fluid machines

A Twitter user stream is a kind of fluid machine (reminiscent of the T-1000 cyborg in Terminator 2) that is comprised of the followers of the largest account in a group of users who are also followers of one another. It’s not the number of followers that makes a Twitter stream strong; rather, the strength of a given stream depends a majority of its members having discovered each other through their shared following of this person AND for those members to have had few if any other people that they followed in common prior to when they started following the Big Fish Twitter account.

The users who make up the fluid Twitter stream machines are what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as “desiring machines”: smaller machines (users) that function as circuit breakers in the larger circuit of the various Twitter streams that they are connected to.  In addition, these smaller machines produce their own flow of desire—which will sometimes run in a direction counter to the overall flow:

“There are no desiring-machines that exist outside the social machines that they form on a large scale; and no social machines without the desiring machines that inhabit them on a small scale.”

According to D&G, the main goal of a desiring machine is to appropriate that which is outside of itself. This is the movement that creates the essential dynamic that keeps Twitter flowing. A Twitter user tries to gain more followers who are receptive and responsive to their tweets.  The goal is to get them to become followers, but also to retweet and hopefully even reblog what they write about.  Every amplification extends the amount of Twitter domain that a user “covers”—each mention adds to the percentage of the Twitterverse that a desiring machine can claim.