Twitter as Heraclitean War Machine:

Real Time Revolutions and Aggregating Utopian Flows

By Abram Anders

University of Minnesota Duluthadanders@d.umn.edu

RSA May 2010

“You use names for things as though they rigidly, persistently endured; yet even the stream into which you step a second time is not the one you stepped into before.”

-RT @Nietzsche: @HeraclitusPhilosophy in the Tragic Age of the

Greeks

“Everything forever has its opposite along with it.”

-RT @Nietzsche: @HeraclitusIbid

Twitter is …

• A social-networking service• A micro-blogging platform• An infrastructure for over 100,000

other services and applications

Twitter users can …

• “Tweet” a post of 140 characters or more

• Post links to web-sites and files• “Retweet” (RT) other users’ posts• Directly mention other users

(@username)• Discuss topics with hashtags

(#sometopic)• “Follow” other users’ posts

“I’ve come to understand that the real value of the service is listening to a wired collective voice … Twitter can be overwhelming, but think of it as a river of data rushing past that I dip a cup into every once in a while. Much of what I need to know is in that cup …”

-RT @DavidCarr NY Times 1-1-10

Twitter is …

Revolutionary!

• Explosive user growth• Ubiquitous feature adoption• Inaugurated real-time web

Revolution?

“Every time I hear about Twitter I want to yell Stop. The notion of sending and getting brief updates to and from dozens or thousands of people every few minutes is an image from information hell …”

“… I’m told that Twitter is a river into which I can dip my cup whenever I want. But that supposes we’re all kneeling on the banks. In fact, if you’re at all like me, you’re trying to keep your footing out in midstream, with the water level always dangerously close to your nostrils.”

-RT @GeorgePacker NewYorker 1-29-10

“The everlasting and exclusive coming-to-be, the impermanence of everything actual, which constantly acts and comes-to-be but never is, as Heraclitus teaches it, is a terrible and paralyzing thought …”

“… Its impact … can most nearly be likened to the sensation during an earthquake when one loses one’s familiar confidence in a firmly grounded earth.”

-RT @NietzschePhilTragAgeGreeks

Aggregating

Utopian

Flows

“[Heraclitus] vision has been locked onto two sorts of considerations: eternal motion and the negation of all duration and persistence in the world.”

-RT @NietzscheThe Pre-Platonic Philosophers

The Twitter Machine

Real-time flows produce a rigorous unorder

(negation of duration/persistence)

Holds an open space or stages the commons

(flat, non-reciprocal architecture; aggregating, ever-flowing movement)

Twitter as War Machine

• Social Media and Twitter• Collective Agency• Transparency of Purpose• Exigence in Common

Opposites Together

• Nomads v State• Twitter v Facebook• Chance/Necessity

“Wisdom is one—to know the intelligence by which all things are steered through all things.”

-RT @Nietzsche The Pre-Platonic Philosophers

It is a curious paradox of our contemporary real-time revolutions: the division, decentralization, and privatization of power may weaken the historical form of the individual agent, yet may also make collective and discontinuous forms of protest, opinion, and aggregating desire increasingly relevant and effective forces for social change.

Our lives, online and off, have become so many flows which can be aggregated, redirected, and redeployed in a multiplicity of increasingly easy-to-use ways.  

As a war machine of rhetorical practice, Twitter cuts into, divides, and fragments the narratives of our lives into increments, 140 character or less. 

However, it also provides the means for creatively reinventing possibilities for living which traverse and interrupt traditional terms and lines of organization.

Ultimately, Twitter is revolutionary, Utopian, and effective precisely because of the superficial and distributed forms of agency and communication it affords.