But as Kurt Cobain famously observed, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you.” Depressive paranoia can blind you to the ways people are actually preying on you. And criticality can be labeled paranoia as a way of discrediting or pre-emptively dismissing it. There is a basic level of paranoia that’s necessary to conceive of oneself as a self, to allow us to recognize our vulnerability and accommodate it in advance rather than let it be something we register only after self-defensive instincts have fired. Some paranoia is necessary to believe that our interpretations of social situations matter. As long as we can modulate our level of paranoia in light of the contexts we find ourselves in, we can retain a secure sense of self — secure, that is, in a suitable understanding of the social dangers we face. (...)
Most of my conjectures lately have to do with the systemic paranoia induced by social media and its surveillance capacity. The horrendous ramifications for privacy are obvious to everyone at this point, yet they have not deterred anyone from using social media and allowing social media to embed themselves ever deeper into everyday-life practices. Where is the paranoia? Is it so omnipresent to have become invisible? And why hasn’t it stopped people from signing up?
Rather than avoid the intensifying social threat, we appear to be adjusting our inner paranoia to accommodate these unprecedented levels of vulnerability. This suggests an unthinking and ongoing transvaluation of values is occurring, whereby the invasive and exploitive possibilities inherent in social media are recoded as an expression of basic human impulses, as realizations of long-held dreams of connection and freedom of expression, of collective self-discovery or the discovery of long-suppressed collectives. Somehow we can look at something like Facebook and see it as a tool for building trust rather than obviating it.
Part of this transvaluation takes the natural yearning for recognition and inflates it an unchecked hunger for indiscriminate fame, as though attention were like money, fungible and hoardable, and more of any kind of it is automatically good. Fame has no limits and can’t really be rationalized on the scale of what had been routine life; those who have been saturated with the amount of attention fame brings have almost always been psychically destroyed by it. It is the opposite of being appreciated for what you do in the moment, or what sort of person you are to the people you are close to, and eventually precludes those humbler forms of appreciation, which are impossible in the context of fame. Your own notoriety becomes the explanation for everything anyone says to you; it’s all obligatory homage being paid to fame, and the relation of all that attention to how you actually are in the world can’t be verified. It becomes a paranoid condition, in which no approval or recognition is genuine but instead must be interpreted as having been calculated to achieve some other aim. Fame in many ways is confirmed by the experience of paranoia. The degree to which fame is regarded as desirable, paranoia is desirable too.
by Rob Horning, The New Inquiry | Read more:
