#86: How to Do Things
“Don’t you think that being things is rather better than doing things?” That line, spoken by a frustrated aristocrat, perfectly embodies The Magnificent Ambersons, Booth Tarkington’s 1918 novel about the declining fortunes of an old-money Midwestern family as they are displaced by industrialist tycoons who *do* things instead of sitting around, idly enjoying their inherited wealth and just being. The line raises an interesting question about whether it’s better to derive one’s identity from actions and accomplishments or from some intrinsic identity that you're born into and then defend. Obviously, the latter is preferable if you (a) start out with a favorable situation and (b) subsequently don't plan on doing much, but regardless, as a culture we have been firmly in the “doing things” camp for a long time. Even though concepts like meritocracy are proving inadequate to describe the American class structure, the broad idea has been a vital myth in the United States since the country's origins. People like the Ambersons, holding onto their inherited status, seemed backward even a century ago.
It's getting more complicated now, though. That myth, despite being so fundamental to American culture, seems to go unacknowledged by computers, who generally ignore the narratives that motivate humans. Now that a huge portion of culture is filtered through software, the superiority of "doing things" to "being things" is at risk: Digital platforms build detailed profiles of us from our online behavior, which in turn dictate what we see and then recursively influence our future actions. To algorithms, in other words, the digital environment is where we reveal who we already are, not a place where we encounter pre-existing, unpersonalized context that shapes us (the latter does happen online, of course, but mostly to the extent that our stubborn humanness overrides algorithmic logic). Spotify, for example, reverses the causality chain that drives music taste: Offline, I can encounter a song I hate, like "Love Train" by the O'Jays, in a new context that makes me start liking it (the end of The Last Days of Disco, right after the "disco will never die" monologue, if you were wondering). On Spotify, I am already classified as a person who doesn't like the song, and there is no contextual mechanism for changing my mind, aside from randomly spraying songs at me in a vacuum, which probably won't change my mind.
This isn't just an academic distinction, but a fairly urgent question for the physical and digital environments that we will build for our future selves. We all intuitively know that our taste and other aspects of our identities are fluid and continuously responding to the surrounding world—that we are assemblages of actions and behaviors more than fixed data profiles (which are actually just blurry snapshots of us at a particular moment). But platforms like Spotify seem to be training us to believe the opposite, that we do have an intrinsic identity (or set of personas) that we should help their algorithms understand so that they can curate better content for us. If that's true, then we don't need context-rich environments, and more of the world we inhabit will resemble the rationalized Spotify vacuum, better optimized for refining the data snapshot. We rejected aristocracy and caste systems for an obvious reason: They were incredibly confining, even to their beneficiaries. If the algorithmic internet forces us to internalize the idea that our identity is just a cloud of behavioral probabilities we can never really get outside of, a predefined structure, then even when we're doing things, we're ultimately just being things.
Reads:
Nicola Twilley on indoor air pollution, which unlike outdoor air quality, is largely unregulated. "We know barely the first thing about the atmospheres in which we spend the vast majority of our time."
Speeding songs up to hide them as samples inside other songs. Hired to remix an Afghan Whigs song, Aphex Twin's Richard D. James "reported being so unable to come up with new ideas for the band’s music that he simply sped their original song up to the length of a high-hat, then composed a new track of his own using that sound."
Why did a YouTube bot make an unwatched video of our blog post? Another weird and creepy entry in the "content made by and for computers" category.