‘Click’, ‘Share’, ‘Like’, ‘Subscribe’

‘Click’, ‘like’, ‘share’, and ‘subscribe’ are the new currencies of rent-seeking digital capitalism, where rapid consumption of digital content is driven by number of views and subscribers of the video shorts and clips. The relationship between digital content and its consumers is defined by quick browsing and the pursuit of instant fun, infotainment, pleasure, utility, satisfaction, or rejection. Such ideals in everyday life influence interpersonal human relationships in the real world beyond the digital sphere. Social life and relationships are becoming like instant coffee.

Friendship is a social, emotional, cultural, religious, moral, and ideological bond rooted in the aims, aspirations, needs, desires, and values of human beings. A relationship based on friendship promotes trust, understanding, and mutual support in everyday life. Friendships are often formed and sustained through shared hobbies. The idealism of friendship moves beyond the narrow silos of class, caste, gender, race, sexuality, religion, nationality and territorial identity. It breaks all such barriers to uphold the values of timeless friendship. Friendship can exist within all types of relationships and can also transcend them. Both sinners and saints have friends in this world, which highlights the universal and indispensable nature and power of friendship. The nature of friendship shapes the character of society and the relationships within it. Whether a society is democratic, feudal, patriarchal, capitalist, hierarchical, egalitarian, or progressive, it is friendship that ultimately defines its nature, essence and spirit.

The rise of private property, as well as agricultural, commercial, industrial, colonial, and digital forms of capitalism and its culture of commodification, has eroded the collective foundations of friendship by atomising societies, individuals, and their needs, desires, and competing aspirations as consumers and their supercilious free choices and freedoms. This transformation has been further accelerated by the deepening digital capitalism, where social media connections and online presence form the basis of digital lives, rendering friendships as transient as browsing web pages in different platforms. The instantaneous nature of these online friendships and relationships mirror the short attention spans of digital consumption– click, like, share, and subscribe– driven by utility, pleasure, and profit. Organic bonds of friendship are largely absent in these digital spheres. Yet, digital platforms hold the potential to transform such fleeting connections into meaningful human relationships, provided that impersonal algorithms and corporate logic do not dominate them. All forms of domination undermine friendships; therefore, meaningful, democratic, egalitarian, and progressive friendships cannot exist under feudalism, patriarchy, or any form of capitalist conditions in society.

All earlier forms of capitalism and its barbaric culture exists within digital capitalism which further deepening of everyday alienation, atomisation, and the commodification of human life and its relationship with the natural world. They create monetised and marketised social, political, economic, cultural and spiritual conditions that are unsuitable and inhospitable to meaningful friendships. Capitalism and friendship are incompatible with each other. Therefore, every effort to ensure meaningful friendship is, in essence, a struggle against capitalism and its inhuman and anti-social values.

[Contributed by Bhabani Shankar Nayak]

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Frontier
Vol 58, No. 13, Sep 21 - 27, 2025