[texts]

The Arc of Networked-Self Dissolution

[10.2011]

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Benjamin H. Bratton
Director, Center for Design and Geopolitics, Calit2
Associate Professor of Visual Arts
University of California, San Diego
bbratton@ucsd.edu

(A short think piece written for collaboration between SEED Media Group and the Santa Fe Institute, to be published as an iPad application. Written October 10, 2011)

Hypothesis: What are the limits of Quantified Self to produce subject-effects? In the short term, an increase in the intensity, granularity, reflexivity of technologies of self-diagramming results in an increase in the experience of self as a coherent and continuous identity. More feedback equals more self. I argue that past a certain threshold (see graph) an increase in the intensity and scale of tracking and tracing results in an ultimate dissipation of a sense of coherent self.  That is, in the long term, an extreme increase in these same technologies undermines the boundaries of self and other, and results in an incoherence and discontiguous sense of self-identity. Too much feedback equals a dissolved self.

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I’ve been thinking about the new Facebook timeline and its relation to the culture of "QS", Quantified Self. The new interface was inspired by Nicholas Felton, famous for his OCD-ish Annual Reports on himself and his life. To the extent that Facebook works to construct logics of self for its users, then new interfaces rework those logics, sometimes to weird effect.

The QS movement has turned techniques of verification and measurement born of big-box supply-chains and re-assigned them to making heretofore unseen patterns in peoples' everyday lives visible, knowable, actionable. But for this, are people being convinced that the uniqueness of their biographies are more real, more individual, than they actually are? Are people being convinced that they actually exist as "individuals" in ways that they in fact do not?  Or, in other ways, are they being trained to realize the opposite of this: that their individuality is a mirage? It depends.

With the new Facebook interface, we may see a critical step in the decadal mainstreaming of QS logic, not just for social network software but for actual social networks and their societies as a whole. What will that mean? If our sense of identity is always constructed to some degree in the image of whatever tools of self-description we use to see ourselves in the world (cave drawings, names, mirrors, souls, marriage certificates, panopticons, frequent flyer miles, genome maps, etc.) then through QS “who” will “we” become? What psyche for homo quantification? In aggregate, will each of us become more atomized, more over-individuated, staring dumbly into our own templated reflections of complimentary feeds, and feedback? Will we come to more deeply believe the trumped up reality show characters we compose for our Facebook profiles? And/or will we become even more hive-like, drifting ADD, with the insect brain memes of this curated, monetized extended cognition? In what patten do these co-exist?

Perhaps it is something like this. An increase (+) in the intensity, granularity, reflexivity of techniques of self diagramming results in a strengthening (+) of the experience of self-coherency (what metric for such a thing? “Number of times someone begins a sentence with ‘I’ over the course of a year”?) But then, after further increase in the techniques (+) passing some as yet unnamed threshold point, “self” per se begins to crash (-) and the lived experience of the information space of the world is one of perforation and the dissolution of self into a more soupy flux. That soupy flux is the raw ingredients of some strange new language/advertising/data-verse to come that is based on some other unit than the now exploded individual.

(To quickly define terms regarding self-diagramming: “intensity” refers to the scope, scale and computational capacity of a diagram to capture an event or life, “granularity” refers to the detail it can capture, and “reflexivity” refers to how much the diagram can be meaningfully acted upon, either in the form of a GUI that controls a feedback loop or in the form of social connections providing surveillance and a stage to show-off the self-events under the social microscope.)




Figure One: Arc of Networked Self-Dissolution. As the intensity, granularity, reflexivity of technologies of self increase (x-axis), the experience of self-coherency (measured in narcissistic conversation traits) initially increases in direct linear proportion and then, having passed a determinant threshold, quickly soon drops well below initial state (y-axis).

A. Imagine the years just before Facebook as somewhere on the left of the arc
B. then the years of its growth in the late '00's just to the right of that,
C. then the introduction of the QS-inspired timeline, to the right of that,
D. and then, the world-to-soon-come of exotic social QS apps just to the right,
E. and then, at the the peak of the arc, some defining cognitive break after which self dissolves into a sea of branded data mush.
F. and then, a weird externalized language of post-individual social networks starts to appear. It  might confound the logics of that micro-sourced, micro-targeted data, or it may fulfill its ambitions for us.

Or, to put all of this in a more technical language: the formation of instruments of self-identity production, mapping, tracing, reflecting, concretization have the effect of making the coherency of self appear to itself as more than it really is. This is the negative lesson of Jacques Lacan's parable of the Mirror Stage of development as read through Gordon Bell's MyLifeBits project.  But these instruments are also strong platforms that give the bits and pieces of that only-apparently coherent image a life of their own, drifting into weird new economies of identity and language that ultimately undermine and dissolve that fiction of self. The tools frame you as more 'you' than you really are --what Actor-Network Theory calls “punctualization”-- and will ultimately, in aggregate, in their density and interweaving, in the overwhelming comprehensiveness of intermingling diagrams, that may or may not be yours or your neighbors or both, cause the fiction of the individual to give way to..what? A pure technicity of all edge no node? Applesauce-brain primates? The Multitude?

Then what? When the canvas of identity is full, then “creation” doesn’t mean adding more information to the canvas, it means subtracting it; removal as design: introducing absence to make space.

Tags: bio media, theory, interfaces, singularity, networked self, network theory, network society, moore's law, lacan, facebook

Published: 10.11.2011

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