Periodically, I’ll log into Twitter in order to check in on events. 

That’s an obvious untruth. Like everyone else in the 30-45 demographic, I’ve probably got an instance of the app running on my phone and desktop every minute of every day in addition to facebook, instagram, and gmail. We’re extremely connected for people who are under lockdown conditions in a state of emergency during a pandemic. 

It’s maybe a facet of the loneliness and solitude people experience during a situation like this that has laid bare the extent of the reliance of these things and over the last couple of months. People are looking at their behaviour, sitting alone, staring at a screen and wondering whether just maybe there’s more to life. I’ve started to notice people saying how tired they are of Twitter.

Especially Beer Twitter. 

Beer Twitter is pretty toxic. Nominally, all of the people on Beer Twitter share an appreciation for a beverage, and you’d be forgiven for assuming that would result in a big happy family full of boosters and cheerleaders. In practice, it’s a lot more vicious than you’d expect, resulting in blockings, mutings, shunnings, dogpiles, drama, slap fights, flame wars, and the occasional population wide schism. Beer Social Media in general has problems.

Why? Well, let’s grab some texts by Marx and Baudrillard and jump in the Wayback machine for a minute. We’re going to a pub that existed before the advent of the internet.

It’s the tail end of the 1980’s and this bar has got three beers on tap: Molson Canadian, Labatt Blue, and Creemore Springs. They might have bottles of Heineken behind the bar. According to Marxian Economic Theory, each of those beers have four attributes that make up their usefulness as a commodity. Economic Value, Exchange Value, Use Value, and Price. 

Use Value is easy to understand: You want a beer. You’re thirsty. The reason you’re going to buy a beer is because it fulfills the requirement you have for a beverage. You don’t want water. You’re hydrated already. You want a beer. 

Price is easy to understand: The beer costs three bucks in this bar. Marx makes a distinction between real and ideal prices. Theoretically, the average ideal price for a beer in the year we’re talking about is a little different than three bucks. Maybe higher, although, there’s a place down the street that does 2.50 during happy hour. Those individual increments are real prices: what you’re paying.

Economic Value is easy to understand: How much are you willing to pay for this beer? The owner of this bar is trying to put his kids through college, and also he’s got a bad coke habit since it’s the 80’s. He wants to charge the maximum amount that you’re comfortable paying. That seems to be about three bucks, otherwise you’d be at happy hour at the bar down the street. 

Exchange Value is easy to understand: The guy sitting next to you is a regular Norm Peterson. He’s a genial fellow and he’s telling an interesting story. You’d like to buy him a beer. His story is worth the same amount to you as a beer. He’s drinking Creemore, though, which is fifty cents more expensive. $3.50. Big whoop.

This is all pretty easy to understand so far! You’re having a nice time at a bar talking to actual people, you’re having a couple of beers, you feel like you’re getting decent value for money, a good time is had by most, although the bartender is becoming slightly worried that he might be a theoretical construct and thus subject to being poofed out of existence at any moment. 

Your neighbour at the bar is drinking Creemore, which is a little more expensive. Still barley, hops, water, and yeast. Pretty much the same amount of labour. You can argue that there economies of scale at play, but probably not fifty cents worth. This is why we need to talk about Baudrillard.

Baudrillard is responsible for Sign Value, which is an additional construct here, but something you’re so familiar with you have already looked at the three beers I listed on tap at this fictional bar and decided you want a Creemore. Sign Value is a product of conspicuous consumerism. Sign Value basically refers to the cultural cachet, social status, or prestige of an item. Molson and Labatt were engaged in an advertising war at the time, so a customer’s choice to drink one of those products is likely to be impacted by the advertising and they may think that drinking that particular beer says something about them as a person, but either is a little everyman or working class. A businessman might walk into the bar and order a bottle of Heineken, the assumption being that because it’s imported and slightly more expensive, people will understand how successful the businessman has been. Creemore, as a locally made microbrew is new and trendy and a little more characterful, and it says to people, “Look out for this loose cannon. He’s a non-conformist. He’s hip. He’s cool. He owns a Bell Biv DeVoe record.” It’s the 80’s and that Poison track is a banger. 

Now, the use value of the beers are all pretty similar. They are going to slake your thirst and act as a vector for getting alcohol into you. The sign value of the beers are variable, but since there are only four beers available at the bar, they’re not THAT variable. Tipping the soon to be poofed out of existence bartender generously, let’s get back in the Wayback machine and log in to the internet.

Baudrillard is really useful in this application because of the concept of Simulacra.

Simulacra is easy to understand: It’s a representation of a person or a thing. If you’ve seen the Matrix, you already know this. Neo on the Nebuchadnezzar? Real. Neo in the Matrix? Simulacrum. You sitting in your computer chair or on your couch? Real. You as represented on the internet? Simulacrum.

In creating any social media account, you create an avatar of yourself in a digital space. Essentially a hyperreal simulacrum. This is a very big problem from a number of standpoints. For one, you’re willingly creating a public facing version of yourself which is unlikely to be a faithful recreation of your existence. We leave a lot of the boring bits out. At best, any online presence is going to be selectively truthful, and at worst it’s going to be a total fabrication.

Let’s dig at those values we talked about earlier. What’s the Economic Value of a twitter account? Well, you’re not willing to pay anything for a twitter account. You just log in. They advertise things to you and the advertisers pay them. There’s an Economic Value for the company, but not for you unless you find some way to monetize twitter. Good luck. What’s the Price of a social media account? Zero dollars in terms of currency value. What’s the Exchange Value of a social media account? Well, for most people, there isn’t one unless you inexplicably camped a bunch of corporate brand names very early on. You wouldn’t exchange your digital simulacrum, would you? Of course not.

There is Use Value. As a communications platform, you can use social media to spread messages worldwide instantly and follow various people. Very useful if you have something to say. Remember: Use Value is about fulfilling a need.

This means that the majority use of social media falls to Baudrillard’s Sign Value. This is particularly true of influencers, but it’s true of everyone to some extent. In order to accrete value to your simulacrum in the digital world, your main currency is Sign Value or Status. It’s a game called “Look at what I have.” Hence the popularity of unboxing videos.

The difficulty with Beer Social Media in particular is its success. During our trip to the 1980’s, there were four beers. They were easily sorted into a hierarchical order based on simple economic principles and a little cultural analysis. It was the work of about five seconds and no one really cared. In a world where there are tens of thousands of breweries making hundreds of thousands of beers, the representation of any product through your social media presence becomes, of necessity, a matter of jockeying for position. Hundreds of thousands of ways to say “Look at what I have” and intimate that your status is higher than that of other people because they don’t have what you have. Social or cultural status always comes at the expense of someone else’s social or cultural status because at least in the community that values an individual signatory fetish item, there is an ever more minute and rigid hierarchical system in which objects jockey for position on the basis of people’s estimation. It’s why people ask, “what’s the best beer in the world?”

Take the Hazy IPA, for example. It’s not a genre I’m particularly enamoured of, but it’s the current focus of trend. There is inevitably a new brewery making a new Hazy IPA that has hype, or cultural cachet, and remaining on top of that trend conveys to the audience of your social media profile that you have hype and cachet. It is aspirational in a very odd way. If you are able to go to (as of this writing) Third Moon or Barncat and get their new Hazy IPA, you will be regarded more highly on social media than you would be if you had the new Dominion City Hazy IPA.

Is the product better? It doesn’t matter. The Use Value of a beer remains the same as it did in the 1980’s. It’s going to slake your thirst and act as a vector for getting alcohol into you. Depending on the flavour, you might prefer it more or less. The Use Value of a picture of a beer may well be significantly greater than the Use Value of a beer if you have a social media account. Essentially we’ve created a situation in which the Sign Value of a picture of a beer is likely worth more from an abstract economic standpoint than the beer itself. 

There’s one other thing to take into consideration here: Dopamine. 

The hyperreal version of yourself, your simulacrum, doesn’t function on its own. You’ve put in a bunch of time and built your social media account to the point where you have a large number of followers. Every time you get a notification from the buzzing phone in your pocket you get a dopamine hit from it. Dopamine is a chemical messenger that plays a role in pleasure and therefore addiction. It’s pretty dangerous stuff.

The hyperreal version of yourself has thousands of followers. If you tweet something or post something on instagram things happen. You get likes. There is a buzz of activity in some digital space, and the physiological connection you share with it is a neurotransmitter responsible for addiction. Your simulacrum happens at a hundred miles an hour. You’re sitting in a chair looking at your phone. No wonder you feel burnt out and tired of twitter.

Oh no! Someone doesn’t like the thing you posted. That’s a stress response. Fight or Flight. In order to protect your future source of dopamine, you had better fight them for it. You might get fewer notifications next time you tweet something if you don’t. It turns a minor disagreement over essentially nothing into a grudge you can’t recover from. I see this a lot on Friday mornings. People get bored at their office job and start arguing online to turn on the dopamine tap. It doesn’t matter whether it’s good attention or bad attention. It’s the need for the dopamine, because regular life moves at the speed of life and the internet moves at the speed of data. 

Beer Social Media, then, is a pretty good way of taking something you enjoy and ruining your enjoyment of it. What you’ve done, basically, is create an untruthful online simulacrum of yourself which eats up a lot of your time and in doing so perverts a very simple appreciative relationship of an object by setting it up as a fetish object in a digital space which you must then performatively represent daily or at least weekly in order to maintain an online presence because you’re addicted to the neurotransmitting chemical that is triggered when people respond to a picture of something that you’re telling them they should have but don’t. It’s weaponized aspiration if you’re using photography; a desire trap. If you’re just arguing online in order to protect your simulacrum’s perceived status, you’re probably arguing about perceived hierarchical Sign Value that exists only as agreed upon within a small group of people, at which point the Use Value of beer only exists as a theoretical bludgeon with which to bash other people about the Simulacrum. It’s easy to forget that there is an equally bored and equally dopamine addicted person at the other end of the exchange and that at some point you transition to valuing the fetish object more than other people. At that point you should probably ask yourself whether you actually like the subject matter or whether you just like the dopamine. 

It also means, given the nature of the environment, that legitimate social causes are always going to fall by the wayside of beer twitter due to the addictive nature of its regular function. It’s not collaborative, but selfish by its very nature. People become disillusioned by that, especially over the last few months when legitimate change has been occurring in North American society. 

My advice? Put down the phone. Go for a walk. Drink a beer that you don’t photograph. Use the platforms unidirectionally as an outgoing message. Don’t argue unnecessarily because the argument doesn’t advance anything. Never trust anyone who knows how many followers they have because they’re keeping score. Ultimately, you’re meant to be sharing something you like with other people so that they can enjoy it as well. The best place to share a physical object designed to slake thirst and get alcohol into you is almost certainly not a place where no one has a mouth and everyone is screaming.