Archetypes and Digital Individuation
The Recommendation Algo's are Commodifying Jung! (Part 3)
Check out this banger by Carsie Blanton! (Video below)
In the morning when I leave my den
I moisturize with the tears of men
Stir my tea with a crucifix
I’m an ugly, nasty, commie bitch
In the evening, when I’m on the rag,
I just rip up a couple of American flags
Take a nice hot bath in the blood of the rich
I’m an ugly, nasty, commie bitch
I try to think, but it hurts my brain
So I have an abortion and a fine champagne
I’m a jezebel, I’m a wicked witch
I’m an ugly, nasty, commie bitch
Weekends when I want some fun
Castrate a man, take away his gun
Drive a classic car into a ditch
I’m an ugly, nasty, commie bitch
Well I know I am. But what are you?
Some fascist bootlick nazi tool?
A whiny boy with a tiny dick?
Or a dumbfuck redneck backward hick?
Did I get it right? Did I peg you yet?
Maybe we don’t know who we ain’t met
Maybe nobody wins but the already rich
If you’re a “dumb redneck” and I’m a “commie bitch…”
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
As Part 1 of my series on Silicon Valley’s Commodification of Jung’s Ideas (on Synchronicity) predicted, the algorithms ensured this song arose into my field of conscious awareness at exactly the right time to generate the maximum dopamine hit: perfect timing for this essay!
Still, it could have just as easily began Part 2. That essay (on Shadow Work) described how algorithmic content feeds harness our impulse to Other and therefore yield great opportunities to look inside ourselves and heal through the integration of our own dejected shadows.
Because if we can love ourselves, we can love the Other. Commie bitch or backward hick.
That’s a decent foundation for “no war but the class war,” as Carsie Blanton beautifully articulates, but maybe we could go a step farther and explore the ways in which we exhibit the greed, narcissism and self-righteousness we deplore in the rich and love ourselves for their positive reframes.
There are undoubtedly small ways we personally exhibit those shameful traits, but what of the Light that casts that Shadow? Do we acknowledge and love ourselves for that?
The Creekmason Discord book club just finished reading Owning your Own Shadow, and one of our main takeaways was that evolution has created these golden Lights, these wells of power available to anyone in the form of instinctual traits and abilities.
Then these wells were enclosed by the ruling class:
“Those aren’t traits for a peasant.”
“Those aren’t traits for a woman.”
Etc
This act of gatekeeping the natural power and strength available to each of us is what creates the cultural “shadow:'' traits that are considered shameful to express.
Our morality is often based around casting into our shadow the exact traits that the powerful exhibit and that enable their continued domination. Meanwhile, we ignore the healthy ways we could engage with those traits ourselves. It’s why Nietzsche called Christianity a “slave morality.”
The well springs up in new places constantly: different innate human impulses become adaptive in different eras. Each time, however, a fence is built around that source of power and those impulses become shameful shadow characteristics.
This creates the necessity for shadow integration. Loving your “dark” side.
When we look at “greed” as the shadow cast by the candlelight we each contain of “desire to be a provider for our loved ones,” we can see how life isn’t served by completely dismissing its whispered advice.
On the contrary, it turns out that if we don’t look at our shadow with compassion, we are more likely to allow it to surprise us. Spurring us into unhealthy, ineffective actions.
Let’s say the street is littered with frogs (or beetles). Slimy, noisy, ugly. Little pesty beasts. You’re more likely to step on one if you’re pretending they don’t exist than if you know they’re there and you love them enough to be careful around them.
Acknowledging (and loving) the iota of greed in every personality’s factory presets, I can use that impulse toward wealth generation to take care of others
Of course, this is very different from the “effective altruism” slogan of “earning to give,” which comes with myriad other complex and problematic shadow characteristics.
But I’ve allowed myself to get off track. This is Part 3 of the Commodified Jung series.
Let’s talk archetypes!
The two characters in Carsie Blaton’s beautiful Dolly Parton-esque ear worm could potentially be considered “Shadow Archetypes” using the Human Alchemy framing in the picture above.
The left and right sides of the political spectrum probably don’t typically consider themselves commie bitches or dumb rednecks. Not so much as they’d simply say progressives and conservatives.
(Unless, of course, they’re pulling off a chin-out challenge like Blanton.)
Still, the semi-mythical qualities and behaviors that Blanton sings about, those that collectively define either side of the political spectrum, can be considered the characteristics of archetypes of those political identities.
Characteristics that our algorithm-recommended content impresses upon us—into us—via its inundating firehouse of concepts, memes and narratives.
Jung introduced this idea: grouping narrative points into elements of the psyche. From wikipedia:
The psychic counterpart of instinct, archetypes are thought to be the basis of many of the common themes and symbols that appear in stories, myths, and dreams across different cultures and societies.
It might sound weird to elevate “commie bitch” to the status of mythological symbol, but it does represent a well-recognized figure to live up to—or to pigeon-hole others into—in modern society.
The practical use of archetypes in Jungian psychoanalysis was to identify elements of a personality that a person’s behavior indicated they wanted to express. This was in service of Jung’s concept of “individuation,” which he described as the process by which a person learns to more fully embody their complete, authentic, natural self.
Problem is, when it comes to the archetypes that we’re nudged and encouraged to express by social media algorithms, we aren’t following our own in-born desires. We’re living out the self-expression that Silicon Valley executives happen to think is right for us. Or at least that which meets the aims of the vague, impersonal forces of what Shoshanna Zuboff called “Surveillance Capitalism.”
Digital Individuation: “Figure out what you are and do it on purpose!”
That quote comes from Dolly Parton. Who knew she was a Jungian?
As is well documented—and probably familiar to anyone who watched Netflix’s documentary hit, The Social Dilemma—recommendation algorithms serve content that intentionally buckets us into personality types in order to predict and modify our behavior toward profitable ends.
Cambridge Analytica is famous for having done this in order to serve highly personalized political advertisements that are supposed to have dramatically influenced the 2016 presidential election. The data science firm is known for laser-targeting individuals in contentious swing states via the use of psychological profiles that they derived from mountains of questionably acquired Facebook data.
What are those psychological profiles other than data-informed archetypes?
What is the voting behavior of individuals targeted with Skinnerian techniques other than a cynically hijacked form of individuation?
Most importantly, how can we seize the means of our own personality structures’ production?
Put another way, faced with recommendation algorithms out-loud agenda to modify our behavior toward its own ends, how can we ensure that we are the ones in charge of our own self-definition?
The obvious answer is to delete everything from your phone that uses a recommendation algorithm, but I believe we actually do have an opportunity for self-brainwashing that is worth pursuing.
Granted, the apps will always take more into account than simply what you and “people like you” choose to watch, re-watch, like, comment on, and follow.
They’ll always, at least in part, follow their own agenda.
But there’s still harm reduction and agency empowerment available to us, and we’d be fools not to act on it.
TikTok Vipassana
Rule 1, you’re going to find a video that expresses a life affirming worldview you vibe with. It should be an opinion video. A rant, maybe.
Rule 2 is that this video cannot make you feel anxious, depressed, ashamed, angry, or outraged. None of the “sticky emotions” our algorithmic overlords think they can use to control us.
Rule 3, this video has to have been made after you started playing the game. How else are you going to know it was meant for you?
Now, watch TikTok.
The whole time, keep checking in with your body. Pay attention to how tight and tense your various muscles are. Hot and cold sensations. Pain. Pleasure. The works.
As you watch each video, does it make your gut clench with anxiety? Scroll immediately.
Does the next one kindle a little spark of warm connection in your chest? Hit the like. Read the comments. Let it repeat.
Does a video address one of your core values but in a way that makes you feel outraged about the people who don’t find the same things sacred that you do? This is important: keep scrolling.
Along the way, you’ll be confronted with the stickiest invitations to debasement that your shadow, as manifested by the algorithm, can conjure. Your For You Page will only show you things it thinks appeal to you and the AI is so good, you can actually use it to discover and overcome that dark wolf in you that you’re not supposed to feed.
Finally! After your slog through the content mines, you’ll come up for air with a chunk of gold. A creator you vibe with who wants you to feel good. You’ll reward them with all that juicy engagement and in the process, you’ll teach the algorithm that what we all want is High Vibrations.
It’s not perfect. It’s not fool proof. You may still want to clear your cache and cookies and reinstall the app regularly.
But by scrolling mindfully instead of mindlessly, you can cultivate your online space like a banzai tree. You can curate your feed to only (mostly) show you content that nudges you toward the archetypes you authentically want to embody.
You can provide yourself with an opportunity for self-programming that steers you toward self-actualization.
the dark wolf is the shadow... it needs food and love also