The Unstreamed World
Metaphysics grounds an age, in that through a specific interpretation of what is and through a specific comprehension of truth it gives to that age the basis upon which it is essentially formed. This basis holds complete dominion over all the phenomena that distinguish the age. Conversely, in order that there may be an adequate reflection upon these phenomena themselves, the metaphysical basis for them must let itself be apprehended in them (Heidegger 1977: 117).The metaphysical basis of our age increasingly reveals itself through computational infrastructure. Where previous epochs found their ground in the printing press, the factory, or the broadcast tower, our age finds its ground in the streamed, the real-time, the always-on computational network. This is not merely a change in media technology but a transformation in how being itself discloses. The streamed world represents a specific interpretation of what is and a specific comprehension of truth that gives our age its essential form. Real-time connectivity, perpetual updates, constant synchronisation across distributed networks constitute the metaphysical substrate through which contemporary existence unfolds. To understand our age requires grasping how streaming as a mode of disclosure shapes not just how we access information but how we comprehend being itself.
What happens when the increasing assemblage of the real-time streamed world becomes an increasing part of our unstreamed, that is, out of the real-time stream existence? In some sense I want to explore what happens when the world is understood as rising from the ground of the streamed world. As Gary Shteyngart demonstrates when using these new technologies, something happens to our experience of everyday life:
Since fiscal year 2008, I have been permanently attached to my iTelephone. As of two weeks ago, I am a Facebooking twit. With each post, each tap of the screen, each drag and click, I am becoming a different person — solitary where I was once gregarious; a content provider where I at least once imagined myself an artist; nervous and constantly updated where I once knew the world through sleepy, half-shut eyes; detail-oriented and productive where I once saw life float by like a gorgeously made documentary film. And, increasingly, irrevocably, I am a stranger to books, to the long-form text, to the pleasures of leaving myself and inhabiting the free-floating consciousness of another. With each passing year, scientists estimate that I lose between 6 and 8 percent of my humanity, so that by the close of this decade you will be able to quantify my personality. By the first quarter of 2020 you will be able to understand who I am through a set of metrics as simple as those used to measure the torque of the latest-model Audi or the spring of some brave new toaster (Shteyngart 2010).
Shteyngart's account traces a transformation in the structure of consciousness itself. The shift from "sleepy, half-shut eyes" to "nervous and constantly updated" marks more than a change in attention patterns. It reveals how streaming temporality reconfigures the relationship between self and world. Where previously experience arrived with delay, mediated through reflection and memory, the streamed world demands immediate response, perpetual presence, constant availability. The iPhone becomes not just a device but a prosthetic extension that reorganises temporal experience around the rhythm of updates, notifications, and real-time feeds. Consciousness itself begins to stream, to flow in sync with the computational networks that frame it. The "loss of humanity" Shteyngart ironically quantifies points toward something more troubling than simple distraction. It suggests that subjectivity under streaming conditions restructures itself according to the logic of real-time data flows, where selfhood becomes measurable, quantifiable, reducible to metrics and updates.
By 2012, this streaming infrastructure has become ubiquitous. Twitter's real-time feed, introduced in 2006, transformed public discourse into a continuous stream of 140-character updates. Facebook's News Feed, launched in 2006 amid user protest, reconstituted social life as an algorithmically curated stream of status updates, photos, and shared links. The introduction of the iPhone in 2007 and the subsequent explosion of smartphone adoption meant these streams accompanied users everywhere, creating what some termed "ambient awareness" of others' lives through perpetual micro-updates. By 2010, Facebook reported 500 million active users, half of whom logged in daily. Twitter processed 65 million tweets per day. The stream had become the dominant mode through which information, sociality, and news were experienced. Yet this dominance operated through a peculiar invisibility. Users experienced the stream as natural, as simply 'staying connected', whilst the infrastructural conditions that produced streaming consciousness remained opaque.
The infrastructure enabling ubiquitous streaming remains largely invisible to users. Cellular networks blanket urban and suburban spaces with overlapping coverage zones, creating the illusion of seamless connectivity. Data centres housing Facebook's servers, Google's search infrastructure, and Twitter's databases consume vast amounts of electrical power whilst remaining geographically remote from users. Undersea fibre optic cables carry international data flows, their physical routes determining which nations and corporations control global information infrastructure. Satellite networks extend coverage to areas beyond terrestrial cell towers. This massive material apparatus disappears behind the smooth surface of the smartphone screen. Users experience streaming as immediate and direct whilst depending absolutely on computational systems distributed across continents, requiring constant maintenance, consuming enormous energy, controlled by concentrated corporate and state power. The stream appears ethereal, immaterial, flowing naturally like water, whilst resting on physical infrastructure whose construction, ownership, and governance remain opaque to those whose consciousness it shapes.
The streamed world operates according to a distinctive temporality. Traditional media worked through delay and periodicity. Newspapers arrived daily, television programs broadcast at scheduled times, letters took days to traverse distances. These temporal structures created rhythms of anticipation, reflection, and gaps between stimulus and response. Streaming collapses these gaps. The Twitter timeline updates continuously, the Facebook feed refreshes perpetually, email arrives instantly on mobile devices regardless of location or time. This creates the tyranny of the now, where the most recent update always takes precedence over deeper reflection or historical context. The stream privileges immediacy over importance, recency over relevance. Information arranged chronologically rather than hierarchically produces a flat ontology where a friend's lunch photo appears with equal weight to news of political upheaval. The result is not simply information overload but a restructuring of temporal experience around the perpetual present of the real-time update.
Earlier network technologies produced different temporal relations. The telegraph, introduced in the 1840s, enabled rapid communication across distances but required specialists to operate sending and receiving equipment, creating temporal gaps between message composition and reception. The telephone, widely adopted by the 1920s, offered real-time voice connection but remained tethered to fixed locations and social conventions about appropriate calling times. Email, emerging in the 1970s and popularising in the 1990s, combined asynchronous communication with digital convenience, allowing messages to await recipient availability rather than demanding immediate attention. Each technology reconfigured temporal experience whilst maintaining gaps, delays, and periods of disconnection. Streaming eliminates these buffers. The smartphone ensures perpetual reachability. Social media platforms expect continuous presence. The stream tolerates no gaps, no offline periods, no moments genuinely outside its flow. This represents not merely quantitative acceleration but qualitative transformation in the structure of networked time.
The streaming infrastructure delivers content and captures data. Every click, every pause, every scroll becomes a data point harvested for analysis. Facebook tracks not just what users post but what they type and delete without posting, measuring hesitation and self-censorship. Google records search queries, mapping the contours of desire, anxiety, and curiosity across populations. Twitter's firehose of real-time data feeds sentiment analysis algorithms that claim to predict everything from election outcomes to stock market movements. The stream flows in both directions. Users experience downstream flow of content whilst upstream flows of behavioural data travel back to corporate servers for algorithmic processing. This double movement remains asymmetric. Users see curated feeds whilst corporations see comprehensive profiles built from aggregated metadata. The metaphysical ground of streaming reveals itself here as extractive, converting human sociality and consciousness into data commodities whilst presenting itself as neutral platform for connection. The streamed world grounds our age by naturalising these computational determinations of what is and what matters.
What appears as free service masks an exchange where users pay with attention, time, and data rather than money. The stream must be engineered to be addictive, to command returning attention, to resist closure or completion. Hence the feed that never ends, the notifications that arrive unpredictably, the social obligation to respond to others' updates. Attention becomes the scarce resource in an economy of abundance, where information oversupply makes capturing and holding awareness the central economic problem. Streaming consciousness emerges not despite but because of this commodification, shaped by commercial imperatives to engineer maximally engaging experiences.
Emerging practices hint at resistance to streaming's dominion. Writers retreat to cabins without internet to reclaim sustained attention. Some users practice digital sabbaths, designating periods free from devices and updates. Yet these resistances often remain individual, therapeutic, oriented toward personal wellness rather than structural transformation. They accept streaming's dominion whilst carving out temporary exceptions, much as one might take a holiday from work without questioning the organisation of labour itself. More troubling, disconnection increasingly becomes a luxury good, available primarily to those with sufficient economic and cultural capital to opt out temporarily whilst remaining professionally connected. The poor and precarious cannot afford digital sabbaths when employers demand constant availability, when gig economy work arrives through app notifications, when social services require online access. Streaming's metaphysical ground thus intersects with class position, distributing temporal autonomy unevenly across social hierarchies.
The embodied effects of streaming consciousness are shown in gesture and posture. The compulsive checking of phones, reveals bodies trained to anticipate updates. Users report phantom vibrations, feeling their phone buzz when it remains silent. The gesture of pulling down to refresh a feed becomes automatic, a bodily incorporation of streaming's demand for constant novelty. Sherry Turkle's research on technology and self, documents teenagers who sleep with phones under pillows to avoid missing updates, who feel anxious when separated from devices, who describe themselves as always on. These are not simply behavioural changes but somatic incorporations of streaming temporality. The body itself becomes synchronised to the rhythm of real-time updates, trained to expect perpetual connectivity, physically uncomfortable with disconnection. What Shteyngart experiences as loss of humanity might be understood as the production of a new form of embodied subjectivity adapted to streaming infrastructure.
The constant task-switching demanded by streams of notifications appears to fragment concentration, making extended focus on single objects increasingly difficult. Some researchers propose that brains adapt to streaming environments by becoming more efficient at rapid scanning and pattern recognition whilst losing capacity for contemplative thought and complex synthesis. Whether these represent permanent neurological changes or reversible adaptations remains contested. Yet the question itself reveals streaming's penetration into the biological substrate of consciousness. If Shteyngart's loss of humanity includes literal rewiring of neural pathways, then streaming's metaphysical ground extends beyond cultural and social structures into the material organisation of the brain itself. The streamed world produces not just new forms of subjectivity but new forms of biological embodiment, new configurations of neurons and synapses adapted to real-time computational demands.
To understand how streaming grounds our age requires moving beyond critiques of distraction or information overload. The issue is not simply that we have too much information or pay attention poorly. Rather, streaming represents a reorientation of how being discloses itself. Where print culture produced subjects capable of sustained linear attention and deferred gratification, streaming culture produces subjects oriented toward immediacy, interruption, and perpetual presence. Where broadcast media created audiences who received information at scheduled times, streaming creates users who continuously produce and consume updates in recursive loops. This is not deterioration from some prior ideal but the emergence of new forms of subjectivity suited to real-time computational capitalism. The quantification of personality that Shteyngart ironically describes is already underway through Facebook's data mining, Google's behavioural tracking, and the countless metrics that translate human activity into computational data. The streamed world does not simply distract us from some authentic mode of being. It constitutes being itself according to the logic of real-time data flows, algorithmic curation, and perpetual connectivity.
If Heidegger is correct that metaphysics grounds an age by giving it the basis upon which it is essentially formed, then we must recognise streaming as the metaphysical ground of contemporary existence. The phenomena that distinguish our age, from perpetual connectivity, real-time updates, algorithmic curation, to quantified selfhood, all arise from this ground. Yet this basis holds complete dominion by remaining invisible, by presenting itself as natural flow rather than infrastructural determination. The challenge for critical thought lies not in rejecting streaming wholesale, which would be both impossible and naive, but in making visible the computational infrastructure that produces streaming consciousness. Only by apprehending the metaphysical basis in the phenomena themselves can we begin to question whether the streamed world represents the only possible ground for contemporary being, or whether alternative grounds might yet be imagined and instantiated. The question is not whether to stream but whether streaming must hold complete dominion over all modes of existence, or whether spaces might be carved out where different temporalities, different modes of attention, different relationships to self and world remain possible.
Bibliography
Heidegger, M. (1977) The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, London: Harper Perennial.
Shteyngart, G. (2010) Only Disconnect, The New York Times, accessed 7/4/2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/18/books/review/Shteyngart-t.html
Turkle, S. (2011) Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, New York: Basic Books.
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