The Wicked Machines
By Fernando J. Contreras
This post originally appeared in Hades United.
We like to think that rationality lies behind our actions, but when it comes to night photography, logic falters. It appears to make sense: there’s not enough light, so let’s push the flash. But do you think the little light on your little camera is going to illuminate the Eiffel Tower standing across the river? Besides annoying the nearby tourists, the amateur photographer ends up capturing a spectral subject smiling in front of a huge darkness. It’s a metaphor for life, I say.
People didn’t learn from their mistakes and became better photographers. The solution was to make cameras more sensitive to light. So the general public didn’t get smarter; technology compensated. Now anyone can take a decent picture, and it’s is an easier world for all… except for the professional photographer, whose work gets buried under millions of mediocre Instagram shots.
Machines keep getting more user friendly, but to what end? As we “progress” most of us know less and less about how modern life functions, so we let others make decisions for us. We already trust Facebook to curate our relationships. It chooses whose baby photos and whose “rehearsed-to-look-natural” selfie we see. We already trust Amazon to suggest the books we might love. We trust Netflix to recommend movies. These companies think they know us well, but are we this predictable and easy to define? If so, we might not be advancing as much as we think.
As certain companies absorb the smaller ones and keep control of the information, soon a few people will own our entire digital imprint. It’s already happening. Our choices online are being recorded, catalogued, and sold to marketing companies. The information is used to produce the ads and “suggestions” that persuade us to make a purchase. Algorithms are set to continuously fire messages away, and one day we wake up with that itching desire to see Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
Or worse, we join other conversations and end up regurgitating the messages that have been previously selected for us based on our tastes. This doesn’t mean Big Brother is brainwashing us. We subscribe to this process willingly. There’s so much information floating around at all times, we can only pay attention to some of it, so we create an echo chamber and listen to the people/ideas that agree with our worldview. News agencies know this, so they don’t report the news anymore. They select the events of the day and spin them to produce the most shock/entertainment for their audience. Life gets transformed into a flat, scandalous parade of headlines. And in the end, we repeat what we hear because in a way, we selected it.
It’s true we are more connected now, but the world feels smaller, tighter, and more boring. A few weeks ago, I was researching a microphone in Amazon for a podcast series I want to create, and I focused on a certain brand. I didn’t buy it, but later that day I’d see that brand advertised on Facebook, Twitter, Google, and other websites. Soon, I couldn’t get rid of it, to the point I regretted my curiosity and stopped searching. This also happens when I travel. It’s sad to go all the way to Beijing or Ulaanbaatar and find much of the same music, clothing, and food from home.
For as much as Netflix thinks it knows me so well, though, it recommends films I would never see, and hides others I’d love to watch. Neither the programmers nor their finest algorithms can narrow down what makes art work. Sometimes it could be the acting, other times the cinematography or the writing, and those concepts transcend categories like “comedy” and “horror.”
But let’s say that soon Netflix gets it right. That would mean I’ve been fully outlined, and my chances to choose how I develop as a person will be managed by these companies. I will live under the illusion of choice, and let’s remember that these companies are driven by sales, not by the desire to improve the human condition.
We will lower our standard to the ranks of a user. That’ll be our main function, to use whatever someone else puts in front of us.
The Disconnected Artist in the Connected World.
Painting as an art form suffered after commercial photography was introduced in the middle of the 19th century. As photography became more affordable, sitting for weeks in front of a feisty dude wearing a beret was not necessary anymore. Now you could get your likeness after minutes. This new machine could catch reality as it happened, and it meant that painting had to change if it wanted to survive. Enter Edouard Manet, then the Impressionists, then Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, and welcome to the XX Century, where artists pushed all the variables of the form for years until the end product became an empty canvas, a can of soup, and a balloon dog.
But photography as an art form never became as popular as painting due to the invention of two more machines: the motion picture camera and the projector. These are photographs with movement, so it became a wonderful medium for storytelling. Movies became king for some decades. The problem with film, however, became apparent at the end of the XX century: they were too expensive to make, needed much time to produce, and required a passive audience. It was hard to become a creator, and audiences needed to sit down and stay put for at least an hour and a half in a world that was becoming more impatient. Video games came to show us that we wanted to interact more with the story. We wanted to be part of it.
This progression indicates that art is moving in a direction where the artist is turning into a facilitator and audiences want to be the artists. In the beginning gods were at the center of every work of art. Then artists moved into focus, and now the audiences demand the attention.
So what about writing as an art form? Fiction in the form of novels, poetry, short stories, and plays are still around, but are ever more irrelevant. Like the painters of the 19th century, writers should be pushing every element to find new ways to tell a story, but storytelling is getting stale. It’s strange, but while the Internet allows for ideas to propagate faster and wider, the act of writing has become less precious. For artists, this is not a case of the foam rising to the top, so their work gets nullified by the incredible amount of writing that is produced every minute. Andy Warhol warned us: the more you reproduce a medium, the faster it loses its power.
I like to think that Hades United will find its audience, and that I will be able to make a living as a writer soon, but history is moving in the opposite direction. Writing needs time to develop, ponder, and process, and audiences are using their phones to find something fun now, so they can move to the next fun thing seconds later. Audiences want a Twitter feed of quick shocks, and want to take credit for the work in the way users activate a program and consume it until it provides no more validation and entertainment. Enter Virtual Reality. That’s where the machines that we created are taking us.
