“The most effective way to diffuse collective action — and the sweeping, systemic changes it can spark — has always been to turn those who are suffering against one another,” Petersen writes. That is also a concise way of explaining what Ring cameras accomplish: They reject the possibility of collective action and embed “every person for themselves” With social media, the reasonable desires for social recognition and tailored information metastasized into addictive use patterns and “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” while the app can continually foreground a sense of the world is fundamentally dangerous.
The system, then, does not particularly care for the individual user as much as it thrives on the decomposition and recomposition of the data that users provide Being shown what you are “supposed” to see is central to what social media offer (the promise of self-expression is mainly an alibi for that larger surrender to algorithmic recommendation); they allow us to consume that passivity toward what we want as pleasurable in itself.
To hold someone's attention with a blank slate, all that's necessary is to put another blank slate beside it. You don't have to write anything on either of them. I start to think about the many selves I project, and how the phones work to align them beside themselves, inviting comparison.
It is as though we’re only starting to learn what the supposed pleasures of this new level of monitoring are supposed to be. But our conditioning in consumerism is such that many are willing to take it on faith that the pleasures will emerge The ubiquity of a product begins to convey a pleasure in its own right — just as the sheer demonstrable popularity of a song can make it seem “good,” can make participation in it feel inevitable and joyful, a consubstantiation of the zeitgeist.
Catron felt during the staring contest “not just that I was really seeing someone, but that I was seeing someone really seeing me” — like a recursive reflection of a mirror in a mirror perhaps.
In practice, though, this means platforms show us things that it is paid to show us (ads, promoted content, etc.) along with the sorts of content that makes us tolerate it, that convinces us there is no point in trying to search for anything different. In other words, algorithmic sorting is meant to make us indifferent to wanting particular things. It teaches users to enjoy passivity as an end in itself, as a kind of pure convenience in the abstract.
The House Is Haunted by the Echo of Your Last Goodbye
instead of interesting thoughts and aperçus, I find instead a lot of self-promotion, water carrying, awkward efforts to impress people, attempts to @ my way into conversations I didn’t belong in, and lots of stray opinions that would have been better off kept to myself in any circumstances. It’s like I had no concept of a “lane” to stay in. I no longer feel like I need to narrate my entire day’s reading to the site as if it were a surrogate listener. But reading them over as I eliminate them from the public record, I see that there was nothing there, nothing that can redeem for me now the time I spent on the platform in the past. It’s more an illustration of the time I wasted while never trying to write something that might have had the remote chance of actually being lastingly useful. No one on social media is speaking to the future.
In other words, the ‘success’ of technologies like self-checkout machines is in large part produced by the human effort necessary to maintain the technologies Their broader point is that automation doesn’t eliminate human labor; it often leads to its disguising and devaluation Customers have to bridge the gap between the norms of human customer service and the company’s imposition of inhuman staff shortfalls without completely losing their patience or simply taking what they couldn’t find a reasonable way to purchase. That is, they rely on the kinds of consideration from users that the companies themselves don’t practice. They have prioritized user growth, data collection, and advertising over providing a safe, reliable service to users. It’s no wonder that some users will adopt the same attitude and the same goals: try to spread unwanted messages as far as possible.
I never thought this waning of curiosity would happen to me, but now that is another lost illusion from youth. But it seems one of the main effects of abundance is to shift the frame of reference to larger units, from songs and albums to artists and genres. But rather than be taken with the ephemeral singularity of a performance (these can be instigated on demand with a generative AI), we can consume the model’s learning process as the composition, and not the particular sounds it makes at any given time. It could be like listening to birdsong that becomes progressively more complex and interpretable. Its emerging capabilities are more interesting as a trajectory, much in the same way our own emerging tastes can be to ourselves. she laments how many AI music projects attempt to re-create already existing styles: “It gets us in kind of a feedback loop culturally which does not move us forward,” she says. “It doesn’t respond to what’s happening now and music should be responsive to the politic and the material world around it.” This feels like a way of taming the threat of abundance, not by rejecting it exactly but by converting it into a set of rules. It is a way to navigate the infinite without sailing over the edge.
it’s a kind negative consumer sovereignty, in which we avoid ever being disappointed by what we’ve chosen, because we just choose “something else” over and over again, as much as we need to
the point of algorithmically sorted feeds is to re-create the experience of channel flipping; to institute the logic of TV consumption to phones and other screens algorithmic feeds seek to replace the desire to experience something specific (that you search for) with a desire for a rhythm of flipping/scrolling itself this rewards the consumer for exercising choice, but choice is no longer selecting something they like but a matter of saying “nope“ over and over again without settling on anything it’s a kind negative consumer sovereignty, in which we avoid ever being disappointed by what we’ve chosen, because we just choose “something else” over and over again, as much as we need to
“…perpetually rediscovering that every identity is ‘manufactured’ and ‘effortless identity’ requires even more effort (and cognitive dissonance) to sustain”
seems like teenagers are perpetually rediscovering that every identity is "manufactured" and "effortless identity" requires even more effort (and cognitive dissonance) to sustain— Rob Horning (@robhorning) April 24, 2019
platforms have to act as though their algorithms work and don’t work at the same time, and this equivocation fosters a paranoia about how algorithms work. The point of advertising, after all, is not to nail down what people are, as if that were static; it’s to shift currents of demand, to alter behavior patterns. But the logic of data profiling uses the past to repeat it as the future. This mystification is not an unfortunate side effect; it’s the value Facebook adds. Users are isolated from each other so they can feel as though they are the implied subject of all the discourse they experience on the site — so that they can be targeted in “one-to-one brand building” campaigns. Users get to feel important, singled out, worthy of decoding, and at the same time they get to interpret whatever they read through the lens of “Why did the algorithm choose this for me? What does this say about me and my tastes?” But that works only through an effort of disavowal: You have to feel that the algorithm is right enough to cater to you but not powerful enough to control you (even while it controls all those “indoctrinated peers”). In this London Review of Books essay about Brexit,William Davies offers this description of accelerated finance: The mentality of the high-frequency trader or hedge fund manager is wholly focused on leaving on better terms than one arrived, with minimum delay or friction in between. To the speculator, falling prices present just as lucrative an opportunity as rising prices (given the practice of ‘shorting’ financial assets), meaning that instability in general is attractive. As long as nothing ever stays the same, you can exit on better terms than you entered. The only unprofitable scenario is stasis. In a sense, platform paranoia is akin to market volatility; it reflects and promotes a high-frequency trading of sorts in various propositions, accelerating cycles of belief and skepticism as we churn through a much higher volume of information. Advertising is more likely to be effective amid these conditions, where it seems that everybody and not just marketers is being manipulative and deceptive. How we are targeted is always incomplete and inaccurate, but these inaccuracies in themselves can still drive and reshape behavior. Being targeted itself affects the targets, regardless of what is targeted at them, or if anything hits. They want to sell control over that connection, the moment at which your feelings become actions in the world. (Advertisers understand that link between feeling and acting entirely as a matter of “conversion rates” — when you actually buy something.) When we remember our lives authentically, we ask a fundamental question: Why did I remember this thing, at this moment? The “Why now?” question gives memory its meaning. Facebook randomizes and decontextualizes memory and detaches it from our current self. And why would I want to know what I looked like 10 years ago?
“it makes more sense to me to analyze social media platforms in terms of ‘social capital’ than things like ‘dopamine hits,’ but they often end up being treated as the same thing”
“it makes more sense to me to analyze social media platforms in terms of "social capital" than things like "dopamine hits," but they often end up being treated as the same thing https://t.co/ryHo7OGAGr”
“the point of assigning some data set the status of an ‘emotion’ is to try to intervene and dictate how people process their own feelings, so that the emotion can be alienated from the person experiencing it, processed by an outside party, and sent
“the point of assigning some data set the status of an "emotion" is to try to intervene and dictate how people process their own feelings, so that the emotion can be alienated from the person experiencing it, processed by an outside party, and sent back to the person as a command”
“‘personal data’ reinscribes the idea that data is property rather than situated information; but that encourages the false idea that you ‘make’ your own data rather than data being read off of you in a potentially infinite number of ways”
"personal data" reinscribes the idea that data is property rather than situated information; but that encourages the false idea that you "make" your own data rather than data being read off of you in a potentially infinite number of ways— Rob Horning (@robhorning) February 15, 2019
On streaming services squeezing out content providers
streaming-service users ultimately end up consuming/enjoying/needing the content-delivery model and not the content itself — streaming itself if the product, what is streamed is eventually arbitrary— Rob Horning (@robhorning) February 13, 2019
“the function of memory is not to document the past (as always the same, always available for rote recall) but to produce the past in the present moment”
the shadow version of you that Facebook creates is its property; it's what's targeted etc.; meanwhile that entity is used against you (it's used to determine what you're qualified to see), which intensifies pressure on us to adopt that as our "real self— Rob Horning (@robhorning) January 25, 2019
“Identity was no longer assigned but became a project for individuals to realize. It became an opportunity and a responsibility, a burden. You could now fail to become someone.” “This is the context in which social media have thrived: They solve the problem of the self under neoliberalism, extending a platform for human capital development while still offering a seemingly stable basis for “ontological security.” It may seem that social media, by making social interaction asynchronous, shifting a portion of it online to an indefinite “virtual” space, and subjecting it all to constant monitoring, measurement, and assessment would not be a recipe for producing a sense of personal continuity. The way our self-expression gets ranked in likes and shares in social media would seem to subordinate identity to competition over metricized attention, dividing peers into winners and losers. And the creation of identity in the form of a data archive would seem to fashion not a grounded self but an always incomplete and inadequate double — a “self partially forced from the body.” You are always in danger of being confronted with your incohesiveness, with evidence of a past self now rejected or a misinterpreted, misprocessed version of one’s archive being distributed as the real you. If Laing is right about ontological insecurity, then social media seem designed to generate it: They systematically impose a sense of insubstantiality on users, turning identity into incoherence by constantly assimilating and demanding more data about us, making our self a vacuum that never fills, no matter how much is poured in. Our identity is constantly being recalibrated and recalculated, and we can forever try to “correct” it with more photos, more updates, more posts, more data.” “...other forms of micro-recognition” “The profile takes over for the old identity stabilizers (family, geography, religion, etc.) and becomes the sturdy blank slate on which various roles can be inscribed while we remain open to the saturation of as many different influences as possible. It can hold our lives while we are busy constantly reinventing ourselves for labor markets. Social media exacerbate ontological insecurity while masquerading as its cure.”
