Appropriate Response (part 03)
The first page of Slanted magazine 37 - ai - based on the Slogans for the class of 2030 project by Douglas Coupland.
“Reading a book, listening to music, researching and learning: these and many other activities are increasingly governed by algorithmic logics and policed by opaque and hidden computational processes. Culture is itself a code/space.”
This quote is what sparked an investigation into the subject of this last section - how our daily lives are dependent on and dominated by a network of digital technologies. The term code/space that Bridle employs is borrowed from a software studies publication of the same name by Kitchin and Dodge, which refers to situations where “software and the spatiality of everyday life become mutually constituted, that is, produced through one another.” (Kitchin and Dodge, 2011). Take the example of an airport. It is a physical space that carries out a function (enabling passengers to travel) that is dependent on technology - software that enables check-in, security checks, communications about which flights are to be boarded from which terminals, and so on. Should these software programs cease to work then the entire process becomes compromised (as the manual forms of these functions have long-since been retired) and passengers, in effect, cannot travel. This means that the airport as a functioning physical space is dependent upon its software infrastructure. So much so that we now plan the physical layout of airports based upon the processes that these computer systems enable. Thus the production of physical space is influenced, or some might say dictated, by technology. It must be said that not all physical spaces fall within this category. In fact many function as coded spaces - spaces where “software makes a difference to the transduction of spatiality but the relationship between code and space is not mutually constituted.”
“Computation does not merely augment, frame, and shape culture; by operating beneath our everyday, casual awareness of it, it actually becomes culture.”
What Bridle is alleging is that culture itself is increasingly becoming constituted by digital technology, so much so that this digitisation becomes the defining factor of our modern society. Kitchin and Dodge also allude to this, stating that as “the world starts to structure itself in the image of the capta and code — a self-fulfilling, recursive relationship develops.” But what does this really mean? Is this a claim that culture is effectively created and modulated by big data? Is our identity tied to our web browsers and social media profiles? Are we unable to meaningfully participate in today’s world without access to technological infrastructures and networks? These questions are meant to be alarmist, however as I write them there manifests an uncomfortable undercurrent which rings true.
“Networked digital information technology looms ever larger in all of our lives. It shapes our perceptions, conditions the choices available to us, and remakes our experience of space and time. It requires us to master arcane bodies of knowledge, forcing us into a constant cycle of obsolescence and upgrade that, with startling rapidity, makes nonsense of our most diligent attempts to reckon with it. It even inhibits our ability to think meaningfully about the future, tending to reframe any conversation about the reality we want to live in as a choice between varying shades of technical development.”
In his book, Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life, Adam Greenfield seems to agree with Bridle. He claims that “networked digital information technology has become the dominant mode through which we experience the everyday”, and “the extent to which it organises the everyday is one of the defining characteristics of our era.” We have become so dependent on technology that our entire way of life and everything that we take for granted - our utilities, food, work, transport, leisure, social interaction, even sense of identity - is completely reliant on coded objects, processes, infrastructures and assemblages (Kitchin and Dodge, 2011). However what Bridle and Greenfield are both proposing is that digitisation goes beyond enabling society, it reforms it within its own image. I say it does this not in the sense that it is somehow self-aware, but that the way we work, relax, commute, and live is largely reliant on digital platforms which over time slowly shape our tastes, habits, and routines.
These systems, objects, and products, however, did not suddenly appear out of the ether. They are created and maintained by individuals, namely private for-profit tech companies. This is important because, as Bridle hints with his statements, technology is employed out of a sense of agency, which is often at the interest of one agenda - capitalism. In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism Shoshana Zuboff lays out an argument that capitalist private companies leverage the data they routinely collect about all of us in order to not only monitor but shape our collective behaviour towards their own profitable ends, resulting in a form of power she dubs “instrumentarianism.” She claims that even though we might be aware of this exploitation, with many of us now becoming accustomed to using VPNs, ad-blockers, and Pi-holes, we ultimately succumb to this status quo because “our dependency is at the heart of the commercial surveillance project, in which our felt needs for effective life vie against the inclination to resist its bold incursions. This conflict produces a psychic numbing that inures us to the realities of being tracked, parsed, mined, and modified.” (Zuboff, 2019). Thus we live in a society where we know that our personal data is being mined and commodified to the ends of corporate pockets, but that exchange is merely the cost of participation.
“We are already halfway distributed, with our work, our familiar and social lives, our memories, our capacity to imagine and even our cognitive processes in a very real sense strewn across the mesh of data centers and server farms, transmission infrastructures and interface devices that constitutes the contemporary global network.”
So am I advocating that we boycott all means of technological utility and interaction in order to return to a ‘pure’ and ‘unblemished’ lifestyle of the past? Perhaps withdrawing ourselves from some notable social media platforms might do us all some good (or a lot of good), but one would need to make very drastic adjustments to their lifestyle in order to escape the influence of digitisation and personally I’m not about to go live off-grid any time soon. My belief is echoed in some of Tim’s responses in the interview, that “the internet is just thirty years old... ...and we haven’t had any time to reflect on how we use the internet, why we really need it, and what’s the best way to use it.” As technology and digital networks move and innovate at an increasingly fast pace, becoming more interlinked, self-regulated, and algorithmically-determined we scarcely have the opportunity to pause and reflect on these systems - how they operate, on whom, and to what end. Greenfield declares that “a time of radical technologies demands a generation of radical technologists”, that questioning the ethics and practices of the infrastructures which enable our lifestyles can only be accomplished through an understanding of how they operate and to what end.
“We believe deeply that understanding how something works is essential to understanding what it means: that knowing how a photo is made tells us something important about images in our culture. There are people making choices on both sides of every button: the people who put the buttons there and the people who push them.”
In Ghost in the Machine: Distributing Subjectivity, Andrew Blauvelt writes, “contemporary designers make tools that enable others to use design, they create systems to engage the intrinsic complexity of technology and life.” The scale of technologies and systems that Blauvelt is invoking here is nowhere near the complexity of those which our culture is now founded upon, however the basic principles of their operation remain the same. I think that graphic designers, those practitioners who are primarily concerned with communication systems and how these messages and platforms function, are well positioned to investigate the nature of this algorithmic culture and hold it to account. Tim argues that creative coding is one of the best tools available to empower us “to navigate a digitised and technologised future.” I agree, though I would say that a complete system-based approach to design, beyond just a generative practice, might be a powerful critical tool. The process is the product. It’s also a key.
