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Reconstruction Vol. 13, No. 3/4

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Spectacular Unhappiness: Social Life, Narcissistic Commodification, and Facebook / Delores Phillips and Kevin Moberly

The spectacle proclaims the predominance of appearances and asserts that all human life, which is to say all social life, is mere appearance. But any critique capable of apprehending the spectacle‘s essential character must expose it as a visible negation of life-and as a negation of life that has invented a visual form for itself.

- Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

<1> In her 2010 work, The Promise of Happiness, Sara Ahmed contends that contemporary society is in the midst of a "happiness turn" (3) that is characterized by a resurgence of interest in the "economics and science of happiness" (3) in popular media, as well as the rapid growth of the so-called "happiness industry" (3) and the establishment of several university departments of Happiness Studies. Recognizing that the concept of happiness has historically been used to justify the oppression of women and minorities, she argues that our contemporary turn to happiness represents a manifestation of a larger socio-political strategy, one in which happiness is deployed as an objective measure of both prosperity and progress and thus functions as an ideological schema through which classes of subjects are marked and differentiated. As she explains, "The science of happiness makes correlations between happiness levels and social indicators, creating what are called ‘happiness indicators.‘ Happiness indicators tell us which kinds of people have more happiness; they function not only as measures of happiness, but also as predictors of happiness" (6). To Ahmed, then, our contemporary fixation on happiness is problematic, especially to the degree to which happiness becomes a duty or an imperative: a means of coercing individuals to adopt subject positions that, as she writes, invariably reflect "ideas of who is worthy as well as capable of being happy ‘in the right way‘" (13). Constructed in this manner, as a "more genuine way of measuring progress" (Ahmed 3), happiness is symptomatic of what Ahmed describes as a very unhappy social agenda, one that presents the economic, gendered, and racialized norms of the status quo as natural, inevitable, and therefore, good.

<2> Recognizing that, as Ahmed does, the "‘question of what does happiness do?‘ is inseparable from the question of how happiness and unhappiness are distributed over time and space" (19), this article examines how happiness facilitates the construction of self in many of the social games that have become synonymous with Facebook. Specifically, we study Tyler Project‘s Social Life. Like Electronic Arts‘ now defunct Sims Social, Social Life represents an important variation on the mode of gameplay popularized by the games in the Sims franchise. It not only allows players to customize and manage avatars as they negotiate the various conflicts that the game imagines as defining "the good life," but explicitly constructs these avatars as virtual versions of the players themselves. What is more, Social Life constructs happiness as the primary measurement of success in the game and the chief unit of exchange. Thus, while Social Life is advertised as a "life simulator," it is perhaps more accurate to describe it as a happiness simulator in the sense that the game affords players the chance to participate in a world of positive accumulation, one in which the acquisition of furniture, clothing, and various other commodities allows players to simultaneously acquire the happiness with which these objects are associated.

<3> We argue, however, that happiness in Social Life is ultimately not a good thing, but in keeping with Ahmed‘s critique, functions to both justify and mask a number of much uglier, oppressive dynamics (2). Much of Social Life‘s game play, for example, is predicated on what, to Guy Debord, is the alienation and fragmentation that characterize the spectacle in contemporary capitalism. Constructed almost entirely through commodified images, it presents players with a virtual world that, as Debord writes about spectacle, is "at once here and elsewhere; it is the world of the commodity ruling over all lived experience. The commodity world is thus shown as it really is, for its logic is one with men‘s estrangement from one another and from the sum total of what they produce" (26). Social Life, however, also capitalizes on what Sianne Ngai describes as the social and political strategy of envy in her work Ugly Feelings. Indeed, one of the primary ways that Second Life encourages players to spend time and money improving their avatars is through the anxiety that they can never be as happy as the non player characters (NPCs) in the game, and perhaps not even as happy as their friends who are playing the game. This anxiety transforms what might otherwise be an exercise in building virtual community into a Veblen-esque nightmare of conspicuous consumption.

<4> Understood in this sense, Social Life speaks directly to the larger question of what it means to participate meaningfully on Facebook. Commodifying happiness, envy, alienation, and consumption as social play, it challenges players to demonstrate their self worth through a ritualized version of what is arguably the primary form of immaterial labor upon which Facebook‘s continued economic success depends: a digital narcissism through which participants perform their happiness through the accumulation of images, "likes," "shares," wall-posts, and other such activities. While it is tempting to approach games like Social Life as commentaries on or even parodies of the degree to which the self has been commodified by Facebook, we argue that the opposite is true. By explicitly constructing the immaterial labor that constitutes participation on Facebook as play, these games perpetuate the illusion that much of what takes place on Facebook itself is not play. In doing so, we argue they perpetuate the illusion that Facebook is real: that it is synonymous with, if not equivalent to, "real life."

Unhappy Workers: The Economics of Emotion in Facebook

<5> A number of recent studies about the emotional impact of Facebook have linked the social networking site with various forms of unhappiness. In a 2009 study, Amy Muise, Emily Christofides, and Serge Desmaires found a "significant association between time spent on Facebook and jealousy-related feelings and behaviors experienced on Facebook" (443). In a 2010 study, Moira Burke, Cameron Marlow, and Thomas Lento reported that Facebook "users who consume greater levels of content report reduced bridging and bonding social capital and increased loneliness." Ethan Kross and a team of researchers at the University of Michigan reported similar results in a well-publicized 2013 study. Measuring the experience of Facebook users over time, they found that the "more people used Facebook at one time point, the worse they felt the next time we text-messaged them; the more they used Facebook over two-weeks, the more their life satisfaction levels declined." They also found that this decline took place regardless of the amount of direct communication users had with friends, the size of their networks, and a number of other factors that previous studies had mentioned as possible causes for the correlation between Facebook use and reported unhappiness. While Kross and his co-authors caution against over-interpreting these results, they nevertheless argue that their research has far-reaching implications for understanding how Facebook affects young adult users. As they explain, "Rather than enhancing well-being, as frequent interactions with supportive ‘offline‘ social networks powerfully do, the current findings demonstrate that interacting with Facebook may predict the opposite result for young adults-it may undermine it."

<6> Considering this conclusion, it is perhaps not surprising that the results of Kross‘s study were quickly reported in almost fifty news stories, many of which of which not only featured headlines that explicitly associated Facebook with sadness and depression, but used the study as the impetus for a larger discussion of the relative value of online communities. A case in point is Lara Devgan‘s and Joanna Stern‘s "Facebook may be Making you Sad." Published on the ABC News website two days after Kross‘s study appeared, their story provides readers with a general overview of the findings, the methodology, and limitations of Kross‘s research. It also, however, offers a hypothesis about what, quoting Kross, they describe as the "Facebook effect": the fact that, as he explains, there is "something unique about Facebook use that is making people feel worse." Linking Kross‘s study to a number of previous studies about the emotional affect of Facebook, Devgan and Stern speculate that the unhappiness participants report might be caused by the fact that Facebook users often compare themselves negatively to their friends. As they explain, "People look at the overcurated digital lives of all their other friends, compare themselves to what they see and then feel a decrease in self-esteem." At the same time, though, Devgan and Stern are also careful to point out that not everything that happens on Facebook is negative. Citing a recent study conducted by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, they write that "prolonged exposure to ones‘ personal Facebook page can increase self-esteem. . . . When you look at your own Facebook profile you look at all the positive and exciting events in your own life without dwelling on the lives of others." They thus conclude that if there is a "lesson in most of these studies," it is that "Facebook users should come to the social network slightly forewarned."

<7> Elise Hu offers a similar interpretation of Kross‘s results in her All Tech Considered report, "Facebook Makes Us Sadder And Less Satisfied, Study Finds." As with Devgan and Stern, Hu does not simply summarize the findings of Kross and his co-authors, but instead attempts to provide readers with an answer to the larger question of why Facebook makes users unhappy. Stating that Kross‘s study "did not get at the reasons Facebook made their test subjects feel glum," she also speculates that the negative emotional impact of Facebook "may have to do with social comparison"-a theory that she substantiates with a quote from John Jonides, one of the co-authors of Kross‘s study: "When you‘re on a site like Facebook, you get lots of posts about what people are doing. That sets up social comparison-you maybe feel your life is not as full and rich as those people you see on Facebook." Hu then reports that the "study found the effects of Facebook are most pronounced for those who socialize the most ‘in real life.‘" Once again quoting Jonides, she writes that these findings might be explained by the fact that participants "who did the most direct, face-to-face socializing" tended to be more sensitive to the limitations of social interactions on Facebook. She thus concludes that the "prescription for Facebook despair is less Facebook." As she explains, "Researchers found that face-to-face or phone interaction-those outmoded, analog ways of communication-had the opposite effect. Direct interactions with other human beings led people to feel better."

<8> Hu thus uses the deleterious effect of Facebook to justify a call for the return to an older, and presumably more genuine model of social interactions. In doing so, she foregrounds a propensity that is latent not only in Devgan and Stern‘s article, but also in Kross‘s study. Indeed, implicit in all of these efforts is the assumption that Facebook should be making people happy. Facebook, after all, has become synonymous in the popular imagination with the promise of digital technologies such as social networking to radically expand and transform the way that people interact with each other, a view that Kross and his co-authors tacitly acknowledge in the introduction of their study, writing, "Online social networks are rapidly changing the way human beings interact. Over a billion people belong to Facebook, the world‘s largest online social network, and over half of them log in daily." Yet the finding that Facebook makes its users unhappy also speaks to an equally potent cultural narrative about technology-namely that technological change threatens to disrupt the status quo, rendering normally healthy social relationships into hollow representations of what they once were. Kross‘s study and much of the media coverage that accompanied it operate between these two poles: between what it wanted and is discovered.

<9> As such, much of this work recalls what, to Sarah Ahmed, is one of the primary symptoms of our contemporary fixation on happiness-a fixation, she writes, that often invokes a crisis of happiness as a means of arguing for a return to older social values. As she explains,

Happiness is looked for where it is expected to be found, even when happiness is reported as missing. What is striking is that the crisis of happiness has not put social ideals into question and if anything has reinvigorated their hold over both psychic and political life. The demand for happiness is increasing articulated as a demand to return to social ideals, as if what explains the crisis of happiness is not the failure of these ideals but our failure to follow them. And arguably at times of crisis, the language of happiness acquires an even more powerful hold… . (7).

<10> Setting aside the perhaps unanswerable and, as Ahmed would argue, ideologically fraught question of whether or not Facebook makes people unhappy, what is interesting about the extent to which the site has become the subject of our contemporary fixation on happiness is that the focus of much of this scrutiny is not really concerned with Facebook itself, but with how participants should ideally construct themselves as subjects in relationship to Facebook. This emphasis on the subject is immediately apparent in the news stories cited above, both of which report that the primary reason that users feel unhappy after spending time on Facebook is not a characteristic of the social networking site itself, but a characteristic of the way that participants use the social networking site: their propensity to compare themselves negatively to status updates of their friends. It is also apparent in the Kross‘s study and many of the other studies about the emotional affect of Facebook-studies that, as Ahmed writes about the work of Richard Yanard and other proponents of the "new science of happiness" (4) are constructed around a "very specific model of subjectivity, where one knows how one feels, and where the distinction between good and bad feelings is secure, forming the basis of subjective as well as social well-being" (6). Understood in this sense, our contemporary preoccupation with the question of Facebook and happiness is symptomatic of a larger ideological strategy in which, according to Ahmed, happiness is not only "used to redescribe social norms as social goods" (2), but functions in this capacity to preempt, if not deflect, a more sustained examination of the underlying social, economic, and political conditions.

<11>Ahmed‘s suggestion that happiness serves to mask the material realities of socioeconomic and cultural production is especially relevant to Facebook, which, despite the way that it appears in Kross‘s study and in many of the accompanying news stories, is hardly a neutral or disinterested party. Facebook is, instead, a commercial enterprise. Beholden to shareholders, its profits depend on revenue generated not only from the advertisements that crowd its margins, but from reselling the personal data of participants to advertisers. Yet unlike traditional media ventures, Facebook also depends on participants for content; their status updates, comments, photos, and other contributions provide the basis for the programming from which Facebook‘s generates ad revenue. Facebook‘s profitability thus depends on securing and reproducing what Tiziana Terranova describes as "free labor," that is, the networked immaterial labor that has come to characterize much of the production that takes place on the Internet and in other manifestations of the digital economy.

<12> This free labor, Terranova points out, is crucial to creating and maintaining the commodity value of web sites, commercial or otherwise:

the Internet is about the extraction of value out of continuous, updateable work, and it is extremely labor intensive. It is not enough to produce a good Web site, you need to update it continuously to maintain interest in it and fight off obsolescence. Furthermore, you need updateable equipment (the general intellect is always an assemblage of humans and their machines), in its turn propelled by the intense collective labor of programmers, designers, and workers. . . . It is the labor of the designers and programmers that shows through a successful Web site, and it is the spectacle of that labor changing its product that keeps the users coming back. The commodity, then, is only as good as the labor that goes into it. (48)

<13> Yet, while she acknowledges that the majority of this labor is unpaid, she also acknowledges that it is "not necessarily exploited labor" (48). Recognizing that Internet communities have a long history of acknowledging the significance of free labor, especially in regards to traditionally masculinized endeavors such as the Open Source movement, she states that it is simplistic to describe the Internet as a pure gift economy or as a site of wholesale capitalist exploitation. Instead, she argues that free labor represents a rearticulation of work in late-capitalism, one which is symptomatic of the material exigencies of the contemporary moment. As she explains,

In the overdeveloped countries, the end of the factory has spelled out the obsolescence of the old working class, but it has also produced generations of workers who have been repeatedly addressed as active consumers of meaningful commodities. Free labor is the moment where this knowledgeable consumption of culture is translated into productive activities that are pleasurably embraced and at the same time often shamelessly exploited. (37)

<14> It is perhaps not surprising, in this sense, that both psychological studies and the popular media have turned to happiness as a means of measuring Facebook‘s economic value. Indeed, if Terranova is correct in stating above that free labor represents the moment when the "knowledgeable consumption of culture is translated into productive activities that are pleasurably embraced and at the same time often shamelessly exploited" (37), then happiness becomes the ideal measurement-the wage-through which this work is quantified.

A Cracked Speculum: Facebook, Social Life, Narcissism, and Happiness

<15> Although Facebook‘s games, like its advertisements, are often relegated to its margins, they nevertheless serve as yet another of its already abundant array of tools through which users are commodified as data. Flash-based, and, according to a 2009 Nielson study, immensely popular with women and older audiences, many of these games are explicitly staged as a return to a time that, in keeping with the formulation that Ahmed offers above, is imagined as simpler, more traditional, and therefore happier. The games in Zynga‘s Farmville franchise, for example, offer players the fantasy of a relatively uncomplicated agrarian life, one that is predicated on the always positive accumulation of grinning cows, chickens, and other accoutrements of rural, bucolic bliss. Zynga‘s Castleville and Frontierville are constructed around the same premise. Featuring bright, two dimensional graphics and a click-based model of game play, they present players with a chance to participate in an idealized past in which high technology is minimally present both within the worlds of the games and in the interfaces through which these worlds are packaged. Much of the same can be said for King‘s Candy Crush Saga, in which the spectacle of ritually consuming hundreds upon hundreds of brightly-colored candies is justified by a narrative of restoring happiness to the demihuman and animal denizens of a sprawling, sugary fantasy world. As players wind their way upwards through zones whose names recall the conventions of the board game Candyland, they encounter and pass (or are passed by) their friends, who, like fellow pilgrims, are present as icons along the candy-striped path. Candy Crush thus presents players with a map to happiness, one that is not only demarcated and quantified by levels, but that also measures the personal progress of players in comparison to that of their friends.

<16> One of the best examples of games that use happiness as a metric for measuring the progression of a projected self is Tyler Project‘sSocial Life. Heir-apparent to Electronic Arts‘ now defunct Sims Social and its clone, Zynga‘s also defunct The Ville, Social Life affords players the chance to escape to a presumably simpler, happier time: the freedom and excitement of early adulthood. Accordingly, Social Life adopts many of the core mechanics popularized by the games in Electronic Art‘s Sims franchise. It gives players control of an avatar and allows them to manage specific elements of the avatar‘s behavior as they work to improve its affluence within the game either by leveling up its character traits, professions, and interpersonal relationships, or by upgrading its house and wardrobe. While Social Life characterizes much of this gameplay as "design" and "customization," it is perhaps more accurate to describe it as consumerism in that players must spend their avatar‘s energy or otherwise purchase "Diamonds" from Tyler Projects in order to acquire the trapping of success: not only furnishings, clothing, and similar markers of material status, but hairstyles, facial expressions, and body parts. Players are thus only afforded the freedom to design and customize their avatars in proportion to the amount of time that they are willing to dedicate to the game (time that is measured in the slowly regenerating energy of their avatars) or the amount of money they are willing to invest.

<17> As with the games in the Sims franchise, then, Social Life does not as much simulate real life, but what, according to Guy Debord, is the essence of the "real unreality" (5) of the spectacle in contemporary capitalism: "a social relationship between people that is mediated by images" (5). That is, it presents players with a virtual world "at once a faithful mirror held up to the production of things and a distorting objectification of the producers" (7). As he explains,

the spectacle in its full development is money‘s modern aspect; in the spectacle the totality of the commodity world is visible in one piece, as the general equivalent of whatever society as a whole can be and do. The spectacle is money for contemplation only, for here the totality of use has already been bartered for the totality of abstract representation. The spectacle is not just the servant of pseudo­use, it is already in itself a pseudo-use of life. (14)

<18> This point is perhaps most obvious in the houses that the player‘s avatars occupy. Constructed almost entirely through commodified images, these houses are furnished with a variety of items, each of which is ultimately as much a representation of a material object as it is a material relationship. Indeed, in addition to being assigned a specific value in either Zenys or Diamonds, many of the objects in the house are associated with specific actions, social or otherwise, which players can command their avatars to perform by clicking on the objects. By clicking on a chair or sofa, for instance, players can make their avatars sit. Clicking on a guitar yields a number of commands such as "Compose," "Play ballad," or "Play Fave Song." While not all of these commands cost energy to perform, they are nevertheless associated with and often generate alternative units of currency such as "Mics," "Melodies," or "Hearts" -units that are themselves manifested as commodified images and that are required to complete quests or satisfy other objectives.

<19> Much of the same can be said for the avatars in the game. Pieced together from commodified images-interchangeable articles of clothing that often double as body parts-they also function within the game as accumulations of surplus value. As with almost every other item in the game, clicking on avatars allows players to mine them in order to extract the Zenys and other requisite units of currency needed to advance. Understood in this sense, Social Life adopts as its central aesthetic and mode of gameplay what, to Debord, is the "prevailing model of social life" (5) as it is manifested in the spectacle:

An earlier stage in the economy‘s domination of social life entailed an obvious downgrading of being into having that left its stamp on all human endeavor. The present stage, in which social life is completely taken over by the accumulated products of the economy, entails a generalized shift from having to appearing: all effective "having" must now derive both its immediate prestige and its ultimate raison d‘etre from appearances. At the same time all individual reality, being directly dependent on social power and completely shaped by that power, has assumed a social character. Indeed, it is only inasmuch as individual reality is not that it is allowed to appear. (7)

<20> Yet if there is a crucial difference, though, between Social Life and the games in Electronic Art‘s Sims franchise, it is that in Social Life, players are forced to play themselves. Indeed, although players are afforded a considerably amount of leeway in designing their avatars, they are not given the option of naming them. As with the avatar‘s birth date, this detail is instead supplied by information mined from the player‘s Facebook profile. More disquieting, Social Life appears to generate avatars based on the player‘s ethnic identity. As we discovered, a black woman who creates an avatar is initially assigned a black female avatar, while a white man is assigned a Caucasian male avatar, further commodifying race and gender. Social Life thus presents players with virtual versions of themselves, avatars that are constructed in much of the same way that the players are themselves constructed on Facebook -that is, as amalgamations of commodified data that are fetishized as images.

<21> Accordingly, players can only act in Social Life through the fetishized images, the avatars, that represent them. Even then, they can only act through their avatars by clicking on objects in the game. Social Life thus constructs gameplay as an essentially alienated series of actions that is never performed by players themselves, but by the avatars that represent them, a feature of many computer games. In doing so, it encodes what, to Debord, is the sense of fragmentation that defines the relationship between the spectator and the spectacle:

The spectator‘s alienation from and submission to the contemplated object

. . . works like this: the more he contemplates, the less he lives; the more readily he recognizes his own needs in the images of need proposed by the dominant system, the less he understands his own existence and desires. The spectacle‘s externality with respect to the acting subject is demonstrated by the fact that the individual‘s gestures are no longer his own, but rather those of someone else who represents him. (10)

<22> Social Life, however, is unique because it constructs this as an inherently narcissistic relationship. Employing an oblique, third person camera perspective, it provides players with an uninterrupted, panoptic view as their avatars not only carry out their commands, but, in keeping with the conventions of the Sims, cook, clean, and entertain themselves independently of any intervention on the part of the player. Players are thus interpellated into the game as both the agents of and witnesses to their own subjugation. As Kevin Moberly has argued elsewhere, they are trapped in a "schizophrenic and panoptic regime of surveillance and counter-surveillance" (225). As such, they "do not produce themselves," but as Debord writes about workers, "produce a force independent of themselves. The success of this production, that is, the abundance it generates, is experienced by its producers only as an abundance of dispossession. All time, all space, becomes foreign to them as their own alienated products accumulate" (10).

<23> Social Life thus takes as its predominant mode of gameplay what many psychological studies have identified as the primary indicators of narcissistic behavior on Facebook. Christopher J. Carpenter, for example, associates Grandiose Exhibitionism-of which superiority and vanity are subset features-with specific behaviors on Facebook such as amassing a high friend count, accepting friend requests from strangers, and frequently posting new content to this audience in order to focus attention on the selves that they curate (483). Similarly, a study performed by Soraya Mehdizadeh found that college women who display strong streaks of narcissism are more likely to "include revealing, flashy, and adorned photos of their physical appearance" in their profiles and to use more promotional Main Photos as self-promotional tools (361). This suggests that for women-who are more likely to play social games than men-it is Facebook‘s visual elements that provide the most effective means of promoting, tending to, and caring for the online self. In a 2012 study, Elliot T. Paneka, Yioryos Nardis and Sara Konrath also investigated the basic features of social networking sites that support narcissistic behaviors. They found that for "adults high in narcissism, social media seems to be used primarily as a means of intensely focusing on one‘s own appearance" and that for "adults who are high in narcissism, Facebook appears to be more useful as a means of conveying one‘s superiority" (2010). Reporting that "Facebook status updates and Twitter posts increased as narcissism rose," they also found that "Facebook‘s use by both college students and adults who are high in narcissism is more analogous to the use of a technologically enhanced mirror, reflecting a pre-occupation with one‘s own image, others‘ reactions to this image, and a desire to update the image as frequently as possible" (2010).

<24> If Facebook offers participants a distorted mirror of themselves, Social Life does one better: it offers them a distorted mirror of the reflections they construct on Facebook.

It offers a body to dress and a space to inhabit-and then to improve. The player‘s Main Photo identifies her, hovering over the head of the animated character. Her touching, mocking, hugging, fighting, and teasing of her friends imitates the structure of the likes, the wall posts, the comments, the tagging that she can do to interact with their profiles (although with notable qualification, as argued below). In the space of play, the home, the player can paper the walls, carpet and tile the floor. She can purchase a wardrobe and fill it with clothing. She can change the color of her bed and buy a ducky tub that is too big to fit in the house. All of her appliances and furnishings yield to better versions that increase in value and ornamentation -even as these better versions perform no better than their predecessors. Finally, she can buy pretty items that are completely useless to her progression such as decorative food items, plants, and light fixtures. The tending of the home extends the tending of the profile, spatializing the care for the virtual self. As Debord writes about the spectacle, this is "at once a faithful mirror held up to the production of things and a distorting objectification of the producers" (7).

<25> Happiness is a primary unit of exchange through which all these reflections are evaluated. The player surrounds herself with objects that make her happy, with that happiness broken into arenas of self-care: hunger, amusement, hygiene, and tiredness. By making happiness its objective, Social Life requires that the player and her avatar turn toward objects to make happiness (Ahmed 300-301). Not only does happiness originate from a point outside the subject (these objects make the avatar and, by extension, the player happy) but the avatar‘s intimate proximity to virtual things quantifiably generates happiness, its making made literal. By eating food, reading Manga, dancing to music, showering, washing hands, watching television, or playing games, the green bars that quantify the avatar‘s happiness fill in measurable increments. The player engages in the labor of producing happiness by seeking it outside the subject, manufacturing it by interacting with useful, needful objects. In Social Life, happiness without objects is impossible. This happiness, however, is unattainable except in short bursts, flurries of activity limited by the yellow energy bar next to avatar‘s portrait. Fifteen units in volume, the player depletes this resource by performing activities geared toward ensuring the avatar‘s long-term happiness: her aptitude in literacy, her strength, her charisma, her advancement in her career. Happiness in Social Life is a happiness always deferred but subject to multiple levels of commodification, the most punitive of which is the need to spend USD to buy packages of diamonds to access the best items in the game, to keep energy levels high enough to rapidly advance the player‘s career, and even to speak in the global chat.

<26> The promise of happiness made by Social Life is thus bound up in the affective phenomenon described by Lauren Berlant as cruel optimism, defined as the relation that develops when "something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing." Optimistic relations are never "inherently cruel. They become cruel only when the object that draws your attachment actively impedes the aim that brought you to it initially" (1). Social Life depends upon a happiness always sought, always just beyond reach. The game cheats the player of happiness by offering its pursuit as a target that can never be sustained or easily met except in teasing increments designed to entice the player to pay for it. The first house in the game other than the player‘s own that she encounters is that of an NPC friend, Seira, who orients the player in the game. As she is a function of the tutorial, the player cannot avoid this visit if she wishes to progress along the quest lines that the game offers, nor if she wishes to act with any autonomy at all in the game, as features do not open unless the player completes the steps that initiate her in their use. Seira‘s house is designed to arouse envy. Shown the potential of her home, the player is enticed to watch Seira‘s flatscreen television, to play with her next-gen video game platform, to use her sleek computer, to bathe in her giant ducky tub. Every item in her cluttered, crowded house, from the decorative cakes on the cafe table to the dress that Seira wears to the espresso machine on the counter, costs either enormous amounts of Zenys or diamonds-mostly the latter, which are parceled out in penurious amounts in gameplay but are available to purchase in bulk using USD. The game‘s most desirable items are the least attainable through the game‘s conventional avenues of achievement. The game therefore rewards instant gratification if the player is willing to pay the game‘s currency-along multiple vectors-to acquire virtual property.

<27> A cracked speculum of Facebook‘s unhappy intimacy-making machinery, the global chat (for which the player must pay diamonds to use) commodifies even the player‘s voice. One cannot speak without paying. (The commodification of voice in Social Life is similar to the commodification of individual updates on Facebook. A user is able to amplify her voice by paying to promote status updates so that they appear at the top of the feeds of her friends.) However, Social Life‘s global chat offers no true connections between players. Because the player must make friends to advance along the game‘s career paths and to complete its quest lines, the global chat feature is a chorus of pleas in multiple languages to "please add me," "please friend me." The game‘s key feature-playing with one‘s social network-yields to plaintive calls from outside the player‘s friends list. In this way, not only is the player‘s happiness bound up in enticing friends and relatives to become neighbors (a coercive aspect of play designed to lure additional consumers who will also pay to win) but the game‘s stress on useful friendships fractures the possibilities for gratifying intimacy as the need for friends translates the bonds of friendship into a commodifiable resource, a transaction in virtual currency. Against its design, the game polarizes the nature of friendship by integrating networks of friends into gameplay. Succeeding in Social Life relies upon building friendships that welcome others into the home: these friends enter the player‘s living space, use her things, interact with her by chatting, insulting, fighting, or falling in love with the player. Yet these interactions can occur between complete strangers who friend and interact with one another in an intimate fashion for the sole purpose of achieving the game‘s objectives. Meanwhile, the game traffics in the illusion of real interactions with others. Once one player has friended another in the game, Social Life creates a clone of his space. While appearing to depend upon and nurture relationships with people, the game provides the illusion of interactivity. When the player uses her friend and his space to increase her friendship with him, he exists only as a projection into her space. They therefore do not share real time-just the commodified data that they create.

<28> Facebook as a social medium also cultivates relations of cruel optimism because the very connectivity that draws people into contact with one another thwarts the connectivity that people seek when they create pages, post updates, upload pictures, tag each other, and invite one another to games. Facebook‘s capacity to alienate its users and the cruelty of its proffered optimism is particularly observable when Facebook users friend strangers met only through Facebook and then use Facebook as a platform for both finding and maintaining these friendships. The modes of attachment that draw us to Facebook cheat us of the intimacy of sharing even as this intimacy is intimated by the function of sharing itself.

<29> This paradox is not what makes the attachments to Facebook cruel; what makes them cruel is that, despite the thwarting of these attachments, Facebook yet manages to stoke the specific pleasures that entice users to continue cultivating Facebook friendships, even as study after study supports the claim that these pleasures are transitory and illusory at best, exploitative at worst. Additionally cruel is the sense of possible intimacy Facebook "ignites," however impossible it is to attain the "expansive transformation" for which people strive as they use it (Berlant 2). Facebook offers instantaneous intimacy with multitudes; the self can expand to limitless dimensions. Meanwhile, the more the user plays on Facebook, the deeper her unhappiness. At the same time, Facebook sells the user‘s data to the hordes of bidders whose interest in her marches in blocks down the right panel of the screen and pursues her even when she is not using Facebook. The very relations that sustain her Facebook presence become threatening: privacy broached, the limitless self falls prey to its own exposure, sustained by its friendships with carefully tailored projections and then made unhappy by them, targeted by marketing efforts that bind friendships to layered forms of commodification, profoundly confirmed as it is profoundly threatened (Berlant 2).

Single White Avatar: Envy, Impossibility, and other Deceptions

<30> The designers of many of the social games on Facebook market their products to women, who themselves become Facebook products saleable to the third-party advertisers who vie for their money. According to a 2012 survey conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, of the two thirds of all online adults who use Facebook, 72 percent are women, while 62 percent are men. A 2010 survey conducted for PopCap Games by Information Solutions Group found that more women than men play social games on Facebook, and over half of the survey participants cited friendly competition on leaderboards and achievements as the games‘ key appeal beyond social interaction. Although these survey results predate Social Life, they are nevertheless pertinent to Social Life because of the role that envy plays in motivating the player to excel. The desire for objects is not isolated to that aroused by scrolling through menus of increasingly expensive dresses, shirts, television, weight sets, bedding, and home appliances. It is also stoked by the spectacle of Seira‘s home and the desirable objects she owns, as well as the homes of her friends who play. The friendly competition encouraged by this game and cited as the most common reason why players play social networking games becomes a virtual exercise in "keeping up with the Joneses," the same impulse that, in many psychological studies, informs the manner in which unhappiness and narcissism predict how users view each other on Facebook.

<31> As Ahmed writes about happiness, this focus on player envy places misapplied emphasis on the agency of players, so that Facebook appears to be a neutral entity. This view holds that players feel bad because Facebook hurts their tender feelings, revealing the weaknesses of esteem that afflict us all. In doing so, it disguises the fact that the reason that Facebook users continue to cynically participate in Facebook‘s exploitative forms of commodification is because the site valorizes the "happiness" of the immaterial labor of creating themselves as saleable products and paying to play its games. Although these exploitative practices emerge every time Facebook changes its privacy policies, the blame for any anxiety that Facebook produces is consistently attributed to the fact that users lack the requisite strength of character to use Facebook properly-that is, the immaterial labor of managing their content, learning and implementing increasingly byzantine privacy settings, and projecting appropriately happy, moral selves.

<32> In keeping with the psychological studies on narcissism in Facebook cited above, this means that participants must learn to manage their ugly feelings. In her book Ugly Feelings, Sianne Ngai identifies envy as a feeling that impedes feminist solidarity precisely because of its feminization and its moralization as a negative emotion as a reflection of a "petty or ‘diseased‘ selfhood" (130). The casting of envy as a diseased, hysterical, feminine notion cheats this particular ugly feeling of its critical potential and "points to a larger cultural anxiety over antagonistic responses to inequality that are made specifically by women" (130). Envy thus has dire implications for feminist critical praxis when it reduces the antagonisms between women thinkers to violent, hysterical, even murderous terms. Antagonistic relations between them become subject to distortion as emulation and aggression characterize the critical postures that feminist thinkers assume against one another, and in ways that offer little potential to productively harness the volatile energies of these negative relations. In her work, Ngai analyzes the film Single White Female, observing how the film pathologizes desire and identification by dramatizing how these feelings slide quickly into envy, as the film‘s villainess confuses object with subject, directing her fury at the latter and foreclosing possibilities for solidarity (141).

<33> While the violence of the feminine antagonisms in Single White Female is ostensibly absent from Social Life, it nevertheless lurks beneath the game‘s cartoony surface in the ugly feelings aroused by Seira‘s house. In encouraging the confusion of subject (or a lack of it, as Seira is an NPC) with the objects she possesses, the game "raises important questions about aggression, gender, and group formation that fully pertain to the conflicts -and the conflicts about the political value of conflict-in feminism today" (Ngai 161), but along an unlikely axis. Unlike the antagonism between Hedy and Allie in Single White Female, Social Life presents no possibility for annihilating the spaces that the player seeks to imitate. Lacking the possibility to change her space or to take or borrow her things, the player can only imitate without achieving contact or solidarity, unable even to destroy that which she envies so that she can take its place, confined within a framework of futile duplication.

<34> However, the envy that is latent in the friendly competition in Social Life does replicate the larger framework of alienation that undermines solidarity as Ngai suggests. Social Life‘s structures of envy speak to the role that envy plays in the unhappiness that Facebook creates: as psychological studies have reported, people see what others have and appropriate that as templates for their own productions of self. The result is an endless progression of what, writing about Single White Female, Ngai characterizes as "bad examples":

in envying and imitating Allie, Hedy is able to transform Allie into an example-something that appears "after the fashion" of a category already defined-voided of its exemplarity. Allie becomes an example that does not exemplify-a particular instance or manifestation of X (female twoness or compoundedness) that does not refer "back" to X as a value already in place. In other words, in being emulated, Allie comes to embody and exemplify a standard that cannot be positively defined or located-that has no ontological coherence or consistency-prior to its exemplification. (159-60)

<35> Much of the same happens in both Social Life and Facebook. In both spaces, users model their performances on absent, idealized versions of other selves, simulacra for which the original not only never existed and which, in their disappearance, come to exemplify virtues worthy of emulation. In Social Life, this tendency takes a mostly benevolent appearance as, caught up in friendly competition, users buy diamonds as a shortcut to filling their living spaces with the desirable objects that Seira already owns. In Facebook, however, this activity is much more indirect in that, caught up in narcissistic competition, users engage in self-production and self-commodification. They acquiesce reluctantly to changes in Facebook‘s terms of usage that grant increasingly invasive exposure to their data-but they acquiesce nonetheless, using Facebook logins as shortcuts across other sites. All the while, Facebook owns the data that users create as they perform the work of assembling themselves as commodified objects, just as Social Life grants illusory ownership of the virtual property that users buy as they decorate themselves and their spaces.

<36> Social Life‘s and Facebook‘s envious relations perhaps affords the possibility of critical praxis-but only by understanding how Facebook and its games offer idealized, sugary, carefully manicured versions of commodified selves surrounded by illusory objects that themselves are designed to force the user to align herself with other products served up for her consumption. These mechanisms conceal themselves in the friendly networks of competition that actually make people unhappy. Meanwhile, users are told that they are to blame for their own unhappiness. Implicit in the media coverage of Kross‘ study cited above is the notion that, if users would only use or view Facebook in the correct way, they would be happier. Facebook‘s unhappiness-making and the envious, cruel work of its games thus open avenues to consider how they manage their users and commodify them. This requires, however, that users strip Facebook and its games of their veneer to peer into their workings and to observe how they convert subjects (users) into objects (products). Ngai writes: "Envy‘s critical potential thus resides in its ability to highlight a refusal to idealize quality X, even an ability to attack its potential for idealization by transforming X into something nonsingular and replicable, while at the same time enabling acknowledgment of its culturally imposed desirability" (161-162). It is this refusal that draws our eyes away from Facebook‘s shiny offerings and toward its capacity to construct a business model around a happiness only cruelly promised.

<37> Envy‘s best usage is therefore the following: it is to understand that Facebook is largely detached from the significance of the profile even as it proffers the profile as its reason for being. Even as we turn away from Facebook, lifting our eyes from the page and deactivating our profiles, Facebook will be sustained, not by the users, but by the advertisers into whose easy reach we are put. Once our capital is literally exhausted, once the user proves to be a source of revenue no longer, only then will Facebook wither. The math is deceptively simple: once the expensive to post ads on Facebook outweighs the revenue they generate, advertisers will move toward a different medium to capitalize on their message and then Facebook will cease to be relevant. Facebook‘s privacy policies therefore gravitate toward the advertiser for a reason that is not at all difficult to comprehend.

<38> Facebook thus capitalizes upon several deceptions that it sells users, and one deception that we sell to ourselves. Facebook‘s prevarications include the lie that we will be able to maintain close contact with our friends when that contact is highly mediated and when people are repeatedly cautioned to monitor it closely, lest personal and professional relationships fall prey to the punitive gaze of others. Another is that our individual profile page is Facebook‘s driving force when, in fact, it is the pulsing updates to the small print cluttering the bar to the right of my feed that is Facebook‘s beating heart: the advertisers who shadow us even when we log out. There are other lies, other oblique promises, other unstated, unpalatable truths. Yet these are less important than the deception that Facebook sells us and allows us to repeat to ourselves with every posted photo, weblink, and update. This is also the deception upon which much of what passes for gameplay in Social Life is predicated, namely the lie that "You are the person Facebook allows you to be."

<39> As with Social Life, there may be hiccups and breakups, but this deception prevails because it allows us to indulge in our fantasies of prosperity and ethical wellbeing and to access the fantasies of others, even as we know, cynically, that these are fictions that we tell ourselves. Berlant writes that her study of cruel optimism places at the center of its attention "that moral-intimate-economic thing called ‘the good life.‘ She goes on to ask:

Why do people stay attached to conventional good-life fantasies-say, of enduring reciprocity in couples, families, political systems, institutions, markets, and at work-when the evidence of their instability, fragility, and dear cost abounds? Fantasy is the means by which people hoard idealizing theories and tableaux about how they and the world "add up to something." What happens when those fantasies start to fray-depression, dissociation, pragmatism, cynicism, optimism, activism, or an incoherent mash? (2)

<40> If study after study affirms that these fraying fantasies are what underwrite our collective, disenchanting affective attachments to Facebook, and if its games build upon and then commodify these dysfunctions, then Facebook and its games serve as participants in the ever-broadening, cacophonous "historical sensorium" for which we must develop strategies of adjustment in order to shore up our sense of what it means to make ourselves happy. This making of the happy self occurs not just in the happiness of play (play makes me happy, being on Facebook makes me happy) but in the assembly of a happy life by amassing happy objects-I make myself a happy self by posting updates and photos that create my profile and timeline, and by building a living space and neighborhood in Social Life. These selves are not only fictive in that they do not exist, although this understanding of the assembled selves peopling Facebook profiles structures the studies that attempt to peer past the envious ache that stabs us as we view what others are doing. These selves are fictive because they are skillfully made selves, artificial in the most basic sense of the created thing, the ἔντεχνος. Facebook and its games erect fantasies of the good life we would like others to imagine that we live as our lives both within and outside Facebook become "a landfill for overwhelming and impending crises of life-building and expectation whose sheer volume so threatens what it has meant to ‘have a life‘ that adjustment seems like an accomplishment" (Berlant 3).


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