Showing posts with label internet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label internet. Show all posts
Wednesday 11 August 2021
Wednesday 25 July 2018
Sunday 10 June 2018
The Age of Perversion
Tabish Khair
We exist in a world where capital has become an obsession. And we are the perverts of free-floating ‘god-like’ capital
The period we are living through has been dubbed an Age of Fundamentalism, of Extremism, of Intolerance, etc. These are all appropriate descriptions. But if I had to choose a tag, I would call it the Age of Perversion.
An overbearing perversion
I do not use ‘perversion’ in its ordinary sense of ‘deviation from normal or accepted behaviour’. Simple deviation is not sufficient (and not necessarily bad) if it is not of an obsessive nature. What characterises a pervert is not the choice of a different option, but an obsession with only that option. The hallmark of an overbearing perversion is that no matter what one says, the pervert sees it only in terms of his/her obsession. Examples? Here you go.
A Muslim girl is raped in a Hindu temple, which causes justified outrage in many Hindu circles, but seems to leave some circles untouched. These miraculously untouched people not only make excuses but even point a finger (without any evidence) at Muslims, or, what they associate with Muslims, Pakistan. A post on Facebook states that Muslim clerics rape with impunity in their institutions. Apart from the wide sweep of its xenophobic purview — and I say so without denying that there can be serious problems in all male-controlled institutions, whether Hindu, Muslim or non-religious — I am shaken by the obsession of the person. No matter what the evidence, such a person can only blame ‘Muslims’. This is a perversion.
Versions of this exist elsewhere too. Go online and look at what many Islamists — who form only a small percentage of Muslims, just as Bhakts form only a small percentage of Hindus — have to say about the U.S., the Central Intelligence Agency, or Israel. No matter what happens, they point a finger at one or all of these three usual suspects. As their easy accusation is far in excess of any evidence, what this indicates is a perversion. Or look at hardcore Republicans: they are capable of blaming even the sinking of the Titanic on either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, or both! This too is a perversion.
What has happened to so many people in our age? Why has there been a decided increase in what can only be seen as obsessive perversions?
One can point to the nature of the Internet — the easy circulation of ‘alternative facts’, unmediated by any real expertise and effective counterchecking. But this is more symptom than explanation. Surely, there is something in us as an age that predisposes us towards such obsessive perversions, so that we seek on the Internet (and elsewhere) only ‘facts’ that suit our singular version of the complex reality out there? What is this ‘something’? Why has it become so extensive that it is changing the political character of entire countries?
The nature of capital
The main explanation is the nature of capital, especially now, when capital is no longer embedded, as it was under classical capitalism, in production and labour. The ‘freer’ capital gets from human labour, the more of an obsession it becomes. If 19th century critics (and even some conservative defenders) of capitalism had warned against the tendency of capital to impoverish other human values and relations, then, today, we have crossed that threshold. Everything has been ‘capitalised’, and capital, unlike money, is no longer just a medium of exchange or a social relation. It seems to be all there is under neo-liberalism. It seems to exist on its own. It is everywhere and nowhere. It reproduces itself. It dominates everything else. It obsesses.
This fact lurks under the surface of governmental actions in all countries, ranging from the U.S. and India to China. Governments defend, primarily, the interests of capital, even by cutting services and causing problems to citizens. Donald Trump’s government is currently being accused of running up trillions in deficit by providing huge tax cuts to the top 5%, and then trying to balance that deficit by cutting necessary services available to the other 95%. But versions of this ‘balancing’ act exist in almost every country in the world: as long as free-floating ‘capital’ is happy, governments can live with their (dirty) consciences, and probably win the next election!
We exist in a world where capital — diminishingly connected to labour and production and no longer primarily a medium of exchange — has become an obsession. It has reduced everything else, usurped the world. We are the perverts of free-floating ‘god-like’ capital. And this is our ‘natural’ state; we cannot really question it. We internalise its structures — and transpose them. Is it a surprise, then, that so many of us succumb to placebo perversions?
The other, smaller explanation is the nature of politics today. Given the kind of world we live in, politicians, operating on quasi-democratic platforms, prefer to cater to the perversions of their voters, which are easier to use as enticement: offer the pervert a titillating picture of his perversion, and you can lead him by the nose. Hence, we have politicians who put all the blame on one obsession – the CIA, Israel, Iran, Russia, Nehru, the Pope, immigrants, Muslims.
The period we are living through has been dubbed an Age of Fundamentalism, of Extremism, of Intolerance, etc. These are all appropriate descriptions. But if I had to choose a tag, I would call it the Age of Perversion.
An overbearing perversion
I do not use ‘perversion’ in its ordinary sense of ‘deviation from normal or accepted behaviour’. Simple deviation is not sufficient (and not necessarily bad) if it is not of an obsessive nature. What characterises a pervert is not the choice of a different option, but an obsession with only that option. The hallmark of an overbearing perversion is that no matter what one says, the pervert sees it only in terms of his/her obsession. Examples? Here you go.
A Muslim girl is raped in a Hindu temple, which causes justified outrage in many Hindu circles, but seems to leave some circles untouched. These miraculously untouched people not only make excuses but even point a finger (without any evidence) at Muslims, or, what they associate with Muslims, Pakistan. A post on Facebook states that Muslim clerics rape with impunity in their institutions. Apart from the wide sweep of its xenophobic purview — and I say so without denying that there can be serious problems in all male-controlled institutions, whether Hindu, Muslim or non-religious — I am shaken by the obsession of the person. No matter what the evidence, such a person can only blame ‘Muslims’. This is a perversion.
Versions of this exist elsewhere too. Go online and look at what many Islamists — who form only a small percentage of Muslims, just as Bhakts form only a small percentage of Hindus — have to say about the U.S., the Central Intelligence Agency, or Israel. No matter what happens, they point a finger at one or all of these three usual suspects. As their easy accusation is far in excess of any evidence, what this indicates is a perversion. Or look at hardcore Republicans: they are capable of blaming even the sinking of the Titanic on either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, or both! This too is a perversion.
What has happened to so many people in our age? Why has there been a decided increase in what can only be seen as obsessive perversions?
One can point to the nature of the Internet — the easy circulation of ‘alternative facts’, unmediated by any real expertise and effective counterchecking. But this is more symptom than explanation. Surely, there is something in us as an age that predisposes us towards such obsessive perversions, so that we seek on the Internet (and elsewhere) only ‘facts’ that suit our singular version of the complex reality out there? What is this ‘something’? Why has it become so extensive that it is changing the political character of entire countries?
The nature of capital
The main explanation is the nature of capital, especially now, when capital is no longer embedded, as it was under classical capitalism, in production and labour. The ‘freer’ capital gets from human labour, the more of an obsession it becomes. If 19th century critics (and even some conservative defenders) of capitalism had warned against the tendency of capital to impoverish other human values and relations, then, today, we have crossed that threshold. Everything has been ‘capitalised’, and capital, unlike money, is no longer just a medium of exchange or a social relation. It seems to be all there is under neo-liberalism. It seems to exist on its own. It is everywhere and nowhere. It reproduces itself. It dominates everything else. It obsesses.
This fact lurks under the surface of governmental actions in all countries, ranging from the U.S. and India to China. Governments defend, primarily, the interests of capital, even by cutting services and causing problems to citizens. Donald Trump’s government is currently being accused of running up trillions in deficit by providing huge tax cuts to the top 5%, and then trying to balance that deficit by cutting necessary services available to the other 95%. But versions of this ‘balancing’ act exist in almost every country in the world: as long as free-floating ‘capital’ is happy, governments can live with their (dirty) consciences, and probably win the next election!
We exist in a world where capital — diminishingly connected to labour and production and no longer primarily a medium of exchange — has become an obsession. It has reduced everything else, usurped the world. We are the perverts of free-floating ‘god-like’ capital. And this is our ‘natural’ state; we cannot really question it. We internalise its structures — and transpose them. Is it a surprise, then, that so many of us succumb to placebo perversions?
The other, smaller explanation is the nature of politics today. Given the kind of world we live in, politicians, operating on quasi-democratic platforms, prefer to cater to the perversions of their voters, which are easier to use as enticement: offer the pervert a titillating picture of his perversion, and you can lead him by the nose. Hence, we have politicians who put all the blame on one obsession – the CIA, Israel, Iran, Russia, Nehru, the Pope, immigrants, Muslims.
Monday 30 October 2017
Big Tech and Amazon: too powerful to break up?
While Google, Facebook and Twitter are set for a grilling in Congress over Russia, it is the online retailer that is drawing intense scrutiny
David J Lynch in The Financial Times
Amazon executives will not be present on Tuesday when three other major internet companies endure a grilling before Congress. But it may just be a matter of time before Washington’s new appetite for regulating the digital economy reaches the e-commerce giant.
Amazon executives will not be present on Tuesday when three other major internet companies endure a grilling before Congress. But it may just be a matter of time before Washington’s new appetite for regulating the digital economy reaches the e-commerce giant.
Lawyers for Google, Facebook and Twitter will occupy this week’s spotlight in front of the Senate intelligence and judiciary committees, which are probing the companies’ unwitting role in Russia’s 2016 election meddling. Already, there is talk of legislation requiring them to disclose more about their operations.
The controversy over the industry’s dissemination of Russian “fake news” highlights a broader souring of attitudes toward the online platforms, triggered by unease over their sheer size and power, which spans the political spectrum. From progressives like Elizabeth Warren, Massachusetts senators, to Steve Bannon, President Donald Trump’s former chief strategist, who runs the nationalist media site Breitbart, there is growing support for reining in, or even breaking up, the digital groups that dominate the US economy.
“The worm has turned,” says Scott Galloway, a marketing professor at New York University and author of The Four: the Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google. “No doubt about it.”
Though unaffected by the Russia allegations Amazon — whose $136bn in revenues last year topped the combined sales of Google parent Alphabet and Facebook — is a target of demands for more assertive antitrust enforcement. Its dominance has also raised questions about whether existing legislation needs to be rewritten for the internet age.
The online retailer’s relentless expansion into new businesses, including groceries and small business lending, and its control of data on the millions of third-party vendors that use its sales platform, warehouses and delivery services, have some analysts likening it to a 21st century version of the corporate trusts such as Standard Oil that throttled American competition a century ago.
“Amazon has big antitrust problems in its future,” says Scott Cleland, a technology policy official in the George HW Bush administration and president of Precursor, a research consultancy. “If there is a minimally interested, fair-minded antitrust effort in the Trump administration, Amazon’s got trouble.”
For now, Mr Cleland’s remains a minority view. Most experts say the company has yet to engage in the classic anti-competitive behaviour that the antitrust laws are designed to prevent. Under the prevailing interpretation of this doctrine, which prizes consumer welfare above all else, champion price-cutter Amazon has little reason to worry. Indeed, US regulators this summer performed only a brief review before approving Amazon’s nearly $14bn acquisition of the upmarket grocer Whole Foods.
Amazon and the other platforms remain popular with consumers, thanks to their low prices or “free” services. But companies that were once seen as avatars of American innovation and achievement are now increasingly treated with scepticism. Mr Bannon has said that companies such as Google and Facebook are so essential to daily life that they should be regulated as public utilities.
The digital platforms “dominate the economy and their respective markets like few businesses in the modern era”, says the bipartisan New Center project of Republican William Kristol and Democrat Bill Galston. It notes that nearly half of all e-commerce passes through Amazon while Facebook controls 77 per cent of mobile social traffic and Google has 81 per cent of the search engine market.
The online retailer stands alone in its cross-market reach, dominating product search, hardware and cloud computing while also serving as an indispensable conduit for other vendors to reach consumers, says Mr Galloway. Last year, 55 per cent of product searches began on Amazon, topping Google.
“They’re winning at everything,” he says. “This company is firing on all 12,000 cylinders.”
Yet even as calls to break up the nation’s big banks after the global financial crisis have faded, talk that the digital giants have grown too large gets ever louder. The downside of economic concentration features prominently in the Democratic party’s “Better Deal” programme for the 2018 Congressional elections. It calls for an intensification in antitrust enforcement and blames stagnant wages, rising prices and disappointing growth on insufficient competition.
An anti-monopoly push will “almost certainly” be a major part of the 2020 presidential campaign, predicts Barry Lynn of the Open Markets initiative.
Silicon Valley’s tradition of funding the party could complicate the Democrats’ anti-monopoly push. In the 2016 election, the internet industry gave 74 per cent of its $12.3m in congressional campaign contributions to Democrats. Internet company executives and their corporate political action committees, which pool individual contributions in accord with the federal prohibition on direct corporate political spending, also gave Hillary Clinton’s campaign more than $6.3m while Mr Trump pulled in less than $100,000, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Individuals and the PACs associated with Google parent Alphabet topped the industry’s list of total political contributors with $8.1m while Amazon ranked fourth with about $1.4m.
Amazon has moved a long way from its roots since launching two decades ago to sell books and nothing but books. Now, it sells just about everything to everybody: nearly 400m products including its own batteries, shirts and baby wipes. It operates a media studio and provides cloud computing space to customers such as the Central Intelligence Agency while running the Marketplace sales platform for other vendors, a delivery and logistics network and a payment service. The company Jeff Bezos launched in 1994 also now makes popular electronics, including the Kindle ereader and the Alexa voice-activated device.
Its growth has been astronomical. Amazon expects to record at least $173bn in annual sales this year — that would nearly double its 2014 figure. It employs 542,000 workers, more than twice its mid-2016 payroll, thanks in part to the Whole Foods deal, and its $1,100 share price has roughly doubled in just 20 months.
By almost any measure, Amazon is a fantastically successful company. Maybe too successful, its detractors say. Mr Trump has periodically suggested antitrust action against the online giant, saying of Mr Bezos last year: “He’s got a huge antitrust problem because he’s controlling so much; Amazon is controlling so much.”
In August, the president returned to the subject, taking aim at the company’s impact on bricks-and-mortar retailers. “Towns, cities and states throughout the US are being hurt — many jobs being lost!” he tweeted.
Still, most politicians regard Amazon as a potential economic boon. Some 238 communities answered the company’s request to identify sites for its planned second headquarters. It is not hard to see why: the $5bn project will directly create work for 50,000 people, plus “tens of thousands of additional jobs and tens of billions of dollars in additional investment in the surrounding community”, Amazon says.
Even critics of the company’s size, such as Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, overcame their concerns. “Amazon would make the right business choice by coming here,” Mr Booker told a press conference last month in Newark.
Amazon, which declined to comment for this story, recognises its potential political problem. The company is on track to spend nearly $13m this year on lobbying the federal government compared with just $2.5m five years ago. In 2016 it added an antitrust lawyer, Seth Bloom, with experience on Capitol Hill and in the justice department.
Though the Trump administration approved the Whole Foods purchase, Amazon’s antitrust concerns have not evaporated. Congressman Keith Ellison, deputy chairman of the Democratic National Committee, who favours a break-up of all the digital players, says the online retailer should spin off its $12bn-a-year cloud computing business known as Amazon Web Services.
“I do think they should be forced to sell off huge parts,” he says. “They’re too big.”
The view is echoed by Mr Kristol, a prominent former official in the Reagan and George HW Bush administrations, who says the tech giants’ dominance hurts workers, consumers and the overall economy. His New Center project, aimed at overcoming political polarisation, supports tougher antitrust enforcement to address “monopolistic behaviour” in the technology sector.
Even among pro-market conservatives, sentiment is shifting on the need for greater government intervention. “People are at least open to the argument that concentration of power is a problem even if there’s no immediate cost paid by consumers,” Mr Kristol says.
US law does not prohibit monopolies so long as they arise through legitimate means. But companies are not permitted to exploit their dominance in one market to control another.
Competition authorities in the EU have moved more aggressively to corral the internet groups. Earlier this month the EU ordered Amazon to pay $290m in back taxes to Luxembourg after Margrethe Vestager, the EU competition chief, said the online retailer had benefited from special treatment.
Ms Vestager has also gone after American internet companies on antitrust grounds, levying a €2.4bn fine on Google in June and reaching a negotiated settlement with Amazon over its ebook distribution contracts. In May, Amazon agreed to scrap contract clauses requiring publishers to offer it terms that were as good or better than those offered to its competitors.
Amazon’s critics say that its role as an essential e-commerce platform for more than 2m other vendors and its control of data on their sales warrant government action. Last year, in a speech that ignited the Democrats’ renewed interest in anti-monopoly efforts, Ms Warren said companies like Amazon provide a platform “that lots of other companies depend on for survival”, adding, “the platform can become a tool to snuff out competition.” For its part, Amazon says it faces “intense competition”.
Critics remain unconvinced. Its control over a vast cache of customer data gives it “unprecedented . . . advantages in penetrating new industries and new markets”, according to Amir Konigsberg, chief executive and co-founder of Twiggle, which sells search and analytics software to Amazon competitors.
There’s no question that the company has grown through innovation and by meeting customer needs. But gobbling up rivals and would-be rivals has also been part of the equation. Since 2005, Amazon has acquired more than 60 companies including some that were at first reluctant to sell, such as Zappos, the online shoe retailer.
“It’s a dominant platform and a vertically integrated dominant platform,” says Lina Khan, author of an influential Yale Law Journal article earlier this year that ignited the debate. “It acts as a gatekeeper . . . It’s closing off the market to new entrants.”
Ms Khan says Amazon also has priced goods and services — such as its unlimited two-day Amazon Prime delivery service — below cost. By prioritising growth over profits, the company has unfairly squeezed competitors, she says.
Though Mr Cleland says antitrust enforcers could make a case against Amazon under the prevailing interpretation of US law, most analysts say a genuine push to break up or constrain the tech giants requires rethinking the antitrust orthodoxy of the past 40 years. The so-called Chicago School of antitrust theory, which focuses on consumer prices and innovation, is ill-equipped to cope with the internet world’s structural tendency to produce winner-takes-all outcomes.
“The rhetoric around consumer prices can disable antitrust law,” says Ms Khan. “These platforms present new issues.”
Sunday 1 January 2017
15 rules for creative success in the Internet age
Molly Crabapple in Boing Boing
Here's what I've learned.
1. The number one thing that would let more independent artists exists in America is a universal basic income. The number one thing that has a possibility of happening is single payer healthcare. This is because artists are humans who need to eat and live and get medical care, and our country punishes anyone who wants to go freelance and pursue their dream by telling them they might get cancer while uninsured, and then not be able to afford to treat it.
2. Companies are not loyal to you. Please never believe a company has your back. They are amoral by design and will discard you at a moment's notice. Negotiate aggressively, ask other freelancers what they're getting paid, and don't buy into the financial negging of some suit.
3. I've cobbled together many different streams of income, so that if the bottom falls out of one industry, I'm not ruined. My mom worked in packaging design. When computers fundamentally changed the field, she lost all her work. I learned from this.
4. Very often people who blow up and become famous fast already have some other sort of income, either parental money, spousal money, money saved from another job, or corporate backing behind the scenes. Other times they've actually been working for 10 years and no one noticed until suddenly they passed some threshold. Either way, its good to take a hard look- you'll learn from studying both types of people, and it will keep you from delusional myth-making.
5. I've never had a big break. I've just had tiny cracks in this wall of indifference until finally the wall wasn't there any more
6. Don't be a dick. Be nice to everyone who is also not a dick, help people who don't have the advantages you do, and never succumb to crabs in the barrel infighting.
7. Remember that most people who try to be artists are kind of lazy. Just by busting your ass, you're probably good enough to put yourself forward, so why not try?
8. Rejection is inevitable. Let it hit you hard for a moment, feel the hurt, and then move on.
9. Never trust some Silicon Valley douchebag who's flush with investors' money, but telling creators to post on their platform for free or for potential crumbs of cash. They're just using you to build their own thing, and they'll discard you when they sell the company a few years later.
10. Be a mercenary towards people with money. Be generous and giving to good people without it.
11. Working for free is only worth it if its with fellow artists or grassroots organizations you believe in, and only if they treat your respectfully and you get creative control.
12. Don't ever submit to contests where you have to do new work. They'll just waste your time, and again, only build the profile of the judges and the sponsoring company. Do not believe their lies about “exposure”. There is so much content online that just having your work posted in some massive image gallery is not exposure at all.
13. Don't work for free for rich people. Seriously. Don't don't don't. Even if you can afford to, you're fucking over the labor market for other creators. Haggling hard for money is actually a beneficial act for other freelancers, because it is a fight against the race to the bottom that's happening online.
14. If people love your work, treat them nice as long as they're nice to you.
15. Be massively idealistic about your art, dream big, open your heart and let the blood pour forth. Be utterly cynical about the business around your art.
Finally...
The Internet will not save creators.
Social media will not save us. Companies will not save us. Crowd-funding will not save us. Grants will not save us. Patrons will not save us.
Nothing will save us but ourselves and each other.
Now make some beautiful things.
Here's what I've learned.
1. The number one thing that would let more independent artists exists in America is a universal basic income. The number one thing that has a possibility of happening is single payer healthcare. This is because artists are humans who need to eat and live and get medical care, and our country punishes anyone who wants to go freelance and pursue their dream by telling them they might get cancer while uninsured, and then not be able to afford to treat it.
2. Companies are not loyal to you. Please never believe a company has your back. They are amoral by design and will discard you at a moment's notice. Negotiate aggressively, ask other freelancers what they're getting paid, and don't buy into the financial negging of some suit.
3. I've cobbled together many different streams of income, so that if the bottom falls out of one industry, I'm not ruined. My mom worked in packaging design. When computers fundamentally changed the field, she lost all her work. I learned from this.
4. Very often people who blow up and become famous fast already have some other sort of income, either parental money, spousal money, money saved from another job, or corporate backing behind the scenes. Other times they've actually been working for 10 years and no one noticed until suddenly they passed some threshold. Either way, its good to take a hard look- you'll learn from studying both types of people, and it will keep you from delusional myth-making.
5. I've never had a big break. I've just had tiny cracks in this wall of indifference until finally the wall wasn't there any more
6. Don't be a dick. Be nice to everyone who is also not a dick, help people who don't have the advantages you do, and never succumb to crabs in the barrel infighting.
7. Remember that most people who try to be artists are kind of lazy. Just by busting your ass, you're probably good enough to put yourself forward, so why not try?
8. Rejection is inevitable. Let it hit you hard for a moment, feel the hurt, and then move on.
9. Never trust some Silicon Valley douchebag who's flush with investors' money, but telling creators to post on their platform for free or for potential crumbs of cash. They're just using you to build their own thing, and they'll discard you when they sell the company a few years later.
10. Be a mercenary towards people with money. Be generous and giving to good people without it.
11. Working for free is only worth it if its with fellow artists or grassroots organizations you believe in, and only if they treat your respectfully and you get creative control.
12. Don't ever submit to contests where you have to do new work. They'll just waste your time, and again, only build the profile of the judges and the sponsoring company. Do not believe their lies about “exposure”. There is so much content online that just having your work posted in some massive image gallery is not exposure at all.
13. Don't work for free for rich people. Seriously. Don't don't don't. Even if you can afford to, you're fucking over the labor market for other creators. Haggling hard for money is actually a beneficial act for other freelancers, because it is a fight against the race to the bottom that's happening online.
14. If people love your work, treat them nice as long as they're nice to you.
15. Be massively idealistic about your art, dream big, open your heart and let the blood pour forth. Be utterly cynical about the business around your art.
Finally...
The Internet will not save creators.
Social media will not save us. Companies will not save us. Crowd-funding will not save us. Grants will not save us. Patrons will not save us.
Nothing will save us but ourselves and each other.
Now make some beautiful things.
Saturday 26 November 2016
How to delete yourself from the Internet
Harriet Marsden in Indy100
In our smartphone-obsessed digital age, we effectively live our entire lives online, which makes us increasingly vulnerable to unseen threats.
Cyber crime, fraud and identity theft are exponentially growing concerns. Our personal lives, locations, and increasingly our passwords are made public online for anyone to find.
If the highly invasive Investigatory Powers Bill (AKA the Snooper's Charter) isn't blocked, then every single digital move you make will be recorded for up to 12 months.
Also, infinite junk mails.
But erasing your digital trace from the World Wide Web can seem overwhelming, especially since each person has on average 1,000,000,000 preferences, passwords, subscriptions and linked accounts. So how would you go about tracking them all down?
In step two Swedish developers, with the easy-assemble, Ikea-style approach.
Wille Dahlbo and Linus Unnebäck have created Deseat.me, which allows you to log in with a Google account, and immediately see which apps and services are linked to it.
The genius part is, instead of having to search all those accounts separately, the site links you directly to the relevant unsubscribe page for that service. It's easy, efficient, and free.
Unfortunately, thusfar the service is only available for accounts and subscriptions linked to Google, which leaves your Hotmail, Yahoo and AOL-related content untouched.
For a similar service, you can use Just Delete Me or Account Killer, both massive directories of links to delete account pages. However, these are only effective when you know the accounts you have.
Here are some other helpful hacks to help ease your digital footprint:
Change your passwords - billions are now available online, and letter-only English-word passwords are the easiest to crack
Consider using symbols and numbers, as well as different passwords for different accounts
Delete unnecessary social media accounts - this could also benefit mental health and productivity
For any accounts you deem necessary, check privacy settings (also consider whether your Instagram page needs to be public)
Since 2013, every tweet posted from your Twitter account from 2006 onwards is archived, even if you delete your account. Consider converting your privacy settings so only approved followers can read your tweets
For undeletable accounts such as Evernote and Pinterest, change your name to a pseudonym, create a random email address to reassign, and delete all the information
Go to 'My Activity' section of your Google account, wipe all search/location history and change account preferences
Similarly, delete all activity from other search engines such as Yahoo and Bing
Consider using a search engine that doesn't track your activity (e.g. DuckDuckGo) rather than Google or Bing
Make sure you click 'unsubscribe' at the bottom of each spam email, before blocking it
Request that search engines delete certain results about you (e.g. via a URL removal tool)
Consider employing the services of a data clearinghouse - although this can be a lengthy and time consuming process
In our smartphone-obsessed digital age, we effectively live our entire lives online, which makes us increasingly vulnerable to unseen threats.
Cyber crime, fraud and identity theft are exponentially growing concerns. Our personal lives, locations, and increasingly our passwords are made public online for anyone to find.
If the highly invasive Investigatory Powers Bill (AKA the Snooper's Charter) isn't blocked, then every single digital move you make will be recorded for up to 12 months.
Also, infinite junk mails.
But erasing your digital trace from the World Wide Web can seem overwhelming, especially since each person has on average 1,000,000,000 preferences, passwords, subscriptions and linked accounts. So how would you go about tracking them all down?
In step two Swedish developers, with the easy-assemble, Ikea-style approach.
Wille Dahlbo and Linus Unnebäck have created Deseat.me, which allows you to log in with a Google account, and immediately see which apps and services are linked to it.
The genius part is, instead of having to search all those accounts separately, the site links you directly to the relevant unsubscribe page for that service. It's easy, efficient, and free.
Unfortunately, thusfar the service is only available for accounts and subscriptions linked to Google, which leaves your Hotmail, Yahoo and AOL-related content untouched.
For a similar service, you can use Just Delete Me or Account Killer, both massive directories of links to delete account pages. However, these are only effective when you know the accounts you have.
Here are some other helpful hacks to help ease your digital footprint:
Change your passwords - billions are now available online, and letter-only English-word passwords are the easiest to crack
Consider using symbols and numbers, as well as different passwords for different accounts
Delete unnecessary social media accounts - this could also benefit mental health and productivity
For any accounts you deem necessary, check privacy settings (also consider whether your Instagram page needs to be public)
Since 2013, every tweet posted from your Twitter account from 2006 onwards is archived, even if you delete your account. Consider converting your privacy settings so only approved followers can read your tweets
For undeletable accounts such as Evernote and Pinterest, change your name to a pseudonym, create a random email address to reassign, and delete all the information
Go to 'My Activity' section of your Google account, wipe all search/location history and change account preferences
Similarly, delete all activity from other search engines such as Yahoo and Bing
Consider using a search engine that doesn't track your activity (e.g. DuckDuckGo) rather than Google or Bing
Make sure you click 'unsubscribe' at the bottom of each spam email, before blocking it
Request that search engines delete certain results about you (e.g. via a URL removal tool)
Consider employing the services of a data clearinghouse - although this can be a lengthy and time consuming process
- Check with your phone company to make sure your number isn't listed online, and request that they do not post your details in future
- Remove yourself from data collection sites such as Spokeo, Whitepages and PeopleFinder - this can be difficult, so consider paying for a service like DeleteMe
Friday 19 August 2016
Thanks to the internet, there are now millions of cyber Rupert Murdochs
Mark Steel in The Independent
The scientists who invented the internet believed they were creating the means for humanity to reach a heightened level of co-operation never considered possible. People from remote corners of the globe could communicate, bringing an understanding of the spectrum of human experience within instant reach of us all.
And that’s how it’s worked out, with discourse such as “Why you not pis off Trottsky scum!” – “Shutt you mouth and join Tories Blairite yak droppings”, advancing the discussion about the Labour party on Twitter and website forums, to enlighten us all.
This process hasn’t just taken place in politics. On sporting forums, someone may advance the premise “Man U rule Arsnal go and do 1 Wenger lik my ars”, and you find yourself considering the points made all day, often reading it many times, to find something new in the sub-text you hadn’t noticed before.
On YouTube, when a local band uploads a song, it will be followed by a series of comments. The first will say “awesome guys” from a friend, then comes 80 more such as “I’d rather eat my own liver with gravy made from the green stuff in Olympic pool than lissen to that dog sick”.
There’s probably a gardening forum, in which someone writes “I’d say now is about the right time of year to plant your begonias.” Then someone replies “That shows what u know about gardning u compost face donky breath bet cant even tell rose from venis flytrap knobhead nippelface hope u trellis falls down kils runner beens lol I tell u what its write time of year to plant tree up you arse”.
I expect the Buddhist Meditation community has its own website, on which followers can share their experiences of finding inner peace, in which a convert may suggest “I learned to love through the mindfulness of breathing, and find my sense of place has found a new calm”
And the first reply will be “my temple beet yous anyday u chant nothing but shite its om not um any Buddhist know that our meditashin only way to troo peace we tear your robe up eesy hope u reinkarnate as wosp”.
Twitter, especially, offers a marvellous service to people who take everything literally. For example, on the one hundredth anniversary of the start of the First World War, it was suggested by the government that we remember the occasion by turning off our lights in the evening. So I mentioned on Twitter “I’ve done my bit to commemorate the soldiers, I turned off my headlights as I was driving up the M23.”
Back came a torrent of abuse that I still haven’t finished sifting through, so it’s lovely to know people care.
There is probably no combination of words you can put on Twitter that someone won’t go berserk about. You could write “What a lovely sunset over Dorset this evening”, and someone will reply “not so lovely if you suffer from Sunset Aversion Depressive Dusk Syndrome actually. Think before you insult SADDS victims please Mark”.
The advanced student of Twitter anger won’t even need a real comment, they can reply with fury to nothing. I noticed someone firing a series of fuming comments about me for “mocking the mentally ill”. Eventually she acknowledged she’d mixed me up with someone else entirely, then without missing a beat carried on being furious about something else that probably hadn’t happened.
This is how the internet has honed our debating skills, as no longer are we bound to the tyranny of having to make sure we’re talking about the right person. We can scream “Why should we take any notice of Clare Balding’s opinions on the Olympics when she ruined Zimbabwe.”
After a couple of weeks we might accept we’ve mixed her up with Robert Mugabe but the original point is still valid.
This is why sometimes, it’s a relief to see one of those petitions that says “Please sign to stop new park bench being built as this will destroy one of Lewisham’s most colourful cluster of dandelions.”
The wonder of the internet, it was suggested, would be to take power from the old media and allow everyone an outlet for their views. We would all, in effect, own a newspaper.
But this week The Times newspaper published a story that Billy Bragg, at the Edinburgh Festival, denounced Jeremy Corbyn for “not reaching out to the wider electorate”, having previously supported him.
This was an imaginative effort, as what Billy said was he still backed Corbyn, and “hoped he would reach out to the wider electorate.”
This is a new and exciting way of reporting news. If Mo Farah’s coach says “I hope Mo starts strongly in the 5000 metres final”, they can report that as “Coach turns on Farah…the previously supportive trainer insisted Mo hasn’t been starting strongly enough, leading some athletes to wonder whether the trainer may decide to replace him with Owen Smith.”
One lesson of this is the worrying revelation that newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch may sometimes distort the facts in some way.
But the reaction to the story on social media was that many Labour members opposed to Corbyn were triumphant, while Corbyn supporters denounced Bragg, and were especially angry that he’d “given an interview to The Times” which he hadn’t.
The genius of this is it means people were angry about Billy Bragg, because someone they trust had spoken to a paper which they believe makes up stories, having read this in the paper they believe makes up stories.
Somehow the internet has made the old papers even more powerful than before.
Soon we’ll need clinics, where the addicted angry people can be weaned off the internet, wandering through gardens occasionally calling the rockery “scum” and writing “#traitor” in the mud about one of the fish until they’re cured.
The scientists who invented the internet believed they were creating the means for humanity to reach a heightened level of co-operation never considered possible. People from remote corners of the globe could communicate, bringing an understanding of the spectrum of human experience within instant reach of us all.
And that’s how it’s worked out, with discourse such as “Why you not pis off Trottsky scum!” – “Shutt you mouth and join Tories Blairite yak droppings”, advancing the discussion about the Labour party on Twitter and website forums, to enlighten us all.
This process hasn’t just taken place in politics. On sporting forums, someone may advance the premise “Man U rule Arsnal go and do 1 Wenger lik my ars”, and you find yourself considering the points made all day, often reading it many times, to find something new in the sub-text you hadn’t noticed before.
On YouTube, when a local band uploads a song, it will be followed by a series of comments. The first will say “awesome guys” from a friend, then comes 80 more such as “I’d rather eat my own liver with gravy made from the green stuff in Olympic pool than lissen to that dog sick”.
There’s probably a gardening forum, in which someone writes “I’d say now is about the right time of year to plant your begonias.” Then someone replies “That shows what u know about gardning u compost face donky breath bet cant even tell rose from venis flytrap knobhead nippelface hope u trellis falls down kils runner beens lol I tell u what its write time of year to plant tree up you arse”.
I expect the Buddhist Meditation community has its own website, on which followers can share their experiences of finding inner peace, in which a convert may suggest “I learned to love through the mindfulness of breathing, and find my sense of place has found a new calm”
And the first reply will be “my temple beet yous anyday u chant nothing but shite its om not um any Buddhist know that our meditashin only way to troo peace we tear your robe up eesy hope u reinkarnate as wosp”.
Twitter, especially, offers a marvellous service to people who take everything literally. For example, on the one hundredth anniversary of the start of the First World War, it was suggested by the government that we remember the occasion by turning off our lights in the evening. So I mentioned on Twitter “I’ve done my bit to commemorate the soldiers, I turned off my headlights as I was driving up the M23.”
Back came a torrent of abuse that I still haven’t finished sifting through, so it’s lovely to know people care.
There is probably no combination of words you can put on Twitter that someone won’t go berserk about. You could write “What a lovely sunset over Dorset this evening”, and someone will reply “not so lovely if you suffer from Sunset Aversion Depressive Dusk Syndrome actually. Think before you insult SADDS victims please Mark”.
The advanced student of Twitter anger won’t even need a real comment, they can reply with fury to nothing. I noticed someone firing a series of fuming comments about me for “mocking the mentally ill”. Eventually she acknowledged she’d mixed me up with someone else entirely, then without missing a beat carried on being furious about something else that probably hadn’t happened.
This is how the internet has honed our debating skills, as no longer are we bound to the tyranny of having to make sure we’re talking about the right person. We can scream “Why should we take any notice of Clare Balding’s opinions on the Olympics when she ruined Zimbabwe.”
After a couple of weeks we might accept we’ve mixed her up with Robert Mugabe but the original point is still valid.
This is why sometimes, it’s a relief to see one of those petitions that says “Please sign to stop new park bench being built as this will destroy one of Lewisham’s most colourful cluster of dandelions.”
The wonder of the internet, it was suggested, would be to take power from the old media and allow everyone an outlet for their views. We would all, in effect, own a newspaper.
But this week The Times newspaper published a story that Billy Bragg, at the Edinburgh Festival, denounced Jeremy Corbyn for “not reaching out to the wider electorate”, having previously supported him.
This was an imaginative effort, as what Billy said was he still backed Corbyn, and “hoped he would reach out to the wider electorate.”
This is a new and exciting way of reporting news. If Mo Farah’s coach says “I hope Mo starts strongly in the 5000 metres final”, they can report that as “Coach turns on Farah…the previously supportive trainer insisted Mo hasn’t been starting strongly enough, leading some athletes to wonder whether the trainer may decide to replace him with Owen Smith.”
One lesson of this is the worrying revelation that newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch may sometimes distort the facts in some way.
But the reaction to the story on social media was that many Labour members opposed to Corbyn were triumphant, while Corbyn supporters denounced Bragg, and were especially angry that he’d “given an interview to The Times” which he hadn’t.
The genius of this is it means people were angry about Billy Bragg, because someone they trust had spoken to a paper which they believe makes up stories, having read this in the paper they believe makes up stories.
Somehow the internet has made the old papers even more powerful than before.
Soon we’ll need clinics, where the addicted angry people can be weaned off the internet, wandering through gardens occasionally calling the rockery “scum” and writing “#traitor” in the mud about one of the fish until they’re cured.
Thursday 9 April 2015
Unconnected and out of work: the vicious circle of having no internet
Stephen Armstrong and Maruxa Ruiz del Arbol in The Guardian
In a modern-day version of the old casual labour scrum outside the local docks, Nick East scrambles for a free computer screen when the doors of Newcastle’s city centre library open.
The fourth floor computer room of the glass-fronted library is stocked with 40 terminals, plus a handful of iMacs. Even so, it’s almost always packed, with people waiting for a computer to become free for a designated two-hour slot.
“You have to get there very early or all the screens will be gone and you have to hang around,” said the 24-year-old, who has been unemployed for 18 months. “And you can’t afford a city centre coffee [while waiting], so you just walk about the streets.”
East’s need for computer time has nothing to with catching up with friends on social media, online shopping or video downloads. He must apply for 24 jobs a week – with applications taking up to an hour each – on the government’s digital jobcentre looking for work, or lose his benefits. When you don’t own a computer, this is no mean feat – as East has found out.
In an increasingly digital society, large swaths of the population – lacking computers, broadband, email addresses or even phones that function without regular cash top-ups – are discovering harsh consequences to being unconnected. About one fifth of households, have no internet access, according to figures compiled by broadband analysts Point Topic, although government statistics put the figure at 16%. At any one time, there are an estimated 10m pay-as-you-go phones without the credit needed to make calls or pick up voicemail messages.
“The primary reason people don’t have broadband is cost,” said Oliver Johnson, Point Topic’s CEO. “It’s still expensive to buy all the kit you need, let alone the monthly subscription. Ironically, the cheapest rail fares and the cheapest goods are online – meaning poorer people suffer twice over.”
Meanwhile, the government is moving more and more services online. Significantly, universal credit, a benefit which will replace six means-tested allowances and tax credits, will be a digital-only service. Claimants are expected to apply online, manage any subsequent changes online, and contact between the government and the claimant will be made online.
Jobcentres are installing extra computers to cope with this, according to the Department for Work and Pensions. “We expect jobseekers to do all they reasonably can to find work and many employers are now only advertising their jobs online,” a spokesperson said. “Jobcentres across the UK now provide free Wi-Fi and more than 6,000 job search terminals, with staff providing additional support if needed so benefit claimants can look for and apply for jobs.”
But with the number claiming jobseeker’s allowance currently standing at 791,200, it is clear 6,000 terminals cannot service all those who need to be online between 10 and 35 hours each week. “You can’t just walk in to the jobcentre and use the computers, you have to make an appointment,” said Andrew Young of Newcastle Citizens Advice. “We had one client who was homeless and couldn’t get an appointment to use the computer but the jobcentre insisted he apply online. They told him to use the library – but you need an address to apply for a library card.”
East lost his job as a kitchen porter in a country pub after being late for work one time too many. His ageing motorbike had finally collapsed and he didn’t have the money to replace it; the bus was irregular and dropped him off some way from the pub. When he signed on, the jobcentre told him to apply for a minimum 24 jobs per week on Universal Jobmatch, the government’s digital replacement for the old jobcentre noticeboard.
Universal Jobmatch seems like a smart response to the digital age. It can monitor online activity to make sure people are actively hunting for work. If they don’t meet their targets, they are sanctioned, losing benefits for anything from four weeks to three years. But applying for 24 jobs on the Universal Jobmatch system is, at best, a complex and time-consuming business – and for those without broadband, it’s far worse.
East travels to Newcastle’s city centre library from his flat in Newbiggin-by-the-Sea – a good 30 minutes away, with one bus every half hour, and a return fare costing £3.90. The journey three times a week takes almost £12 from his jobseeker’s allowance, leaving him about £6 per day to pay for food, bills and other essentials.
Each job takes a minimum of half an hour to apply for, up to an hour if there are added questionnaires on skills – requiring 12 to 24 hours per week online. If he reaches the end of his two-hour session with an unfinished application, Universal Jobmatch does not give him the option of saving for later completion, meaning he has to start afresh at the next session.
Four months ago, he failed to hit his target of 24 applications and received an official warning. “There just weren’t the jobs,” he said. “I was down for bar work, factory work and general labouring but there weren’t any jobs.”
A few weeks later, he missed his target again when he did not have enough cash for the bus fare to the library. “They sanctioned me. Four weeks with no money – they took my JSA [jobseeker’s allowance], my housing benefit and council tax benefit. I had nothing.”
In Wigan, Lisa Wright, 47, a former factory worker who has been unemployed for three years after the food processing plant she worked for closed, is doing a mandatory six-month community work programme. Alongside 30 hours of community service each week, she has to put in 10 hours on Universal Jobmatch.
“I can only get to a computer in Wigan library on Thursday evenings, Fridays and Saturday mornings,” she said. “There’s sometimes a queue so you can hang around for up to an hour. That’s the only time I can check my emails, which means if I get sent a reply to a job application on Monday I don’t see it for days. It feels like you’re constantly doing things wrong and struggling just to keep up. I met a kid last week doing 200 hours’ community service for robbing a shop. I’m doing 780 hours’ community service and my only crime is being unemployed.”
She feels under constant pressure from using shared computers. “I like to do an application and then go back to it and perfect it and make sure it’s good - but using a shared computer, someone else is waiting. You’re cutting and pasting things from another application. Before you get your application in, you’re already at a disadvantage.”
One of the most deprived areas in the country is Speke, Liverpool – designed as a postwar garden suburb built around a cluster of factories, but the factories closed in the late 70s and early 80s. “Around 85% of our clients don’t even have email addresses,” said Bob Wilson at Speke Citizens Advice.
Citizens Advice clients use its phones to appeal against benefits sanctions if they have no phone credit or cannot afford long calls on an 0800 number, which until June this year are free from landlines but not from mobiles.
Rebecca Thompson, 36, was sanctioned for turning up late to a jobcentre interview and then could not afford to top up her phone for two weeks. She had to borrow a neighbour’s phone to make a doctor’s appointment when she was sick, and faced difficulty applying for an emergency loan to tide her over.
“It takes about two hours to apply for a crisis loan from the welfare fund over the phone. It’s a free number, but it’s not free from a mobile and most people on benefits don’t actually have a landline,” she said.
Data on how many pay-as-you-go mobile phone customers regularly run out of credit is elusive. The UK has 36.1 million pre-pay users, according to Ofcom figures, but no company will release exact figures on how many have zero credit at any one time. A source at one mobile phone company suggested this ran at about 30% – “but it’s hard to be sure exactly why they’ve got a zero balance”, he said. So there could be about 10 million people unable to make calls or access their voicemail at any one time.
And for those who can afford broadband, there’s a final divide: broadband quality. Last June, Ofcom surveyed broadband speeds in 11 UK cities, finding wide variations in speed by region. Residents of Cardiff and Inverness were twice as likely to be on a slower connection as those in London or Birmingham. Superfast broadband was more restricted in city neighbourhoods with lower household incomes. For example, 57.8% of homes and business in the poorest parts of Glasgow had access to superfast broadband, while for most of the cities the figure was 90%.
In December 2014 the government set out its digital inclusion strategy, aiming to reduce the number of people offline. “By 2020, we will have reduced the number of people who lack basic digital skills to around 4.7 million – less than 10% of the adult population,” said the Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude.
Meanwhile, the country is racing towards increasingly digitised election campaigns in which online petitions and Twitter storms can influence government policy. “If 20% of the country can’t take part in this, they can’t be part of the conversation,” warned Mike Harris, CEO of policy and public affairs consultancy 89Up.
For Nick East, the strain of bouncing from home to library to jobcentre is starting to show. He has always been friendly and sociable, with a mop of tousled hair and a cheerful grin, but he’s started to feel miserable every time he climbs the library stairs or walks in to the jobcentre.
“You can see all these gloomy faces – no one wants to be there, I don’t want to be there,” he says quietly. “If I get sanctioned again it’ll be for longer – how do they expect you to pay for stuff? It’s like they’re pushing you to go and commit crime.”
Thursday 2 April 2015
The Future of Loneliness
Olivia Laing in The Guardian
At the end of last winter, a gigantic billboard advertising Android, Google’s operating system, appeared over Times Square in New York. In a lower-case sans serif font – corporate code for friendly – it declared: “be together. not the same.” This erratically punctuated mantra sums up the web’s most magical proposition – its existence as a space in which no one need ever suffer the pang of loneliness, in which friendship, sex and love are never more than a click away, and difference is a source of glamour, not of shame.
As with the city itself, the promise of the internet is contact. It seems to offer an antidote to loneliness, trumping even the most utopian urban environment by enabling strangers to develop relationships along shared lines of interest, no matter how shy or isolated they might be in their own physical lives.
But proximity, as city dwellers know, does not necessarily mean intimacy. Access to other people is not by itself enough to dispel the gloom of internal isolation. Loneliness can be most acute in a crowd.
In 1942, the American painter Edward Hopper produced the signature image of urban loneliness. Nighthawks shows four people in a diner at night, cut off from the street outside by a curving glass window: a disquieting scene of disconnection and estrangement. In his art, Hopper was centrally concerned with how humans were handling the environment of the electric city: the way it crowded people together while enclosing them in increasingly small and exposing cells. His paintings establish an architecture of loneliness, reproducing the confining units of office blocks and studio apartments, in which unwitting exhibitionists reveal their private lives in cinematic stills, framed by panes of glass.
More than 70 years have passed since Nighthawks was painted, but its anxieties about connection have lost none of their relevance, though unease about the physical city has been superseded by fears over our new virtual public space, the internet. In the intervening years, we have entered into a world of screens that extends far beyond Hopper’s unsettled vision.
Loneliness centres on the act of being seen. When a person is lonely, they long to be witnessed, accepted, desired, at the same time as becoming intensely wary of exposure. According to research carried out over the past decade at the University of Chicago, the feeling of loneliness triggers what psychologists call hypervigilance for social threat. In this state, which is entered into unknowingly, the individual becomes hyperalert to rejection, growing increasingly inclined to perceive social interactions as tinged with hostility or scorn. The result is a vicious circle of withdrawal, in which the lonely person becomes increasingly suspicious, intensifying their sense of isolation.
This is where online engagement seems to exercise its special charm. Hidden behind a computer screen, the lonely person has control. They can search for company without the danger of being revealed or found wanting. They can reach out or they can hide; they can lurk and they can show themselves, safe from the humiliation of face-to-face rejection. The screen acts as a kind of protective membrane, a scrim that allows invisibility and transformation. You can filter your image, concealing unattractive elements, and you can emerge enhanced: an online avatar designed to attract likes. But now a problem arises, for the contact this produces is not the same thing as intimacy. Curating a perfected self might win followers or Facebook friends, but it will not necessarily cure loneliness, since the cure for loneliness is not being looked at, but being seen and accepted as a whole person – ugly, unhappy and awkward, as well as radiant and selfie-ready.
This aspect of digital existence is among the concerns of Sherry Turkle of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who has been writing about human-technology interactions for the past three decades. She has become increasingly wary of the capacity of online spaces to fulfil us in the ways we seem to want them to. According to Turkle, part of the problem with the internet is that it encourages self-invention. “At the screen,” she writes in Alone Together (2011), “you have a chance to write yourself into the person you want to be and to imagine others as you wish them to be, constructing them for your purposes. It’s a seductive but dangerous habit of mind.”
But there are other dangers. My own peak use of social media arose during a period of painful isolation. It was the autumn of 2011, and I was living in New York, recently heartbroken and thousands of miles from my family and friends. In many ways, the internet made me feel safe. I liked the contact I got from it: the conversations, the jokes, the accumulation of positive regard, the favouriting on Twitter and the Facebook likes, the little devices designed for boosting egos. Most of the time, it seemed that the exchange, the gifting back and forth of information and attention, was working well, especially on Twitter, with its knack for prompting conversation between strangers. It felt like a community, a joyful place; a lifeline, in fact, considering how cut off I otherwise was. But as the years went by – 1,000 tweets, 2,000 tweets, 17,400 tweets – I had the growing sense that the rules were changing, that it was becoming harder to achieve real connection, though as a source of information it remained unparalleled.
This period coincided with what felt like a profound shift in internet mores. In the past few years, two things have happened: a dramatic rise in online hostility, and a growing awareness that the lovely sense of privacy engendered by communicating via a computer is a catastrophic illusion. The pressure to appear perfect is greater than ever, while the once‑protective screen no longer reliably separates the domains of the real and the virtual. Increasingly, participants in online spaces have become aware that the unknown audience might at any moment turn on them in a frenzy of shaming and scapegoating.
The atmosphere of surveillance and punishment destroys intimacy by making it unsafe to reveal mistakes and imperfections. My own sense of ease on Twitter diminished rapidly when people began posting photos of strangers they had snapped on public transport, sleeping with their mouths open. Knowing that the internet was becoming a site of shaming eroded the feeling of safety that had once made it seem such a haven for the lonely.
The dissolution of the barrier between the public and the private, the sense of being surveilled and judged, extends far beyond human observers. We are also being watched by the very devices on which we make our broadcasts. As the artist and geographer Trevor Paglen recently said in the art magazine Frieze: “We are at the point (actually, probably long past) where the majority of the world’s images are made by machines for machines.” In this environment of enforced transparency, the equivalent of the Nighthawks diner, almost everything we do, from shopping in a supermarket to posting a photograph on Facebook, is mapped, and the gathered data used to predict, monetise, encourage or inhibit our future actions.
This growing entanglement of the corporate and social, this creeping sense of being tracked by invisible eyes, demands an increasing sophistication about what is said and where. The possibility of virulent judgment and rejection induces precisely the kind of hypervigilance and withdrawal that increases loneliness. With this has come the slowly dawning realisation that our digital traces will long outlive us.
Back in 1999, the critic Bruce Benderson published a landmark essay, Sex and Isolation, in which he observed: “We are very much alone. Nothing leaves a mark. Today’s texts and images may look like real carvings – but in the end they are erasable, only a temporary blockage of all-invasive light. No matter how long the words and pictures stay on our screens, there will be no encrustation; all will be reversible.”
Benderson thought the transience of the internet was the reason that it felt so lonely, but to me it is far more alarming to think that everything we do there is permanent. At that time – two years before 9/11, and 14 years before Edward Snowden exposed the intrusive surveillance it had set in motion – it was no doubt impossible to imagine the grim permanence of the web to come, where data has consequences and nothing is ever lost – not arrest logs, not embarrassing photos, not Google searches of child porn or embarrassing illnesses, not the torture records of entire nations.
Faced with the knowledge that nothing we say, no matter how trivial or silly, will ever be completely erased, we find it hard to take the risks that togetherness entails. But perhaps, as lonely people often are, I am being too negative, too paranoid. Perhaps we are capable of adapting, of finding intimacy in this landscape of unprecedented exposure. What I want to know is where we are headed. What is this sense of perpetual scrutiny doing to our ability to connect?
* * *
The future does not come from nowhere. Every new technology generates a surge of anxious energy. Each one changes the rules of communication and rearranges the social order. Take the telephone, that miraculous device for dissolving distance. From the moment in April 1877 that the first line linked phones No 1 and No 2 in the Bell Telephone Company, it was perceived as an almost uncanny instrument, separating the voice from the body.
The phone swiftly came to be regarded as a lifeline, an antidote to loneliness, particularly for rural women who were stuck in farmhouses miles from family and friends. But fears about anonymity clung to the device. By opening a channel between the outside world and the domestic sphere, the telephone facilitated bad behaviour. From the very beginning, obscene callers targeted both strangers and the “hello girls” who worked the switchboards. People worried that germs might be transmitted down the lines, carried on human breath. They also worried about who might be lurking, invisibly eavesdropping on private conversations. The germs were a fantasy, but the listeners were real enough, be they operators or neighbours on shared telephone lines.
Anxiety also collected around the possibility for misunderstanding. In 1930, Jean Cocteau wrote his haunting monologue The Human Voice, a play intimately concerned with the black holes that technologically mediated failures of communication produce. It consists of nothing more than a woman speaking on a bad party line – as these shared services were known – to the lover who has jilted her and who is imminently to marry another woman. Her terrible grief is exacerbated by the constant danger of being drowned out by other voices, or disconnected. “But I am speaking loud … Can you hear me? … Oh, I can hear you now. Yes, it was terrible, it was like being dead. You’re here and you can’t make yourself heard.” The final shot of the television film of the play, starring Ingrid Bergman, leaves no doubt as to the culprit, lingering grimly on the shining black handset, still emitting the dead end of a dial tone as the credits roll.
FacebookTwitterPinterest Photograph: Gail Albert-Halaban courtesy of Edwynn Houk Gallery
The broken, bitty dialogue of The Human Voice underscores the way that a device designed for talking might in fact make talking more difficult. If the telephone is a machine for sharing words, then the internet is a machine for constructing and sharing identities. In the internet era, Cocteau’s anxieties about how technology has affected our ability to speak intimately to one another accelerate into terror about whether the boundaries between people have been destroyed altogether.
I-Be Area, a chaotic, vibrant and alarming film made in 2007, turns on these questions of identity and its dissolution. Its central character is engaged in a war with his clone, and his clone’s online avatar. Making lavish use of jump cuts, face paint and cheap digital effects, the film captures the manic possibilities and perils of digital existence. All the cast, starting with the children in the first frame making hyper-cute adoption videos for themselves, are in search of a desirable persona. They perform for an audience that may at any moment dissolve or turn aggressive, which stimulates them into increasingly creative and bizarre transformations. Often seemingly imprisoned in teenage bedrooms, everyone is talking all the time: a tidal wave of rapid, high-pitched, Valley Girl inflections, the spiel of YouTube bedroom celebrities mashed with corporate catchphrases and the broken English of bots and programming lingo. Everyone is promoting, no one is listening.
The creator of this visionary and hilarious film is Ryan Trecartin, a baby-faced 34-year-old described by the New Yorker’s art critic, Peter Schjeldahl, as “the most consequential artist to have emerged since the 1980s”. Trecartin’s movies are made with a band of friends. They possess a campy DIY aesthetic that often recalls the avant garde genius of the 1960s film-maker Jack Smith, the character morphing of Cindy Sherman, the physical mayhem of Jackass and the idiotic confessional candour of reality TV.
These films take the experiences of contemporary digital culture – the sickening, thrilling feeling of being overwhelmed by a surge of possibilities, not least who you could become – and speed them up. Trecartin’s work is ecstatically enjoyable to watch, though as the critic Maggie Nelson wryly observes: “Viewers who look to Trecartin as the idiot savant emissary from the next generation who has come to answer the question ‘Are we going to be alright?’ are not likely to feel reassured.”
Watching the precisely crafted chaos, one has the disquieting sensation that it is one’s own life that is under the lens. Trecartin’s characters (though I doubt he would sanction such a term, with its vanished, 20th-century confidence in a solid knowable self) understand that they can be owned or branded, discarded or redesigned. In response to pressure, their identities warp and melt.
What is exciting about Trecartin’s work is the ecstasy generated by these transformations. It is tempting to suggest that this might even be a futuristic solution to loneliness: dissolving identity, erasing the burdensome, boundaried individual altogether. But there remain lingering currents of unease, not least around the question of who is watching.
* *
FacebookTwitterPinterest Frank Benson’s sculpture Juliana, 2015. Photograph: Benoit Pailley
But Surround Audience also includes work that testifies to the internet’s ability to dissolve isolation, to create community and closeness. Juliana, Frank Benson’s extraordinary sculpture of the 26-year-old artist and DJ Juliana Huxtable, is a triumphant icon of self-creation. Huxtable is transgender, and the sculpture, a life-size 3D print, displays her naked body, with both breasts and penis, those supposedly defining characteristics of gender. She reclines on a plinth, braids spilling down her back, her extended right hand fixed in a gesture of elegant command: a queenly figure, her shimmering skin spray-painted an unearthly metallic blue-green. Juliana shows how the trans community is redefining authenticity. It is not a coincidence that the trans rights movement has surged in an era in which both identity creation and community building are facilitated by technology. Turkle’s talk of the danger of self-creation misses the importance, especially for people whose sexuality, gender or race is considered marginal, of being able to construct and manifest an identity that is often off-limits or forbidden in the physical world.
* * *
The future does not announce its arrival. In Jennifer Egan’s Pulitzer prize-winning novel A Visit from the Goon Squad, published in 2010, there is a scene set in the near future that involves a business meeting between a young woman and an older man. After talking for a while, the girl becomes agitated by the demands of speech and asks the man if she can “T” (text) him instead, though they are sitting side by side. As information silently flushes between their two handsets, she looks “almost sleepy with relief”, describing the exchange as pure. Reading it, I can distinctly remember thinking that it was appalling, shocking, wonderfully far-fetched. Within a matter of months it seemed instead merely plausible, a little gauche, but entirely understandable as an urge. Now it is just what we do: texting in company, emailing colleagues at the same desk, avoiding encounters, DMing instead.
While I was in New York, I met with Trecartin to discuss Surround Audience and what it has to say about the future we have fallen into. He was clutching a coffee and dressed in a red hoodie emblazoned with the word HUNT, a leftover prop from a shoot. He spoke much more slowly than the logorrheic characters he plays in films, pausing frequently to locate the exact word. He, too, felt that, with the acceleration in the past few years, we have entered almost unknowingly into a new era, long heralded and abruptly arrived. “We don’t necessarily look different yet, but we’re very different,” he said.
This space, the future now, is characterised, he believes, by a blurring between individuals and networks. “Your existence is shared and maintained and you don’t have control over all of it.”
But Trecartin feels broadly positive about where our embrace of technology might take us. “It’s obvious,” he said, “that none of this stuff can be controlled, so all we can do is steer and help encourage compassionate usage and hope things accumulate in ways that are good for people and not awful … Maybe I’m being naive about this, but all of these things feel natural. It’s like the way we already work. We’re making things that are already in us.”
The key word here is compassion, but I was also struck by his use of the word natural. Critiques of the technological society often seem possessed by a fear that what is happening is profoundly unnatural, that we are becoming post-human, entering what Turkle has called “the robotic moment”. But Surround Audience felt deeply human; an intensely life-affirming combination of curiosity, hopefulness and fear, full of richly creative strategies for engagement and subversion.
Over the week, I kept being drawn back by one piece in particular, an untitled six-minute film by the Austrian artist Oliver Laric, whose work is often about the tension between copies and originals. Laric has redrawn and animated scenes of physical transformation from dozens of cartoons, anchored by an odd, unsettlingly melancholy loop of music. Nothing stays constant. Forms continually migrate, a panther turning into a beautiful girl, Pinocchio into a donkey, an old woman deliquescing into mud. The people’s expressions are striking, as their bodies melt and reform, a heartrending mixture of alarm and resignation. The film captures our anxieties about image: Am I desirable? Do I need to be tweaked or improved? This sense of being out of control, subject to external and sinister forces, is part of what it has always meant to be human, to be trapped in temporal existence, with the inevitable upheavals and losses that entails. What could be more sci-fi, after all, than the everyday horror show of ageing, sickness, death?
Somehow, the vulnerability expressed by Laric’s film gave me a sense of hope. Talking to Trecartin, who is only three years younger than me, had felt like encountering someone from a different generation. My own understanding of loneliness relied on a belief in solid, separate selves that he saw as hopelessly outmoded. In his worldview, everyone was perpetually slipping into each other, passing through ceaseless cycles of transformation; no longer separate, but interspersed. Perhaps he was right. We aren’t as solid as we once thought. We are embodied but we are also networks, living on inside machines and in other people’s heads; memories and data streams. We are being watched and we do not have control. We long for contact and it makes us afraid. But as long as we are still capable of feeling and expressing vulnerability, intimacy stands a chance.
At the end of last winter, a gigantic billboard advertising Android, Google’s operating system, appeared over Times Square in New York. In a lower-case sans serif font – corporate code for friendly – it declared: “be together. not the same.” This erratically punctuated mantra sums up the web’s most magical proposition – its existence as a space in which no one need ever suffer the pang of loneliness, in which friendship, sex and love are never more than a click away, and difference is a source of glamour, not of shame.
As with the city itself, the promise of the internet is contact. It seems to offer an antidote to loneliness, trumping even the most utopian urban environment by enabling strangers to develop relationships along shared lines of interest, no matter how shy or isolated they might be in their own physical lives.
But proximity, as city dwellers know, does not necessarily mean intimacy. Access to other people is not by itself enough to dispel the gloom of internal isolation. Loneliness can be most acute in a crowd.
In 1942, the American painter Edward Hopper produced the signature image of urban loneliness. Nighthawks shows four people in a diner at night, cut off from the street outside by a curving glass window: a disquieting scene of disconnection and estrangement. In his art, Hopper was centrally concerned with how humans were handling the environment of the electric city: the way it crowded people together while enclosing them in increasingly small and exposing cells. His paintings establish an architecture of loneliness, reproducing the confining units of office blocks and studio apartments, in which unwitting exhibitionists reveal their private lives in cinematic stills, framed by panes of glass.
More than 70 years have passed since Nighthawks was painted, but its anxieties about connection have lost none of their relevance, though unease about the physical city has been superseded by fears over our new virtual public space, the internet. In the intervening years, we have entered into a world of screens that extends far beyond Hopper’s unsettled vision.
Loneliness centres on the act of being seen. When a person is lonely, they long to be witnessed, accepted, desired, at the same time as becoming intensely wary of exposure. According to research carried out over the past decade at the University of Chicago, the feeling of loneliness triggers what psychologists call hypervigilance for social threat. In this state, which is entered into unknowingly, the individual becomes hyperalert to rejection, growing increasingly inclined to perceive social interactions as tinged with hostility or scorn. The result is a vicious circle of withdrawal, in which the lonely person becomes increasingly suspicious, intensifying their sense of isolation.
This is where online engagement seems to exercise its special charm. Hidden behind a computer screen, the lonely person has control. They can search for company without the danger of being revealed or found wanting. They can reach out or they can hide; they can lurk and they can show themselves, safe from the humiliation of face-to-face rejection. The screen acts as a kind of protective membrane, a scrim that allows invisibility and transformation. You can filter your image, concealing unattractive elements, and you can emerge enhanced: an online avatar designed to attract likes. But now a problem arises, for the contact this produces is not the same thing as intimacy. Curating a perfected self might win followers or Facebook friends, but it will not necessarily cure loneliness, since the cure for loneliness is not being looked at, but being seen and accepted as a whole person – ugly, unhappy and awkward, as well as radiant and selfie-ready.
This aspect of digital existence is among the concerns of Sherry Turkle of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who has been writing about human-technology interactions for the past three decades. She has become increasingly wary of the capacity of online spaces to fulfil us in the ways we seem to want them to. According to Turkle, part of the problem with the internet is that it encourages self-invention. “At the screen,” she writes in Alone Together (2011), “you have a chance to write yourself into the person you want to be and to imagine others as you wish them to be, constructing them for your purposes. It’s a seductive but dangerous habit of mind.”
But there are other dangers. My own peak use of social media arose during a period of painful isolation. It was the autumn of 2011, and I was living in New York, recently heartbroken and thousands of miles from my family and friends. In many ways, the internet made me feel safe. I liked the contact I got from it: the conversations, the jokes, the accumulation of positive regard, the favouriting on Twitter and the Facebook likes, the little devices designed for boosting egos. Most of the time, it seemed that the exchange, the gifting back and forth of information and attention, was working well, especially on Twitter, with its knack for prompting conversation between strangers. It felt like a community, a joyful place; a lifeline, in fact, considering how cut off I otherwise was. But as the years went by – 1,000 tweets, 2,000 tweets, 17,400 tweets – I had the growing sense that the rules were changing, that it was becoming harder to achieve real connection, though as a source of information it remained unparalleled.
This period coincided with what felt like a profound shift in internet mores. In the past few years, two things have happened: a dramatic rise in online hostility, and a growing awareness that the lovely sense of privacy engendered by communicating via a computer is a catastrophic illusion. The pressure to appear perfect is greater than ever, while the once‑protective screen no longer reliably separates the domains of the real and the virtual. Increasingly, participants in online spaces have become aware that the unknown audience might at any moment turn on them in a frenzy of shaming and scapegoating.
The atmosphere of surveillance and punishment destroys intimacy by making it unsafe to reveal mistakes and imperfections. My own sense of ease on Twitter diminished rapidly when people began posting photos of strangers they had snapped on public transport, sleeping with their mouths open. Knowing that the internet was becoming a site of shaming eroded the feeling of safety that had once made it seem such a haven for the lonely.
The dissolution of the barrier between the public and the private, the sense of being surveilled and judged, extends far beyond human observers. We are also being watched by the very devices on which we make our broadcasts. As the artist and geographer Trevor Paglen recently said in the art magazine Frieze: “We are at the point (actually, probably long past) where the majority of the world’s images are made by machines for machines.” In this environment of enforced transparency, the equivalent of the Nighthawks diner, almost everything we do, from shopping in a supermarket to posting a photograph on Facebook, is mapped, and the gathered data used to predict, monetise, encourage or inhibit our future actions.
This growing entanglement of the corporate and social, this creeping sense of being tracked by invisible eyes, demands an increasing sophistication about what is said and where. The possibility of virulent judgment and rejection induces precisely the kind of hypervigilance and withdrawal that increases loneliness. With this has come the slowly dawning realisation that our digital traces will long outlive us.
Back in 1999, the critic Bruce Benderson published a landmark essay, Sex and Isolation, in which he observed: “We are very much alone. Nothing leaves a mark. Today’s texts and images may look like real carvings – but in the end they are erasable, only a temporary blockage of all-invasive light. No matter how long the words and pictures stay on our screens, there will be no encrustation; all will be reversible.”
Benderson thought the transience of the internet was the reason that it felt so lonely, but to me it is far more alarming to think that everything we do there is permanent. At that time – two years before 9/11, and 14 years before Edward Snowden exposed the intrusive surveillance it had set in motion – it was no doubt impossible to imagine the grim permanence of the web to come, where data has consequences and nothing is ever lost – not arrest logs, not embarrassing photos, not Google searches of child porn or embarrassing illnesses, not the torture records of entire nations.
Faced with the knowledge that nothing we say, no matter how trivial or silly, will ever be completely erased, we find it hard to take the risks that togetherness entails. But perhaps, as lonely people often are, I am being too negative, too paranoid. Perhaps we are capable of adapting, of finding intimacy in this landscape of unprecedented exposure. What I want to know is where we are headed. What is this sense of perpetual scrutiny doing to our ability to connect?
* * *
The future does not come from nowhere. Every new technology generates a surge of anxious energy. Each one changes the rules of communication and rearranges the social order. Take the telephone, that miraculous device for dissolving distance. From the moment in April 1877 that the first line linked phones No 1 and No 2 in the Bell Telephone Company, it was perceived as an almost uncanny instrument, separating the voice from the body.
The phone swiftly came to be regarded as a lifeline, an antidote to loneliness, particularly for rural women who were stuck in farmhouses miles from family and friends. But fears about anonymity clung to the device. By opening a channel between the outside world and the domestic sphere, the telephone facilitated bad behaviour. From the very beginning, obscene callers targeted both strangers and the “hello girls” who worked the switchboards. People worried that germs might be transmitted down the lines, carried on human breath. They also worried about who might be lurking, invisibly eavesdropping on private conversations. The germs were a fantasy, but the listeners were real enough, be they operators or neighbours on shared telephone lines.
Anxiety also collected around the possibility for misunderstanding. In 1930, Jean Cocteau wrote his haunting monologue The Human Voice, a play intimately concerned with the black holes that technologically mediated failures of communication produce. It consists of nothing more than a woman speaking on a bad party line – as these shared services were known – to the lover who has jilted her and who is imminently to marry another woman. Her terrible grief is exacerbated by the constant danger of being drowned out by other voices, or disconnected. “But I am speaking loud … Can you hear me? … Oh, I can hear you now. Yes, it was terrible, it was like being dead. You’re here and you can’t make yourself heard.” The final shot of the television film of the play, starring Ingrid Bergman, leaves no doubt as to the culprit, lingering grimly on the shining black handset, still emitting the dead end of a dial tone as the credits roll.
FacebookTwitterPinterest Photograph: Gail Albert-Halaban courtesy of Edwynn Houk Gallery
The broken, bitty dialogue of The Human Voice underscores the way that a device designed for talking might in fact make talking more difficult. If the telephone is a machine for sharing words, then the internet is a machine for constructing and sharing identities. In the internet era, Cocteau’s anxieties about how technology has affected our ability to speak intimately to one another accelerate into terror about whether the boundaries between people have been destroyed altogether.
I-Be Area, a chaotic, vibrant and alarming film made in 2007, turns on these questions of identity and its dissolution. Its central character is engaged in a war with his clone, and his clone’s online avatar. Making lavish use of jump cuts, face paint and cheap digital effects, the film captures the manic possibilities and perils of digital existence. All the cast, starting with the children in the first frame making hyper-cute adoption videos for themselves, are in search of a desirable persona. They perform for an audience that may at any moment dissolve or turn aggressive, which stimulates them into increasingly creative and bizarre transformations. Often seemingly imprisoned in teenage bedrooms, everyone is talking all the time: a tidal wave of rapid, high-pitched, Valley Girl inflections, the spiel of YouTube bedroom celebrities mashed with corporate catchphrases and the broken English of bots and programming lingo. Everyone is promoting, no one is listening.
The creator of this visionary and hilarious film is Ryan Trecartin, a baby-faced 34-year-old described by the New Yorker’s art critic, Peter Schjeldahl, as “the most consequential artist to have emerged since the 1980s”. Trecartin’s movies are made with a band of friends. They possess a campy DIY aesthetic that often recalls the avant garde genius of the 1960s film-maker Jack Smith, the character morphing of Cindy Sherman, the physical mayhem of Jackass and the idiotic confessional candour of reality TV.
These films take the experiences of contemporary digital culture – the sickening, thrilling feeling of being overwhelmed by a surge of possibilities, not least who you could become – and speed them up. Trecartin’s work is ecstatically enjoyable to watch, though as the critic Maggie Nelson wryly observes: “Viewers who look to Trecartin as the idiot savant emissary from the next generation who has come to answer the question ‘Are we going to be alright?’ are not likely to feel reassured.”
Watching the precisely crafted chaos, one has the disquieting sensation that it is one’s own life that is under the lens. Trecartin’s characters (though I doubt he would sanction such a term, with its vanished, 20th-century confidence in a solid knowable self) understand that they can be owned or branded, discarded or redesigned. In response to pressure, their identities warp and melt.
What is exciting about Trecartin’s work is the ecstasy generated by these transformations. It is tempting to suggest that this might even be a futuristic solution to loneliness: dissolving identity, erasing the burdensome, boundaried individual altogether. But there remain lingering currents of unease, not least around the question of who is watching.
* *
*
FacebookTwitterPinterest Photograph: Gail Albert-Halaban courtesy of Edwynn Houk Gallery
For the past two years, Trecartin has been working with the curator Lauren Cornell to put together the 2015 Triennial at New York’s New Museum, which opened at the end of February. This event brings together 51 participants whose work reflects on internet existence. The title, Surround Audience, expresses the sinister as well as blissful possibilities for contact that have opened up. Artist as witness, or maybe artist imprisoned in an experiment none of us can escape.
Over the course of a freezing week in New York in February, I went to see Surround Audience four times, wanting to understand how contemporary artists were grappling with loneliness and intimacy. The most confrontationally dystopic piece was Josh Kline’s terrifying Freedom, an installation re-creating the architecture of Zuccotti Park, the privately owned public space in Manhattan that Occupy Wall Street took over. Kline had populated his replica with five human-size Teletubbies dressed in the uniforms of riot police, with thigh holsters, nine-hole boots and bulletproof vests. In their bellies were televisions playing footage of off-duty cops flatly read aloud from the social media feeds of activists. Kline’s work makes tangible the growing complication of the spaces we inhabit, and the easy misappropriation of our words. As I sat listening to the feed I watched a beaming young woman with a baby take repeated selfies with one of the helmeted figures.
What is it like to be watched like this? Many of the pieces suggest that it feels like being in prison – or perhaps in the horrifying quarantine bunkers designed by the Hong Kong artist Nadim Abbas. These tiny cells, no larger than a single bed, have been furnished, Apartment Therapy-style, with potted plants, striped throws and abstract prints, an atmosphere of modish domesticity at odds with the implicit violence of the space. As in Hopper’s Nighthawks diner, there is no way in or out; simply a pane of glass that facilitates voyeurism while making contact impossible. Touch can only be achieved by way of two sets of black rubber gauntlets, one pair permitting someone – a guard, maybe, or a nurse or warden – to reach in and the other allowing the incumbent to reach out. It’s hard to think of a lonelier space.
FacebookTwitterPinterest Photograph: Gail Albert-Halaban courtesy of Edwynn Houk Gallery
For the past two years, Trecartin has been working with the curator Lauren Cornell to put together the 2015 Triennial at New York’s New Museum, which opened at the end of February. This event brings together 51 participants whose work reflects on internet existence. The title, Surround Audience, expresses the sinister as well as blissful possibilities for contact that have opened up. Artist as witness, or maybe artist imprisoned in an experiment none of us can escape.
Over the course of a freezing week in New York in February, I went to see Surround Audience four times, wanting to understand how contemporary artists were grappling with loneliness and intimacy. The most confrontationally dystopic piece was Josh Kline’s terrifying Freedom, an installation re-creating the architecture of Zuccotti Park, the privately owned public space in Manhattan that Occupy Wall Street took over. Kline had populated his replica with five human-size Teletubbies dressed in the uniforms of riot police, with thigh holsters, nine-hole boots and bulletproof vests. In their bellies were televisions playing footage of off-duty cops flatly read aloud from the social media feeds of activists. Kline’s work makes tangible the growing complication of the spaces we inhabit, and the easy misappropriation of our words. As I sat listening to the feed I watched a beaming young woman with a baby take repeated selfies with one of the helmeted figures.
What is it like to be watched like this? Many of the pieces suggest that it feels like being in prison – or perhaps in the horrifying quarantine bunkers designed by the Hong Kong artist Nadim Abbas. These tiny cells, no larger than a single bed, have been furnished, Apartment Therapy-style, with potted plants, striped throws and abstract prints, an atmosphere of modish domesticity at odds with the implicit violence of the space. As in Hopper’s Nighthawks diner, there is no way in or out; simply a pane of glass that facilitates voyeurism while making contact impossible. Touch can only be achieved by way of two sets of black rubber gauntlets, one pair permitting someone – a guard, maybe, or a nurse or warden – to reach in and the other allowing the incumbent to reach out. It’s hard to think of a lonelier space.
FacebookTwitterPinterest Frank Benson’s sculpture Juliana, 2015. Photograph: Benoit Pailley
But Surround Audience also includes work that testifies to the internet’s ability to dissolve isolation, to create community and closeness. Juliana, Frank Benson’s extraordinary sculpture of the 26-year-old artist and DJ Juliana Huxtable, is a triumphant icon of self-creation. Huxtable is transgender, and the sculpture, a life-size 3D print, displays her naked body, with both breasts and penis, those supposedly defining characteristics of gender. She reclines on a plinth, braids spilling down her back, her extended right hand fixed in a gesture of elegant command: a queenly figure, her shimmering skin spray-painted an unearthly metallic blue-green. Juliana shows how the trans community is redefining authenticity. It is not a coincidence that the trans rights movement has surged in an era in which both identity creation and community building are facilitated by technology. Turkle’s talk of the danger of self-creation misses the importance, especially for people whose sexuality, gender or race is considered marginal, of being able to construct and manifest an identity that is often off-limits or forbidden in the physical world.
* * *
The future does not announce its arrival. In Jennifer Egan’s Pulitzer prize-winning novel A Visit from the Goon Squad, published in 2010, there is a scene set in the near future that involves a business meeting between a young woman and an older man. After talking for a while, the girl becomes agitated by the demands of speech and asks the man if she can “T” (text) him instead, though they are sitting side by side. As information silently flushes between their two handsets, she looks “almost sleepy with relief”, describing the exchange as pure. Reading it, I can distinctly remember thinking that it was appalling, shocking, wonderfully far-fetched. Within a matter of months it seemed instead merely plausible, a little gauche, but entirely understandable as an urge. Now it is just what we do: texting in company, emailing colleagues at the same desk, avoiding encounters, DMing instead.
While I was in New York, I met with Trecartin to discuss Surround Audience and what it has to say about the future we have fallen into. He was clutching a coffee and dressed in a red hoodie emblazoned with the word HUNT, a leftover prop from a shoot. He spoke much more slowly than the logorrheic characters he plays in films, pausing frequently to locate the exact word. He, too, felt that, with the acceleration in the past few years, we have entered almost unknowingly into a new era, long heralded and abruptly arrived. “We don’t necessarily look different yet, but we’re very different,” he said.
This space, the future now, is characterised, he believes, by a blurring between individuals and networks. “Your existence is shared and maintained and you don’t have control over all of it.”
But Trecartin feels broadly positive about where our embrace of technology might take us. “It’s obvious,” he said, “that none of this stuff can be controlled, so all we can do is steer and help encourage compassionate usage and hope things accumulate in ways that are good for people and not awful … Maybe I’m being naive about this, but all of these things feel natural. It’s like the way we already work. We’re making things that are already in us.”
The key word here is compassion, but I was also struck by his use of the word natural. Critiques of the technological society often seem possessed by a fear that what is happening is profoundly unnatural, that we are becoming post-human, entering what Turkle has called “the robotic moment”. But Surround Audience felt deeply human; an intensely life-affirming combination of curiosity, hopefulness and fear, full of richly creative strategies for engagement and subversion.
Over the week, I kept being drawn back by one piece in particular, an untitled six-minute film by the Austrian artist Oliver Laric, whose work is often about the tension between copies and originals. Laric has redrawn and animated scenes of physical transformation from dozens of cartoons, anchored by an odd, unsettlingly melancholy loop of music. Nothing stays constant. Forms continually migrate, a panther turning into a beautiful girl, Pinocchio into a donkey, an old woman deliquescing into mud. The people’s expressions are striking, as their bodies melt and reform, a heartrending mixture of alarm and resignation. The film captures our anxieties about image: Am I desirable? Do I need to be tweaked or improved? This sense of being out of control, subject to external and sinister forces, is part of what it has always meant to be human, to be trapped in temporal existence, with the inevitable upheavals and losses that entails. What could be more sci-fi, after all, than the everyday horror show of ageing, sickness, death?
Somehow, the vulnerability expressed by Laric’s film gave me a sense of hope. Talking to Trecartin, who is only three years younger than me, had felt like encountering someone from a different generation. My own understanding of loneliness relied on a belief in solid, separate selves that he saw as hopelessly outmoded. In his worldview, everyone was perpetually slipping into each other, passing through ceaseless cycles of transformation; no longer separate, but interspersed. Perhaps he was right. We aren’t as solid as we once thought. We are embodied but we are also networks, living on inside machines and in other people’s heads; memories and data streams. We are being watched and we do not have control. We long for contact and it makes us afraid. But as long as we are still capable of feeling and expressing vulnerability, intimacy stands a chance.
Monday 10 February 2014
How internet dating became everyone's route to a perfect love match
The algorithm method: how internet dating became everyone's route to a perfect love match
Six million Britons are looking for their perfect partner online before Valentine's day on Friday, but their chance of success may depend on clever maths rather than charisma
Six million Britons visit dating sites each month. Photograph: Tom Merton/Getty Images/OJO Images RF
In the Summer of 2012, Chris McKinlay was finishing his maths dissertation at the University of California in Los Angeles. It meant a lot of late nights as he ran complex calculations through a powerful supercomputer in the early hours of the morning, when computing time was cheap. While his work hummed away, he whiled away time ononline dating sites, but he didn't have a lot of luck – until one night, when he noted a connection between the two activities.
One of his favourite sites, OkCupid, sorted people into matches using the answers to thousands of questions posed by other users on the site.
"One night it started to dawn on me the way that people answer questions on OkCupid generates a high dimensional dataset very similar to the one I was studying," says McKinlay, and it transformed his understanding of how the system worked. "It wasn't like I didn't like OkCupid before, it was fine, I just realised that there was an interesting problem there."
McKinlay started by creating fake profiles on OkCupid, and writing programs to answer questions that had also been answered by compatible users – the only way to see their answers, and thus work out how the system matched users. He managed to reduce some 20,000 other users to just seven groups, and figured he was closest to two of them. So he adjusted his real profile to match, and the messages started rolling in.
McKinlay's operation was possible because OkCupid, and so many other sites like it, are much more than just simple social networks, where people post profiles, talk to their friends, and pick up new ones through common interest. Instead, they seek to actively match up users using a range of techniques that have been developing for decades.
Every site now makes its own claims to "intelligent" or "smart" technologies underlying their service. But for McKinlay, these algorithms weren't working well enough for him, so he wrote his own. McKinlay has since written a book Optimal Cupid about his technique, while last year Amy Webb, a technology CEO herself, published Data, a Love Story documenting how she applied her working skills to the tricky business of finding a partner online.
Two people, both unsatisfied by the programmes on offer, wrote their own; but what about the rest of us, less fluent in code? Years of contested research, and moral and philosophical assumptions, have gone into creating today's internet dating sites and their matching algorithms, but are we being well served by them? The idea that technology can make difficult, even painful tasks – including looking for love – is a pervasive and seductive one, but are their matchmaking powers overstated?
The Kiss, 1901-4, by sculptor Auguste Rodin. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian
In the summer of 1965, a Harvard undergraduate named Jeff Tarr decided he was fed up with the university's limited social circle. As a maths student, Tarr had some experience of computers, and although he couldn't program them himself, he was sure they could be used to further his primary interest: meeting girls. With a friend he wrote up a personality quiz for fellow students about their "ideal date" and distributed it to colleges across Boston. Sample questions included: "Is extensive sexual activity [in] preparation for marriage, part of 'growing up?'" and "Do you believe in a God who answers prayer?" The responses flooded in, confirming Tarr's suspicion that there was great demand for such a service among the newly liberated student population. Operation Match was born.
In order to process the answers, Tarr had to rent a five-ton IBM 1401 computer for $100 an hour, and pay another classmate to program it with a special matching operation. Each questionnaire was transferred to a punch-card, fed into the machine, and out popped a list of six potential dates, complete with address, phone number and date of graduation, which was posted back to the applicant. Each of those six numbers got the original number and five others in their response: the program only matched women with their ideal man if they fitted his ideal too.
When Gene Shalit, a reporter from Look magazine, arrived to cover the emerging computer-dating scene in 1966, Operation Match claimed to have had 90,000 applications and taken $270,000 in revenue. Even at the birth of the computer revolution, the machine seemed to have an aura about it, something which made its matches more credible than a blind date or a friend's recommendation. Shalit quoted a freshman at Brown University who had dumped her boyfriend but started going out with him again when Operation Match sent her his number. "Maybe the computer knows something that I don't know," she said. Shalit imbued it with even more weight, calling it "The Great God Computer".
The computer-dating pioneers were happy to play up to the image of the omniscient machine – and were already wary of any potential stigma attached to their businesses. "Some romanticists complain that we're too commercial," Tarr told reporters. "But we're not trying to take the love out of love; we're just trying to make it more efficient. We supply everything but the spark." In turn, the perceived wisdom of the machine opened up new possibilities for competition in the nascent industry, as start-up services touted the innovative nature of their programs over others. Contact, Match's greatest rival, was founded by MIT graduate student David DeWan and ran on a Holywell 200 computer, developed in response to IBM's 1401 and operating two to three times faster. DeWan made the additional claim that Contact's questions were more sophisticated than Match's nationwide efforts, because they were restricted to elite college students. In essence, it was the first niche computer-dating service.
Over the years since Tarr first starting sending out his questionnaires, computer dating has evolved. Most importantly, it has become online dating. And with each of these developments – through the internet, home computing, broadband, smartphones, and location services – the turbulent business and the occasionally dubious science of computer-aided matching has evolved too. Online dating continues to hold up a mirror not only to the mores of society, which it both reflects, and shapes, but to our attitudes to technology itself.
The American National Academy of Sciences reported in 2013 that more than a third of people who married in the US between 2005 and 2012 met their partner online, and half of those met on dating sites. The rest met through chatrooms, online games, and elsewhere. Preliminary studies also showed that people who met online were slightly less likely to divorce and claimed to be happier in their marriages. The latest figures from online analytics company Comscore show that the UK is not far behind, with 5.7 million people visiting dating sites every month, and 49 million across Europe as a whole, or 12% of the total population. Most tellingly for the evolution of online dating is that the biggest growth demographic in 2012 was in the 55+ age range, accounting for 39% of visitors. When online dating moves not only beyond stigma, but beyond the so-called "digital divide" to embrace older web users, it might be said to have truly arrived.
It has taken a while to get there. Match.com, founded in 1993, was the first big player, is still the biggest worldwide, and epitomises the "online classifieds" model of internet dating. Match.com doesn't make any bold claims about who you will meet, it just promises there'll be loads of them. eHarmony, which followed in 2000, was different, promising to guide its users towards long-term relationships – not just dating, but marriage. It believed it could do this thanks to the research of its founder, Neil Clark Warren, a then 76-old psychologist and divinity lecturer from rural Iowa. His three years of research on 5,000 married couples laid the basis for a truly algorithmic approach to matching: the results of a 200-question survey of new members (the "core personality traits"), together with their communication patterns which were revealed while using the site.
Whatever you may think of eHarmony's approach – and many contest whether it is scientifically possible to generalise from married people's experiences to the behaviour of single people – they are very serious about it. Since launch, they have surveyed another 50,000 couples worldwide, according to the current vice-president of matching, Steve Carter. When they launched in the UK, they partnered with Oxford University to research 1,000 British couples "to identify any cultural distinctions between the two markets that should be represented by the compatibility algorithms". And when challenged by lawsuits for refusing to match gay and lesbian people, assumed by many to be a result of Warren's conservative Christian views (his books were previously published in partnership with the conservative pressure group, Focus on the Family), they protested that it wasn't morality, but mathematics: they simply didn't have the data to back up the promise of long-term partnership for same-sex couples. As part of a settlement in one such lawsuit, eHarmony launched Compatible Partners in 2009.
Carter says: "The Compatible Partners system is now based on models developed using data collected from long-term same-sex couples." With the rise of Facebook, Twitter, and celebrity-driven online media, have come more personalised and data-driven sites such as OkCupid, where Chris McKinlay started his operation. These services rely on the user supplying not only explicit information about what they are looking for, but a host of assumed and implicit information as well, based on their morals, values, and actions. What underlies them is a growing reliance not on stated preferences – for example, eHarmony's 200-question surveys result in a detailed profile entitled "The Book of You" – but on actual behaviour; not what people say, but what they do.
In 2007, Gavin Potter made headlines when he competed successfully in the Netflix Prize, a $1m competition run by the online movie giant to improve the recommendations its website offered members. Despite competition from teams composed of researchers from telecoms giants and top maths departments, Potter was consistently in the top 10 of the leaderboard. A retired management consultant with a degree in psychology, Potter believed he could predict more about viewers' tastes from past behaviour than from the contents of the movies they liked, and his maths worked. He was contacted by Nick Tsinonis, the founder of a small UK dating site called yesnomayb, who asked him to see if his approach, called collaborative filtering, would work on people as well as films.
Collaborative filtering works by collecting the preferences of many people, and grouping them into sets of similar users. Because there's so much data, and so many people, what exactly the thing is that these groups might have in common isn't always clear to anyone but the algorithm, but it works. The approach was so successful that Tsinonis and Potter created a new company, RecSys, which now supplies some 10 million recommendations a day to thousands of sites. RecSys adjusts its algorithm for the different requirements of each site – what Potter calls the "business rules" – so for a site such as Lovestruck.com, which is aimed at busy professionals, the business rules push the recommendations towards those with nearby offices who might want to nip out for a coffee, but the powerful underlying maths is Potter's. Likewise, while British firm Global Personals provides the infrastructure for some 12,000 niche sites around the world, letting anyone set up and run their own dating website aimed at anyone from redheads to petrolheads, all 30 million of their users are being matched by RecSys. Potter says that while they started with dating "the technology works for almost anything". RecSys is already powering the recommendations for art discovery site ArtFinder, the similar articles search on research database Nature.com, and the backend to a number of photography websites. Of particular interest to the company is a recommendation system for mental health advice site Big White Wall. Because its users come to the site looking for emotional help, but may well be unsure what exactly it is they are looking for, RecSys might be able to unearth patterns of behaviour new to both patients and doctors, just as it reveals the unspoken and possibly even unconscious proclivities of daters.
Tinder is a new dating app on smartphones.
Back in Harvard in 1966, Jeff Tarr dreamed of a future version of his Operation Match programme which would operate in real time and real space. He envisioned installing hundreds of typewriters all over campus, each one linked to a central "mother computer". Anyone typing their requirements into such a device would receive "in seconds" the name of a compatible match who was also free that night. Recently, Tarr's vision has started to become a reality with a new generation of dating services, driven by the smartphone.
Suddenly, we don't need the smart algorithms any more, we just want to know who is nearby. But even these new services sit atop a mountain of data; less like Facebook, and a lot more like Google.
Tinder, founded in Los Angeles in 2012, is the fastest-growing dating app on mobile phones but its founders don't like calling it that. According to co-founder and chief marketing officer Justin Mateen, Tinder is "not an online dating app, it's a social network and discovery tool".
He also believes that Tinder's core mechanic, where users swipe through Facebook snapshots of potential matches in the traditional "Hot or Not" format, is not simple, but more sophisticated: "It's the dynamic of the pursuer and the pursued, that's just how humans interact." Tinder, however, is much less interested in the science of matching up couples than its predecessors. When asked what they have learned about people from the data they have gathered, Mateen says the thing he is most looking forward to seeing is "the number of matches that a user needs over a period of time before they're addicted to the product" – a precursor of Tinder's expansion into other areas of ecommerce and business relationships.
Tinder's plans are the logical extension of the fact that the web has really turned out to be a universal dating medium, whatever it says on the surface. There are plenty of sites out there deploying the tactics and metrics of dating sites without actually using the D-word. Whether it's explicit – such as Tastebuds.fm, which matches up "concert buddies" based on their Spotify music tastes – or subtle, the lessons of dating research have been learned by every "social" site on the web. Nearly every Silicon Valley startup video features two photogenic young people being brought together, whatever the product, and the same matching algorithms are at work whether you're looking for love, a jobbing plumber, or a stock photograph.
Over at UCLA, Chris McKinlay's strategy seems to have paid off. After gathering his data and optimising his profile, he started receiving 10-12 unsolicited messages every day: an unheard of figure online, where the preponderance of creeps tends to put most women on the defensive. He went on 87 dates, mostly just a coffee, which "were really wonderful for the most part". The women he met shared his interests, were "really intelligent, creative, funny" and there was almost always some attraction. But on the 88th date, something deeper clicked. A year later, he proposed.
Online dating has always been in part about the allure and convenience of the technology, but it has mostly been about just wanting to find "the one". The success of recommendation systems ,which are just as applicable to products as people, says much about the ability of computers to predict the more fundamental attractions that would have got McKinlay there sooner – his algorithms improved his ability to get dates, but not much on the likelihood of them progressing further.
In the end, the development of online dating tells us more about our relationship with networked technology than with each other: from "the Great God Computer", to a profusion of data that threatens to overwhelm us, to the point where it is integrated, seamlessly and almost invisibly, with every aspect of our daily lives.
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