More or Less

Rachel O’Dwyer

It’s 1995, and Bill Gates is dancing onstage to the Rolling Stones’ ‘Start Me Up’ with a cohort of other white, middle aged men, all dressed in khakis and button down polo shirts, all indistinguishable from one another. They shuffle their feet, sway their wide hips and click their fingers off the beat. They look as self-conscious as a group of men who have seen the future of the internet and know it’s just an endless scroll of YouTube comments mean enough to make a grown man cry.  

It’s 2007, and a baby-faced Mark Zuckerberg takes the stage at F8 to the soundtrack of Daft Punk’s ‘Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger’: “More than ever/ Hour after hour/ Work is never over/ Work it harder”. He’s dressed in a North Face hoodie and pool slides with socks. His eyes glitter with all the fervour of a child preacher but his voice and gestures feel awkward and stagey, more high school debater than true believer. The presentation kicks off with Facebook’s annual growth figures, a huge PowerPoint of climbing line graphs thrown on the screen while Zuckerberg paces the stage below and intones a dizzy list of figures “growing by more than 100,000 users a day”, “growing at a rate of 3% a week” “just about tripling every year and doubling every six months – sorry – growing by 300% - quadrupling every year” “It’s roughly like adding the Size of San Francisco once a week” “if you do the math”. The specific figures matter less than the performance. This is an economy based on exponential growth, one where figures today need not only match yesterday’s but exceed them. But in a strange way, this is also an economy based on less. Facebook does very little in the way of manufacturing or producing goods, there’s no product as such beyond the data and hype that grows around real goods made in some distant elsewhere. 

Not long ago I attended a Tech expo held in a five star hotel on the Las Vegas strip. The hallways between panels are full of middle aged men dressed like Gates and a younger cohort dressed like Zuckerberg, a collision of old school finance and bitcoin evangelism. These delegates are exhaustively male and at every bathroom break I share a conspiratorial smirk in the mirror with whatever woman is at the sink beside me, breezing in and out while outside the tech bros hop up and down in line and miss the coffee and free cookies in the breakout area. There’s stages everywhere where CTOs pace back and forth and speak about ‘cookies for the real world’, or the ‘robots in the sky’ that will make decisions in the near future better than any human ever could, where an Israeli child prodigy who needs a stool to see over the podium showcases his smart contract locks for Airbnb. On the floor below is the exhibition centre, an endless stream of booths with dishes of free swag that I squirrel away in my free tote bag, keychains and pens and candy and t-shirts bearing the logos and slogans of up and coming start-ups specialising in algorithmic credit scores and risk optimisation. The sounds of 8-bit slot machines and wild gambles drift up from the hotel’s casino on the ground floor.

I’ve scored a free ticket with an uncharacteristic bit of smooth talk. I’m here to get under the hood, to find out what is really going on in the tech industry. This is where the industry shapes itself, after all, where decisions and fortunes are made. For five days I attend back-to-back panels and live coding sessions and wander the corridors of the exhibition centre. By the end I have a dizzying sense that the more I see, the less I know. The expo isn’t the space for truth. It’s a space of front and swagger, a space of excess. This desire for more, projected in keynotes and slogan T-shirts, will be translated into software that goes out into the world and demands more of its users. This is not only a case of ‘more data’, it’s also a case of asking more of the user: not only worktime but ‘downtime’ needs to be productive, not only physical work but intellectual and now emotional labour. Capitalism grows by asking us for more.

Software For Less takes the vernacular of the standard tech expo. Works are presented like products. Bowls of free swag throughout the exhibit(s) offer the user Love heart candy, stickers, and t-shirts. Where the soundtrack to the expo is usually an upbeat techno piped in from everywhere and seemingly nowhere at once, the soundtrack here is Zuckerberg intoning figures. One supercut, ORDER OF MAGNITUDE, features a dazzling array of growth figures spliced together from public interviews with Zuckerberg. Grosser has scraped these from the web, capturing every time the CEO intones a metric: projected profits, user numbers, energy consumption. It’s 47 minutes long. ORDER OF MAGNITUDE takes the rhetoric of growth and exaggerates it so that there is nothing else left, no context or humanising touches. The counterpoint is DEFICIT OF LESS, a supercut drawn from the same archive, but this time extracting every time Zuckerberg spoke about less. Adding up to scarcely a minute of public footage, here the CEO is more circumspect. In this iteration, the footage has been slowed down to match the length of ORDER OF MAGNITUDE and so Mark’s every “less” emits a smeary sub bass drone through the space. In slow motion, Zuckerberg’s gestures seem even more robotic. In a single gesture that lasts over a minute, he brings his open arms together, closing the negative space between his cupped palms. Less. “I feel like I’m animating Zuck’ into who I wish he was” Ben tells me, “getting him to talk about less at least as much as more. but it's such a stretch (literally/figuratively) that it goes somewhere else, part rock music played backwards, part incantation”. I’m reminded of a K-punk post where he writes that listening to the electronic musician Burial is a lot like listening to the ghosts of 90’s rave culture, of wandering through a derelict building after all the partying has finished [1]. Wandering this exhibition is like encountering the spectres of web 2.0.

The exhibition and its layout invoke what the artist describes as a ‘spiral of strategies’ that confront big tech platforms but to be reductive we might say that Ben Grosser asks what happens when the logic of growth - of software for more - is exaggerated or distilled to nothing. On the one hand, a number of Grosser’s works exaggerate or extrapolate the desire of the platform for more – more users, more engagement, more metrics. Other pieces work to pare back the platform to its bare essentials, removing metrics so users can reflect on how these shape the online experience. 

More

Works like Go Rando, and Not For You are based on excess. By giving the platform more, they give it less.

Go Rando is a Facebook plugin that randomises a user’s emotional responses to other user’s posts. Clicking ‘Like’ randomly shuffles through the spectrum of reactions – like, love, angry face, crying, wow and so on. It’s through these prompts for emotional engagement that Facebook builds profiles of users that are in turn used for advertising and risk analysis. Facebook infamously experimented with ‘emotional contagion’ in 2014, undertaking an ethically dubious research experiment where users of the platform were unknowingly exposed to angry, sad or upbeat posts in their feed, to experiment with how this exposure shaped their future emotional state. By randomising a user’s emotional responses, Go Rando produces more data for the platform, but less value.  

Obfuscation techniques are a feature of Ben’s work, from earlier pieces like ScareMail, which randomly inserted suspect noise into user’s emails to overwhelm NSA surveillance, to recent works like Not For You, an ‘automated confusion system’ designed to confuse TikTok’s video recommendation algorithm. The system navigates the site in the background, clicking on indiscriminate links and following unlikely paths. An excess of data makes the user less visible to the platform. For users, the result is an experience less tuned to what the platform thinks they want, puncturing the filter bubble that determines future content from past data. This might seem at odds with the platform - surely users have spent time working to finetune and be seen by the algorithm? 

When I showed Not For You to a group of art students over Zoom in late 2020, that wasn’t their reaction at all. In fact, most felt that the TikTok algorithm didn’t really see them; it projected back a pale data shadow of their real selves with no space for nuance or surprise. This is an algorithm that wants you to be more yourself, where that ‘self’ is a recognisable profile of desires and drives that can be captured and sold. The ‘you’ it finetunes is not really ‘for you’ at all.  

Less

Grosser is probably best known for his Demetricator works, which conceal the metrics of social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. Ben’s first iteration was with the Facebook Demetricator, creating a plug-in that obscured the user’s figures from Friends to Like Counts to Notifications. Instead of an interface overwhelmed with numbers, the user gets a platform free of metrics. A user could continue to use the platform and Facebook could continue to use the metrics to profile and advertise to them in the background, but the behavioural prompts that push and guide the user to engage more, or share more, or change and subtly adjust their behaviours to drive more engagement, are absent. Facebook Demetricator is a design experiment that asks how software programs its users, how users are shaped by and respond to the algorithms that demand more of them. Ben has designed Demetricators for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok (the latter, humorously, was a piece of tape applied to the screen to obscure the figures in the margin). As a research experiment, the piece runs ahead of theory on metrics and quantification, but in this instance it also anticipated, by nearly a decade, future changes that the platforms considered, and in some cases, made to visible metrics.

The conclusion of this is Safebook, a plugin that removes all the data from the Facebook page leaving behind empty placeholders that structure our use of the platform, the ‘boxes, columns, pop-ups and drop-downs that enable ‘likes’, comments and shares’. This is Facebook emptied of prompts for engagement. And yet, Grosser argues, despite this, the site is still usable, drawing questions about how familiar we are with the platform interface that we can navigate it quite literally blind. 

A new work, Platform Sweet Talk, abstracts the personalised messages offered to users about their precious memories into their basic programmed strings. It’s a bit like the moment when a personalised email goes awry and accidentally reads ‘hello [insert_username_variable] we wanted to offer you a special treat for being such a loyal customer!’ Here the personalised variable is replaced with an amorphous ‘Someone’ who liked your photo, or a comment you are mentioned in, or sent you a friend request, or asked something of you. ‘Reminder: Someone invited you to like something’. It strips back the cosy veneer of personal connection, reminding you you’re just another metric, just another data point, one user in billions. 

Under the Hood

In the tech expo, the logic of ‘more’ gets translated from business rhetoric into executable code. Code scripts social interactions, gearing them for more engagement, for amplified emotional content rather than along axes that might be more socially, emotionally and politically beneficial for users and society. Grosser’s practice runs this process in reverse, writing code to investigate and critique code, to start a conversation, to ask ‘what if we had a different script?’ It’s the kind of under the hood investigation I was hoping for when I visited the expo in Las Vegas , but which I didn’t find. 

At a moment when ‘online culture’ has become…well, culture, where opting out is not only a privilege but also an impossibility for many, Grosser uses platforms to struggle against platforms. It’s a fine balance; to gloss Mark Fisher, nothing runs better on Facebook than a protest against Facebook [2]. But maybe this is the whole point. Every year or so a meme goes around where people tell Facebook, contrary to the terms and conditions that they’ve already agreed to, that it has no ownership over their data. They share hashtags exhorting others to #deletefacebook. One way of looking at this gesture is as a meaningless bit of Boomer resistance. Another is that it gives us a glimpse of how control is never complete in social networks. When the wealth of networks are based on network effects, the most effective way of disrupting them is often from the inside. 

Minus

At the very centre of the expo is a new work called Minus. Unlike the other works in the exhibition, which interrogate existing platforms, this piece offers a radical alternative. This is a social media platform whose design features deliberately go against the drive for endless engagement. The main principle of Minus is that every user gets 100 posts - for life. The only visible metric counts down, showing where the user is in that countdown and the stakes that number represents. Other values, such as the length of time since a post was written are couched in deliberately vague language like a culture without quantification, time or numericity when things happened ‘recently’ or ‘a while ago.’  

I sign up for the Beta version. As a late adopter, I normally join social networks when the FOMO rises up and overwhelms me. The party is usually in full swing or dying down by the time I arrive. The exception was Signal, where for a long time my contacts were almost exclusively geeky men I slept with in my twenties and never wanted to speak to again. Minus is not only minus metrics, it’s, as yet, minus the noise of other people. Unlike Facebook, which continues Zombielike through its acquisition of Instagram, this is a platform with built in obsolescence, a platform whose definition of success is less rather than more engagement. 

My husband has a theory that the more people share on social media, the unhappier they are IRL. I want to complain that this theory is ageist, and very probably sexist, but deep down, I suspect it is very probably true. The ‘ideal user’ of the social media platform might be a lonely and occasionally outraged academic, hungry for support and affirmation re: the trials of interdepartmental politics. So reads my newsfeed anyway. I’m not sure who the ideal user for Minus is. Does having 100 posts for life suggest a desire to Marie Kondo your feed, the social media equivalent of a banana plant and Farrow and Ball’s Schoolhouse White? I’m reminded of a segment from Lena Dunham’s ‘Girls’ where Jessa, the nonchalantly cool English girl, says she isn’t on Facebook and try-hard Freshman Shoshanna breathes ‘you’re so fucking classy.’ Jessa is an influencer; in 2012 she already senses that Facebook is a dying medium. Grosser’s Demetricator was prophetic and I feel like this might be too.

Logging in for the second time, I notice I’m immediately primed to read metrics for signs of connection and approval and their absence leaves a blank space for me to project all kinds of insecurities into. I know the names of quite a few of the other Beta testers and feel vaguely anxious that their Ascii dragons are somehow more authentic and less earnest than my contributions, that everyone here knows the right way to do digital culture but me. After using it in bed when my family has all fallen asleep and the house is quiet, I close my laptop, tuck it under my side of the bed and fall asleep too. I dream I have posted something clever to Twitter and am refreshing the page, looking for new likes instead of doing my work. This happens occasionally when I am awake. This happened to me a while back. 

Like a lot of speculative design, it’s hard to imagine the business plan for a social network that succeeds if its users share less rather than more. It takes me a while to realise why this registers as strange. Maybe it’s a platform driven by the user’s desires rather than those of the market.  

Feeling Free

I was at a panel on digital art and activism in 2014, shortly after the first round of Snowden revelations. The mood was circumspect – what was the point of artistic critiques of software in the face of monolithic platforms and widespread abuses of power? It’s a question that’s never far from digital art. Just as the panel were about to agree that there was maybe no point at all and we should all become PGP experts instead, the documentarian Laura Poitras spoke up. We can be told something - we can know the facts - she said, but that’s not the same as a feeling, an emotional engagement that’s necessary for change to happen. This feeling - this affect - is where aesthetics come in [3]. Grosser draws our attention to what we don’t normally see, or to what the platform would rather we didn’t see. It’s so much more than being lectured by a Linux kernel developer at a party that there’s a problem with Facebook. We learn something, about ourselves and the platform, but we also might feel something.

In the middle of writing this essay I drop my phone one night in the dark. My outstretched finger puts a professional spin on it as I fumble to catch it. The device hits the ground and breaks into two neat slices and the insides fall out. Like a sandwich. I borrow an old phone in the meantime. I don’t know how to enable screen notifications and make no effort to find out. I have no idea of what is being asked of me. I feel a little bit free. 

Many of Grosser’s works give me a confused feeling; at times they can feel less like artworks and more like working prototypes in Beta form, things that might just show up in a social feed or expo near me sometime soon. Arguably it’s this uncertainty that gives the works their aesthetic power. As uncomplicated art works they can be easily consigned to clever commentary or critique. As something uncertain – the working plugin and prototype - their effect and status is more disturbing. They suggest that things could be different, and they take steps to build a different kind of world, one with software that works for less.  

Footnotes:

1. Fisher, Mark. "London after the Rave." In ‘Fisher, Mark. Ghosts of my life: Writings on depression, hauntology and lost futures. John Hunt Publishing, 2014.

2. “[N]othing runs better on MTV than a protest against MTV”. Fisher, Mark. Capitalist realism: Is there no alternative?. John Hunt Publishing, 2009, p.9

3. Poitras, Laura. “Art as Evidence” Transmediale 2014 Keynote Panel, Berlin., January 2014. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PL9olnMFdRIwt8CBoekDcLO4ufwmAmkCOZ&time_continue=2&v=NEipLr9xLMU&feature=emb_logo3.

Rachel O’Dwyer is a lecturer in Digital Cultures in the School of Visual Cultures in NCAD. She is an associate researcher in the Orthogonal Methods Research Group in Connect, the SFI Centre for Future Networks, TCD,  a former Government of Ireland Research Scholar and Fulbright Alumni. She is the founder of Interference a Journal of Audio Culture (2009 – 2017) and co-editor of Neural Magazine for Critical Digital Cultures and Media Arts. Her research centres on the intersection between digital cultures and digital economies with a particular focus on surveillance capitalism and artistic modes of resistance to online surveillance. This is the topic of a forthcoming manuscript. She frequently curates events on digital cultures including DATA (2007 – 2016), Openhere (2012 – 2014) andand Ascend: artist methods for engagement with algorithms (2019-).