Margot Rot, a writer who lives on the internet: “My search history contains my soul”

During the pandemic, Margot Rot (Gijón, 27 years old) fell into what she calls her “sadness”: a kind of depression galvanized by the miseries of 2020 but mitigated by an entire universe of people, affections, ideas and supports that she kept in the palm of the hand. It was her cell phone, her internet, the parallel world where this philosopher and writer found the relief that the physical dimension gave her. Now in Infoxication (Paidós), Rot, who is preparing a doctorate in Philosophy, Science and Values ​​at the University of the Basque Country, studies the strange mental processes resulting from sailing on-line as something valid, complex and worth studying and not just the product of an unhealthy vice that, we are warned daily, will end the world.

“Apart from the fact that it is a philosophical essay, it has the ambition to understand how you emotionally relate to what is in your pocket, in your bed, on your kitchen table,” he describes on the same terrace on Paseo de la Florida ( Madrid) where he usually writes. “I know how I feel when I get home and, even though I have a thousand things to do, or perhaps precisely because of the thousand things in the house, because everyday life, washing machines and things like that, overwhelms me, suddenly it happens to me. four hours on TikTok. I have tried to do an analysis from there.”

Ask. Do you assume that it is normal to be on your cell phone for four hours?

Answer. I say that you have to think carefully about what happens on that cell phone. And not as criticism or as a justification of a moral discourse. 'Oh, you only see this, you only consume that, fatal.' No man, let's give it one more spin. What are you consuming and how does it make you feel? At what point do you spend four hours on your cell phone and how do you leave afterward? And what do you remember about what you saw?

Q. Speaking of remembering, the Internet has a strange, almost dreamlike quality: when you wake up in the morning, it is normal to remember the emotion caused by the dream, but not the content. When you leave your cell phone it is similar, you live with the residue of intrigue, envy, sadness, that it has left you but…

R. …without being able to give it a discursive device in words, now. And let's go beyond the machine itself. Look, I would never show my search history. My search history… it is my psyche, my soul, what worries me, from what interests me most to the most absurd banality that structures my day: if I have to look for a dry cleaner, dry cleaning in Madrid Paseo de la Florida. It's all there. And those searches are returned to me in the form of content that I consume.

Q. What content do you consume?

R. I go to TikTok and see girls cleaning their house and putting candles and changing the sheets and leaving everything ideal, a trend on-line that I love. Or the #mukbang, people who eat things that make noise. It's everywhere, people just eating. One might wonder why anyone wants to watch a video of someone eating. Well, because it satisfies him. His taste buds are enjoying, his appetite is activated. The girl who puts candles: I want to have a house like that. There's the thing that all these girls have a lot of money. The aspirational is also in my psyche, perhaps unconsciously, and it is also revealed there. That is affection and that is desire.

Q. Little is said about what the Internet gives you. A lot of how much we give it (hours, attention, emotions) but not what it gives back.

R. Incredible things, I think.

Q. In your love for the internet, where does cell phone addiction come in?

R. The addiction is not to the phone, but to what is inside it. And what's up? Well, the entire aesthetic spectrum that you desire and see and observe or… or pure nothingness. The pure moment of reading so that this time passes, without wondering what to do now, because I can simply spend five hours here without thinking and it is already time for dinner. I would qualify cell phone addiction a lot; It's not the cell phone, it's something else.

Q. Do you give it a name?

R. For each person it is different depending on what they consume on the internet. It is very symptomatic. What you see tells you about what you want.

Q. And what one uploads to the internet? That search for dopamine, for social approval?

R. There's more to it than social approval, right?

Q. In a like?

R. In the exercise of uploading something to the Internet. When you upload a photo to Instagram, you surely think about whether it matches all the others you have uploaded. Or a tweet, if the tone in which you write it is in line with your narrative being on Twitter. If we give it one more spin, that approval would be your way of meaning yourself in the world, right?

Q. What relationship do you see between who one is and how that person appears? on-line? It seems that people upload to the Internet the opposite of what they feel. Those who have social anorexia upload photos surrounded by people; who works too much, vacation photos. I, who have less time than I would like to read, see myself uploading books. And couples about to separate are the ones who post the most photos as if they were in love.

R. Virtuality on the internet is a place. A time and space suspended in infinity. It has nothing to do with interaction. Now, while I talk to you, I cannot measure who I am as much as I would like, because my body says more than I would like, or my face, or my stuttering, or my way of making mistakes. But on the internet
I can control. For years it has been theorized that the modern subject is free and has agency, that God does not exist and one chooses and each identity is a construction. Well, Instagram or Twitter or virtuality give you this possibility. And possibly for this reason the lack can be catalyzed. What do I want? Being okay with my partner when I'm not. What do I want? Read when I can't. You upload those books because you really want to read, because you are a reader. And that interests me more, perhaps, than the fact that it is a deficiency, without ignoring it.

Q. The mobile phone is closely linked to emotions. What do you think is the device through which we inform ourselves?

R. Informing ourselves is a rational act but reason is not free of emotions. Therefore, informing ourselves is an emotional act.

Q. Same as reading on paper?

R. Knowledge is acquired, above all, through the affective system. Knowing is learning and what you are learning always arouses some emotion in you. That cannot be separated. However, it separates: a mistake. When people talk about reason or knowledge, it seems like they do so by suspending your emotional tools. This is seen a lot in politics. You approach political issues in an affective way, which does not mean that it is not rational, but we must not forget that reasons are affects, they are emotions. One of course reasons, but he reasons through his affections.

Q. Why the relevance given to affect, to emotion, not only in your essay but also in other works by thinkers of your age?

R. We have won so much the battle of identity, of personal construction, that now the only thing left to think about is what one does not choose: the affections that the things that happen to you arouse in you. You don't have as much agency there. That is why desire is now in vogue. After fighting over the constitution of your identity, suddenly you don't choose what you want. What's happening there, who are you? That's why we talk a lot about emotions now.

Q. What is infoxication?

R. It's a concept I read in an American sociology book, The shock of the future [Alvin Toffler, 1970]. I was amazed because it was very catastrophic. He proposed that in the future we will develop adaptation problems, like soldiers who return from war and cannot live with their traumatic memories. What if all the phenomena that virtuality precipitates me into really prevent me from relating emotionally to what is happening? My concern was and is: how is it possible that there is a war right now in Gaza and that I can watch a carnage live, here, in the palm of my hand, for five minutes and then move on with my life?

Q. Do we have less empathy with the people we see on our phones?

R. It's not that. As a person who has grown up on the internet, for me, there are very dear people that I will never see and that I have never seen. I only read what happens to them or how they feel. My sadness would have been much worse if I hadn't had the internet. All the people who have accompanied me in my sadness, during my depression, for many years connected, are a community. At the same time that I say this I disassociate myself from the horror that I see. It seems that you can't take charge, that you can't relate to all the horror around you, but you can empathize with someone you have never seen and will never see.

Q. Will this tension reach a limit and subside? Or will we adapt to it?

R. Don't know. I know that we are going to face it in the same way in which we have faced everyday life all our lives. We have always generated strategies to resist. We are now aware that the work system separates us from our loved ones and exhausts us. We are much more aware that we have to take care of our loved ones even if we are exhausted. And we try. And virtuality gives us the possibility of collectively finding answers to that difficulty. The essay talks about technology and virtuality, yes. But it is nothing more than talking about the present because the problems are those that confront us in our daily lives, and there the mobile phone does not matter. It's just that I want to read; I want to see my friends more; I'm tired, maybe I don't like my job that much… And maybe I'm going to get divorced. It's not the cell phone. That's life. I don't know what tomorrow will be like, if there will be restrictions or not, I don't know if they will advocate for a disconnection… But I know that as problems arise, we look for a collective way to solve them. And that is hopeful.

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