Virtual Memories: Social Media Stories Capture and Storage Technology (SmS-C/ST)

Rapidly evolving social media technologies are accelerating the development of an eerie global artificial memory server. Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, have each co-opted the ‘stories’ function, allowing for photographic memories to be saved on the platform’s server. Viewed at a later date by the user, usually produced in the form of a notification, roughly a year in advance of the original posting date. Perusing an old photo book at one’s own convenience has become enveloped by the convenience of the intrusive smartphone. The device co-opts attention and, increasingly, memory itself. We shall see that the ‘stories’ function on social media apps mediate physical records of human phenomena, stored on the cloud as a noumenological back catalogue of data, back to the user in an arbitrary, calendric fashion. With humans acting as transactional agents in the cyber-social plane of immanence, memories themselves, virtual stores of data, become property of those social media companies. The machinic doubling, virtual abstraction of memory, its capitalisation, shall be labelled SmS-C/ST — an abstract network of desiring production from all angles — a crossbreed of social, financial and technological machines operating within an increasingly speculative and dynamic political system.

Generally speaking, memory is necessary for humans to operate in society. Simple tasks such as when one last ate, or slept, etc, form a cohesive sense of linear time through which we navigate our spatial surroundings. The philosophy of memory dates back to the work of Augustine, with some contemporary philosophers arguing that memory is “the pivotal entity through which one can think meaningfully of temporal continuity.” (Manning, 2013). Memory triangulates our understanding experience of time, allowing human subjects to comprehend time and space through their own unique faculties. As Kant argues in his Critique of Pure Reason, for there to be any space, any sense of existence, there must first be time. (Kant, 1781, p. 69). This is to the time it takes to travel across space from one location to the other. “I must remember to return those books.” “Where was that place again?” “Oh yeah, I had forgotten about that.” Memory is a basic tool through which we navigate our surroundings. We create a virtual cartography of the world, allowing us to look back through history and forwards into the future. Memory informs the subjective desiring production utilised by human beings to map their own lives. “Experienced continuity is possible only by and through memory.” (Manning, 2013)

Throughout history, within our own matrix at least, memory is imperative for a sensible barteridge in society, to manage stores of value to a greater or lesser equitable degree. In the age of rapid information technology and exchange, it’s as much necessary for computers to have ‘memory’, insofar as being able to store, analyse and produce data. Memory’s value is in its storage capacity. We will investigate the development of SmS-C/ST in recent times, drawing on its inception through Snapchat. Afterwards we examine its spectacularising effect on Instagram, and its perpetuance on Facebook and Twitter. Of particular concern is the extent to which those memories are considered our own. We must also beg the question, what are the implications for this in future technology? Babies, with extremely limited social cognitive awareness, have their own social media accounts, mainly on Instagram, run by none other than their parents. This commonality effectuates a ‘mommy daddy me’ triangulation that would have Guattari turning in his grave; an eternal oedipal nightmare. With SmS-C/ST, social media itself becomes a communal time machine with capitalist temporality. All the writing on the walls is swallowed up, enveloped for future reference, posted at a later date.

Snapchat demarcates an ultra-present, data-driven hyper-accelerationism. Host to a sweeping mesh of anti-aesthetic intensities, its service design allows users to swaths of nominal content for others to view for a brief period of time. The uploaded media can be viewed by followers for 24 hours before it is removed, before vanishing completely, collapsing into its own virtual delerium. Victim to our own cognitive functioning, it is quite impossible to remember everything. Yet Snapchat retains the ability to capture visions of the past, regardless of whether we remember them in the future. In other words, it is able to capture and store memory itself. Memory, that is, the faculty by which the nine stores and remembers information. More recently, an additional feature that has been adopted also by Instagram and Facebook that allows stories to be viewed privately to a select few. It even gives the option for more unwitting users of the app to share their real-time location with others on an animated map. I recall, through an organic memory, a time when my brother Not only does the app allocate a user’s memory to themselves, it enables users to appropriate memory of themselves to other users. A bizarre, often necessary form of pseudo-psychological spectacularization. There are, of course, things we might not want to remember, things that we would rather not share with others. With SmS-C/ST, however, they are nonetheless present.

Instagram, an otherwise updated notion of spectacle, fulfills Guy Debord’s definition; “the accumulation of capital until it becomes images.” (Debord, 1967, p. 17). Whether it be economic, cultural or political capital, the images mediated as memory ostensibly concretise a barren Released in 2010 it began as a platform strictly for the documentation of digital photos, with a select few filters to choose from. To date it has evolved into something far more. The messaging feature was added before the ability to share videos. Soon after, it followed Snapchat in adding the stories feature. And not only were people making these accounts, but everything from businesses, charities, pets and influencers alike. Nicheness climbed to the point of the theorygram phenomenon, where philosophy and meme culture heavily intersect to ludicrous degrees. Sponsored advertisements began to appear on feeds promoting all kinds of accounts and offers. Face filters became more advanced, both impressively and nonsensically. Now you can even go live, share videos, albums of photos as well as making group calls. The technical machines of SmS-C/ST have effectuated a virtual reality system which is both easily accessible and open to manipulation by every user.

Combined with the purveyance of information technology, the spectacle itself, coupled with digital stores of information. In the words of Deleuze, “individuals become dividuals, and masses, samples, data, markets or ‘banks.’” (Deleuze, 1990, p.7) — Noumenological doppelgängers of ourselves. A data subject, a virtual record, an account holder, usually accompanied by an identification number, and details about the data subject’s personal history. During the height of the Roman Empire, the term capitus diminitio was a term used to describe the diminishment of one’s legal status. Capitus diminitio maxima involves the loss of citizenship to the status of slavery, with one’s name punctuated by capital letters to demarcate this. Notice how on official government or corporate documents, our name is indeed printed in capital letters. This virtual record of us is, in of itself, constitutive of capital’s processes. However, Capitus diminitio maxima is very much an archaic vertical provision. Facebook, on the other hand, is a more horizontalised vertical system of control. Digital records now come with a face as well as a name. What’s more, personal information, relationships, photos, statuses, etc., turns virtual life into a global network of dataveillance. That is, the process through which the live tracking and storage of data is used for economic and social surveillance for the purposes of capital accumulation and human security.

Even Twitter, an unsustainable information machine, has a stories function. SmS-C/ST persists within social media. Every day you log in, you are given the option to look back on posts you made years ago. 10 years ago today I took a photo of my friend’s cat, Whiskers, sitting on its back in the front garden of my friend’s house, basking in the sun directly above the patch of green. I could not remember the last time I had thought about that moment, an event which would not have been placed inside a picture book. Seeing Whisker’s thick black fur mediated through my handheld device as I sit working from, I wonder about all the other memories from the past that make their way onto my past timeline. SmS-C/ST brings to life forgotten, perhaps repressed aspects of the past, and explodes them into re-existence. It’s a form of time travel — the past folding in on the present.

Much like the machines in the matrix, we are witnessing a situation whereby capitalism itself is becoming the state. In tandem with this, SmS-C/ST is machining a process of becoming memory. To quote from Cicero, “memory contains not only philosophy, but all the arts and all that appertain to the use of life.” We are producing virtual futures, whereby desire, encroached on the body of capital, reterritorialises socio-economic strata toward the complete coding capital’s eternal spatio-temporal colonisation. SmS-C/ST posits a system of memory external to the human subject. Whilst the memory stores are produced by the human as the transactional agent engaging with SmS-C/ST, the memory itself is no longer confined to that of the human. As time goes on, the phenomenon of virtualism is far from uncommon. The virtuality of our world is increasingly apparent. Difficult to ignore. The COVID-19 pandemic to date has only accentuated this due to the risk posed by social interaction and physicality. Likewise, SmS-C/ST is a virus that has mutated the way through which memory itself operates. Memory is no longer intrinsically related to the body. Memory becomes its own body.

Bibliography

Debord, G. (1967) Society of the Spectacle. Translation by Knabb, K., UK , Rebel Press

Deleuze, G. (1990) Postscript on the Societies of Control. 2nd edn. France, Colombia University Press

Kant, I. (1781) Critique of Pure Reason. Translation by Weigelt. M., Germany, Penguin Classics

Manning, L. et al. (2013) St. Augustine’s Reflections on Memory and Time and the Current Concept of Subjective Time in Mental Time Travel. Online Edn, US National Library of Medicine