The illusion here is to think that our experience could be monitored and influenced by a central computer in the first place. For its calculations, the latter has to rely on what I give it; but also demands that what I give it be in a form that it can recognize, so that it can manipulate the data, present it according to some algorithm of emotion, to predict trends in usage and to test new features, etc. The problem is that I give it much more than it knows how to read; and I dont tell it anything in its language. In truth, I dont tell it anything. It cannot properly listen, it cannot hear, think, feel, or respond; all it can do is manipulate the signs of life, the signs of emotion. If it wants to try to play with me, to frame me, I welcome that; I will not be in the least convinced that it plays with anything but a ghost, or even less, with the shadow my ghosts casts over the presence it would like to structure and put on display for me. In fact, this is a virtue of the virtual, and I am thankful for this facilitation--in trying to convince you that I am anything more than a few traces on a blank space, that whats being conjured here is really my identity, who exactly is it trying to fool? (Broadly speaking: to what model of personhood, of being-feeling-human, does this program appeal, and how can we turn that appeal otherwise?) However, what I do find irritating is the lack of control that I end up having over what I will see on my own news-feed (that is, which ghosts I get to read, frame, play with and respond to, spook back)--as if Facebook could calculate the value of my friendships and relationships better than I can; as if it had the right to show me one story and not the other; as if it knew what I desired, or even should desire, from what my friends share with me; and worse, as if it could perfect its guessing game through a random sample of the general populace, through the measure of clicks and likes. Even the options to choose what to see from different people (comments? pictures? life events?, etc.) have been stripped down to the option follow or unfollow (which leaves us to choose who we want to sacrifice in this economy of ghosts, who we want to reappear and how). This massive effort to curate my life, to guide the curation of my experience, to lead it to genuine ultimatums (to unfollow you is to consign you to oblivion, forcing you to message me personally; but how would you ever know?), all of this could almost be interpreted as an attack against the human right of self-expression, the right to be exposed and to be exposed to. (All that said, the fact that we no longer have control over how we are shared in the community, over where and how we will appear or not appear, suggests other strategies, I would say other freedoms of thinking and expressive dispersal. At any rate, it will not be a matter of trying to regain control of this proliferation of images, but to play with the fictions this proliferation makes possible.) To give the curative and expressive power back to the user would make the big platforms more democratic, but the problem of personalization within a set of prefigured options remains. How down does this prefiguring go? It begins with this dialogue box, with this interface and all its attempts to capture and play with my ghost (epitomized in the time-line: I never signed onto this ploy, I never consented to be represented in this way, I never vowed my allegiance to chronology as the true structure of temporality; it is time we analyzed the violence of this ploy), and goes up to all the links I could share, all the songs, even all the opinions and thoughts, everything contaminated by everything else in this mediatized communication, this cyber language, where every image is as good as disappeared and every voice as good as gone. But I think we are ahead of this game, this trap of presets. To greater or lesser degrees, we know how to play tricks on it, how to cut out unique tracks of communication and emotion that remain forever unforseeable (without presets, without program, in truth, without any expectations). In my eyes, this is just what Facebook is, a kind of experiment with singularity and encounter, disseminating artifacts that no one, in effect, knows what to do with yet (and perhaps theres nothing to do with it: what were doing here is not advertising). Perhaps it is a stretch to say we personalize this space, but we do haunt it and its program in ways it will never recognize; we can turn its own expectations against it, for example, sharing more than what weve heard, exposing ourselves more than we thought we should, transmitting experiences that wouldnt seem to be able to pass through the objective circuits of computers (but, as you know, the border between nature and technology is less clear than ever). Barring a grave infringement, it cannot prevent me from indicating to myself and to you its very superfluousness (what could be more common, really?), even the platforms outdatedness with respect to the very user it is trying to win--including the outdatedness of the whole ideology of self-representation that, largely unquestioned, still structures how we experience ourselves and others, an ideology that virtualization itself calls so strongly into question. Arent we all laughing at the way Facebook structures us? And yet we suffer under this structure. Out of a fear of being misrepresented by the algorithm, we crawl back into it, modify ourselves consciously or unconsciously to suit what it wants to hear from us. We represent ourselves here just as the program would want us to: with its key words, its key emotions, and very importantly, its key grammar (a wholesale devaluation of language here is not hard to spot, along with a total disregard or disinterest for patience). Obviously, the influence of these keys stretches far beyond the computer screen, their roots being in social anxiety in general. Which gets us back to the whole problem of the timeline and the logic of personhood underpinning so many oppressive structures and habits in our society. My hypothesis, however, is that this is precisely the place to begin tampering with these structures, these anxieties, these programs. The keys must be broken, we must make virtual space an experiment for and of ourselves. In this sense, it resembles features of a total work of art: more than a show-and-tell session, more than a forum for democratic discussion, more than a structuring of a virtual persona that will facilitate our real lives in this way or another, but an actual space of exposure, a space where identity itself is risked, entrusted to the unknown other who may or may not hear it out, where the image we have of ourselves is constantly challenged and cracked open, where emotion itself is set free from the servitude of control-- that is, of knowledge, power, and self-sovereignty in general. Because exposure and control, as the words themselves suggest, are utterly incompatible, they call for opposing thoughts and practices, in truth, opposing lives. (As for the important debate over privacy on the internet, I would both defend this right, and the right to non-surveillance (would it include a ban on Facebooks control of the news feed?) while simultaneously affirming that, at its heart, virtualization points in an entirely other direction, toward what Vilem Flusser calls the publishable private.) No doubt it would be a kind of madness to do this, without knowing what was at stake, or what kind of ghost effect an intervention in a machine of this kind might have. But perhaps if we push to the limit our inscription and our sharing here as non-programmable, non-calculable, non-manipulable, non-standardizable, uncontrollable, indeed unknowable, we can find new uses for these machines that they are more than ready for. This would imply a kind of subterranean revolution, a collective effort of expression, of invention, quotation, and poetry, perhaps even a form of amorous secrecy; but it would set the stage for a new practice of humanity or of being human that involved becoming-virtual, becoming-spooky, becoming-dislocated, and which would start with the ever renewed decision to be vulnerable.
Posted on: Tue, 01 Jul 2014 14:28:10 +0000
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