What is it about social media that makes us our hottest, stupidest, cruelest selves?

I've always wondered whether my relationship to Twitter is entirely healthy, and rather

than spending money on a therapist to help me explore this issue, I instead invited

Richard Seymour, the author of the Twittering machine, to help me work it out.

We talked about trolling, joughts the cat, feet guys, and more.

Thank you so much for joining us.

I'm glad to be here.

So I really hate to admit how reluctant I was to read the Twittering machine, and it had

been recommended to me, partner, but my friends, and I just couldn't bear to open it up

because I was scared that I would see a mirror to myself.

So what made you want to open up this particular box of frogs?

I think there's a number of things, I mean, it's partly a book about writing, and the underlying

conceit is essentially we're writing more than we ever have in history, but it's very

different kind of writing machine.

It used to be you would have a hierarchy of texts, you know, the Holy Bible, the Constitution,

something from which authority flows all the way down to your green ink letters to the

editors or your diaries or whatever, and obviously that's being upended, and writing

now is structured not around alphabets, spoken word, but around marks, digital marks that

are essentially the equivalent of let's say seismographic writing or pictograms, logograms,

et cetera.

You're going to have to explain what some of those things are.

Okay, well, just, you know, there's a progress myth of modernity that goes back to the

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