In most discussions of social technologies, the digital is an outside force disrupting the human world. It is a poison to mental health. It is ripping apart the political fabric. It is creating a monoculture. It destroys our sleep patterns. This past May, the United States Surgeon General, in response to recent data reporting that 95% of children 13-17 use social media, with a third stating they use it “almost constantly”(1), issued a warning to express extreme concern regarding the impact of social media use on the mental health of children. The advisory lists potential problematics such as exposure to extreme content, harmful impacts on bodily perception, and a reported increase of the “pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent”(10). Concern for adult usage of social technologies remains far more in the political realm. Terms such as “feedback loops,” and “echo chambers” describe how adults, due perhaps to a digital illiteracy, have their biases confirmed and thrown back to them in an increasingly radicalizing cycle. However, across generations, the self and the supposed sanctity of our sense of sense are positioned as the perpetual victims of our internet and social technologies.

In the opening of “On Narcissism,” Freud writes, “The term narcissism is derived from clinical description” and denotes “the attitude of a person who treats his own body in the same way in which the body of a sexual object is ordinarily treated—who looks at it, that is to say, strokes it and fondles it till he obtains complete satisfaction through these activities.”(73). Similar to the described habits of a narcissist, the creation of a digital identity begins with a similar cathected relation to the self. To begin, the user must choose a name, of which there is no particular expectation that you should be locatable by your legal name. Additionally, to sign up for most platforms, you must disclose your age, location, and sex, which rarely need to reflect reality. Next comes the visual. You can use your image, but any visual will do. You can also opt for the default option, but, perhaps to the distaste of those who do this, this choice also reveals something about how you choose to represent yourself. Every choice is a curatorial one to such an extent that to exist digitally is to engage in what could be psychologically considered a narcissistic practice. A quick note, though. Integral to understanding both a Freudian conception of narcissism and its application to the world of the digital, however, requires divorcing of this terminology from moral judgment. Understanding digital narcissism as an individual defect makes easy for those who believe that they are beyond or above the digital to be apathetic toward its effects. As it stands for Freud and myself, narcissism is related more to a balancing of external and internal relations, which exists functionally in all people in varying levels of dysfunction. This baseline level of narcissism is classified as primary narcissism.

The embeddedness of narcissism within the psychic structure and its applicability to digital existence is underscored by Freud’s explanation of the individual's twofold existence. One which serves its own purposes, the second existence is as a link in a chain, which Freud notes is against the individual's will. This ladder existence rings particularly true for the digital double who only exists and reaps the benefits of the digital once they agree to a set of terms and conditions that are so disagreeable that we cannot even bear to read them. Understanding primary narcissism as fundamental and necessary to form even the most underdeveloped digital bodies makes it clear we are all implicated in our new precarious ontological market. However, what would be considered a more severe case of narcissism is the human subject may very well exist as a baseline for the digital.

The narcissism of the digital can is characterized by the secondary narcissistic habits of paraphrenics. As Freud pathologized, “paraphrenics display two fundamental characteristics: megalomania,” which can be generally understood as a delusional inflated sense of self and “diversion of their interest from the external world—from people and things”(74) the libidinal energy of which is directed towards the ego. Designers of social technologies seem to be aware of our inherent levels of megalomania and the digital’s capacity to exasperate it. To enter the digital world, the user is required to turn away from the external world. We all have experienced the difficulty of maintaining a conversation with someone who is on their phone and we all have been guilty of this ourselves. We cannot remain present in two places simultaneously. So once we turn away, we are continuously prompted to make our presence known. Across all social network platforms, a means to share or communicate is always available to the user, and user’s profile is equally privileged alongside all other content. This is to say that to engage in the digital world is to engage narcissistically, though users engage with differing levels of severity.

It must be distinguished, though, that the internal world of the ego and the digital world are not synonymous. By withdrawing from the external and into the digital, the user is not engaging in ego-cathexis because the digital does not contain an ego. In misrecognizing the digital as something with such capacity, however, the structure of the ego is projected onto the digital double with an intensified primary narcissism. This clarification is also meant to recognize the viability of the digital world as a space operative on a social and political level. An elaboration on the impossibility of the internet to contain a psyche but its unique ability to serve as a screen for its exaggeration can be seen in Laurie Penny’s essay on online misogyny. Penny writes, “ The internet does not hate women. The internet doesn’t hate anyone, because the internet, being an inanimate network, lacks the capacity to hold any opinion whatsoever. People hate women, and the internet allows them to do it faster, harder, and with impunity”. It is crucial to understand that the internet is unalive. It is an “inanimate network.” The internet cannot act upon us, and it is the pervasive narrative that it is out to get us and our world that illuminates our narcissistic attachment to it. The internet, instead, exposes our misrecognition of ourselves at the deepest level. That fundamental tension between our Ideal-image and our inability to achieve it or even wholly conceive of it. The internet gives us the impression that we have that power, so we increasingly lean into it. Despite some users of the internet having the vocational title of “influencer,” the internet and the social network platforms that inhabit it operate because we all believe we can sway each other and sway a dialogue. The internet, in many capacities, has taken on our psychic structure. In one register, we make conscious decisions about how we wish to be represented, and on the other, data is collected with and without our complete understanding, the impacts of which reveal themselves through mediation, such as advertisements and tailored feeds. But despite this similar formation, we make one profound misrecognition: what is definitively an object, commodity, fungible token, or opportunity for exchange-value, we believe is a true reflection of ourselves.

The camera’s centrality to this technology and the image-centric world it produces helps further understand how the objectifying effect of digital technologies clashes with our confidence that a self is present at all. Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida describes the sensation of being photographed: “Now, once I feel myself observed by the lens, everything changes: I constitute myself in the process of ‘posing,’ I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image”(10). Like the photograph, the digital double exists only to be observed by other users and the entities that track and store user data. The notion that an observed body is a posed body and, therefore, a different body provides a succinct framework for understanding the digital body's detachment from the physical. “Odd that no one has thought of the disturbance (to civilization) this new action causes,” writes Barthes, “a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity”(12). This is the precarity of the photograph and how it ushered in the ability to situate oneself within History and the world, is shared with the digital world even more so. My image, name, habits, secrets, and desires are all there in the digital. It's all there, except for me, yet I feel a deep personal attachment. I cried the day I was unfairly suspended from Twitter. My intense reaction can, of course, also be explained by Barthes's foresight. “This disturbance is ultimately one of ownership… Photography transformed subject into object”(14). The day I lost my Twitter, I felt something of mine had been taken away. This disturbance of ownership made finding out who owns my Instagram, which I have had since I was 11, an imperative question. The answer is complicated, but it is most certainly not us. Once we place our photographs, or our likeness, into the digital world and social network, they become objects that can be owned, traded, manipulated, and destroyed.

When it comes to the questions of disturbance, the image, and the Other it is impossible not to reengage psychoanalysis, but this time with Lacan. The mirror phase sets forth in the subject a persistent sense of alienation brought forth by their inability to reconcile the fractured self with the Ideal-Image he sees in the mirror, which remains whole. “The mirror stage is a drama,” Lacan states, “whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation and, lastly, to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject’s entire mental development”(3). The individuals of the contemporary digitizing world, thus, experience not only the drama set forth by the mirror phase but an additional drama of not existing as a subject at all within the digital world. The misrecognition of the subject's condition of existence in the “real world” directly runs up against the inherent substantive narcissism operational in the digital. This additional misrecognition of objecthood for subjecthood, may be more aptly classified as psychological horror the effects of which bleed into the real through modes of various violence

As part of a larger series entitled “Pixelated Revolution,” artist Rabih Mroue showcases a series of seven images taken from cellphone videos of protesters during the government assault on Syrian citizens in 2011. Each of these images captures the moment a military gunman met the gaze of a protestor's cellphone camera zoomed in, or blown up, to the point of near distortion. Several of the photos also represent the last thing their producers saw before being executed by the gunmen. In his book Dark Mirrors, photographer and theorist Stanley Wolokau-Wanambwa pointedly analyzes these photographs. While witnessing these images, he writes, “I grappled with the flatness of the photographs: their resistance as images to the narrative development of dimensional depth; their aggressive compression. This steady degeneration of optical resolution seemed a function of the limits of the devices that made the images, and of the digital files that served as source materials for the prints”(90). Wolokau-Wanambwa, in analyzing the aesthetics and violences of degeneration, brings into conversation the work of Paul Virilo, who in his landmark essay War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, tracks the implementation of sight in weaponry. He begins his history of “wars of light” with the Russo-Japanese War in which the searchlight was first utilized as military weaponry. This, for Virilo, set forth “a future where observation and destruction would develop at the same pace”(68). The weaponry utilized by the Syrian military against civilians showcases this history of observation and destruction. It is with the scope attached to the rifle that the gunmen can identify civilians and target them from such a distance that their image must be zoomed in to the point of obfuscation to see them closely. But chiefly operative in these instances is that the observation and destruction are not one-sided. The protester observes back and does so with a cellphone camera. Amid a systematic dehumanization of civilians, the gunman is confronted with his susceptibility to objectification. He is confronted with another destructive observation mode; his reaction is extraordinary violence. Wolukau-Wanambwa classifies this confrontation between the gunman and cameraman and, more broadly, privileging of images over objects, time, and space as “the modality of our contemporary politics”(95). He elaborates that the “ontological power of the image to make manifest that which the gunmen seek to repress has not resulted in the eradication of the data, but in the murder of citizens, and what persists for us to reckon with is the final image that precedes their deaths”(95). In killing the citizen, the gunmen seek to repress the production of an image entirely rather than eradicate the evidence of the image, the data as it circulates on the web. This demonstrates the state's belief that the citizen does not have the right to objectify and that all attempts to destroy state subjectivity through observation must be eradicated upon meeting the gaze. It is not the image itself they take issue with; it's the audacity to produce one. As Wolokau-Wanambwa asserts, doing so interrupts the smooth continuous emission of a distorted image”(95). However, despite the efforts of military states worldwide, these images proliferate and exist to experience another register of observation by those outside who witness these photos in the continuous wake of violence. Unfortunately, destruction follows as theorized. In an essay written by Mroue regarding the state of Israel’s assault on Lebanon, he writes, “Sometimes I think I am nothing but an image that others have seen and deleted”(100). Despite the power of these images, which capture a lethal gaze, in the digital world, there does not seem to be any way around the compression of even the most desperate calls for humanity into objecthood. These images call demand for us to dial into the external world, to place our energy and compassion into our fellow man, but to do so would be to exit the digital. For most of the observers of these images, their knowledge of these horrors is situated in the digital replicating the destructive force of the type of engagement expressed by Mroue, to be seen and then deleted.

In keeping with photography and the digital’s further complication of the image, is the selfie and all the unfortunate places users tend to take them. After a meeting of a seminar on representations of the Holocaust in media, I was explaining to a friend that the day's topic of discussion was selfie-taking at Auschwitz. In response, my friend asked: “Why wouldn’t you?” This took me back. However, considering the inherent narcissism of our digital identities, that question becomes an interesting point of exploration. Selfies have become integral to the choreography of modern-day travel. This is not a particularly exciting revelation, and it can be seen through Sontag’s figuring of travel photography as a means of “certifying experience”(6). However, Sontag’s view of this certification as a demotion of travel to souvenirs does not entirely account for the importance of the selfie, and the selfies' intended distribution on social media networks holds for the user who is attempting to resist its objecthood and continually asserts its unattainable subjectivity. Without placing our digital bodies as captured through the front camera into the foreground of a landscape, how can we prove that we have been there at all? And if we cannot prove that we have been there, how are we meant to extract social capital from the experience? Maria Zalewska takes on questions of digital narcissism, reading it as a phenomenon that is on an upward trajectory, citing that internet environments and their emotional detachments facilitate extreme unempathetic behavior like selfies from “horror sites”(103). She continues stating that selfie-takers “seem to privilege ‘the self’ over the surroundings and context within which they are taken. The space and memory become objectified”(109). The selfie does not “seem” to privilege the self over the surroundings; no matter how historically significant or horrific those surroundings might be, it can do nothing but privilege the subject. Front camera technology was conceptualized with the singular purpose of aiding the subject in privileging itself, and the intended location of these images is in the marketplace of the narcissistic digital subject, social media. The space and memory become objects because digital technologies of sociality serve the singular purpose of making a commodity of the human social. Whether it be our clinging to technology or the wishful desire that one-day social technologies will realize the potential we imbue it with, we seem to be able to identify the unsettling ways in which digital narcissism creeps into the real world but seem unwilling to identify this problematic as fundamental to the technology.

Beyond the unsettling effects, the production and circulation of images that privilege the digital body over the setting are a more general unsettling of what we understand to be the work and function of postmemory. Marianne Hirsch, in the essay “Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory,” argues that repetition, displacement, and recontextualization of canonized images of the Holocaust allows second-generation survivors to connect with the first by generating representations of events without claiming to have experienced the event firsthand. Given that social digital technology serves to privilege the self while simultaneously objectifying it, the use of these technologies in the name of remembrance without claiming experience is antithetical. However, the obviousness of this fact has not impeded any effort to digitize the traumatic past. The USC Shoah Foundation specializes in developing new technologies of remembrance, including interactive 3D renderings of Holocaust survivors and, most recently, a virtual reality immersive experience entitled “The Last Goodbye.” Utilizing two variations of VR technologies, standard 360 video that allows users to walk around Majdanek concentration camp, guided by the testimony and virtual body of survivor Pinchas Gutter, and then a walk-around experience, which Co-creator Ari Palitz says was motivated by a desire to move beyond documentary and generate for the user the sensation of being in the camp (“The Last Goodbye”). In a promotional video for the technology, Palitz exclaims: “I am really in the concentration camp. I am really in the gas chamber”(2:18). The gas chamber is the penultimate moment of the experience. Gutter guides the user to the threshold of the gas chamber where his family was murdered and presents the user with an option. Gutter will not be going in however, the user can roam the site of abject annihilation on their own. It is argued by those sympathetic to these new technologies of remembrance that by giving the user this choice the distinction between the playable character and survivor is made clear. But given the novelty of this project, the choice may become rhetorical for the viewer who wishes to yield as much value out of the experience as possible, which would undoubtedly mean going into the gas chamber. The presence of Gutter previously established some semblance of differentiation between survivor and user, but alone in the gas chamber the user becomes the solitary subject of its virtual reality. It is the most concentrated present example of how new technologies of remembrance can serve as a refusal to stick to the mimetic quality of postmemory and instead a traversal into attempting to claim survivor memory as one's own. Is that not the goal of this immersion, and is that not the repeatedly revealed consequence of subjugating any sensitive material to the objectifying and flattening effect of social or gamified digital technologies? While total immersion will always be impossible, as you cannot be in the camps, what is present is the fetishized striving for immersion and the present notion that the digital body must experience something in order for the event to be experienced at all.

Through a turning towards these technologies, it seems that all facets of life and history must be mediated by the techno-social and made accessible to the digital double in order to remain in public memory This false equivalency reveals a growing privileging of the digital. However, usage of virtual reality in spaces of remembrance, selfies at locations of atrocity, and lethal cases of observation though jarring to encounter and upsetting to many still demonstrate what I would classify as a primary digital narcissism and the expected results of utilizing technology that exists to indiscriminately objectify. The more severe cases of digital narcissism, as displayed by individuals who are immersed in the darkest corners of digital existence, have yet to be examined.

In May of 2022, eighteen-year-old Payton Gendron carried out a plan to murder Black and Brown patrons of a Buffalo, New York grocery store, the details of which were worked out on the social media platform Discord months ahead of the attack, which killed ten and wounded three patrons. First-hand video footage was also live-streamed on the platform Twitch, where it remained for two minutes before being taken down by the service’s content moderators. The video is not entirely ephemeral, as it remains in circulation on various online platforms. For many, Gendron’s extensive digital footprint and his obsessive admiration and quotation of other mass shooters broke through the false notion that perpetrators of these attacks are born out of social isolation and neglect. However, admittance to the digital sociality of violent actors does very little to understand the networks from which they emerge and are bolstered by or the nature of the livestream as an attempted extension of the ego.

Thirty minutes before carrying out the attack, Gendron published a nineteen-page manifesto across multiple digital platforms. The manifesto takes the form of a one-sided interview where Gendron answers questions covering his identity, motivations, and plans of attack. Revealed in his words is his unsurprising entry into the digital world of extreme hatred and violence. During the 2020 lockdown, out of “extreme boredom,” he began investing large amounts of time on decentralized social platforms, where he learned about and became invested in the commonly and widely circulated great replacement theory. The anxiety that he and his race were being pushed out of American culture led him to dive deeper into these digital platforms, where he found video documentation of previous racially motivated mass shootings. He admits that there was little to no influence from those he has in-person relationships with on his beliefs and that they came from being revealed the truth over the internet. For Gendron, his attack is the amalgamation of time spent online. The profound paranoia of a white genocide as a result of an admitted withdrawal from the outside world and privileging of the digital can be classified as what Freud would describe as obsessional neurosis. This return to Freud is not in any means to excuse extreme hatred and genocidal sensibilities via pathology but to attempt to understand what differentiates even over-active internet users from users such as Gendron.

Once, one enters the sort of digital sphere where racist and anti-Semitic ideologies are hyper-normalized, the reality of the external world, which does not perfectly align with their anxieties, becomes almost inhospitable. As they dive further and further into the digital there is a sort of frenetic energy caused by not only the user's desire to assert their subjectivity online but for their subjectivity to dominate both the digital world and the external world which they have rejected. The user has overvalued the digital and ideologies which, in their view, define it, so that when they reengage with the external world it is for the explicit purpose of attempting to replicate their digital reality onto the world they feel is slipping away.

However, despite their violent explosion off the screen into the real, the internet-grown violent actor cannot leave behind their digital image. He must attempt to carry it with him into his attack and often his final moments. Their sighted weapon of choice is routinely the live stream. In continuing the relationship between camera and weapon mentioned previously in the context of a conflict of observation between the cellphone camera and the rifle's scope, the work of Paul Virlio remains salient. As stated by violent actors such as Gendron, the purpose of livestreaming pre-planned attacks is to proliferate the image and ideologies of those carrying them out as well as add to the archive of images that inspired the attacks in the first place. By placing the live-broadcasting camera onto the gun, mass shooters engage in the development of “invisible weapons that make things visible”(71), as Virilo states. The live stream is perhaps the only means by which the digital body can be brought forth in the digital world, which is pertinent for the goals of mass shooters and the continued privileging of the digital body even as they carry out violence in the real world. It is an attempt to center the digital body and make it visible in the digital world beyond the segment in which they occupy.

In attempting to make sense of or critically engage with the internet while willingly embedding myself further into its web, I am reminded of a moment in “On Narcissism” that captures the invigorating precarity of observation-based practices such as psychoanalysis and, arguably internet studies. “It is true that notions such as that of an ego-libido, an energy of the ego-instincts, and so on, are neither particularly easy to grasp, nor sufficiently rich in content,” confesses Freud. But still, he is of the opinion that a science erected on empirical interpretation. “will not envy speculation in its privilege of having a smooth, logically unassailable foundation, but will gladly content itself with nebulous, scarcely imaginable basic concepts, which it hopes to apprehend more clearly in the course of its development”(77). Critique of the digital formulated around the structure of narcissism may not be easy to grasp or, more accurately, sufficiently rich in content, but the language of addiction or chemical imbalance did not seem sufficient in qualifying an internet that slips through my hands like my sense of self. For now, I am content with the scarcely imaginable and hope we might be able to one day look past our noses far enough to figure out just what we are dealing with.