Usage of Twitter continues to rise. One thing is for sure: it isn’t boring! (Elon Musk’s tweet)

The “accounts” that you follow on Twitter are sources that drive you, your selection among them is at the level of drive control. To receive the drives from the sources (follow), to attend the drives (like) and to convey the drives (share) is up to you. So you “keep your accounts” accordingly, do your best to approach “useful” drives while distancing “useless” drives (or those that you deem so). Lacan distinguished two statements in his Seminar 3 on Psychoses:

1) Tu es celui qui me suivra: You are the one who will follow me.
2) Tu es celui qui me suivras: The one who will follow me is you.

In the first statement “suivra: the one” addresses “anyone who is supposed to follow me in the future” whereas in the second statement “suivras: is you” assigns the second person the identity/status/mandate of “followership” (like some kind of studenthood).

An internet user whose status with respect to the others remain to be “account / a source of drives” can only be the “anyone” in the first statement, (s)he cannot attain the identity/status in the second statement, because at any time (s)he can easily be declared/assumed “harmful” and referred to the fear of Elon Musk (blocked) [1].

At most, an internet user can be one of those things:
1) A source of drives received
2) A source of drives attended
3) A source of drives conveyed

In all of these expressions with passive voice “the agent: them” is the anonymous crowd fetish as an illusory being (example: “people with true consciousness”). As daily news disseminate from Twitter and “truth” is formed on social media, this agent sort of assumes the role of a north star. Though of course it’s an illusory agent and a knockoff north star, i.e. it’s cold comfort. Nevertheless people continue drifting after the illusory crowd because –as is well known– the more stuff there is to be disavowed, the more people stick to their “not boring” fetishes [2].

(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 “Ağa botunun üstüne bot olur mu la! Bana robot deyip durma, Satarken siborg mu olduk?”

[2] See “Okay but where is your hamster?” Slavoj Žižek