thing. The inherent dishonesty of disinformation method has added increased monetary value to explicit lies and, in the mode of consumer capitalism, both rewards and legitimises disinformation whilst subsequently trivialising core principles like facts and truth. It is not a coincidence that PR, marketing and advertising does the same things only with seemingly lower stakes and less malicious intent. Points like the ones in this article can often project a techno-dystopia where the morally virtuous rebels revolt against the evil corporate overlord who’s bidding is enacted by an array of bad people with the worst of intentions. The reality is predictably more banal – commodification of the individual is something humanity is collectively doing to itself, unconsciously and mostly by process of indeterminable iteration. It is best conceptualised by Guy Debord’s Society of The Spectacle or Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism as a self-creating and self-growing force that consumes everything it comes into contact with. 

One of the reasons our vague new world is coated in a translucent veil and that the actuality of something is often unavailable is because we are not the ones building it. We are increasingly looking to a fictional representation of reality in an attempt to understand both the world and ourselves. It is lineal synthetic logic trying to turn the non-lineal minds of human-beings into something that they can control. In that insanely reckless pursuit, humanity has produced a weapon against itself that at best is a tool for disinformation and at its worst limits what we can be as a species.