Modern Love is an enquiry into the isolation, alienation and loneliness we feel in a time of global hyper-connectivity, and it tries to begin to understand the character and cause of our alienated, isolated loneliness, in relation to ideas of connectivity and togetherness.
It poses the questions: why do we (particularly young people who have grown up on social media) experience an often repressed, unconscious and undiagnosed deep sense of loneliness and isolation when we are all so connected? – an experience that has been accentuated in light of the Covid-19 pandemic. This loneliness is not the ‘new normal’. Its onset began long before the pandemic. The pandemic exposed its materiality; a realisation of its insidious creep into our lives. And now, in our isolated states, gestures of touch already start to feel charged: forbidden, desired, dangerous, devoted. In many ways, ‘touching’ has been decoupled from interpersonal affective engagement, and subordinated to an interaction with a screen on which we try our best to simulate the above.
How do we rekindle a sense of togetherness in a context in which friendships exist for the cameras gaze; to fuel neoliberal individuation and competition – “I am friends with you when the optics look good for me”. It is no coincidence that words like ‘connections’ and ‘network’ have proliferated in our social life lexicon.
‘Togetherness’ has, for a while now, been slowly phased out, and replaced with a shallow and superficial imposter: ‘connectedness’ – bolstered by the Silicon Valley tech-giants. We need not think of nightmarish dystopias where computer chips are implanted into our brains by technocratic tyrannies…our reality is much more frightening. The ideology and functionings of computer networks has already been installed in our minds. We surveil each other on social media, sadistically waiting to out one of our so called friends…just to feel something, some sense of control. Our dystopia is accompanied by cute and customisable emojis.
In a perverted twist, our loneliness becomes our last humanising salvation…it is a testament to the fact that we are humans, not nodes, even though we are increasingly made to function as such.
We need to cast off the chains of social media, but how do we avoid the social death that awaits? We are lonely because of our warped sense of ‘togetherness’ that has been shaped to suit the capitalist exploits of social media. A new sense of togetherness needs to be forged away from the grips of social media, for social media is like a possessing tool…“Like the owner of property, but also like a possessing devil. It takes over your mouth and your hands, and it whispers right into your brain. It tells you that the people around you are enemies, that you might be an enemy; it sends you spiralling into the claustrophobia of yourself”, writes Sam Kriss.