Desire in the Age of the Algorithm
image from wikipedia article on Reinforcement, uploaded by U3144362 and released under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license.
I’ve been having phone problems lately — the battery is dying, because of course it is — and in the process of getting it fixed, I’ve been loaned a temporary phone. Now, I know that there’s no such thing as a “good” corporation, but I’ve been an Android user for years. All of my habits have been shaped by being plugged into that infrastructure, by occupying that skinner box.
So, of course, the loaner is an old iPhone.
Now, if I’d been paid several thousand dollars by Apple, maybe I’d claim it was better than I anticipated, but no one’s asking for testimonials from socialist bloggers working three jobs, even those broke enough to consider it (I’m getting there. How am I still broke while working three jobs? Someone who is good at the economy please help.) Needless to say it’s like trying to work with an ill-fitting prosthetic: the concerns that this machine is designed to address are fundamentally different from those I have.
So, because I’m like that, I started thinking about our relationship to our built environment: it’s entirely possible that if Apple products had been more affordable when I started using a smart phone, back in 2011 (I think?), perhaps I would have gone with that, and then my expectations for what a smart phone is would have been shaped by that, and Androids would seem to me the way that linux computers do: finnicky things that you have to constantly mess with the settings of, managing the in-flow and out-flow of information on, safeguarding the permeable boundaries of your personal envelope of information.
What I’m saying is, while necessity is commonly acknowledged to be the mother of invention, invention creates its own sense of necessity. It’s a feedback loop, and we often can’t put ourselves in the headspace of people outside of it (for more on this, see this piece in The Bustle, prompted by, of all things, the Instant Pot.) I remember, vaguely, having the sense in the 1990s that I would never want a cell phone. I’d just wait until I got back to the phone or pay a quarter to use the payphone if I had to make a call.
Now, I’m comparing the absence of this device, implicitly, to a sort of amputation. Which has a lot of baggage. Before anyone comes for my scalp, let me point out that Donna Jeanne Haraway, the author of The Cyborg Manifesto, as well as the book Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, articulated a theory of what it means to be human which argues that we’re a hybrid sort of creature: to be human is to be a tool-using creature. Other than that, we’re just hairless apes that have really good balance. But what, then, is a tool? Something that extends the function of the body.
No. Not like that. (image from Futurama, owned by 20th Century Fox/The Curiosity Company.)
So, it’s easy to think of the glasses as an extension of the eye, but by this logic, the wheel is an extension of the foot and the knife is an extension of the tooth. The phone (I’m dropping the adjective “smart” — it feels unnatural, 21st century “digital native” that I am) is an extension of the mind. But the mind isn’t a part of the body. What, then, the brain?
My trouble is that what I have been given functions more as an extension of the eye — they sell it based on the camera, and it offers a much more visual and less linguistic experience — while the device I’m used to is an extension of the ear or maybe the voice. I use it to listen to music and podcasts, and it’s just easier to type on.
EDIT: Though the iPhone grew out of the iPod, so perhaps it’s the ear, while the more writing-focused Android is an extension of the eye? It’s hard to say — one is lexical and the other is affective.
Okay, so I’m an android stan. That’s not useful information or particularly interesting. I’m a bit of a reactionary when it comes to the whole business of mobile technology. I resisted getting a tablet for the longest period of time, despite ebooks being easier to move than physical books and DRM-free versions being available. Moreover, when I found out I couldn’t remove the battery from my phone, I almost asked for a refund: I wanted to be able to be certain that it was deactivated, and without the ability to remove it completely from its power supply I didn’t feel I could be certain.
I may not be terribly handy, but I generally have a Maker-friendly streak to me, and Make magazine published “the Owners Manifesto” back in 2006, which led with a simple, easy maxim: “If you can’t open it, you don’t own it.” While I don’t know how to fix it, when I was able to open things I at least could easily be certain that it was off.
Okay, but what does this have to do with the creation of a sense of necessity?
We inscribe our ideas about the world on the things that we make. No one would build an overpass without building a car first. No one would make a lock without something to close. As soon as these prerequisite things exist, the later things can come into being.
I want you to imagine trying to explain the concept of the juicero to Charlemagne. Now can you imagine doing it in a way that doesn’t result in him ordering your execution?
This is logic that is postulated by the Civilization series by Sid Meier. It’s something that those of us who grew up playing video games learned pretty early but it is, itself, an inscribed idea. We think that technological process is some transcendentally-mandated march from stone to bronze to iron to whatever it is we’re doing now.
This puts forward the idea that there’s some future golden age we’re on the march towards, probably involving wisecracking robots and pink lasers that implant knowledge directly into your head. The problem is that progress, in this sense, is a social construct. It may exist, but it doesn’t objectively, transcendentally exist in a way that is accessible to everyone, everywhere, for all time..
Let me put forward an alternate idea: the feedback loop, not driven by necessity, but driven by desire. We desire that something happens (the ability to talk to someone who is absent — whether across town or across the Atlantic.) and when that is fulfilled, other desires crop up (we wish to do this from the privacy of another room, not just the room the device is plugged in within; we wish to do this from our car instead of from the home; we wish to avoid the awkwardness of a conversation and just send really, really, really fast letters, all typed with our thumbs.) We feel a desire, and eventually someone makes a mechanism to fulfill that desire (see: the George Carlin bit about the flamethrower); but at the fulfillment of this desire, there is still the impulse to want.
Nothing disappoints quite like satisfaction.
And so newer desires arise and we seek to fulfill those.
Now, I promised myself that I would write a piece on the art and design instead of a piece on politics, but I find my mind wandering. I fear I may talk about some Marxist ideas. I’ll make it brief, but bear with me for a moment.
How many of your desires do you think are genuinely your own? How many of them have been instilled in you by advertising? This is, honestly, something that I’ve been wondering about myself for a while. Do I want this, or have I simply been told that I want this? Is this me, or is this the Spectacle?
For a while, I almost jumped into Buddhism, thinking that the engine behind injustice was desire.
The problem I came up with is that without desire — without want — how can you say that you want to achieve something? How can you say that you want to break free of something? There’s no impulse to do anything without desire — I’m pretty sure that it’s a marker of depression to be without it.
So, what, then? Do we just open up Amazon or something and look at what it tells us to want? Do we revel in the feeling of wanting?
This is an unsatisfying answer. We want our desires to be for something “meaningful” or “genuine” or “fulfilling.” So where do we find that?
Maybe a broom is what we’re looking for? Or some kind of shop vac?
It seems to me that the issue here is that we have a problem and the tool we’ve invented for it is really stupid. I’m not just talking about algorithms, but more on that in a moment, I’m talking about the industry of advertising and the regime of production we’ve created. We feel want, but can’t name the thing that we want, so there’s this thing, the advertisement, to suggest to us something that we want, and this gives us a little quest. We’re Parsifal on the way to the chapel, the Stalker on the way through the Zone.
And when we make our way through the Chapel Perilous, through the Meat Grinder to the Room, we find ourselves taking home an iPhone or a weighted blanket or a crunchwrap supreme. And this does not fulfill us.
So we invented better advertisements, we invented something to better desire things for us.
Here we come to the algorithm. This can’t be quire as stupid as the previous thing, because surely a machine is more accurate than ad men, right? It’s a machine, it can’t give the wrong answer.
I hate to break it to you about the thing telling you that the weighted blanket goes perfectly with that Blu Ray DVD of Adam Sandler’s The Water Boy and a 24-pack of ice cream sandwiches go great together has (a) identified that you’re suffering from depression and (b) is in the same family of software as the thing that made your Facebook display posts out of order.
Because on the other end of the equation, far away, unless you’re in California, there was a man who had the desire to use a particular piece of software to make a lot of money, and that desire led him to the opportunity to plug that block of code longer than War and Peace into the back end of a website and make enough money to ride off to New Zealand in a yacht made out of hundred dollar bills to live in a compound because he thinks that society is going to collapse and he doesn’t want to be around for it.
Though California and Australia are looking mighty similar, and New Zealand isn’t that far away from one of them. (Image from ABC news)
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This is turning into a rant, and not a particularly focused one at that. Let me reorganize, summarize, and expand on these points.
Cognition is embodied — this is something that Edgar and I have disagreed on in the past, so this is just me saying it — and what our bodies do changes our minds.
Our tools, the things we make and use, change the way our bodies work. They extend some functions and farm out other functions, both of which have some influence on our bodies. So our tools can also be said to change how our minds work, because they change our bodies and our bodies influence our minds.
The things we make — the things you can just go down to the store and buy if you don’t have them — are made to fulfill a certain set of needs, solve a certain set of problems, and — ultimately — generate a certain set of changes on the mind. A lot of these changes are unconsidered.
Each object fulfills a desire, but dissatisfaction is constant. We immediately start to desire new things, but our minds have been changed by the thing we have acquired. It is a new mindset that is desiring, a new set of desires looking to be fulfilled.
The tools we have created to help ease the fulfillment of desire are, universally, very, very dumb. Comically so.
On the other end of the equation — the other users for these tools, you have another set of humans trying to solve the same general problem (how to fulfill one’s desires with the tools on hand) but they have advertising and algorithms to use. Fundamentally, they interact with the world differently from you.
Sometimes, the things they make are equally dumb. Let’s look at that, maybe that can teach us something.
Hello again! I present to you: the dumbest thing silicon valley ever made.
Consider, again, the humble juicero.
Or, rather, not humble. There’s nothing humble about it — it’s a monument to overconfidence.
It is a thing that doesn’t need to exist. No one needs a $400 internet-enabled “juicer” that only works with proprietary juice packets that can also be opened by scissors (a comically failed sort of enclosure.) This could easily have been an example of fraud, if the people responsible hadn’t also been taken in by their own hype.
The problem they were trying to solve is “I have less money than I want to have.” The way you supposedly do that in a capitalist system is you find someone else’s need and you fill it for a nominal fee. This isn’t how it works. How it works now is you create a need that you are able to fill: you convince people that they are insufficient and broken without the solution that you are offering.
It isn’t exactly violence, but it is definitely a dick move.
Juicero failed because they underestimated the amount of work it would take to convince people that they needed a $400 web-enabled Keurig-for-juice machine.
More than anything else, human beings want to want. We throw away our satisfaction and cast about for new things to desire. The problem is that we’ve become focused on the problem of the people who are fundamentally satisfied — the people who can afford to drop hundreds of dollars on a widget made by an idiot, which signifies nothing. We ignore the people who want water and food and shelter, because those people who want those things have nothing to offer.
All of our attention is focused on the bleeding edge, and we claim to be moving fast, oh so very fast, but I’ll let you in on the dirtiest of secrets: all of that speed? All of that acceleration?
None of it’s real.
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In “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit”, (referenced here and here,) anthropologist David Graeber makes the assertion that technology hasn’t really been advancing at nearly the rate we think it has. Instead, following the end of the Cold War, the technologies that emerged most readily were:
so much a reorientation toward market-driven consumer imperatives, but part of an all-out effort to follow the technological humbling of the Soviet Union with total victory in the global class war—seen simultaneously as the imposition of absolute U.S. military dominance overseas, and, at home, the utter rout of social movements.
For the technologies that did emerge proved most conducive to surveillance, work discipline, and social control. Computers have opened up certain spaces of freedom, as we’re constantly reminded, but instead of leading to the workless utopia Abbie Hoffman imagined, they have been employed in such a way as to produce the opposite effect. They have enabled a financialization of capital that has driven workers desperately into debt, and, at the same time, provided the means by which employers have created “flexible” work regimes that have both destroyed traditional job security and increased working hours for almost everyone. Along with the export of factory jobs, the new work regime has routed the union movement and destroyed any possibility of effective working-class politics.
If we take Graeber at his word, and I’m honestly inclined to do so, we can see the veil slipping a bit. In the 2020 “State of the World” on The Well, Science Fiction author Bruce Sterling writes that
there's no technological innovation in MMXX [2020]. Innovation and invention are out of style. The closest we've got to innovation is "capital moating," where you start some allegedly technical company to screw around with, say, hotels or taxis, and throw so many billions at the project that businessmen are awed. That's financially innovative -- sort of -- it's like the space-aviation biz staying aloft by angling subsidies. That's not Moore's Law, there's nothing amazingly great that is busting out of the garage to set Google-Apple-Facebook-Amazon-Microsoft on their ear. There is no wonderment, because there is no reason to wonder.
In short, design is faltering because we have reached the limits of desire for a small slice of the population. Specifically, for the slice of the population who are comfortable: they want something new, they want to re-experience the shock of novelty that they saw when people first encountered the iPhone or the desktop computer or the airplane.
It’s the Nostalgia Trap for design, but the problem is that, much like Brianna Rennix and Nathan J. Robinson wrote about architecture (referenced here,) the built environment is hard to escape, and I think that a lot of the devices that we’ve come up with are the same problem in as a granular, neoprene vapor, instead of in the solid block of concrete ugly.
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