"Hi, It's Me, You're All in Danger"

Online Culture and the Eradication of the Social

“Gradually reduced to nothing by the various tools of transport and instantaneous communication, the geophysical environment is undergoing an alarming diminishing of its ‘depth of field’ and this is degrading man's relationship with his environment. The optical density of the landscape is rapidly evaporating, producing confusion between the apparent horizon, which is the backdrop of all action, and the deep horizon of our collective imagination; and so one last horizon of visibility comes into view, the transapparent horizon, a product of the optical (optoelectronic and acoustic) magnification of man’s domain.”

Paul Virilio. Open Sky.

“Yes, oh my gosh!”

speedstackinggirl quoted in Skrillex. “Scary Monsters & Nice Sprites.”

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Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers was ahead of its time. When released in 2012 it was notable for featuring several popular Disney stars (Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens) in roles that featured drugs, sex, and violence. However, the film offers an incisive look at a society that, even over a decade ago, was expanding the space of socialization into untethered, digital zones of interaction.

The film opens with an iconic scene.

Skrillex’s “Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites” fades in to a sunlit beach scene. The bodies of young people on spring break seem to float against an infinite horizon. They are positioned in a vertiginous void of sky, sand, and ocean. The field of vision is free of blemishes – objectless, but full to the brim with subjects.

As the bass drops, the scene increases in gratuity. Oiled breasts are thrust into the roaming, handheld camera. Middle fingers are raised, popsicles and drink straws are suggestively licked.

Cut Skrillex. Abrupt transition.

The handheld camera is replaced by static establishing shots depicting a small American college. The flattened void that had been filled with bodies, with life and subjects, is replaced with a traversable, linear perspective filled with objects. Archways recede into the distance. Courtyards form patterned grids in which motion is predetermined, as if on a chessboard of cold, concrete grey. Inside a classroom students are geometrically arranged, mimicking the columns and archways outside.

The film proceeds to state its theme, not only visually, but verbally. A professor indistinctly drones on about civil rights as Candy and Brit, played by Vanessa Hudgens and Ashley Benson, express their inability to participate in the drab life around them by doodling penises.

The professor notes that the second reconstruction – American civil rights in the ’50s and ’60s – was the perpetuation, at home, of a fight against fascism which started abroad. The momentum for radically transformative social action emerges from a journey beyond the social.

The possibility of new forms of life emerges from a trauma – from a viscerally destabilizing collective moment in which the integrity of life is rent. The horizon of potential experience expands through a movement towards the unfamiliar – towards the vanishing point of possibility, the crisis and catastrophe of global war – before recoiling back to the familiar.

In war, one goes abroad in order to find oneself. Yet, in the face of death, having risked a total loss of oneself in the journey, one’s identity is rediscovered back at the beginning – at home.

As Paul Virilio observed, as early as 1995, the speed and globalization of instant communication is eradicating the fundamental distinction between here and away – between the familiarity contained by immediate social bonds and the alien nature of the world outside of them. The possibility for movement – to and fro, advancing and retreating towards the vanishing point of possibility and, thus, affirming the existential foundation of the possible – is eradicated by speed.

It is speed and advancement, Virilio notes, which gives rise to a catastrophic inertia, a breakdown of the social that arises from the cancellation of movement, the collapse of space. Instead of suffering driving accidents, as we wrap ourselves in cars and trains, we encounter “parking accidents” – having buckled into terminals and interfaces, mobile devices of another sort.

From its opening scene, Korine’s film is concerned with a society of individuals evacuated from their living space – the perspectival, grounded space of the horizon – and into a horizonless void of instantaneity and immanence: spring break.

Spring break, in this sense, stands in for the ritualized outlet of deconstructive destabilization. Spring break is the release of an inevitable aggression against the bonds of society, aggression which is unregulated and untethered, yet socially permissible as it occurs out of space (away from home, abroad) and out of time (in measured units, of service in war or of the seasonal festival).

But what if spring break were forever? What if space and time collapsed, under the weight of a culture of instantaneity, no longer able to contain a space of traversal – from here to there, and from then to now?

‘Spring break, forever’ is the mantra of Alien, a rapper and criminal who coerces the protagonists to participate in crime: the ultimate outsider activity. More than socially alienating, ‘spring break, forever’ is the ultimate statement of temporal alienation, as well. It signifies the terminal point of traversal in both space and time: ‘exist outside of existence, forever.’

Spring break, forever, is a forever war – like Virilio’s ‘pure’ war, in which the planetary backdrop of existence is increasingly supplanted by an artificial technological environment. Such a replacement is, itself, a war waged against the spontaneity of the subject by the standardization and stability demanded by an increasingly technological environment. Each subject must be coerced and constrained, hammered into shape and made uniform. Each subject is form-fitted, like cartridges lined up in the magazine of a firearm – each destined to be ejected by the same apparatus, the same approximate distance and trajectory.

‘Spring break, forever’ is a consequence of war beyond necessity; war prolonged by any means. It is the elimination of free time as a consequence of all time becoming free time. It is the eradication of potential transformation in the homogenization of novelty.

Alien, introducing the girls to his home, is proud to have Scarface on repeat. The boundary between film and real-life dissolve. Alien might as well live in a universe sustained by the monomythic telling and re-telling of the tale of Tony Montana. Alien’s universe is filled with an abundance of standardized goods – he has shorts in “every colour,” so that even beach wear becomes a uniform. In an alien life, the distinction between the space/time of work and leisure, of mundaneness and mythmaking, is completely eradicated.

In this way, Spring Breakers portrays a social situation in which the home front has been evacuated wholesale, yet no one has had to leave. To use Virilio’s term, the ‘trajective’ disappears as subjects, barrelling at hyperspeed (cyberspeed?), collide with distant objects. In an increasingly digital culture, the social – the horizon of trajective motion between subject and object, here and there, now and then – has been evacuated into the realm of online platforms. Online, everyone is away on spring break because no one is here.

It is no coincidence that spring break begins not when the girls arrive in Florida, but when they violently rob a diner to fund their trip. As Freud asserts, the unconscious “knocks for admission at the gates” of consciousness in the dream, the joke, and the symptom. The initial boredom the girls felt, positioned as nodes in a classroom grid on a campus that extended beyond what the eye could see, could only be alleviated in what Freud called a “festival for the ego.” A circumscribed and delineated moment in which the gates of consciousness – the inherited regulations of social life assimilated as the conscience or super-ego – can be flung open, if only for a while, before slamming back shut to stand firm, stronger than before. In this way the festival reorients, sublimates, inevitable aggression towards the creative sustenance of the social – not necessarily its dissolution.

Thus, like a dare or a joke, the first act of violence perpetrated by the group is inside the home. It would be more correct to assert that the girls invited spring break into their lives, than to consider them going ‘away’ on spring break.

As Virilio put it, the pollution of planetary space, as a result of the widespread technicization of life, is accompanied by a pollution of time. A dromospheric pollution – from the Greek, δρόμος [dromos]; a race or running, but also the ritual pathway leading to a tomb. The breakdown of the social, arising from its hyper-instantaneous amplification through global communications systems, amounts to a speedrun of the dromos that leads to our own sarcophagi – an eternal life, after life, adorned with the circuitry of the technological prostheses with which we have smothered all possibilities of living on earth.

Excess time results in the cancellation of time. What emerges is an eternal now where the ego cannot circumscribe the festival through which it can rejuvenate itself against the persecutory demands of society. An endless here in which the journey elsewhere is rendered inert. Transcendence is eradicated in the ubiquity of transcendence.

Although highly relevant today, Spring Breakers is a film uniquely resistant to depicting technology. Phone calls and texts, instead of organically depicted, are solitary monologues, spoken by each girl as if they were Dear John letters ripped from the pages of old war novels. They are immediate and immanent communications which curiously elicit no immediate response.

When we are all accessible to each other, ubiquitously connected, the film states, each individual is truly alone.

Even the Skrillex song that opens the film – a mixture of delicate melodies and aggressive bass drops – expresses the technological mutilation of life. Social life, itself, becomes the material that is ‘sampled’ and remixed. Skrillex’s bass drop is signalled by an audio clip from a YouTube video. A young girl, speedstackinggirl, exclaims in innocent joy as she beats a personal record in stacking plastic cups: Yes, oh my gosh!

Referencing Korine’s film with her song of the same name, Charli XCX condemns the centralized institutionalization of ‘culture’ – the Grammys, the charts, the perceived mainstream:

“Every time, I make it so outrageous
Always gonna lose to people playin' safer
Four, three, two, one, see you later
Crazy girl shit, gonna go Spring Breakers”

The new youth culture is a culture of societal collapse. It is the culture of utopia, of no-where, because it is anywhere and everywhere we are. Its merit as art is unmeasurable in bureaucratic terms, precisely because the transcendent world that art once posited as an antithesis to social reality is no longer contained as art. Art is no longer a portal to peer into an other life, art is the backdrop for the performance of our lives. We perform our lives to the tune of sound bytes, clips, snippets – of songs, of films, of other’s performances of life; like the life of speedstackinggirl or Charli XCX’s sampling of Britney Spears’ “Everytime” (itself ‘sampled’ by Korine’s film).

Online, everyone is absent – everyone is away on spring break. Instead of perceiving the transcendent from the grounded perspective of the social, we each live in a transcendent plane of our own. All that is left is to perform public acts of boredom, alone – acts which run the gamut from banal (cup stacking) to antisocial (public pranks) to criminal (mass violence). It is these acts of boredom that form the building blocks of a new society of absence, of asociality.

The closing scene of Korine’s film, which intentionally mirrors the opening scene, features the same exuberant bodies, tumbling through the void of spring break and juxtaposed with the linear horizon of the home front. This time, however, the contrast is not with a college campus, but with the linear architectural features of a drug dealer’s mansion whose occupants the girls murdered. Whereas at home, the grid of their community college was populated by the occasional lone figure, the mansion in which they find themselves is similarly populated by an occasional corpse.

The parallel, between opening and closing scenes, seems to indicate that, perhaps, in going away, the girls did find a horizon – a creative force for life found in courting death. The girls soliloquize – once again to no one in particular, perhaps in a closed loop to themselves – that they want to come home, to do better, to be better.

Yet even at the end, ‘spring break, [is] forever.’ Because it is during spring break that they can “see beyond the stars, into the light.” Perhaps new forms of life and light – the light of a black sun – hover on the horizon. It is a horizon which, in the digital cancellation of the social (or, rather, its radical update), is indistinguishable from a void, until it erupts with violence.

Works Cited

Charli XCX. 2024. “Spring Breakers” on Brat and it’s the same but there’s three more songs so it’s not. New York: Atlantic Records.

Freud, Sigmund. 2022 [1921]. “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. James Strachey. London: Vintage. 67-143.

Korine, Harmony. 2012. Spring Breakers. New York: A24.

Skrillex. 2010. “Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites” on Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites. New York: Big Beat Records.

speedstackinggirl. 2008. “7.00!!! OMG!!! NEW PB! OMG!! OMG!!! SO CLOSE TO SIX!! OOMMGG!!!” YouTube. Accessed March 8, 2025. < www.youtube.com/watch?v=j54yGxuk0yo >

Virilio, Paul. 1997 [1995]. Open Sky. Trans. Julie Rose. London: Verso.

Virilio, Paul & Sylvère Lotringer. 2008 [1983]. Pure War: Twenty-Five Years Later. Trans. Mark Polizzotti. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e).