How to do nothing productive (with tech)
In which I recommend three art projects and a few new ways of seeing.
Hi. Summer is slinking away and I’m ready to write again. This week, I’m dusting off an old draft for the sake of momentum.
In a world where our every internet-mediated interaction is surveilled and optimized and monetized, art is an important form of resistance. One of my favorite internet niches is that of “digital art” — a vague term that I like to think of as “non-productive uses of technology.” Like any art form, digital art can help us see what’s possible in the everyday, digital or otherwise. This week I’ve got a few letters of recommendation on participatory digital artworks, which I find are more interesting than purely visual work. (I don’t get into computational production using things like GPT-3 and DALL-E 2; more on those soon.)
LETTERS OF RECOMMENDATION
Read someone else’s emails (The Enron Corpus)
Share your location indefinitely (Find My Friends)
Build your own g-d website (Glitch)
LETTER OF RECOMMENDATION: Read someone else’s emails via the Enron Corpus 📧
Inbox getting you down? Try someone else’s! For years now I’ve been receiving emails from the Enron Corpus via Sam Lavigne’s fabulous art project, The Good Life.
In his words:
The Enron scandal was, as of 2004, the largest bankruptcy in American history and is a prescient example of corporate fraud and audit failure. The Good Life offers a unique opportunity to experience this landmark event from the inside. Users may sign up to receive 225,000 emails confiscated from Enron by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, direct to their inbox. The emails arrive in the order they were sent, over the course of 7, 14, or 28 years.
Most of the time I forget that Enron is pooling in my inbox, so sporadic is the IV drip of emails; they’re delivered as if in real-time. When I remember they’re there, and when I have the time, I take a refreshing dip into someone else’s corporate crud. The emails are completely mundane, but they show you how the sausage is made: slowly, inefficiently, stupidly, numbingly. You meet characters and you hear about their underachieving children, their lunch plans, their petty, cover-your-ass BCCs: “FYI, this is typical CCSI.”
Let this be a reminder: our emails and Slacks (even and especially the petty BCCs), will outlive us all.
But going back a second to the topic of parents and underachieving children. Take another look at the email above and you’ll see a certain Chris Holmes helped draft this Repurchase Agreement with Catalytica. Who’s that other Holmes that’s been in the news this year? Yep. Elizabeth Holmes, our generation’s huckster-in-chief, was actually spoon-fed by an Enron executive, and here he is. The curious can see his email trail and understand that evil truly is banal.
For a deeper exploration of the Enron corpus, check out Nathan Heller’s New Yorker piece. You’ll be surprised to learn that these 600,000 emails comprise one of the largest bodies of publicly available email correspondence — and that our current suite of machine learning technologies were trained on them (natural language processing in particular). The implications of that are for another day . . .
And while we’re on the topic of data dump art, a phrase I’m coining here, I have to plug this cookbook of leaked recipes by Demetria Glace. It marries all my interests, of course, and looks genius. It’s on my list to try and report back.
LETTER OF RECOMMENDATION: Share your location data indefinitely via Find My Friends 📍
My close friends know where to find me—every minute of every day. All they have to do is open up their “Find My Friends” app, and there I am. If the sharing is mutual, and it should be, I can do the same. It’s a dynamic I think of as a kind of site-specific performance art (or perhaps it’s site-unspecific?).
If you’re new the game, start with one person. Pick a best friend, someone you tell everything to. From your iMessage app, share your location data — not for an hour, not for a day, but indefinitely. And that’s it, you’re ready to go. Go on living your life and pull up the app at random times through the week.
For max effect, err on the side of respect. Sharing location data is radically intimate, and with great power comes great responsibility. Respect your friend’s privacy and raise topics respectfully. You don’t need to call them out in the group chat for the 3am bodega visit. Ask them one-on-one what they woke up to in Gowanus. When necessary, call people on their shit: “I know you’re not on the train.” Just as often, be sweet: “Glad you got home safe.”
Sharing location data is finding love in a hopeless place; by flipping the surveillance dynamic, we can try out a new kind of intimacy in this digital wasteland. If we are going to be tracked — and we are, there’s no getting out of that — can we use that data in interesting ways?
I find the experience eye-opening in another way. It’s liberating what you can’t learn from metadata, what stays hidden. Seventy percent of the time you’ll hardly get any signal at all: there’s Lizzie at her apartment, again. You don’t know what she’s doing or who she’s with or when her blip will move. It reminds me that no subject can truly know another subject (i.e., the intersubjectivity problem). Maybe the digital corollary is that we can only know someone’s trail of metadata. And to take this data-constrained perspective is to assume a kind of machine vision — it allows you to see yourself as an algorithm would, as rows of data. You can see where the signals are bright and where they’re shaded. I’d argue that understanding how we are digitally rendered breeds a deeper and more useful techno-political awareness.
LETTER OF RECOMMENDATION: Build your own goddamn website via Glitch 🕷️
Building websites has gotten really hard, and that’s no coincidence. Our Big Tech overlords don’t want us having our own kooky corners; rather, they want all of our data and behaviors tied to one verified identity that they can sell ads to. Over the last decade, the tech giants fought to trap us in their own “walled gardens.” Readers of a certain age will remember Google Reader and the golden age of RSS — a time when every person was empowered and equipped to curate their content diet. The tech giants very purposefully killed RSS and other open-web initiatives . . . and the result, we all know, is ugly. As one colleague put it, “there is a straight line from the death of Google Reader to Trump’s election.”
Enter Glitch. Glitch is a service I love and have written about before. It’s like Dreamweaver for 2022: it makes it easy for you to build your own websites and apps without the fuss of hiring a dev/ops team. My advice is to start small with the perfect starter project: a landing page that you can use as your “link in bio.” You can make a live page in actual minutes, which is a magical and empowering feeling. This is my MVP, which took me about 10 minutes:
I love this project because it couldn’t be easier to create something that feels personal and yours — and at scale, can help us take back the internet, and make it a more creative place (and not just one where we’re sold things).
This project illuminates a few interesting dynamics. For one, modern websites, even simple ones, are complicated. But they don’t need to be. Second, the use case reveals something about the modern web: people need to create “link in bio” pages like this one because Instagram wants to keep profiles small and to prevent users from linking out. Instagram, like other social networks, wants to keep you in the walled garden, proscribing specific ways to browse that harvest your valuable data and allow them to serve you more ads. Creating your own digital experience reveals how most of our online experiences are completely determined, but create the illusion of freedom.
And with that, I’ll leave you with a gif sticker of my oscillating disembodied head, which you can also find on my “link in bio” page. The folks at Giphy gifted it to me after I gave a talk a few months back. It’s on Instagram and everything (open GIFs and search “Linares”). Embedding here for posterity.
Link up 🔗
Jenny Odell’s excellent How To Do Nothing is a great read if you’re interested in the broad topic of rejecting technology (I’m due for a re-read and would bookclub with anyone!).
On the topic of AI consciousness and machine vision, you must read Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest book. I could talk about this one for forever.
Kevin Roose writes about how good AI is getting. We are living in amazing times. (via NYT)
A solid piece on the BeReal phenomenon, which I will almost certainly will be writing about soon. (via Every)
Glitch’s CEO, Anil Dash, talks about the slow web and the example of Wordle on the EFF podcast (via EFF)
Until next time, be best. —XML