What does it mean to be “vital” as opposed to “viral” in this era of digital, informational excess, sociopolitical instability and ecological catastrophe?
Last week I released this song, “Don’t Be Viral (Just Be Vital)” — it’s the second installment in an ongoing series examining the status of art, education and personal identity in the Digital Age. Its fundamental thesis is that we are inundating ourselves with an ever more suffocating layering of informational excess — a phenomenon I call metafication, wherein the layers of self-presentation and virtual re-presentation that we place upon the world come to obscure our access to the world itself, and our capacities for flourishing. The series seeks to describe this phenomenon through both philosophical and personal lenses, and to offer ethical frameworks for dealing with it. See here for the introductory essay.
The stakes of being “viral” or “vital” extend far beyond aesthetic trends or personal well-being — virality now shapes the very structure of power. In an era where influence is dictated by digital reach, virality can propel individuals to astonishing political heights, as for instance Trump’s newly appointed FBI director and others who have risen to power through the force of online momentum. Moreover, the digital landscapes in which these power shifts occur are controlled by axes of technocracy that comes to affect every aspect of our lives.
This piece examines the ethical, psychological, and sociological implications of “virality” across these various domains, with particular attention to its spiritual dimensions and ramifications.
As is the case with my method of “rhapsodic pedagogy”, I like to explore concepts like these not only through analytical essays, but through songs — which, as I’ll expand upon in the next installment, is in fact the original vessel for philosophical discourse, one that is often more “vital” than expository prose.
And so here, instead of supplementing it with a separate prosaic appendage, I’d like to indulge in a lyrical analysis of the song I’ve posted here, to expand more thoroughly on the concepts it explores with poetic compression. (You may want to listen to and/or watch the music video first, and then read the analysis second.)
And now without further ado, let us ask — Viral? or Vital?
You can tell a lot about what we value from the words that we use.
Etymologies are my favorite starting place for conceptual analysis. Since language in many ways conditions our experience, discovering the root meaning of a word is something like pulling up the hood of your consciousness, and having a look around the engine. Discovering words’ origins can not only shed light on how our thinking works, but even some of the ethical structures that may spring from that understanding.
There’s a quote from the Roman philosopher Seneca on this point —
Mira in quibusdam rebus verborum proprietas est, et consuetudo sermonis antiqui quædam efficacissimis et officia docentibus notis signat.
There’s a wonderful accuracy in certain words; and the usage of ancient terminology signifies certain things with extremely effective indications of the duties implicit in them. (Epistle LXXXI).
Without getting into the weeds of asserting that we can in fact get an “ought” from an “is” (which I think we actually can, in a sense), the implicit claim of this song is going to be that the root meanings of these words “vital” and “viral” imply the following ethical propositions: 1) life is good and 2) devoting your life to going viral isn’t.
For instance, sometimes I think about the word “viral”, and how “going viral” is something you can do with your life. …Which is ironic, because “viral” literally means something antithetical to life — from the Latin virus, which literally means “poison”.
The antithesis works in two senses — both in the sense of poison as a substance that terminates the life-force, and in the modern biological sense, in that a virus is typically understood as a non-living, mechanical process, exhibiting no agency or organicity, as opposed to a living cell or bacterium.
I could spend my life trying to spread like a virus.
It boggles the mind that so much of the power dynamics of our current lifeworld rest upon this function of “going viral” — careers begin this way, fame and fortune are accrued this way, power is obtained this way — power that can ultimately have political and cultural exigencies reaching far beyond the casually “social” domains ostensibly offered by social media. “Virality” in current discourse is almost exactly synonymous with “success”. The way to be powerful in this life is to be poison-like in the sense of spreading one’s self, or the image of that self, in the manner of a virus.
In some ways I feel like I have actually been seeking to do this over the past years — to be a poison, even if an ostensibly salutary one — and that this song, and this series of which it’s a part, are my way out. Beneath all this analysis is a deep psychological need to heal myself of a certain cart-before-the-horseness that has taken over my consciousness in these years of digital self-promotion, this dubious and sometimes psychopathic content creation career. (Thanks for subscribing btw 🙃)
On the other hand, from the Latin word for life, vita, we get the word “vital” — and so, “vital” means “living”, and “viral” is what destroys it.
Vita is from the Indo-European root *gwei-. It shows up in Latinate words with a “v-” consonant, and in Hellenic words with a “b-”, hence it is also directly related to bio-, as in biology, or biography, or “link in bio.”
To be viral implies self-replication in endless iterations of your own code or image.
Modern biological science understands a virus as an “obligate intracellular parasite" — it requires a host cell in order to replicate its DNA, and that replication of itself is effectively its only function. The “host” in this analogy can be understood on one level as digital space itself; but it can also be understood as human attention, and human consciousness — the space in our daily thoughts and attention taken up by viral content, by the accidental or intentional proliferation of the image of someone or something, or ourselves.
This analogy also relates to meme theory, or memetics, as explored by Richard Dawkins and Susan Blackmore. The viral spread of memes online is only one form of a para-biological structure also seen in the spread of ideas (e.g. religious ideas, political ideologies) in human minds, which, like viruses, are inorganic and yet exhibit a kind of agency in their vast replicative and evolutionary success.
To be vital is to affirm the relations that make up your being, for to live is to live with.
In this line I’m making a very compressed metaphysical claim about the structure of matter, and the structure of reality.
Aristotle asserted that there were ten fundamental categories of being, coterminous with the categories of thought — substance, quantity, quality, place, time, situation, condition, action, passion, and relation. Among these, “substance”, the “being” of the thing itself, he considered primary, and the others are effectively sub-categories that account for the different ways that beings can be.
My own metaphysical viewpoint, for which I’m mostly indebted to A.N. Whitehead, is that in fact the fundamental category is relation — there is no such thing as “independent” being — to be is always to be with. This alternative view is not unique to Whitehead; it can also be found in the thought of other “process” philosophers like Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze. We call them “process” philosophers because they emphasize the fluid, changing process of things over fixed, eternal being.
Another implicit view I take from Whitehead is that not only is reality fundamentally relational, it is also fundamentally alive, in a generously expanded sense of that term. The ever-interrelating processes that make up the world are not only physical, they are also psychical, in that the various relations we find them expressing (like the interaction of particles in the strong and weak nuclear forces, for instance) are expressions of a sort of vital agency rather than an impersonal mechanical force imposed on them by “laws of nature.” This is arguably a more parsimonious view, since otherwise, where did those laws of nature come from? (One might say “God” —I do indeed think there is God, but a God who does not so much impose, as invite. More on this later.)
I'm not saying that it's bad to go viral.
Ngl all this aside I’d still fucking love to.
But why not be a cell that lives well with the host? Why not be content? …And in the way you live, and in the content that you post…
Good question, Nathan. Why not? Why not just “be”, instead of "conflating “being” with “being seen”? My life is a long experiment in sluggishly applying the advice offered by my own philosophy songs.
Don't be viral, just be vital —
If you vibe with just your side, that's suicidal —
Given the organismic structure of the world offered here, if an entity’s imperative of self-preservation becomes too strong, such that its actions vitiate the well-being of the whole, that entity is literally being suicidal, insofar as the satisfaction of its self-interested purposes will also neutralize the substratum of its existence.
When you find your mind divided,
Then be mindful that the final
Light inside you lives to find you.
It's divine.
In addition to needing to hear these words myself, I’m glad to say that this is one of those songs that musically arrived rather than having to be constructed. There can be structures of virality even within one’s own mind, where a certain part of the psyche dwells parasitically, destructively and obsessively on the larger whole. Aspects of my creative work have sometimes had this internally viral tendency, contorting my being, instrumentalizing it, making me the tool of myself — which, as you might imagine, doesn’t even end up making for very vital creative works.
In this case, the song invited me — rather than invading me from within, in the manner of a virus.
What is meant here by invoking the “divine”? If we don’t need God to impose laws on cosmic process — if the entities themselves generate those laws as patterns of elective interrelation among themselves — then do we have a need for God at all?
Along with Whitehead, I would say Yes. The forms of relation offered to creation are divine in origin, in that possibility precedes actuality. Those who know about philosophy controversies will recognize that a very distinct gauntlet has just been thrown. This view precedes from my (unprovable) conviction that free will is real. For there to be freedom among the entities that interrelate, there have to be possibilities offered for their interrelation. For there to be possibilities, there has to be a place or entity in which those possibilities reside, since everything that exists needs to exist somewhere. Hence, I have a sense that there is a transcendent source that offers relational forms to the matrix of the cosmic process.
That’s the loquacious, argumentative version. The simpler version is that there’s a Source, and the Source regards us. The even simpler version is that I love God.
Don't be viral, just be vital.
Don't blindly value that by which you're lied to —
Notwithstanding the fact that I spend so much time writing and thinking about it, it still amazes me how much energy and time we give these platforms that are demonstrably designed to manipulate us. Like all effective manipulation, it rarely takes the form of outright untruths — rather, it takes the form of inundating us with things that are true, in such a way that we become ironically disconnected from reality and truth itself.
For your life's not measured by
How many like you or subscribe to
What your finite self’s confined to —
You're divine.
Relational beings that we are, it is almost irresistible to measure your worth by your recognition. I sometimes conceptualize this with another dichotomy, between kleos and kenosis.
The former, kleos, is the cornerstone of the archaic Greek value system — the “glory” or “honor” that it was the duty of the ancient hero to obtain: to live beyond death by remaining on the lips of poets and in the minds of men, ages hence — Heracles, Achilles, Odysseus, etc.. In this view, to be = to be known.
But from a Christian viewpoint, which, broadly speaking, comes to replace the Classical worldview derived from the one above, the fundamental relation is not ultimately between creatures and other creatures, but between each creature and its Creator. Hence kenosis, the word St. Paul uses in Philippians 2:7 to describe the “emptying” to which Christ consented in His worldly incarnation. Insofar as the creature is willing to empty their own finitude, they enter into union with the infinite Source whose act of creation is the original self-emptying.
Social media is a kleos machine in what could be a kenosis world. This dichotomy is not as morally stark as the viral-vital one; kleos (glory) is not in and of itself a bad thing. But the moral way to obtain it is to let fall the bounds of one’s finitude, to give oneself to the world, to be the gift, and go back to God — which, arguably, is the way of the true hero.
Don't be viral, just be vital —
For that prize that you would die for is an idol —
Since now we’ve cracked into theology — “You cannot serve both God and Mammon” (Matthew 6:24).
Economically unbalanced as the world currently is, the most relevant form of gain for those of us who don’t already have monetary capital is to build the externally quantifiable social capital offered by views and followers — virality is capital.
If you're vying for rank or title
Then you might as well be idle;
Though the virus is societal,
You'll be fine.
Yes, you will. You already are.
You might have heard it said before:
“Our kind is like a virus” —
A cell within a planet,
Like the cells that live inside us.
We're kinda like a cancer,
We can't help multiplying, thus
It makes it kinda difficult for other cells to vibe with us.
Here is a more common formulation of the ecological metaphor at the heart of this song — that human civilization is a carcinogenic phenomenon. In some cases this is suggested as more than a metaphor, if one takes the ecosophical perspective the planet is in fact a unitary organism (e.g. Gaianism). A cancer is of course a biotic process whereas a virus is abiotic; but the basic analogy works either way. In this sense, virality is what happens when a part of the whole begins to dominate over the other parts, at the expense of the whole’s wellbeing. This conception shows up in various places in eco-philosophy — for instance in Gregory Bateson and Arne Naess.
But are we really akin to a cancer, or a virus for that matter? As we’ll return to in a later section, it may be that this very logic of thinking of oneself or one’s species this way is destructive and unhelpful, and fails to motivate the transformations toward which it aims. Aspects of this thinking were ascendent in the mid-20th Century environmental movement, especially when one of the primary concerns was overpopulation. Consensus about overpopulation has shifted and become more dynamic since then, but the fundamental maybe-it’d-be-better-if-we-weren’t-here-at-all perspective has persisted, for better or worse.
This has ecological consequence,
And also psychosocial technological concomitants —
Another way to formulate the viral-viral dichotomy would be to contrast autogenic (self-making) with ecogenic (home-making) processes — things that merely make more of themselves, vs. things that work with other things to make a home, thus mirroring, or really integrating themselves with, the nature of reality, which exhibits an ecological holism. (Eco- literally = “home.”) We could also say egogenic vs. ecogenic, since it sounds even cuter, though it does illicitly mix Greek and Latin roots.
The technological and ecological aspects of the dichotomy are interrelated. Not only do our viral tendencies in digital space structurally mirror our viral proliferation in the terrestrial ecosphere; but those very technologies require immensities of energy to perpetuate themselves — the physical energy cost of the internet and other media systems. In this sense, immaterial as it may seem, every digital replication of yourself does take up physical space, minuscule though it may be. Its literal mass is negligible (the mass of the electrons used to store information on a device) — but the energy required to store is part of the increasing share of global energy costs taken up by the internet (estimated to be nearly 2%).
Replicate and replicate yourself until you feel
That you've been seen enough by others to convince yourself you're real.
Unless I’m on an extended hiatus from social media — long enough to fully “detox” — I do, in the short term, often have the curious feeling that if I do not post, I do not fully exist.
And so you're caught unconsciously
Locked in the clot of the crossed ideologies,
Clockin’ all your thought in your content constantly —
Kinda hard to sleep and to keep on being a conscious being.
“The clot of crossed ideologies” refers to what has Herbert Marcuse called “the flattening of discourse” — the phenomenon whereby forms of mass media constrain the conceptual imagination of society, congealing it into ideological blocks that are increasingly estranged from one another and unable to see outside themselves, and thus easier to subjugate and control. The major social media platforms almost literally enshrine this model as their modus operandi, well beyond the most vivid prophetic nightmares of Marcuse and other 20th Century critical theorists.
