In Greek mythology Artemis is known as the goddess of wilderness and hunt. But the statue of Artemis of Ephesus found 65 years ago in Turkey presents a different goddess figure (Figure 1). The round shapes that cover her chest are usually assumed to be breasts but they might also be fruits or eggs. In any case archeologists agree that Artemis of Ephesus is a goddess of abundance and fertility. One can also find a multi-breasted (polymastros) Artemis fountain in Villa d’Este (Italy) from the 16th century (Figure 2).

Figure 1: Artemis of Ephesus

Figure 2: Fountain in Italy

In Kleinian psychoanalysis, the breast is the basic object of envy/gratitude. If the infant fails to feel gratitude for the mother’s breast that feeds it with milk, if it is seized by anger thinking that the “bad mother” deliberately withholds milk from it, breast envy ensues: The angry baby passes to the act of disrupting and destroying the mother’s creativeness, it turns ungrateful. Melanie Klein explains that it is due to breast envy that the most productive people receive the most destructive criticism. “The tree that bears fruit will be stoned” is the Turkish (also Tamil!) proverb that tells the same story [1].

There is another possible stance towards the breast, other than gratitude/envy (praise/insult), and that is utilitarian use: To have the mother’s breast and to “milk it like a cow”. The peak of this stance is capitalist industrial animal husbandry. In Before Midnight (2013) Celine expresses her greatest fear: To be turned by a man into a submissive housewife. This metaphorical link in the notions of productivity and utility explains the “natural” affinity between feminism and veganism/animal rights [2].

Now let’s think of social media as the Artemis of Ephesus: Every content producer on the Internet is like a breast. The social media user makes curation/selection among these breasts by “friending” or “following” them. Some users feel and express gratitude for these breasts that feed them. But the negative atmosphere of social media is not quite favorable for this mode of expression, which is why envious feelings gain dominance in the virtual world. It is not penis envy but breast envy; or more precisely (since it is symbolic/metaphoric) it is not phallus envy but mamilla envy [3].

Both the world and our country (Turkey) have entered what might be called the Epoch of Disasters or the Age of Entropy or the Era of Relentlessness (“No Future”) [4]. This historical transformation is devaluing the real breast in the sense of making and feeding children, and compensating it with virtual breasts (like music was once “food for the soul”). The deep antagonism between the second and third waves of feminism on whether to define the concept of “woman” in biological or cultural terms reflects the intensifying contradiction between the envies for the real and virtual breasts [5].

It is true that envy defeats gratitude in today’s world. But envy is in turn defeated by utilitarian use: By being seized by mamilla envy and chasing after “productivity” and applause, the social media “user” fails to be worthy of this epithet and is reduced to be a data breast reserved for the greedy use of platform owners, i.e. big shot virtual lords like Mark Zuckerberg [6].

Data is any information that feeds the virtual lord’s power. Every “user” imagines himself/herself to be a tiny virtual lord: (S)he is supporting the values that (s)he likes, blocking the parties that (s)he dislikes, collecting the “data” that (s)he needs and thereby (supposedly) distributing “righteousness and justice”. But this tiny virtual-lord-wannabe can never be anything more than a “pseudo-user”: Since (s)he is driven by envy instead of utility, (s)he is reduced to be a data breast “milked like a cow” by the virtual lord who has perched on top of him/her. (S)he thereby becomes one of the millions of wet-nurses (or cows) that feed the monster babies of techno-feudalism. Perhaps the true problem of the Opportunistic Media Ecology is that it’s not “opportunistic” enough and that it succumbs to irrational mamilla envy [7].

(Turkish)

Işık Barış Fidaner is a computer scientist with a PhD from Boğaziçi University, İstanbul. Admin of Yersiz Şeyler, Editor of Žižekian Analysis, Curator of Görce Writings. Twitter: @BarisFidaner

Notes:

[1] See “On Breast Envy” Melanie Klein

[2] See “Jesse and Celine Shall Bring Us the Horns of Wilmington’s Cow”

[3] Another example for mamilla envy: A main component of David Graeber’s theory of “bullshit jobs” is the deep envy felt by the middle classes that do useless work towards the lower-middle classes that do more useful work precisely due to this fact. David Graeber (2018) Bullshit Jobs.

[4] See “Fütursuz Çağa Karşı Sütur”

[5] See “The Conflict About Sex”

[6] See “The Superego Centrifuge”

[7] See “The Opportunistic Media Ecology Has Supplanted The Law”

Image source.