Self-Defense Against Technology
This is a rough transcription of a talk I have given at a few venues/festivals, such as Meta Marathon 2019, NØ School Nevers 2019 and Blue \x80.
I’ve been doing research on how technology affects our bodies in many different ways. From physical ways like neck pain from improper positioning while sitting behind a desk or watching YouTube videos on your phone in bed, to less visible ways such as how technology affects our sleep, our anxiety or mental health in general. And there are lots of studies, some more interesting than others, out there.
This image was taken from a BBC article from 5 years ago, so I imagine that things could have gotten worse at this point. The article talked about a study that suggests that people in Britain spend more time on technology than they do on sleep. Granted, as you can see, the difference is just 20 mins, however 8 hours and 41 mins is a lot of time to spend on technology related activity a day. At the same time, I feel that in 2019 we shouldn’t be shocked that people are spending a lot of time on their devices, we’re pretty used to it by now, but somehow hearing that people are using their phones more than they’re sleeping still shocked me.
Different companies tried to deal with this problem in their own ways, mainly through creating other products that are meant to serve as utopian solutions.
If anyone is not familiar with this device this is Google Glass and it was a huge failure. Aside from being visually unappealing, it also served no clear purpose, was incredibly expensive (1500$) and created a lot of problems regarding privacy. But essentially it’s this pair of “glasses” that allowed you to instantly take and share photos and to quickly look something up online.
But the failure of Google glass as a product is not what interests me about it, it’s the presentation of it. Here’s a clip of the TED talk that Sergey Brin gave in 2013 about this new device.
Brin says that using a smartphone can potentially be socially isolating. He’s definitely right about that, but it was crazy to me to hear someone like Brin talk about this publicly, because Google does make smartphones and yet here we have the president of Alphabet inc. talking about how smartphones suck!
What is also interesting about the Glass project is that this is the tag line on Google+ page for google glass — “Getting technology out of the way.” Tech companies want to make technology so seamless and invisible, so that we would be able to enjoy life with this elusive technology. It’s important to think about whether not being able to notice technology is really a good thing. And Google Glass wasn’t the only one that marketed itself as a new kind of device that got technology out of the way.
Here is an iPad 2 ad from 2011, and boy, do I love seeing tech companies speaking the same language:
The silky smooth voice-over almost sold me on the “getting technology out of the way” line, but I’ve been in the business of complaining about technology for a while now and can’t be bought that easily! (Or at least that’s what I tell myself).
But it’s true smartphones and iPads aren’t necessarily the best tools for us. Nicholas Carr in his book The Glass Cage says:
“we’ve never carried on our person a tool that so insistently captivates our sense and divides our attention”
Later in the book he goes on to say:
“we’ve defined our relation with technology not as of body and limb or even that of sibling and sibling but that of master and slave”
This is where we can get into a discussion about whether that’s the case, who’s the master and who is the slave in our relationship with our devices, which of course also depends on each user, but many others have agreed with Carr on this subject.
In this article from The Economist, the author says about the our relationship with smartphones:
“for most people the servant has become the master”
However the idea that technology is somehow taking the dominant role in the relationship between human and device is a rather recent one, as you might imagine. In 1891, Oscar Wilde wrote an essay titled The Soul of Man Under Socialism, in which he talks about the beauty of socialism, the downsides of capitalism and the hope that technology (or machinery) brings. This hope being that with the rise of industrial machines, humans will be liberated from all boring activity and could go on to pursue artistic activity that they so longed for. Here’s an example:
“All unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull labour, all labour that deals with dreadful things, and involves unpleasant conditions, must be done by machinery. […] Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralising. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.”
This is the way that Wilde imagined the future I guess we are now in. But can we say his predictions were correct? Or did Carr describe our lives in a more accurate way. Are we not slaves of technology? Think about how many times you pick up your phone not because you need it to perform a task for you, but because it’s almost calling your name asking you to check your notifications just one more time…
Though all this is not to say that our interactions with technology have changed drastically just in the last couple of years. Every tool calls for different ways of interacting with it, and that has been around for a really long time. Back in 1911 Frederick Winslow Taylor created something he called scientific management, which was his philosophy that essentially stated how work with machines needs to be done. He created principles for factory owners in order to educate them on how to treat their employees and their machinery in order to make the most amount of profit. One of his suggestions was to script every movement of the workers body and mind in order optimize efficiency which could only be achieved by following the machines. And of course that may sound harsh now, the idea of having to follow a strict set of movements in order to benefit from the technologies presented by the machine, however if you think about it we now have a real science around that same idea.
Welcome to the world of ergonomics — the study of people’s efficiency in their working environment. The study of ergonomics nowadays is the opposite of what Frederick Winslow Taylor believed back in the 1900’s, they show that you’re supposed to design the technology and the environment around the human rather than optimizing the machine and forcing the worker to adapt to it. But of course, as the word technology becomes unanimous with progress, ergonomists become ignored and concerns about the effects of computers and other devices on people’s minds and bodies become of no value, as the desire for efficiency and precision becomes more and more important, as it brings a large profit.
And that’s where my project, Center for Technological Pain comes in. With it I really wanted to propose ideas for combatting addiction to technology, but also physical pain from our devices. So I started developing DIY solutions to health problems that come from technology. The way that I present this project is a parody of other corporate and tech companies. All the solutions are meant to be ironic and to serve as a criticism of our daily interactions with of devices.
I started out, at first, by making prototypes of objects that served different purposes, but essentially were supposed to either make your life easier, or make sure that you didn’t experience pain while interacting with your devices.
So here you see a pair of glasses with two motors and two pieces of cardboard on them. As you keep working behind your computer the shades open and close, so to speak, in order to force you to take a break from your computer and in the long run prevent eye strain.
This object, which I called a hands-free headset, was kind of my response to google glass, because just like google glass I attached a screen right in front of my eyes, because i do agree with Sergey Brin that the movement of looking down is not only socially isolating, but is also bad for your neck and back, but I decided to get technology in the way with this object.
Usually, when I show this object, is when most people start not just laughing, but mainly questioning their choice of listening to a 30 mins talk by someone whose idea of a solution to neck problems is to glue a screen directly in front of your eyes. So this would be a perfect moment to remind the viewers/readers that this is an artistic project and not a commercial object, and to further explain that it is meant to be ironic.
The last object out of the collection I’ll show you is this headset that prevents eye dryness, by dripping eye drops into your eyes. While working on this project i found out that when we’re watching TV or looking at a screen, our brain gets so distracted by trying to decode what it is that we’re watching, that it forgets to remind our eyes to blink, so we blink less often and therefore our eyes get dry and sometimes even irritated. So these are just some examples of the objects and as you can see they’re all made out of cheap materials that are easily found anywhere, which was important to me because the project was always meant to be DIY; and because it was important for me to organize the information I learned I started working on manuals that would describe how one could easily remake any of the objects I came up with.
Of course the logical next step for me was to hold workshops, not only to encourage others to join me in this DIY tech pain movement, but mainly to shed light on these problems and addictions that most people face everyday and to start a discussion while hopefully getting some people to think and reflect on how they interact with their devices.
While the workshops were very fruitful and gave me a good idea of how to approach the topic of tech-related pain, I started reading a lot about design violence and being slaves to our devices, so I decided to create a set of self-defense moves against our devices that also serve as tactics or resistance against our “masters.”
Similar to the objects, the self-defense against technology moves come in an illustrated way that shows you how you could perform one of these moves, as well as a youtube-style tutorial video that goes through each move and explains their purpose.
More recently though, I have been working on a new course called “Yoga for Healthy Phone Use”, and it’s a yoga routine that is at once a relaxation tool — a way to meditate and exercise while keeping up with recent updates from your friends via your phone — and a way to ridicule our obsessive media consumption by inserting our phones into one of the most solitary activities. Throughout this 7-minute video, the viewer gets to learn three different yoga poses designed specifically to ensure stress-free phone use. At the same time as mocking our everyday addictive behavior, this routine actually forces the person performing it to reflect on that behavior while making the overall browsing experience a lot more pleasant.
The project has been shown in a couple of ways. It has been presented as a performance, where I play the Doctor of this fictional center and present the visitors with solutions to any and all of their pains.
And while a part of the Computer Grrrls exhibition, it had quite a different look.
If you’re interested in seeing more objects, watching the self-defense video or in any other information regarding the project:
