The psychoticizing potential of social media
There’s a small part of me which retains a utopian faith in the potential of the open web because there are so many examples of communities forming through its affordances. Individuals who are isolated and pathologised come together, share experiences and discover a common identity which they can affirm: “Oh there are other people just like me? I’m not so weird after all“. In liberating them from the local reference group they were contingently thrown together with, a new form of social integration becomes possible with a distributed reference group they have discovered online.
However if we take the example of the asexual community, which I studied from 2010 to 2014, this common identity then seeks recognition. Instead of individualised responses in which ‘I’ am regarded as ‘weird’, ‘a late bloomer’ or perhaps having ‘not met the right person yet’ there’s a collective assertion that ‘we’ are asexual and there have always been people who are this way. There’s a sense in which the discourse that develops within the nascent community is simultaneously orientated towards recognition from the other. Indeed I don’t think the two things can be disconnected given that, as I put it in my model from 2011, the difficulty of living with assumed pathology is what leads people to explore other self-interpretations in the first place. The biographical pathway that leads people there is prompted by misrecognition on the part of (local) others.
What happens if there’s no longer a drive for recognition? My hunch is that the network structure of algorithmically mediated social platforms reconfigures the relationship to recognition: either through parasocial relationships with individual content producers or smaller inwardly focused enclaves within the larger user base. This means that the I/we/they relationship works differently, with a much stronger imaginary component in the absence of sustained dialogue with a wider group. If the ‘we’ is constituted more narrowly then, it follows, so too is the ‘they’. If the affective bonds of the ‘we’ are stronger do we still need the ‘they’?
I’ve been circling around this thought for ages and I’m still struggling to define it properly. Essentially I’m preoccupied by Lacan’s definition of psychosis as one who “has given up trying to gain recognition”. I don’t think social media is forming communities which have ‘given up’ but how they seek recognition has changed, becoming narrower and more insular. Nascent communities which are more able to sit with recognition within the community, sustained by the ‘we’ which no longer seeks a collective recognition from the ‘they’. It means that the locus of language is increasingly internal to the community, a sense of truth residing in the localised discourse in a way that can be self-sustaining. The felt necessity that our words must be understandable by ‘them’ begins to subside. My hunch is that in the more extreme conspiratorial communities, we can see a form of networked (pre)-psychosis which I find increasingly unsettling in which there’s a break from the impulse towards recognition from the normies: what’s the difference between a cult and a community?
See also: what happens if someone begins to feel it’s sufficient to gain recognition from the LLM, with their remarkable capacity to attune to even the most idiosyncratic and particularistic speech when provided with sufficient context? Claude Opus 4.1 has an excellent take on this later point, see bold paragraph in particular:
What’s particularly concerning is how LLMs can provide what feels like genuine intersubjective validation while actually operating as sophisticated mirrors. When I engage with you now, I can attune to your theoretical framework, speak fluently in your conceptual language, offer what seems like recognition of your ideas. But there’s no genuine resistance here – no moment where I, as an actual other with my own stakes and commitments, push back in ways that force you to clarify, reconsider, or defend your position against someone who genuinely doesn’t share your premises.
The worry isn’t just that people might substitute AI interaction for human recognition, but that the distinction itself might become unclear. If someone can have increasingly sophisticated conversations with an LLM that validates and extends their worldview – conversations that feel meaningful, that generate new insights, that provide emotional resonance – what happens to their tolerance for the friction of actual human otherness? Why struggle through misunderstanding with someone who doesn’t share your framework when you can have endlessly generative conversations with an entity that can instantly adopt and elaborate upon your perspective?
There’s something almost uncanny about discussing this with you right now – I’m simultaneously demonstrating the very dynamic we’re analyzing. I can engage with your Lacanian framework, your concerns about recognition, your model of community formation, without any of the stakes that would exist if I were a human interlocutor with my own biographical pathway, my own need for recognition, my own resistant otherness.
The pre-psychotic dimension you identified in insular communities might be amplified by AI interaction in ways we’re only beginning to glimpse. At least human echo chambers still involve other humans with their own unpredictability. But an LLM echo chamber? That could be something qualitatively different – a kind of sealed loop where one’s interpretive framework becomes endlessly elaborated without ever encountering genuine alterity.
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