Hungry Ghosts in the Machine: Digital Capitalism and the Search for Self by Mike Watson was published by Revol on September 27th 2024.
In Mike Watson’s latest book, Hungry Ghosts in the Machine: Digital Capitalism and the Search for Self, he again stares into the darkest corners of our culture, the darkest aspects of the modern self, to find the slimmest chink of light. But a chink of light none the less!
Watson’s “Hungry Ghosts” is a reference to Gabor Maté’s seminal study on addiction and its causes, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction (2008). Maté’s book has become fundamental to our understanding of addiction as he showed that we ought not to focus on addiction and its treatment as a moral failure of the addict, an approach that has cruelly punished and tortured the most vulnerable members of our society. Rather, addiction needs to be considered as a symptom of a loss of connection. As Maté has demonstrated by decades of groundbreaking work, if you help addicts to re-establish social connections and connections with nature, their addiction withdraws. In a nutshell, this is the framing that Watson offers to critique our addictions under capitalism.
This is not only about our addiction to social media, but also about how any number and perhaps an infinitude of addictions are “induced by capitalism” (p36). An infinitude, as it is in the nature of capitalism to leave us hollow and constantly desirous of that next dopamine hit. Capitalism has reframed our relationship with the world as addictive, “we are hungry ghosts, out to fill a gnawing hole at our centre, which will anyhow consume us” (p12). This is not something that we are only drawn into whilst online for, “The home prison and workplace are inescapable. Like snails, we carry them around with us” (p10). And, for those of us who hope that we might be allowed nightly respite in the dreaming of our sleep, Watson points out that, “Today even sleep is bookended by smartphone activity (as if dreaming occurred in parentheses)” (p18).
Exploring possible ways that we might escape the trap of capitalist-induced addiction, Watson follows Mark Fisher in finding evermore dead ends. We find traps that end up further fuelling our addictions to alcohol, online spirituality and self-help, and even render the great panacea of psychedelics yet another trap. The promise of liberation through psychedelics and “ego death” we are told have been bent to the service of the capitalist economy (p34-35). Alcohol on the other hand, Watson observes, has been socially acceptable for so long because it reinforces notions of us and them, rather than breaking down this boundary as can happen with psychedelics. However, even where LSD and psilocybin are framed positively for the improvement of our mental health, they benefit the individual whilst leaving society unchanged (p39).
Where art might offer us another pathway to liberation, we find artists who must benefit from the capitalist system that they ought to critique, “Yet might we produce meaningful commentary and critique from within the husk of digital capitalist society precisely because we are hungry ghosts?” This is our first glimmer of hope and builds on the emancipatory possibilities Watson previously explored in The Memeing of Mark Fisher in 2022. An analysis that Watson further develops in Hungry Ghosts towards the horrific recognition of humans as the physical hosts for memes (p31), meaning that by seeking life in the attention economy, we become death due to our “indiscriminate acquiescence to the lifeless system of data exchange” (p33). Even where spiritual support is sought online, “There is a risk that online methods of treatment and/or spiritual advice might be sought to cope with symptoms of burnout…exacerbating dependence on the digital realm to plug gaps in real-life human interactions.” (p14)
But, as we read Hungry Ghosts, the possibility of a better world slowly, very slowly and at an agonising distance, comes into view. Priming us for the development of a different and better way of being, Watson critiques the “stand-off between the intelligent human being and a frightful exterior nature” that “popular science sets up”. Proposing that this “perceived supremacy of the rational (mostly middle-class and Western) mind is at the root of our estrangement from nature”. (p25)
The possibility of escaping the rationalist impositions of modernity (and white, middle-class men), Watson tells us, might lie in Fisher’s “limit experience”, Adorno’s “shudder” and Benjamin’s “Dialectical Image”. Each of these proposals offering “an intense moment of reckoning whereby the subject undergoes a loss of its boundaries and is temporarily unified with the object” (p26). Seen through the lens of addiction, Watson asks if these experiences offer the possibility for a breakdown of class boundaries and lasting cure through the possibility of “anti-capitalist well-being” (p27).
While I would have happily carried on reading Watson’s analysis for another 100 pages, for this is a short and pithy book, I fear that to do so might have further fuelled the “depressive mania” (p17) that is all too familiar from within the field that Fisher opened with Capitalist Realism. But staring into the shadows of our alienation under capitalism is necessary work for us all, both as individuals and through our shared literature and analysis such as is explored in Hungry Ghosts. It is only through Watson having held our hand as we stare into the abys of our capitalist dystopia that he is able to offer us, in the very final paragraph of the book, a truly emancipatory pathway forward. It’s not my place to spell out what this pathway is in a review, you’ll also have to grapple with Watson’s shadows in the preceding pages of Hungry Ghosts to get to this point.
Rob Faure Walker is author of Love and the Market: How to Recover from the Enlightenment and Survive the Current Crisis (Bristol University Press, September 2024).