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A raucous voice blasts from the phone screen as a hot pink kurta obfuscates the speaker—a tiny yet fiery woman behind it. She announces to her audience the features of the product on display—silk blend, anarkali, zari embroidery, perfect for an evening party. My mother, hooked onto the screen, listens intently.
I prompt her, “Do you want to buy this?”
“No, no. I’m just seeing.” She responds.
This seeing happens everyday, often to my father’s annoyance. My mother spends hours engaging with numerous women like her—middle aged, middle class—but with a confidence she does not share. They design and sell clothes, invent recipes and sing bhajans that she herself designed, clothed, invented and sang not too long ago. Now, she watches them.
Her hands, that once played with needles and fabric to birth elaborate embroidery, patterned sarees with tie dyes and experimented with chef Sanjeev Kapoor were gradually restricted to perform the sole function of domestic labour for the last three decades.
A few years ago, her hands learned to perform a novel function—to scroll. The act of scrolling acquainted her to a world where housewives, like her, fostered their passions to build an audience, thanks to Facebook marketplace. Residing inside the phone was a fragment of my mothers’ that was eliminated from existence, a fragment that bore no resemblance to her present. Yet, like a prosthetic, my mother carried it everywhere. She watched, incessantly, while cooking and cleaning, amongst people and alone- the women on the screen. They, like mythological creatures, embodied a self that exuded confidence, skill, independence and voice. The phone externalised the function of the hand, and a self that had diminished was birthed anew. This ‘process of externalisation’ enabled her to pursue ‘life by means other than life’ (Steigler, 1998).
According to Deleuzian perspectives, desire is rhizomatic in its conception, i.e., it is “absolutely free, decoded flow” that spreads across ideas, concepts and identities as free flowing energy (Holland, 2013). In my mother’s relationship with scrolling on social media, the rhizomatic conception of this flow of desire connects concepts, selves, and ideas in multiplicitous ways—technology, individuality, entertainment, leisure, creative expression, patriarchy, feminism, consumption—exist in ‘reciprocal presupposition’ with each other (ibid). They exist without preceding each other, and hence, their dependence on each other shapes their meaning.
Accompanying these infinite possibilities of pure desire, the institutions underlying the formation of these techno-human relations determine its actualisation. In the case of scrolling short form content, desire is determined by algorithms optimising for engagement.
Social media algorithms rely on the part of our thinking that is instinctive, automatic, and relies on our emotional response to stimuli, , also known as System 1 thinking. In the face of the everyday, we fall back on the instinctive, reflexive part of our brain that allows us to make fast decisions. My mother’s desire of watching housewives cum influencers is as much interconnected with limbic capitalist systems’ exploitation of human instinct as anarchic desires of passion, selfhood and becoming that are hidden from her conscious everyday yet embedded in its underbelly. As she scrolls, spacetime warps itself at the cusp of possibility— a moment of abandon where she no longer plays the role of a mother, daughter, wife— but simply one who consumes her self through the other. In her seeing, she is being seen. Performing her everyday duties, her virtual transgressions are hidden, private, and seemingly impossible to actualise. In her seeing, she instinctively engages with content that is optimised for addiction, suspending her in a state of limbo, where a desire is replaced as quickly as it emerges.
In the film Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022), the antagonist Jobu Topaki experiences everything—alternate realities, selves, powers, infinite knowledge of the multiverse, and all the chatter that comes with it—simultaneously.. Her fractured consciousness and ability to rupture through membranes of the universe allows her to jump (uni)verses and collapse possibilities to alter realities. But it leaves her with internal chaos and disillusionment, “Not a single moment will go by in your mind without every other universe screaming for your attention…Never fully there. A lifetime of fractured moments, contradictions, and confusion…” (Daniels, 2022).Experiencing the possibility of every random desire fulfilled all the time, Jobu Topaki is unable to grasp the meaninglessness of reality and spirals into a ‘bagel’ of nihilism. With infinite possibilities, the rupture enables every thought, idea or desire to transform reality, except a deeper longing for someone to see what she sees, feel what she feels.. She is intent on destroying everything and herself, because ‘nothing matters’, even though she traverses across the noises of the universes hoping someone (her mother) helps her make sense of her world.
Technology’s increasing ability to expand the human experience inches closer to Jobu Topaki’s experience. More specifically, when it comes to consuming short-form content on the internet, where each 30 to 60 second reel is a mini-verse in itself, scrolling feels nothing short of jumping between universes. My mother’s feed, that I meticulously explored with her, reflected her fractured selves in various loci, temporarily satiating the desires for ideas she was unable to materialise. Often when I ask her, “Why don’t you do something about it(her interests)?” she says, “What am I going to do with this? It’s not like I will become anything at this age.” Her consumption is meaningless to her, and in a way, it reminds me of Jobu Topaki’s nihilism.
Here lies the inherent contradiction of consuming short-form video content: it simultaneously liberates desire through novel, virtual experiences and exploits human attention to limit possibilities of desire outside the scroll.
Despite vibrant explorations on social media, my mother’s own relationship with becoming is fraught with attention scarcity. Her sporadic efforts to materialise her desires into concrete reality, whether through learning about music or fashion, are out-engineered by the technologies that optimise for dopamine rush. When asked why she doesn’t materialise watching/consuming these videos into creating something herself, she responds: “I can’t remember anything after I’ve watched it. It’s all a blur.”
The gap between her intention and action is a direct consequence of persuasive technologies (Chiossi et al, 2023) that alter the processes of desiring. When brain fog, a natural consequence of doom-scrolling, becomes an inherent part of our relationship with digital desires, how does it change the flows of desire?
Existing in a perpetual brain fog both inhibits and liberates my mother. In the everyday, she exists in a haze of the past, present and future, where temporalities muddle the concrete and present a mushed version of reality. When all selves become blurry, the moment of abandon becomes easier to access for her, when the dutiful wife suspends reality to warp space time and enter the multiverse—the idea of independence fulfills her with momentary respite.
Donna Haraway’s Cyborg, “a kind of disassembled, reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self” (Haraway, 1985, 302) and my mother and her phone, both muddle human identity with techno-human relations to reimagine the self, only for my mother, the independence is fleeting, but the scroll, infinite.
