It has almost become customary to assess the social media in terms of its revolutionary potential. From theoretic lenses it is commonly viewed as opening up a post-humanist discursive space or is positioned as a development paving the way towards the arrival of the so called networked communes or nomadic collectivities we call the ‘schizoids’ while relegating the exclusivist totalitarian subjectivities to the brink of entropy. However, it was the gradual rhizomatic expansion of the media and our collective desire to experience the socius in the terms of a deep affinity with it at all levels that made way for the arrival of the phenomena we call the mediatized real—or the hyper-real—and its radicalized splinter group the social media. It was the gradual intensification of this social media, a repository of the means to enhance trans-territorial social bonding, alliances and networks, which led to the creation of the current times of ‘the information empire’ in which we live. And the reason for which this media stands as a common plane of existence in our current times may be explained in the terms of the disjunctive relationship it bears with the earlier times. If the modern times manifested a stratified socius making way for phases of intense territorialization or abortive de-territorialization the gradual ascendency of social media that gave us the information empire turned this socius into a range of loose configurations or the mobile dynamic stratas. It is argued that it is because of the social media that we view the socius no longer as a unified singularity revolving around a despotic face or center, but as a densely interconnected heterogeneity or as made up of pure differences.

It is lately argued that the social media has turned us into desiring machines. The connections we make through this media with the surrounding are not contingent or determinable. Rather they are free connections of desire. They have the potential to at once undermine the forced connections between multiple worlds that the bio-political apparatuses necessitate and the individualist interests and concerns foreground. It is argued that while the relational field that the current day pro-capitalist bio-political apparatuses open up across the world determinably hinges upon policies and agendas of conquest, capture and assimilation and betray links, connections and alliances between multiplicities or worlds that can be best described as arboreal, binaric, circular and linear, social media proliferate non-hierarchical, asymmetrical, non-centered, de-structured, transversal, lateral, plural and rhizomatic connections and links. Such connections or alliances that we make through social media, some have argued, have brought about a rapid schizophrenization of our-selves. As one might say, once we plug into the relational field of the social media we lose our selves in a multiplicity of connections and thereby pose an involuntary threat to the current bio-political mechanism that hinges upon the stable idea of selves. It is argued that while bio-political apparatuses aims to produce clearly defined and docile selves or what Agamben called ‘bare-life’ so it can exploit and manipulate them with ease social media does the opposite. It is argued that as the social media enables us to persist on the socius as an autotelic becoming we are invested with potencies that make us elude the manipulative strategies of containment and surveillance of the bio-political apparatuses. It is argued that with the arrival of the social media a dialectical space has opened up between the institutional surveillance strategies and the masses lingering on the surface of this media. While the former attempts to map our being and anchor it to its bio-political agendas and schemas the social media fills us with ‘auto-rejectional potency’, the potency to persist on the socius as a kind of anonymity or an extended absence or more precisely with a non-identarian identity. It is also argued that the social media works as an expansive and inclusive public sphere or even as what Deleuze called the war machine, a space that bears the traces of our revolutionary impulses. As some have observed with respect to social media that it is not only an unfolding of an absolute democratic framework that one gets to sense in the surfaces of the media networks, ranging from twitters, social networking sites, FB and numerous chat machines, but assemblages or configuration of resistance poised to keep the institution in a mode of destabilization and self-renewal. With minimal intervention from the proverbial big brother it also mimics what Deleuze calls the BWO, (body without organs), which stands as a key to exist in the groundless ground of the coming communities. Precarity has become the hallmark of our current existence. This may seem tragic on the one hand, but the social media had reengineered this Precarity into a means of resistance. The multiples shades of a precarious existence, namely uncertainty, temporality, nomadism, schizophrenization, becoming, rhizomaticity, multiplicity and assemblage are tools by which monolthical framework of the institutes is contested and kept open ended.

However what deserves our attention is the way the line of flights that the social media releases gets caught and manipulated by the various partisan interests, power blocs and the exponents of bio-political apparatuses. While we exult in the endless becoming triggered off by the social media a genealogical or geneticist assessment of this media has gone on to uncover underlying truths within its post-truth ontological framework. It is indeed a desiring machine as much it is a creative product of what we call the corporate capitalism. In other words, it works as a desiring machine of the corporate while creating an illusion of being an autonomous one with immanent goals. It is true that it brings about a deterritorialization or what is called schizophrenization of selves, but it is also no less true that it is inadequate to engineer a rupture with existent contemporaneity and pave a way towards a new earth. The deterritorialization of engineers is not only relative but dovetailed with agendas of corporate profit making. One is free to be a nomad as long as he is chained to the policies of the corporate. It is argued that while one exists as a multiplicity leading a trans-territorial, cross cultural, nomadic existence, traversing worlds and planes of existence, at once connecting with and delinking from a cornucopia of possibilities on the social media sites, he is blissfully unaware of the fact that his movement is being unduly mapped by some corporate eye managing these sites. It is ironic that one’s becoming is doggedly traced and relentlessly commodified by these corporate agencies. It is measured, calculated and traced in the terms of artificial intelligence so policies and programmes could be evolved to contain one’s being within the profit making registers. However, it is not merely the intangible voyeuristic corporate gaze measuring our every move in order to manipulate us and turn us into consumable commodities that worries us. One is equally disturbed as one gets to encounter the nexus between corporate agencies and the bio-political apparatuses and institutions. This nexus becomes evident as our becoming meets a more organized and consolidated bio-political apparatus aiming the check this becoming into a manageable excess. It is argued that what the corporate gathers on the basis of their surveillance and forensic scrutinization of our ontological becoming is eventually sold out to the bio-political apparatuses so they could control and check this becoming. So we experience some sort of schizophrenic dialectical oscillation between the world of social media releasing us from the cyclic, binaric and hierarchical patterns of bio-political entrapment into a world of becoming and that of bio-political apparatuses trying to contain our becoming with the very same patterns of entrapment. This oscillation leads to a massive deadlock and stasis. Due to this, it is argued, that the relational field the social media opens up leads nowhere and the line of flights that this media triggers off culminates in cycles of paranoia and depression. In fact, we get a sharp insight into the aforementioned in one of the current issues of OPEN, a leading news magazine of India. This magazine makes a disconcerting revelation that it is the urban networked communes who frequently stand afflicted by cycles of paranoia, depression and loneliness. As one may say, despite being in a state of connectedness through a cell phone or social networking sites the networked communes feels lonely, left out and depressed. This could be because, as it has been argued, the connections we form through the social media networks are not rhizomatic, but caught up in a dialectical contradiction or in a kind of schizophrenic split. As one may say, the line of flights the social media triggers off culminates in yielding arborescent formulations. And this is because the social media sites are backed by corporate agencies that do not want a revolution or traumatic rupture with the existent order but are committed to profit making and preserving the status-quo for their own interests. So what we encounter as a revolutionary trend in the socius is soon converted into a fashionable trend by the social networking sites and thereafter categorized, reductivized, repackaged and sold to the masses as one of the many readymade options available to them in the current times. It is quite common nowadays to encounter spaces in the social media promoting off beat, postmodern relational dynamics between genders and those promoting conservative ones with equal flamboyance and gusto. The structures of faith, convictions, values, worship, rootedness, nationalism, fascism, jingoism, casteism, religion and illogicality are fashionized and made available as readymade options to be tried out alongside those of de-structured desires. And the result of all this is, as it has been pointed our earlier, a massive deadlock. Most importantly it is also equally tragic the way the social media has partly contributed to the rise of and allied with the right wing governance and structures of fascism across the world. This has bred fear, terror and paranoia, and has curtailed free speech to a great extent. It is true that a great deal of resistance has built up nowadays against bio-political institutions, but then social media carries out an exercise in double articulation that the on the one hand allies with the schemes of these institutions and on the other facilitates a critique of and antagonistic resistance against them. However, what one gets to see nowadays is something even worse than what we have witnessed before. Social media not only stages a deadlock, a kind of stasis, which it generates by allying with bio-political stratagems and resistant forces, but has also lately turned into a site of terror. Messages, video clips, of terror and fear not only circulate freely across social media, but loudly negate ones of love, brotherhood and charity. What is encountered as a result, as many have observed, is not only a natural conspiratorial gathering of anti-productive affects or haecceities that is necessary for controlling the exponential production of desire on the socius or life’s innate capacity to check its own production by creating an assemblage of affects that undermines this production, but an interconnected world of non-production, stasis and impotence. This world is not integral to life, but lies “outside” life’s sphere of production, a pure bio-political engineering that privileges and promotes bare impotent life or what Agamben calls Zoe and cancels the vibrating pulsating life world.

Therefore the workshop which shall be held in collaboration with Simon Fraser University, Canada will put a spotlight on issues related to the social media. The aim of the workshop shall be to show how social media has failed to work like a desiring machine and how instead of becoming gradually like every desiring machine does a reliable resistant mechanism against the bio-political network it has become its ally. Eventually the workshop will culminate in fleshing out a thorough critique of the nexus between the bio-political apparatuses and the social media.