Friend, Fuck or Follow: Reflecting on Tech Hype and Human Hope
Hope and hype are only a single letter apart. But while we’re willing to admit we hope, few of us ever want to be accused of hype. While to hope is to be optimistic, to hype is to be taken a fool. And, well, no one wants to be taken a fool.
Except, apparently, when it comes to tech.
Where the thoughtmonkeys of Slate and Vox would have us believe they are so hip on hype as to be post-hope, why does this absurd compulsion to piss on hype preemptively never seem to extend to consumer technology? Why are these same bananas who say Bernie Sanders is a pipedream always wearing Apple watches and salivating over VR?
How does tech continue to inspire an unwavering sense of wonder in people who otherwise have made a career rejecting radical hope everywhere else?
I wish I could say I knew the answer to this question. It baffles me that every year consumer tech expos draw the kind of media attention once reserved for war coverage. I’m fairly confident that there are today more hands at work writing reviews of Occulus Rift demos now than there are American journalists writing about the homelessness epidemic by an unforgivable margin.
But it isn’t the media’s fault, the media says, if news consumers no longer care about child poverty or sex trafficking stories if it’s the headlines about iPhones that get the clicks. The attention market, after all, directs the lens for capture. The tech just made it clear to advertisers how shallow we are whenever we get a modicum of control over what content will distract our attention.
So it goes.
So already when I think about technology, I think about it in the context of something being fetishized in America far past the point of defensibility. For people to be this preoccupied with personal consumption means our attention is being co-opted so well, the cameras already know where to go. The content is already half-written.
The hype machine is building itself.
Soon, thank God, the journalists won’t even be necessary once the machine learns how to hype itself.
But let’s get back to now because this is the only place I can stand any ground. We all know sociologists never get drafted to play the fun futurist.
No, all we ever get to be are embittered nowists.
And what do sociologists do all day? Well, they think about the big hurt machine. The big hurt machine has always been running, 24/7. Since the dawn of times, bullies have known if humans can be made to suffer, then they can be made to do pretty much anything if it promises to alleviate their suffering. If their children can be threatened, parents can be impelled by power to do practically everything — even sell themselves into slavery. The big hurt machine is whatever an oppressor relies on to keep the poor from resisting and overthrowing their oppression.
People like me study the big hurt machine in an effort to pick out a specific component so that we might come to know it so well, we might figure out a way to shut it down and help end the cycle of violence. It is not enough for a cultural sociologist to merely label a system of hurt or even to measure its effects on the rest of society. For me, I have to understand how to rip it apart. Otherwise, what is the fucking point?
I don’t need to waste your time telling you water is wet.
But here I sit coming back over and over again to the problem posed by the big hype machine. It should be patently obvious that the refugee crisis we face right now is directly causing the suffering of literally millions of people. We know one million children a year are being forced into prostitution. We know families in Flint will suffer for the rest of their lives.
We know these horrible things.
Yet we’re getting to a point when Kim Kardashian’s ass-fueled iPhone apps could feed the world several times over and don’t.
The hurt machine has been so obscured by the hype machine that I can’t help but lose myself in the utter absurdity of it.
Maybe this is why I have learned to stop worrying about the hurt machine and learned to love the hype.
Maybe I love the hype machine because breaking it apart poses a puzzle to me but if I can figure it out, I’ll have figured out something huge. Consider this: how can I get you to attend to your moral obligation to unravel the Gordian knots of Patriarchy, racism, and capitalism if I can’t get you to pay attention to anything but your fucking iPhone?
It takes at least 6 people to lift a coffin. I’m sure it’ll take millions more to end the human war.
So as to why I can’t sleep at night, I come back to the relationship between hope and hype and how so often hype eclipses my hope. Do I have a moral obligation to stop the hype machine so that we might reorient ourselves to ending the hurt machine? Is that what must be done to stop the pain?
Is that my activism? To ask how we might curb the hype so that even the least privileged among us can experience hope for the future?
Where I ask this of politics, many of my friends ask this of art. Perhaps an unconventional move for the CEO of a tech firm, my friend Boaz Sender repurposed his office’s storefront entrance into a gallery. Walking down South Street in Boston, neighboring startups hang banners in their windows lulling pedestrians with the same comfortable platitudes we’ve come to expect from the so-called innovation sector: “think bigger” and “make stuff people want.” The windows at Bocoup, however, are aiming to discomfort.
This past month, artist Lauren McCarthy opened her show, Friend or Follow. Classically trained in the fine arts at MIT, McCarthy shoulders into the Black Mirror of consumer tech. Using apps, cameras and wearables, Lauren’s work equips us with the tools necessary to step into a near counterfactual future so that we might be unsettled by it and hopefully come away asking ourselves: what the actual fuck.
But what happens when people take the fuck seriously?
Consider the installation, pplkpr (2015), an app McCarthy worked on with collaborator Kyle McDonald that you can download right now from the iPhone appstore. The duo developed the project at the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, with support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and through a residency at Eyebeam Art + Technology Center.
Obviously tech-facilitated sociality is our near future — pplkpr just brings it to the now.
Using a smartwatch, the app measures your heartrate when you’re interacting with friends and gives you a readout of who in your life is making you stressed, anxious, bored and even aroused.
The app then uses cumulative stress data to advise relationship decisions. This person angers you, would you like to block them? This person makes you calm, would you like to set up a time to see them again?
Pplkper was tested at Carnegie Mellon, giving students real-time data on their social media and real life relationships. And they have offered testimonial as to how the app has informed major life decisions, from starting a romance to cutting “toxic” people from their lives.
What would you do if you could use technology to automate your social life?
Would you trust it?
What checks would you want against its AI?
Who would you be afraid of ever seeing all the documented secrets of your heart?
Ask Lauren about her inspiration and she’ll tell you it’s asking tech these questions. “What I was trying to do is make these things that could almost be real to ask people what they think — do you want this to be real?” McCarthy asked me.
“Do you hope it’s not?”
What do I think? Honestly, many of McCarthy’s apps inspire terror in social theorists. I, for one, fear that tools like pplkpr will use a single measure — heartrate data — to rationalize social disposability over the cultivation of skills such as conflict resolution. Will we lose the capacity to communicate our feelings in an age when we could so much more easily use tech to dissolve a difficult human connection?
Do we raise our kids to learn how to get along with frustrating people or will we look at their heart monitors and advise them to make different friends?
Will we measure our marriages by their long-term effects on the heart?
Will employers ask for our heart data on the job?
Reflecting on her experience in software development, said McCarthy, “There’s a pressure to make it fast and cheap, to give people what they want but without the space to ask if that’s what they want…but artists can ask these weird questions no one else can.”
And this is why tech CEO Boaz opened an art gallery on a street lined with startups.
On the opening night of McCarthy’s installation, Boaz found himself approached by many hoping these spec demos were real startups — ventures they could fund. Visitors came to ask, “How do you plan to monetize this?” Recruiters came to offer McCarthy their card. Engineers and researchers came to ask how they could collaborate.
No matter how much he protested, insisting on the mission of the art to raise questions, the visitors refused the premise.
No, they said, this is real.
Why would we question it?
