antipopper

My concerns of late are best represented in a discussion I’ve been having with Jean:

I [...] want to correct the impression that I think manipulation by “consumers” is simply utopian. That’s why I’ve got this beef about the “digital superego” of the user that needs to be challenged. For instance, the official narrative of user-centric software design has always been about making everything seamless and transparent to aid the smooth manipulation of data by the user. I find that idea vaguely horrifying! This is an easy collusion between corporate ideologies of workplace productivity and (perhaps less obviously) an idea of (internally) hierarchicalised and abstracted (self-)management as a fundamental part of the process of individuation (phew!). The User as Lord of Their (Petty) Domain.

But alternatively, an interaction with design could be like a kind of distributed therapy, in which a user’s relationship with the world is challenged, their teleologies interrupted. Metaphorically: instead of “auto-correct”, what about an “auto-mistake” feature, which would open up creative possibilities and make interesting disjunctures where they weren’t immediately apparent? This has interesting implications for interface design. So it’s not always “noble users challenging design” — we always need to think about design enabling a rethinking of the Self and the world.

This is connected to some long term thinking I’ve been doing for an ongoing “vapourware” software project — Silver Surfer: The Assodissonance Engine. Similar in genre to (and perhaps predating) the Association Engine of Nat Friedman’s Dashboard app for Linux, Silver Surfer would run beside other applications and organise various trains of thought by letting you link various chunks of data together, which it then would be able to track and display according to different schemas, searches or, more importantly, relatedness to whatever data you happened to be viewing at the time. Going beyond Dashboard, you’d be able to share these rhizome-schemas with other people, in a kind of groupware overlay for the Web and other public documents on the Internet.

But transcending all this fairly obvious guff, the interesting thing about Silver Surfer is that it would try to explode the inherent assumptions within “knowledge management” by fucking with the data. This is why it’s an Assodissonance Engine, rather than an Association Engine. In the background, it would always been trying to generate weird associations between data objects, based on various arbitrary rules and adaptations, with your own behaviour as some kind of modifier. Rather than just displaying brute-force related data via common strings, it would also display antonymic relationships, and also display chunks of catalogued data in different documents that had different degrees of separation from each other, leading to unexpected drifts. You could apply shared group schemas (with all their idiosyncratic behaviours) to your private documents.

Hopefully, Silver Surfer would act as a kind of anamorphic database. Like the thrill of a horror movie, this software would continually provide shocking moments of anamorphosis and desubjectification, like my goosebumpy feeling the other week of being swallowed by a whale, of engaging with an environment rather than being a manager, with all the danger that comes with real engagement. And yes, it would be a weird kind of creative prosthesis. The space between the links is the unconscious, an unravelled calligram. So instead of a digital superego, say hello to a cybernetic unconscious.