Why You Shouldn’t Share Your Personal Life on Social Media
Living in Byung-Chul Han’s Society of Intimacy
Exhibiting your naked soul to be enjoyed by others is pornographic. And this is the death of eros. Your personhood is defined by a withdrawal from society, carving out a space called your own. The gap between your private and public life is what individuates you into a subject over an abstract human amongst the masses. Eros dies when this gap disappears, and you cannot differentiate between the private and the social; you cease to exist as an individual—meaning, not divisible (individuus). Without negativity, relationships with that which you are not, the Other, are impossible because you become everything, difference is lost, and you’re left in the abyss of self-relation. Withdrawing is your negativity; your negation of the world by saying, “I am not this” is where a self emerges from an animal. This is the Hegelian point in defence of alienation: “One must submit to total isolation in order to achieve connection.”1 Without the distance between yourself and society, life becomes pornographic; you’re left to be mauled and ravished by others. In a hyper-positive society that leaves no space for the negative, you disappear into a uniform space of sameness.
A pornographic culture has little to do with porn. Indeed OnlyFans, Pornhub and the like did not create porno-culture; rather, it’s a cultural good of our society of exhibition. The ideological demand to exhibit all aspects of your life and prolapse the inner to the outer is what creates a society of pornography:
The society of exhibition is a society of pornography. Everything has been turned outward, stripped, exposed, undressed, and put on show. The excess of display turns everything into a commodity; possessing ‘no secret,’ it stands ‘doomed ... to immediate devouring.’ Capitalist economy subjects everything to compulsory exhibition. The staging of display alone generates value; all the inherent nature of things (Eigenwüchsigkeit der Dinge) has been abandoned. They do not vanish in the dark, but through overexposure: “More generally things visible do not come to an end in obscurity and silence-instead they fade into the more visible than visible: obscenity.” (Han, 2015)2
Hasn’t intimacy itself become an exhibition, a show we put on to please the gaze of social media? Intimatus, in Latin, conveys oneness with yourself and the other. Being in an intimate relationship with your romantic partner signifies the distinctiveness of another person in your life that cannot be replicated, commodified and reproduced. The singularity of love doesn’t fit in the capitalist market. But still, the compulsion to create a spectacle of your life on social media has given rise to the love-industrial complex. Our society has accomplished what the most despotic tyrants in human history would have only dreamt of, and 20th-century dystopian writers couldn’t even imagine; we’ve publicised intimacy and love in order to hamper and tame it, neutering people by getting rid of the imbalance and violent excesses of truly loving another. For instance, on Valentine’s Day or an intimate one’s birthday, we’re used to seeing social media posts where people write lengthy paragraphs about how much they love and appreciate a person. But why? Such posts certainly could be heartwarming and wholesome at times, but why not tell the person directly by writing a card or simply message them privately? Why the need for an exhibition? If the post is directed to a specific person, why must it be announced to everyone else? If truth be told, isn’t it that in the current times of hyper-stimulation, where people are inundated with information, most of us don’t care about these intimate posts? Isn’t what we’ve gotten best at doing is scrolling away like a hamster on a wheel? Doesn’t an ineluctable numbness pervade all of life? In reality, such posts aren’t directed at your loved one but at everyone else. But if everyone else doesn’t care about them, who are they directed at? No one. The target audience is not actual people but rather a complete virtual Other that exists in your psycho-social reality, mediating our lives and telling us how to live. This Other is that person we believe our social media posting is received by when they have no substantial existence, unlike an actual human being or even a physical object; they only exist in the simulacrum of collective virtuality, which nonetheless has an ontological status; indeed it has more power over us than anything real.
But the virtual Other isn’t a unique phenomenon to our times. As theorists like Jacques Lacan and René Girard discovered, we’re beings of the Other; the moment an infant enters the field of language (systems of signifiers3), humans can only exist through this symbolic space that gives our lives meaning. Other people, language, culture, laws and customs, traditions and norms, unspoken practices within society, and myriad such signifiers we’re mostly unconscious of inevitably constitute our lives. If not for the Other, there is no self. You wouldn’t exist without your social world because you don’t know what you are. The deeper you look into yourself, the more you fall into an abyss. You’re the result of your failure to self-actualise. The Other is needed to prevent this failure from annihilating your being and the being of others. The self you think you have is thanks to your social sphere—which itself is lacking and contradictory—and your desires are the desires of others because you learn what to desire through the Other. This is an ahistorical and universal truth, not contingent on social media or any other modern phenomena; indeed, social media’s pervasiveness is due to this datum that “Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.”4
Even a marginal reader of critical theory is aware of Michel Foucault’s use of Bentham’s panopticon to illustrate his theory of power. The design of the panopticon was a prison-like institutional building with an efficient, inbuilt system of control to be used in prisons, sanatoriums and asylums. In the middle of a rotunda-like building, there lies a tower with a single guard that cannot be seen by the inmates, who themselves are isolated and unable to communicate with each other. Since, at any given moment, none of the individual inmates know if they’re being watched, the gaze of the guard at all times reaches out to every corner of their cell. The inmates succumb to self-control without requiring watch over each individual cell: “‘The essence of it consists, then, in the centrality of the inspector’s situation, combined with the well-known and most effectual contrivances for seeing without being seen.’ With the help of technological cunning, the illusion of permanent surveillance is achieved.”5 Foucault’s disciplinary society controls its subjects through direct conspicuous force. Modernity brought forth social engineering and technological politics of the Benthamian kind. Systems of power subjugate people through procedures and mechanisms driven by a utilitarian ethos as opposed to the pre-modern kind of Kings and aristocrats. While ostensibly for virtuous reasons like justice, control is ultimately for the sake of control alone to create a docile populous to be utilised by the system. And yet, the inmates of the panopticon still know they’re being watched and controlled. Their unfreedom speaks. People living in a disciplinary society are under a unipolar power edifice where they know who imposes power on them, be it the church, monarch or the state. Hence, subjugation is imposed perspectively through loci of power with the omnipotent despotic gaze. In contrast, in our society, the control has been outsourced to us. We’re both the guards and inmates. We’re watching and being watched. Social media is the multipolar aperspectival panopticon of what Byung-Chul Han calls the transparency society where the locus of power cannot be found as it’s perspectival-less and people believe they are free only because their unfreedom cannot speak:
Today’s society of control possesses a distinct panoptic structure. In contrast to the occupants of the Benthamian panopticon, who are isolated from each other, the inhabitants of today’s panopticon network and communicate with each other intensively. Not lonesomeness through isolation, but hypercommunication guarantees transparency. Above all, the particularity of the digital panopticon is that its inhabitants actively collaborate in its construction and maintenance by putting themselves on display and baring themselves. They display themselves on the panoptic market. Pornographic putting-on-display and panoptic control complement each other. Exhibitionism and voyeurism feed the net as a digital panopticon. The society of control achieves perfection when subjects bare themselves not through outer constraint but through self-generated need, that is, when the fear of having to abandon one’s private and intimate sphere yields to the need to put oneself on display without shame. [...] Today the entire globe is developing into a panopticon. There is no outside space. The panopticon is becoming total. No wall separates inside from outside. Google and social networks, which present themselves as spaces of freedom, are assuming panoptic forms. Today surveillance is not occurring as an attack on freedom, as is normally assumed. Instead, people are voluntarily surrendering to the panoptic gaze. They deliberately collaborate in the digital panopticon by denuding and exhibiting themselves. The prisoner in the digital panopticon is a perpetrator and a victim at the same time. Herein lies the dialectic of freedom. Freedom turns out to be a form of control. (Han, 2015)6
Recently, Madison Blackband, a 20-year-old on TikTok, went viral for her melodramatic reaction to a Taylor Swift song. She was ridiculed for being overly sensational and creating a spectacle by sharing her breakdown on social media, all the while conveniently having a camera on record to capture the exact moment. Music, of course, does invoke intense emotions in us. What’s, nevertheless, off-putting about Madison’s case wasn’t her emotional response but the fact that she made an exhibition out of her intimate moment, which made people question if any of it was genuine or yet another show being put on for attention. Isn’t this the predicament of our times? We’re all marionettes to each other. Revealing the inner to the outer makes us doubt the authenticity of the inner, even our own. We’ve gone beyond Cartesian scepticism and aren’t just sceptical of the outer world but also of the thinking cogito, our minds, which Descartes claimed we could use to make proper judgements about reality. But that self-trust has passed into oblivion. It’s mistaken to think Madison is the impostor while the rest of us are “keeping it real”, as the colloquialism goes. We’re all somewhat psychotic. I believe Madison was being authentic, but since she, like the rest of us, lives in a multipolar aperspectival panopticon, she’s performatively authentic. Her authenticity was looking for approval and asking, “Am I being authentic the right way?” from the Other; it’s a performance she has to put on as her inner self—with its manifold breadth of complex emotions and thoughts—is invalid if it isn’t performed to the unyielding gaze of social media.
Your life has become an advertisement. Modern people are flesh bags of public relations machines. Think of the unending slew of personal branding workshops, self-help masterminds and the multibillion-dollar life coaching industry. The purpose of these is to mould you into barely surviving our turbulent times and eventually serving the hegemony like a pack animal. As Žižek identified, your unfreedom is repackaged and sold to you as freedom: you’re in constant anxiety about losing your job due to the volatility of market economies, you’re told you have the freedom to find another one by upskilling and self-branding to sell yourself optimally or become self-employed to “own your time”; you have no time nor energy to pursue any hobbies, passions and those qualities that make us human, you’re told to free yourself by building a passive income through crypto-schemes, MLMs masquerading as mentorship programs, or bogus FIRE movements, etc.; you’re burned out from overworking and hyperactivity, you’re told to engage in mindfulness, go on cold therapy and meditation retreats, attend health and wellness camps to detach yourself from the chaos of daily life so you can be free and live in the moment. And to be sure, you must do all this while broadcasting your so-called progress on social media so that the Other is pleased by you being a good, obedient boy or girl—the problem is always you, not the social structures. Freedom is coercion. Ultimately, you find the sole purpose of your life is being a sexual organ for neoliberal capitalism:
Marx already said it: individual freedom is the cunning of capital. We believe that we’re free, but deep down, we just produce, we increase capital. That is, capital uses individual freedom to reproduce. That means that we—with our individual freedom—are the sexual organs of capital. [...] “Under the compulsion of performance and production, there’s no possible freedom. I force myself to produce more, to perform more, and I optimise myself to the point of death… that’s not freedom. (Elola, 2023)7
The same careerisation of life reaches its tentacles to all corners of your being. The countless vulnerability sessions of people crying on camera, talking about their flaws, giving unsolicited life updates and “keeping it real” are narratives you create in order to please the God of authenticity. The pagans sacrifice animals for their gods; we make TikToks for ours. And the worst sin of our times is to have a private life. Excess positivity has destroyed anything that mediates between the inner and outer. The world has become a stage for us narcissists to lay our souls bare. The demand to be authentic, though, is not from an actual society—because the expulsion of the Other has made social relations impossible—but a virtual one within our ideological edifice that we cannot step outside of. Indeed, people prefer sharing the most intimate moments of their lives on social media than with another human being. In a society of intimacy, everything has to be exhibited and subject to the gaze of a virtual society:
The world today is no theatre where actions and feelings are represented and interpreted, but a market on which intimacies are exhibited, sold, and consumed. The theatre is a site of representation, whereas the market is a site of exhibition. Today theatrical representation is yielding to pornographic exhibition. [...] According to the ideology of intimacy, social relations prove more real, genuine, credible, and authentic the more closely they approach the inner psychic needs of individuals. Intimacy is the psychological formula of transparency. One believes that one attains transparency of the soul by revealing intimate feelings and emotions, by laying the soul bare. (Han, 2015)8
But if there’s no symbolic authority in our times, who are we trying to please? If we truly live in the freest and most permissive times, who are we performing for? Each other. We ask the question: “What is it?” We unceasingly want to know what everyone else wants us to be, and the answer eludes us. The “it” is a vacuous placeholder that forms an unfulfillable lack in our lives, much like a consumer looking for the perfect commodity to fulfil their desire, which, needless to say, doesn’t exist. Leonardo da Vinci’s Saint John the Baptist aptly captures this predicament of human subjectivity9. The androgynous figure points somewhere or at something representing the eternal question mark of creation, the enigmatic “What is it?” of existence, while consequently looking into us with a rather erotic and teasing look because we never find the “it” yet is engrossed by the question. Despite self-expression being the highest aim of our times, we never succeed at fully expressing ourselves or finding the kernel of who we are. Social media perfectly captures this failure. People are constantly trying to be authentic online; in fact, the commandment of the day is to “be your true self”, and yet what we find is a desert of sameness. Everyone’s parroting the same cliché, using the same filters, and drying out in uniformity like sand grains in a desert. But this isn’t a defeatist argument. We can still be individuals, not by expressing our true selves but by self-negation. The only way to be yourself is by resignation, to say “I would prefer not to” like Melville’s Bartleby, refusing to partake in an ideological edifice that wants you to enslave yourself through hyperproductivity, self-exploitation and the pressure to self-actualise, not through stoic apathy but inactive resistance. The wager offered is that by focusing on yourself less and instead committing yourself to the Other, be it emancipatory political and social justice movements, meaningful (and ethical) vocations and existential projects, you will free yourself from the horror of having to be yourself.
The concerns about social media have only risen in the past decade. Despite these platforms not being treated as public utilities (which is what they are), governments have at least begun to take steps in regulating Big Tech—albeit most of it is for political spectacle. And yet, as it tends to be in our psycho-politicised times, the majority of the discourse is around self-regulation. We’re inundated with a slew of productivity books and programs, distraction blocker apps and so-called alternative platforms, but none of these technological solutions work. And then there are digital minimalists who are the contemporary anarcho-primitivists calling for us to partake in pseudo-spiritual social media cleansing practices by abstaining from the use of these platforms and taking up mindfulness practices or some such nonsense. But a complete sobering and going cold turkey doesn’t work either as this mistakenly compares social media to any other social vice like alcoholism or drug addiction, further psychologising a structural issue, which is precisely what neoliberal ideology wants. The dialectic of social media is that it’s a necessary evil. These platforms are the Church, town hall, local pub and market of our times, so we can’t not be a part of them. As Hegel’s criticism of Stoicism goes, negativity is never free of all positivity. The stoic that refuses to partake in the social hierarchy inevitably has a place in it as the outsider, and as its power grows due to the stoic negation of the external world, it’ll nonetheless affect their beinghood. Similarly, even if you leave all social media platforms, what happens on them will affect your life as you’re a social being, and your individuality is a result of your social world. Individual solutions will never work for our predicaments; they have to be social and structural ensued through collective resistance. The resignation I propose isn’t a stoic one but is in the spirit of Samuel Beckett’s famous quote: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Some claim that the original goal of Facebook and other platforms that seeded social media was good, but later on, it got corrupted. This is a mistake as it was structurally flawed at the get-go, independent of the technology. Social media was a failure, to begin with, and our only hope now is to fail better. So, to resign means to fully identify with the intent of social media and treat it for the messy and ugly public sphere it is that treats its users as cattle to exploit. Be a complete fake online, using it only to play a role, and perhaps this way, you can inauthentically try and make social media serve humanity better. Indeed, this is perhaps the only way to exist in our world, as “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”10 Do not be yourself. Fully identify with your mask.
McGowan, T. (2021) Emancipation after Hegel: Achieving a contradictory revolution. New York: Columbia University Press, p. 73.
Han, Byung-Chul. and Butler, E. (2015) The Transparency Society. Stanford, CA: Stanford Briefs, an imprint of Stanford University Press, p. 11.
A signifier for Lacanians is understood in the broadest sense: when an infant is hungry, their cry for food is a signification of this need. Similarly, language—not solely limited to words or speech—is used by adults to allow a person to enter a space of symbols, signs, and signifiers that pre-exist the individual, e.g., you’re given a name before you’re born. Following Saussure, if we take the example of a tree, the signifier is the word “Tree”, which is a representation of what we know to be a tree but not a tree itself. That which is being signified, the tree, along with the signifier, the word “Tree,” makes a sign. But this relationship is never straightforward. If, for instance, we take two doors with the signs “Gentlemen” and “Ladies” above them, this signifies one door is for gentlemen to pass through and the other for ladies, but these doors aren’t men nor women; they are just doors or apertures in a wall for that matter. The signifier and signified are independent of each other, with meanings that can change with time, much like how the definitions of gentleman and lady have changed. A social construct is what allows us to understand the meaning of the message these signs convey. For Lacan, signs never exist alone but only make sense within an intersubjective meaning space—a signifying chain—which also can’t exist without signs. In other words, human subjectivity collides with the structure of signification.
Burkert, W. et al. (1999) Violent origins: Walter Burkert, René Girard, and Jonathan Z. Smith on ritual killing and cultural formation. Stanford, Ca.: Stanford University Press, p. 122.
Han, Byung-Chul. and Butler, E. (2015) The Transparency Society. Stanford, CA: Stanford Briefs, an imprint of Stanford University Press, p. 46.
Ibid., p. 46-49.
Elola, J. (2023) Byung-chul Han, the philosopher who lives life backwards: ‘we believe we’re free, but we’re the sexual organs of capital’, EL PAÍS English. Available at: https://english.elpais.com/culture/2023-10-08/byung-chul-han-the-philosopher-who-lives-life-backwards-we-believe-were-free-but-were-the-sexual-organs-of-capital.html (Accessed: 12 March 2024).
Han, Byung-Chul. and Butler, E. (2015) The Transparency Society. Stanford, CA: Stanford Briefs, an imprint of Stanford University Press, p. 34-35.
You can listen to my conversation with Lacanian psychoanalyst Dr Leon S. Brenner, where we discuss Lacan’s object a, desire, and Da Vinci’s painting in detail.
Shakespeare, W. and Marcus, L.S. (2011) As you like it. New York: Norton.
Beautifully written Rahul!
"Pics or it didn't happen" has become a reality. I still struggle with maintaining a good relationship with social media. As much as I want to start writing/ sharing my ideas on the internet, there's a part of me who knows I want to do it for the gaze of the others. Still struggle with it. But your writings and videos do inspire me a lot. Keep doing this!