How do We Contextualize Us+ Into the Narrative of Self-Improvement Applications?
After logging into my Google account, I downloaded an extension for Hangout (Google’s video chat service), Us+, and began a conversation with a friend. Us+, an art project turned Google Hangout extension was executed by artist/programmers Lauren McCarthy and Kyle McDonald in 2013. The application uses Linguistic Word Count (LIWC), Linguistic Style Matching (LSM), as well as facial recognition expression analysis, all of which are used to “improve conversation”.[1] As I played with the extension, it was quite responsive, and it achieved exactly what its description entails. When my body language was negative, it gave me suggestions how to make myself more presentable, after some time of me talking too much, it suggested I talk less, and after ignoring it, it subsequently muted me for a period of time. However, as I continued to converse with my friend, I couldn’t help but stare at the emotional characteristic level bars, in which I was constantly fighting to keep them at a neutral. McCarthy and McDonalds’ project works in the fashion that is proposes it to, but it operates in a hyperreal position in which the intention of the project doesn’t necessarily align with its outcome due to the reception of media culture. This decontextualization of the project reveals a cultural intuition rooted in a late capitalist ideology that in turn creates cultural obsessiveness with self-improvement applications that maximize efficiency and productivity.
US+ isn’t necessarily the first project of its kind. There are plenty of applications that maximize sleep cycles, eating patterns, and other various applications that precede it. However, US+ works in a slightly more technical manner, as it analyzes linguistic patterns and body language of users, as opposed to more objective statistics like body weight, age, sleep cycles, diet, etc. The reception of US+ as a social inevitability reveals American culture’s technological logos. Jonathan Crary writes of this pervasiveness and ever commodification of private life in his writing, “24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep”. Crary uses the idea of sleep as a mode that resist capitalism, because it is the one state which one isn’t engaging in a productive or efficient activity, “Under these conditions, (late capitalism) the relentless financialization of previously autonomous spheres of social activity remains unchecked. Sleep is the only remaining barrier, the only ‘enduring condition’ that capitalism cannot eliminate.”[2] Crary uses sleep in literal terms, implying that the physical act of sleep cannot be penetrated by capitalism, because it is the only time we slip into unconsciousness. I’d argue, in accordance with Crary’s argument that late capitalism is beginning to penetrate the last barrier, sleep. The ways in which sleep is becoming progressively controlled by late capitalism is prevalent in our technological culture. Sleep is becoming ever scientific through applications for smartphones and other digital devices that seek to maximize efficiency in sleep patterns, thus enabling the user to increase sleep’s productivity.
An example of this exploitation of sleep for the sake of efficiency would be the iPhone application, Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock by developers Northcube AB. The application analyzes sleep patterns and then sets off an alarm in a 30-minute window in which the user is sleeping the lightest. The editor’s note says, “This one, doesn’t need extra hardware or require your iPhone to be resting on your bed: it tracks your sleep using just your iPhone’s microphone.”[3] This application demonstrates Crary’s idea that autonomous spheres are constantly being exploiting through the means of Capital. As we utilize this application on our bed stands at night, we give up our autonomy in terms of our ability to regulate our own sleep system for an application that regulates in a manner that is proposed to be more efficient. Unconsciousness is separate from the bounds of capital, but the applications developed as a result of the consumer culture of late capitalism pushes users to treat sleep as an exchange, where there can be an exact formula for maximum efficiency sleep in turn for a maximum functioning body.
One can also abstract the notion of sleep from Crary’s more literalist terms to a metaphorical of sleep in order to describe a mode in which an individual does not bear any consumer identity or relationship to production or capitalism. Under this metaphorical blanket of sleep, we can include socialization. Like sleep, socialization isn’t inherently rooted in a particular form of capital or consumer identity. It is simply a function of human “down” time, so it also traditionally fits underneath a definition of sleep as non-productivity. Human beings socialize in their times of leisure, and thus are not engaging in it for the sake of efficiency or production. However, I do acknowledge that, in order to use Us+, one need needs engage with a computer, open an Internet browser and log into a Google account. In this regard there are already barriers between users and an autonomous method of socialization. Perhaps to a certain extent, using video-chat to socialize altars the behaviors of traditional socialization, because users have to utilize the computer and a web chat, and engage with a new system to connect to the other user. Nonetheless, webcam chat spaces like Google Hangout have no specific intentions, and users can socialize in a method that simulates reality, and is mostly entirely free of advertisements (the only advertisement comes from Google itself). Engaging in webcam-based socialization already introduces a moderate interference in the autonomous sphere of leisurely socialization, but with the introduction of the Us+ Google Hangout extension, autonomy is entirely disrupted. When Us+ is used, conversations are analyzed and managed at the will of the interface rather than the user. It is cybernetic in form, as it seeks to maximize and emphasize the efficiency and functionality of the conversation, thus regulating conversation as a form of exchange, eliminating the possibility for leisure and metaphorical sleep.
Certainly, the intention of McCarthy and McDonald’s was not for project to be taken at face value. Based on the context that both artists primarily work at the intersection of technology and social experimentation, the artists were presumably not developing an app for Google to maximize user productivity, but instead they are attempting to create a meditative space to explore how users interact with technology, each other, and what biases users are presented with in technology. However, this intention is lost when media’s reception largely took the project as a face-value development, and decontextualized the Hangout extension from an art project to a functional application that should be utilized by those who use Google Hangout. Many of the press articles on the front page of a Google search frame Us+ as a functional device that will make your conversations more productive. Many of the writers eventually touch on the intention of artist, like in the Wired article when journalist Kyle Vanhemert writes, “Both artists see something like US+ as an inevitability, but at this point, the software is more about exploring the idea of algorithmic mediation than actually mediating conversation in a significant way.”[4] The article isn’t putting the artists in a position in which they make any particular value judgment on technology that is disrupting previously autonomous spheres. This is exemplary of the media coverage on Us+, as it situates McCarthy and McDonald’s intentions somewhere in between their self-proclaimed idea of “social-hacking” and as an exercise of cybernetics. The articles also use click-bait based advertising strategies for individuals to read the articles. An example would be the Huffington Post article of Us+ titled, “Finally, an App to Fix Your Terrible Personality”. In these articles, there is certainly a tension between the critical and the advertisement, and while there are points in the Huffington Post and the Wired article, like the many others, that lightly touch on what qualifies this project as art, they also propose the project as a functional piece of technology that really can help you get more out of your conversations. In doing so, they push the project more into the realm of the cybernetic than the socially investigative.
At one point in the Huffington Post Article, however, the author, Bianca Bosker writes that, “As I catch myself consulting Us+ to see if it approves of my tone, it becomes clear how easily we might fake our feelings to please the software, or say something because a computer told us to — not because we meant it.”[5] This sort of experience in which the user responds to the application, rather than person on the other end of the software, is a symptom of late capitalism’s exploitation of affective labor. Theorist Michael Hardt explains that Affective Labor is essentially immaterial labor that appeals to and manipulates the emotional experiences of individuals. He also argues that this form of labor is taking an increasingly larger role in the late capitalist economy, “In the production and reproduction of affects, in those networks of culture and communication, collective subjectivities are produced and sociality is produced — even if those subjectivities and that sociality are directly exploitable by capital. This is where we can realize the enormous potential in affective labor”[6] Since the progression of information technology, there is a shift in which there is distance between the worker and the individual receiving services (the emergence of online shopping, phone services, etc.), but with advent of webcam chat and other digital ways to convey emotional expression, workers and people in general are able to transmit their appealing emotional qualities through the network. In conversation with the Us+ project, both workers and people engaging in video chat now have the ability to convey themselves in a way that is conducive for the right emotional response. Especially, when Us+ is considered through the lens of Crary, in which we can now understand how an extension like Us+ commodifies socialization into an exchange value, we can also understand how Us+ monetizes behavior in a way that produces affects, and thus promotes users’ engagement with affective labor. Once two individuals begin a conversation through Google Hangout with an Us+ extension, they are no longer responding to each other, rather they respond to the levels of emotional measurement conveyed on the screen, as well as the suggestions that the software gives. The software mediates the conversation, and the individuals respond to the software, which in turns produces a productive and efficient affects.
In the interview with Wired, the artist Kyle McDonald says, “Hopefully if we experiment enough, early on, we can retain the critical perspective we have before it’s impossibly prevalent.”[7] McDonald’s intentions in trying to bring a critical perspective into these information-based improvement applications brings up Frederic Jameson’s questions of how to contextualize postmodern art in broader society, and more specifically for Us+, does the application reinforce the logic of late capitalism and cybernetics or subvert it? In his essay, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society”, Jameson writes that the methodology of pastiche is the primary mode in which postmodern artists are working. With Us+, this is certainly at play. McDonald and McCarthy’s work is identical to the designs of information-based lifestyle improvement applications like that of the Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock for the iPhone mentioned earlier. This demonstrates that Us+ is pastiche of a specific genre of digital apps. Jameson concludes in his exploration of pastiche that, “We have seen that there is a way in which postmodernism replicates or reproduces — reinforces — the logic of consumer capitalism; the more significant question is whether there is also a way in which it resists that logic. But that is a question we must leave open.”[8] In this conclusion Jameson is pairing postmodern art up against its predecessor, modernism, which he claims to be negative, subversive, and deinstitutionalizing in nature. As pastiche, Us+ formally appears as a functioning application, but it is meant to create a hyperreal atmosphere to push users into questioning of other self-improvement applications alike. I would argue, however, in accordance with Jameson, that though Us+ aims to provide a critique of technologically sophisticated lifestyle improvement technologies, that it falls short, because it embraces the prophecy that it attempts to resist. The artists fail in acknowledging that self-improvement applications are already to a certain extent ubiquitous. Though Us+ can be read as more technologically sophisticated than other market-ready self-improvement applications, it is still impossible to ignore that applications of this kind have already saturated the marketplace. The combination of self-improvement applications already being readily available and the media’s presentation of Us+ companies as a usable and functional improvement application decontextualizes the work from its conception as a critique. Unfortunately, the intentions of the artists are no longer relevant. Here Jameson’s critique of pastiche proves itself to be true, as Us+ pastiches the design and analysis methods of other self-improvement applications, and thus reinforces the logic of late capitalism and cybernetics, because it ignores that it exists alongside so many other applications that seek to maximize the efficiency and productivity of a particular aspect of subjectivity.
This decontextualization, in which the media advertises this work as functional also serves as grounds in which the word function should be investigated in relationship to Us+. By functional, do journalists mean that Us+ functions in that it helps users more easily attain affects and conventions of socialization that are condoned by the late capitalism’s obsession with efficiency and productivity? The implications of that question are that there are potential biases inherently present in the work that journalists didn’t necessarily bring up. In the Huffington post article, Bosker writes that, “Like so many self-improvement apps, Us+ currently espouses the seemingly irreproachable goal of helping everyone get along. Yet it’s easy to imagine the app, or one like it, being altered to manipulate speakers’ behavior for more selfish ends.”[9] What Bosker leaves out, is that there are already biases present in the application. The device approaches socialization from the view of late capitalism, and maximizes the efficiency and productivity of the conversation as such. This state in which journalists are proposing that there is potential for bias in the device, instead of pointing to the inherent biases already present, is what Jean Baudrillard writes of in “Simulacrum and Simulations”. Baudrillard writes that, in our postmodern age, we are presented with a precession with the simulacrum, where it is impossible to distinguish the simulation from the real, and that apart of this postmodern precession is that media culture is more involved than just sharing information, and it actually revolves more around interpreting information for us. Thus we subscribe to an ideology in which we interpret our surroundings through the biased interpretations that media culture instills in us.[10] This is very much present is the media’s portrayal of Us+, where the app provides analysis of our emotions and behavior for ourselves through a cybernetic interpretive lens. The application and its media representation puts forth the illusion that it is helping us express ourselves more honestly, but rather it is subscribing to a media culture associated with the precession of the simulacra, in which media interprets information for us, and we are unable to distinguish the bias or commercialization in that information. Describing Us+ as a functional device for self-improvement, without a bias already present in the application, implies that we are unable to distinguish the real from the hyperreal. This points to Baudrillard’s hypothesis of the precession of the simulacrum, in which we have lost our ability to find a distinction between simulation and reality.
Us+ has a great appeal to it. It forces us to act in ways that aren’t necessarily natural in our behaviors. However, we must understand these behaviors not necessarily as products of ourselves. For better or for worse, sometimes conversation takes courses that aren’t necessarily efficient or productive, or even healthy, but this is to a certain extent human nature. The suggestions that Us+ gives in order to “strengthen” socialization produces contrived conversations, in which we respond to the software’s attempts to maximize our ability to produce artificially positive affects from whoever is on the other side of the screen. Perhaps the artists meant for the project to be transparent as social commentary, but unfortunately it has been decontextualized in such a way that these intentions are lost. My critique lies not within the will or propositions of the artists, but in this decontextualization in which this application becomes indistinguishable from the real. Like other works of postmodern art, the pastiche works alongside this decontextualizing nature and results in the work embracing the structures of cybernetics and late capitalism that it tries to resist.
** Works Cited
[1] McCarthy, Lauren. “Us+.” lauren-mcCarthy.com 2013. Web.
[2] Crary, Jonathan. 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. p. 74. Verso, 2014. Print.
[3] North Cube AB. “Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock.” App Store. Apple, 7 Mar. 2016. Web.
[4] Venhemert, Kyle. “Google+ App Monitors Your Video Calls and Tells You What to Say.” Wired UK. Wired, 08 Jan. 2014.
[5] Bosker, Bianca. “Finally, An App To Fix Your Terrible Personality.”Huffington Post. HPMP News, 23 Jan. 2014. Web.
[6] Hardt, Michael. “Affective Labor.” Boundary 2 26.2 (1999): 89–100.JSTOR. Web.
[7] Venhemert, Kyle. “Google+ App Monitors Your Video Calls and Tells You What to Say.” Wired UK. Wired, 08 Jan. 2014. Web.
[8] Jameson, Frederic. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” University of Southern California Art. University of Southern California, n.d. Web.
[9] Bosker, Bianca. “Finally, An App To Fix Your Terrible Personality.”Huffington Post. HPMP News, 23 Jan. 2014. Web.
[10]Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. Print.