#196: I Care Because You Do

Despite the popularity of analogies comparing social networks to casinos, the best metaphor for our current cultural anomie, or at least the part that’s shaped by the internet, may be the shopping mall. A core principle of 20th-century mall design, which has since spread to a much wider variety of spaces, was a type of environmentally-induced disorientation called the Gruen Transfer, a phenomenon that architecture theorist Sanford Kwinter describes as “a threshold, the moment when a shopper’s purposive behavior and directed, coherent bodily movements break down under the barrage of excessive, narrow-spectrum stimulation and continual interruption of attention.” These conditions follow directly from the mall’s physical layout—its architecture, decor, lighting, and soundscape. “The unconsciously bewildered shopper, rendered docile, cannot help but drift into the prepared pathways and patterns of externally induced consumer activity, unfocused but exquisitely suggestible to gentle but firm environmental cues.” The result of this confusion, of course, is more shopping, particularly the kinds of spontaneous purchases that mall-goers had not planned on making before entering the mall itself.

Decontextualization—the temporary or permanent removal of an individual or object from its familiar environment—is frequently blamed for misinformation and fake news, but more broadly, it is an opportunity for other parties to fill the void with their own context. Victor Gruen, who is only indirectly responsible for the Transfer, invented the shopping mall as we know it in the 1950s in a utopian effort to recreate the pedestrian-friendly shopping districts that were vanishing from urban downtown areas due to the transformative impact of the automobile. The existing environment’s flaws, in other words, demanded the creation of self-contained bubbles where the pernicious external forces would not impinge. More than sixty years later, we constantly inhabit the proverbial mall—physical and digital environments that furnish their own all-enveloping context in place of whatever context we arrived with (if any). In his 1996 book Ladders, Albert Pope wrote, “Today, the single overriding ambition of each closed development (meaning the single overriding ambition of urbanism today) is to enhance and refine our ability to simulate the world.” The equally utopian digital version of this constitutes the realm where our minds, if not yet our bodies, spend more and more time; as this partitioned interior becomes increasingly comprehensive, we lose the ability to point to any external reality that might ground us.

The clearest indication of this condition is suddenly caring about something that you wouldn’t have cared about at a safe distance—the Gruen Transfer at work. “Who cares?” is a question we don’t ask ourselves enough as we trawl the contemporary information landscape, a truth that is painfully clear upon cursory examination of so many cultural phenomena. Digital media is haunted by the idea of quality and its measurability (via engagement stats) or at least knowability (by recommendation algorithms), but “quality” is a red herring. Something can be good and still not matter; we should focus more on the latter and less on the former. In a recent essay about AI art, Dean Kissick wrote, “Images drawn by code make the world seem lighter and less binding still. Reality is concealed below signs that point nowhere: there’s no such thing as a Tubby Cat, not in life or in fiction. Rembrandt never painted raccoons. He never saw a raccoon in his life! These images are not simulacra because they don’t represent or imitate anything. The new modes of figuration don’t refer to anything at all. They are pictures from somewhere else.” Despite our persistent efforts to pretend otherwise, the internet still struggles to create its own durable meaning, and still requires external inputs to avoid descending into entropy (the pandemic was an experiment in minimizing those inputs). Elsewhere in the same essay, Kissick writes, “How desire functions has changed: the way something appears or makes you feel no longer matters so much, and images have been so hollowed out by escalating repetition, so debased, that an utterly tasteless image can become extremely valuable in ways that can hardly be comprehended.” This may be the surest sign that we have fully collapsed under the ubiquitous mallscape’s disorienting overstimulation, and are finally docile enough to stop caring about whether we care at all.

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Last week’s subscribers-only issue was about Twitter as a declining city and fake public space.

Reads:

• I wrote for Wired about the potential demise of Twitter and how we fill the voids created when platforms die out or when we just quit them.

• A keynote lecture by Lil Internet and Caroline Busta of New Models about the decentralization of media and the consequent destabilization of the cultural landscape. “In Pokémon GO you use poké balls to catch monsters; on Twitter and Instagram you use content to catch followers.”

• Tumblr users made up a fake Martin Scorsese movie called Goncharov and are manifesting it into existence via memes and detailed descriptions of its plot.