<aside> 📄 INTERACTIVE RESEARCH DOCUMENT: The Kindness of Strangers by Hannes Bernard
Royal Academy of Art, The Hague Graphic Design Department — Interactive Media Design
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<aside> 📖 *This document is a mostly non-linear collection of my various approaches and methods, fragments, media scrapings and academic research from the past year in the KABK Research Group. It is a work in progress.
Within my practice, collecting and collaging social media artefacts into narratives arcs (often as multimedia installation) forms a part of both my artistic research, methods and output. Through the KABK Research Group I attempted to investigate some of the overlaps between my approaches to research and practice with more precision.*
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A rapidly expanding digital economy is redefining traditional notions of familiarity and estrangement. As cultural and economic activities — such as work, dating, media consumption, shopping and protest — migrate online, their social-relations are increasingly surveilled through code and assessed by agents of Big Data. Contemporaneously, platform-capital [1] provokes new etiquettes and attitudes of openness through the ‘gig’ and 'sharing' economies, while redefining common social interactions or behaviours. Whether inviting foreign guests to share your home, commissioning a faceless Fivver freelancer, outsourcing dinner through an app or working remotely, our proximity to strangers or engagements with those familiar to us is rapidly evolving.
[1] The term ‘platform capitalism’, coined by Nick Srnicek, proposes that firms, such as Google or Microsoft and Uber or Airbnb are transforming themselves into platforms: businesses that provide the hardware and software foundation for others to operate on. This transformation signals a major shift in how for-profit (and highly financialized) firms operate and how they interact with the rest of the economy. Capitalizing upon the underlying platform itself problematizes and blurs the line between distinct social roles and relations, from workers to users, producers to consumers, and vice-versa.
In August 2019 the online music streaming service Spotify updated its terms and conditions for use, specifically amending aspects of its so-called 'family plan'[2]. Such 'family plans' have become increasingly common marketing propositions amongst digital service-providers and online platforms. They allow multiple users to receive discounted subscription-rates through a shared, umbrella account. While Spotify's 'family plan' is presumably targeted towards members of a family-unit, their terms and conditions had thus far neglected to codify a binding definition of 'family'. One possible reason for this omission is the fickle linguistic[3] and sociological understanding of 'family' and by extension its legal determination within EULAs (end-user license agreements). Spotify users, as a result, could leverage diverse social constructions or familial configurations against this void.
With its updated terms and conditions, Spotify sought to address this situation — which it deemed 'an abuse' of its user agreement — by including new pre-conditions for eligibility, as well as ongoing compliance checks. New criteria include the verification of a physical location ('the home'), while software scripts determine whether a user ultimately resides at this 'home' address. This determination is facilitated through the recognition of behavioural patterns, movements and location histories gathered by its mobile app.
The updated agreement outraged many Spotify users, whose familial relations or sociological makeup deviate from this narrow definition of 'family'[4]. By openly deploying an algorithmic mechanism for policing social relations, Spotify ultimately made strangers of siblings, spouses, parents and children overnight, while conjuring familial ties between roommates and neighbours through little more than common frugality.
Screenshot: Updated Terms & Conditions for Spotify users
The mainstream transition towards a digital, platform-based economy brings with it new problematics and limitation for some approaches in academic study: roles or social positions — often delineated through demography and ethnography — merge online under the murky label of user, displaced amidst an infosphere where socially concrete taxonomies such as worker or parent are seamlessly reconfigured through an opaque (and often automated) marketplace of personhood.
The transition from tangible economic and social roles to the more pliable position of user obfuscates and often negates the conventional modes of subjectivity that might play out in more materially solid socio-economic realms. How then — given the intangible, immaterial, invisible, atemporal and seemingly boundless realm of a globalized digital economy — might the user imagine or (re–)articulate her own subjectivity?
The transition to new socio-economic modes of existence at first appears enthralling and exhilarating. In the introduction of Psychopolitics Byung-Chul Han surmises:
... freedom is felt when passing from one way of living to another – until this too turns out to be a form of coercion. Then, liberation gives way to renewed subjugation. Such is the destiny of the subject; literally, the ‘one who has been cast down’.
My primary research question (one probably more suited to artistic methods) is concerned with the process of this transition and its influence on the user as subject and, by extension, her familiarity with — or estrangement from — the social other; from the tangible processes of work or metabolic life; from the materiality of ‘flesh and blood’ engagement and economic exchange.
In what ways might this user then become solid? And by what means, forms or formats might their digital subjectivity emerge? This ‘mediation of subjectivity’ is the starting point for an artistic research trajectory.
During the Corona pandemic, Uber fired more than 3500 custom-service employees via a mass zoom meeting. One worker attempted to captured this event — even though it took place in real-time and in existing digital-media format — by filming the screen of their laptop with a smartphone.
<aside> 🧠Initially I had wanted to explore the phenomenon I saw emerging through user-generated posts in relation to the longer, historic precedent of economic deregulation that has accelerated the erosion of social welfare, community infrastructures and services over the past 35 years. My first research proposal hypothesised an inter-relation between this historic precedent and new socio-economic dynamics, whereby shared communication platforms (such as Reddit) or startup-funding services (such as GoFundMe) increasingly function as substitutes for services traditionally provided by the state or closely-integrated communities. **
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I am interested in the social divisions of tense that help shape how social belonging, abandonment, and endurance are enunciated and experienced within late liberalism... how various narratives of belonging, abandonment, and endurance are socially enunciated and experienced depends in part on the ways that the relationship between the time of narration and the event narrated, or, put in another way, the event of narration and the narrated event, is grammatically marked.
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In this project, academic research methods (survey of literature) create a foundation and critical context for studying a digital economy through the elicitation and definition of key concepts and terms. Theory connects conditions of digital labour, productivity and communication to the economic stakeholders, digital infrastructures and main research questions about digital subjectivity - or personhood - online**.**
By expanding upon the methods of scraping, collecting, tagging and mapping artefacts from social-media and digital platforms in the project, I hope to illuminate different ways in which the user — a simultaneous producer and consumer in the digital economy — exposes, articulates or mediates their subjectivity. This phenomenon might occur intentionally by creating, posting and sharing media across common communication platforms, or it may be captured inadvertently via the very platforms, tools and technologies of digital productivity.
A logic of positive feedback is installed in the connection between digital technology and financial economy, because this connection tends to induce technological automatisms, and psycho-automatisms too, leading to the advancement of destructive tendencies.
[6]
The media ‘artefacts’ I collect during this research come from various social media apps and platforms and their contents are diverse. However they have one element in common: ‘breaking the fourth wall’ (or in this case interface) of this digital-economic stage — either inadvertently or purposefully. As such, this collection of digital artefacts can be seen as ephemeral mediations of a ‘digital subjectivity’. Through a process of tagging and mapping, new taxonomies may be proposed, in order to expose the points of friction between familiarity and estrangement through novel social practices or sensibilities of online exchange and behaviour.
Projects are the thick subjective background effects of a life as it has been lived; and these thick subjectivities provide the context of moral and political calculation. All judgments and views always occur within thick and particular life projects— a point most anthropologists would take as axiomatic.
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Press image from Taskrabbit.com, an online service for outsourcing odd-jobs in and around the home.
[2] Gartenberg, Chaim. 'Spotify is cracking down on family plan sharing again by asking for user locations'. [online] https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2019/9/12/20863066/spotify-family-plan-sharing-location-terms-conditions
[3] Two somewhat contradictory meanings are ascribed to the term 'family', namely "a group of parents and their children that live together in one household"; and "all the descendants of a common ancestor".
[4] For example: children whose parents live in separate homes; or parents whose children study elsewhere.
<aside> 🧠*One aim of this research is to achieve a better understanding of the new, emergent social practices of familiarity and estrangement facilitated by online services, platforms and interfaces within an ever-expanding digital economy.
As a designer and researcher I’m interested in this ecosystem, specifically the relations and exchanges between its economic imperatives, media production and cultural ephemera.*
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🎵 Time Poverty Amidst Digital Abundance — Judy Wajcman
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/eeb2e264-d530-4c66-9150-a65208c8ff77/01_TimePoverty_Judy-Wajcman.m4a
<aside> 🧠What first drew my attention to this topic is a series of posts on the image aggregation platform 9GAG. Anonymous users were sharing images of empty or extremely bare apartments, along with a short (± 30 word) statement. Although 9GAG's interface, user experience design and underlying economic incentives promote consumptive digital behaviours — such as bookmarking, rating (up- or down-voting) and commenting — of predominantly humorous memes, images or gifs, some users had started co-opting the platform as a means of sharing grief, loss or hardship instead.
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[5] Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 6, Apple Books.