me, alone with everyone: interrogating ‘digital anxiety’ as a governing process of social media

This thesis will develop a conceptual framework of ‘digital anxiety’ as a productive mode of interpellation that configures subjects towards modes of voluntary self-exploitation via social media. This framework allows for a nuanced examination of social media as a subjectivising force of contemporary existence that goes beyond the dominant discourses of addiction, dysfunctionality, and ‘false consciousness’. I will utilise the ideas of Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Žižek, Jodi Dean, Mark Fisher, Louis Althusser and Byung-Chul Han, whilst also drawing from ethnographic and self-ethnographic material, to make the case that social media functions as a simultaneously extractive and interpellative ‘apparatus’ of neoliberalism that mobilises anxiety as a productive force. By looking at the production of subjectivity through social media, this thesis opens up an important new perspective on social media as an adapted machine of capitalist individuation that amplifies long standing sociocultural pressures and anxieties by design. As opposed to the dominant framing of social media subjects as either clueless victims of big tech’s ‘addiction machine’ or shallow narcissists too self-absorbed to notice their own exploitation, I contend that this knowledge is circumvented through our collective disavowal of what we know (but cannot accept) about social media: that it repurposes our overwhelming and disquieting anxiety into its extractive apparatus, and that we are complicit in — and ‘enjoy!’ — our own capture. So, instead of aiming to ‘traverse the fantasy’ of social media, this thesis deploys ‘digital anxiety’ as a conceptual tool through which the interpellative processes of social media can be studied, without falling prey to the illusion that ‘unmasking’ an ideology is to disempower it.