J.G. Ballard didn’t predict social media. He vivisected it in advance, then left the carcass twitching under fluorescent light. Before Zuckerberg was a glint in a dorm room’s databank, Ballard had already mapped the pathology of curated identity, algorithmic libido, and digital entropy. If the elevator shaft in High-Rise had Wi-Fi, we’d be exactly where we are now.
Ballard’s tower blocks are not housing. They are autonomous systems masquerading as communities, structural cathedrals to hierarchy and isolation. Inhabitants lived stacked, surveilled, and increasingly feral – yet always convinced of their own civility, their own curated status within the glass cathedral. This is LinkedIn with plumbing. Instagram with broken lifts. X/Twitter if the blue ticks started eating each other.
“The more they came to know one another, the more they learned to isolate themselves.”
That’s not a punchline. That’s the algorithm.
Social media promised connection. What it delivered was exhaustion, identity theatre, and infinite scroll. Like the tenants of Ballard’s high-rise, we don’t talk – we perform. Not to each other, but at each other. Aesthetic becomes ontology. Feedback becomes affect. The timeline is just a corridor of muttered threats and filtered selfies, looping like CCTV.
And then there’s Crash. Forget the pornographic collisions – what matters is the feedback loop. The same compulsion. The same eroticised machinery. Each car crash intensifies the desire for the next, not in spite of the trauma, but because of it. This is Twitter rage. This is comment-section flame wars. This is the libidinal economy of attention.
Ballard understood: systems don’t collapse after they fail. They fail by design. His buildings, like our platforms, are monuments to their own disintegration. The only thing more artificial than the community is the performance of self within it.
You don’t live on the platform. The platform lives through you.
So yes, Ballard was already online. He logged in through the service entrance, weaponised the feedback loop, and left us with a diagnosis masquerading as fiction. What we mistook for dystopia was, as always, autobiography.
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