The Twittering Machine cover art

The Twittering Machine

 Preview
LIMITED TIME OFFER

3 months free
Try for £0.00
£8.99/mo thereafter. Renews automatically. Terms apply. Offer ends 31 July 2025 at 23:59 GMT.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.

The Twittering Machine

By: Richard Seymour
Narrated by: Adam Bromley
Try for £0.00

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Offer ends 31 July 2025 23:59 GMT. Cancel monthly.

Buy Now for £13.99

Buy Now for £13.99

Confirm Purchase
Pay using card ending in
Switch payment method
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.
Cancel

About this listen

In artist Paul Klee’s The Twittering Machine, the bird-song of a machine acts as bait to lure humankind into a pit of damnation. Leading political writer Richard Seymour argues that this is a chilling metaphor for our relationship with social media. Former social media executives tell us that the system is an addiction machine. We are users, waiting for our next hit as we like, comment and share. We write to the machine as individuals, but it responds by aggregating our fantasies, desires and frailties into data, and returning them to us as a commodity experience.

Through journalism, psychoanalytic reflection and insights from users, developers, security experts and others, Seymour probes the human side of the machine, asking what we’re getting out of it, and what we’re getting into.

©2019 Richard Seymour (P)2019 W. F. Howes Ltd Media Studies Social Sciences

Listeners also enjoyed...

 Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom cover art
Fear and Trembling cover art
Necessary Illusions cover art
K-Punk: Politics cover art
Dance Your Way Home cover art
Wish I Were Here cover art
Which Side of History? cover art
High Weirdness cover art
Silicon Values cover art
Stolen cover art
After the Fact? cover art
Necropolitics cover art
How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle cover art
Fossil Capital cover art
The Tyranny of Big Tech cover art
Elite Capture cover art

Critic reviews

“Richard Seymour has a brilliant mind and a compelling style.” (Guardian)

“A brilliant, urgent, game-changing intervention.” (China Miéville)
All stars
Most relevant  
I found this book to be incredibly insightful and thought-provoking. Beautifully written and thoroughly researched. Even though the information gets quite 'heavy' in places, it is well worth the journey.

A very important book

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Very easy listen- the writer uses language very eloquently and it was pleasant to listen to. The topics are gripping and will stick with me for sure. Quitting facebook has done wonders for me and this book affirms why it was a good decision!

Nice

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
This book was a scathing critique of the narrative surrounding social media, rather than what I thought to be a book about the science of social media

Commentary more than science

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.