Real Life: Audio Edition: Recent Episodes
Real Life Magazine
This is the audio edition of Real Life, a magazine about living with technology. The emphasis is more on living.
The auto industry used political leverage to remake the physical world and embed future demand for its products, despite their self-evident destructiveness. Now the tech world is trying the same trick with phones and apps. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag
If trauma seems ubiquitous online, that’s because it has become the authentic experience par excellence — uniquely able to hold our gaze and compel us to keep watching. This casual misuse shouldn’t distract from the fact that “trauma" refers to a real mode of experience that demands seriousness, but we need to unpack the ways it has become synonymous with “the real." Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag
The main strategy of the children's culture industry — transforming free play into a mania for collectibles and "commoditoys" — has been adopted by crypto startups, whose toy-like aesthetics are necessary for a digital asset class backed by nothing more than flows of sentiment. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
The social app BeReal promises respite from the pressure to perform, but its gimmick of forced spontaneity merely refines it in an effort to re-enchant the practice of posting to platforms. Obedience to the platform's rules doesn't cancel competition for clout among its users. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
A fantasy life of push-button convenience and technological coddling is just as much a “virtual world” as any metaverse. With the gig economy as their operating system, these "userverses" isolate consumers from each other and protect the exploitive system tech companies and venture capital have built. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
So far, audio-based social apps have not had major success. Perhaps this is because the human voice has contrasting associations: intimacy, on one hand; and the public-facing self, on the other. However, we should be vigilant: both associations operate on the notion that there is something “pure” about spoken forms of communication, and both are highly co-optable. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Although sleep wearables seem to promote rest, what they actually promote is rest reconfigured as productivity. A properly-charged wearable is always awake, acting as a sort of surrogate, low-level consciousness that keeps running and recording even while you temporarily abdicate your own. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
As algorithms are deployed across society to assess and predict behavior, older modes of control based on normativity are in eclipse. The way we experience control has changed accordingly — it registers more in terms of "vibes" and "cringe" — as have the ways it can be resisted, not through revaluing antinormative behavior but through extending care-oriented practices like mutual aid. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
The sales pitch of "Web3" depends on its having its own aesthetic to counter the "Instagrammability" aesthetic that social media has spawned. But all crypto can generate is self-referential hype and boiler-room sales pressure to sustain its many Ponzi schemes. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Images of suffering compel a reaction. "Crisis actor" conspiracy theories show that it's sometimes easier to claim they are "fake" than to respond appropriately, or to deal with the cognitive dissonance of not knowing how to respond at all. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Against the self-reinforcing metaphor of communication as penetration — the hypodermic needle by which information can be injected into other people's minds — other scholars have offered alternative framings that emphasize reciprocity and collaboration. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Reaction videos are pleasantly numbing — they ease the constant pressure to "react" to people and events online. This sort of content arrives to us pre-metabolized: all we have to do is absorb it. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
The NFT hype is not about present-day utility or novelty but an experience of collective faith in an age of taxing isolation. Web3 provides an optimistic story about a future to believe in, and NFTs act as frames for these emotions, serving as sacred spaces for a community of believers. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
To refer to a disaster by name is to be guided by an imaginative infrastructure that sets these events apart as exceptional. This reaffirms the normalcy that has been excepted. But disasters increasingly exceed our capacity to contain them in a title. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Stafford Beer, a cyberneticist who worked with Chile's socialist government, sought to find a balance between scale and individual autonomy in large social systems. His work sets an example for how we might accept responsibility for the internet and make it reflect the fullness of our humanity rather than reduce us to Like/Subscribe/Share cogs. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Amid renewed anxieties about the prospect of nuclear war, we might consider the Cold War theorist Günther Anders, who argued there is nothing wrong with fearing the worst-case scenario — in fact, we must fear the worst. We ignore it at our peril. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Adding a networked surveillance camera to a work truck takes all the problems and incipient paranoia that comes with Ring doorbell cameras and makes them mobile. Fear and distrust can be imported into any neighborhood. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
For many years, readers have loved to declare the death, or demotion, of narrative itself. What this tells us is that the fate of narrative is yet another narrative. What makes it such a compelling one? Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
"Creator" has emerged as an all-purpose aspirational descriptor for people who make internet content. It seems to promise a work life of artistic autonomy, but in practice it subjects workers to algorithmic control and exploits them to the point of burnout. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Our online spaces are littered with ruins, dead websites, and broken links. The attempt to conceal this chaos creates a creeping sense of unease, but by looking at it directly, we become more alert to the mechanisms used to conceal it; and to the internet’s ultimate mortality. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
While the “goggles and gloves” model of virtual reality has lingered in our cultural imagination since the 1980s, haptics devices probably won't ever live up to the idea that they can replicate physical contact. They could, however, implement a simplified version of touch subject to quantification and surveillance. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
YouTube gives the viewer the sense that they — and they alone — are always in the process of “authoring” their own experience. Conspiracy media, like those in the lineage of Loose Change, can easily leverage this sense of authorship, making us feel like we’re playing a far more active role than we actually are. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Google has kept its "I'm Feeling Lucky" button as a whimsical artifact of its past. As the company's power has grown, however, the button has taken on a manipulative function, conjuring a sense of autonomy within Google’s bullpen, hearkening back to a deceptive sense of freedom. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Tech companies present the metaverse as an irresistible paradigm shift akin to the move from desktop to mobile computing. Or they present it as a challenge to the limitations of physical reality itself. In practice, it's just a struggle among those companies for a larger cut of the profits from the same old business models. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Using AI to diagnose conditions like autism is not simply a matter of automating the same kinds of diagnostics used by clinicians. The definition of the condition itself is always contested terrain. AI developers may believe their work is apolitical, but inevitably they become key players in a political struggle over how care is conceived and distributed. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Relationship apps teach us ways of loving that privilege efficiency over depth, quantifiability over knowledge, and success over joy. They sanctify the institution of the “couple,” while shrinking down the experience of love until it conforms to neoliberal rhythms. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Hype about the metaverse and virtual reality propose screens as a mode of escape from physical environments. But it is far more likely that new kinds of screens will be implemented in physical environments to reshape our experience within them. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
The pre-crash housing bubble was abetted by propaganda about an "ownership society" that linked personal property to autonomy but in practice widened inequality. The Web3 hype has seized upon similar rhetoric and is yielding similar results, only now it's conflated with ideals of collective ownership that deserve to be considered apart from the speculative mania of crypto. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Asked what color the internet is, different generations would give different answers. This question is more meaningful than it seems: giving the internet a color gives us a coherent, if mutable sense of what it is, and a better way to critique it. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Robots are being used more and more to provide elder care, often as a means to assuage social isolation and loneliness. Critics find this dehumanizing, but that may stem from their seeing the robot as replacing human care rather than serving as a medium for conducting it. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
While nominally a fiction writer, W.G. Sebald's work remains theoretically prescient. Long before social media, he understood the suspicious anxiety inherent to learning about the world over social media. His works embrace this unease, accepting the unreliability of all individual sources, but also the obligation to make sense of them. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Images were once too scarce to be deployed rhetorically; they seemed to be more documentary by default. Now communicating continually with images is common, which generates a nostalgia for when images could speak something other than what the photographer meant to say. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Much concern has been raised around teens spreading misinformation on TikTok. But fear, and a sense of abandonment by the authorities, can drive compulsive behavior online. Young people — facing just as many threats as adults, but with less power to protect themselves — are just as susceptible to this as their elders. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Sidewalk Toronto is dead, but its legacy is instructive. It shows that surveillance systems aren't so much documenting as producing a desired reality — and that erasing these images, rather than increasing privacy, only makes that constructed reality harder to audit. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Proponents of "Web3" often claim that their crypto-based platforms will eliminate some of the problems associated with conventional social media. It will replace big tech companies with decentralized systems, replace the drive for virality with a commitment to community. But Web3 remains entirely dependent on existing platforms to attract users, and relies on the same dubious incentives to build hype. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Watching old movies reveals a chasm between seemingly once-possible "off-grid" experiences and the continuous connectivity that persists today, arching between childhood and later stages of life. The way our timelines excavate our own pasts for us not only makes remembering from a distance less possible — no longer are we narrators remembering a singular bygone era — but contemporary storytelling too is morphing away from the "closed chapter" adventure into narratives that take this sustained connectivity into account. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Conversations about technology tend to be dominated by an optimistic faith in technological progress. There is endless encouragement to think about all of the exciting benefits of new technology, but significantly less attention paid to the ways things might go spectacularly wrong. That's where Paul Virilio comes in. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Those who view “real life” as distinct from images might prefer to believe that undocumented experience is the “truth.” They might suggest that experiences contrived to produce photogenic images are false, an “as-if” experience, LARPing in the pejorative sense. But the life they are describing — a way of being in the world that is untouched by performativity and projection — is the biggest LARP of all. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
The concept of “the offline" is deeply enmeshed with that of "wilderness." Both concepts offer a fantastical escape from the hazards of a globalized world. But in setting up a binary between the corrupted, digital self, and the pure, disconnected self, they both perpetuate a hazardous logic. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Beauty filters like "Belle" are praised for providing better representation. But the underlying technologies are historically steeped in bias, which raises the question: Is this sort of representation desirable in the first place? Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
In the early 2000s, optimistic commentators expected the internet to generate a more participatory culture, in which fans gained more control over the entertainment properties they were invested in emotionally. But participation is not an intrinsically positive force: It has since become a means of fostering overinvestment, obsession, and frustration — volatile social energies with unpredictable social consequences. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
After school shootings, the surveillance industry mobilizes to sell school districts on more intensive monitoring schemes that they claim could help prevent future tragedies. But rather than successfully predict future crime and protect kids, increased surveillance in schools targets students of color for exclusionary discipline. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Communities can form around illnesses that are ignored, or contested, by outside authorities. Havana syndrome differs from other contested illnesses: not only for its proposed cause, but for the massive institutional investment in its narrative. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
For decades, popular imaginings of the future have promised difference, but delivered more of the same — recycling technical functions but also, more perniciously, their underlying social relations. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
To help users make sense of massive volumes of content, streaming services rely on recommendation algorithms, which depend in turn on breaking both content and consumers down into component variables. This process manifests as a new kind of nostalgia — a continuous repacking of past pleasure in new permutations rather than an impossible desire to return to a "better" time and place. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
The concept of "telepathy" appeals to tech consumers and tech CEOs for different reasons: consumers are wooed with the idea of seamless, clearer and more intimate communication; to CEOs, telepathy represents a more complete form of surveillance. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Paper maps positioned the viewer outside the territory mapped, but mapping apps situate the viewer within the map, not only as a blue dot at the center but also in terms of what information is displayed. The subjective dimension of maps has become more pronounced; they have become more manipulative in telling you where as well as how to go. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Rocky IV is not only a film about the Cold War; it's a film about robots: Drago (the robotic human) and SICO (the humanoid robot), and also Rocky himself, who must disavow his dependence on technology to assert an idea of himself as humanity's last hope against cyborg-ization. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Micro-mobility devices like scooters and e-bikes were supposed to replace cars, but in practice they often reinforce the excesses of car culture: They intensify the confusion and clutter on existing roadways without reducing the total number of miles traveled. The micro-mobility industry is still a capitalist industry, intent on maximizing use and profit at the expense of sustainability. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
The concept of a "normal" on the other side of Covid has merged with the concept of a "real world" beyond the screen — ridiculous but emotionally convenient. After so much loss and disruption, to feel “normal” would be much stranger than whatever it is we feel. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Gender online is no longer something that is witnessed so much as something that is felt. Memes that seem merely playful at first open up new ways of defining and embodying gender, returning the means of construction to users — as something less like a binary characteristic, or even an item in a list of options, and more like a "mood" or a “vibe.” Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Anti-surveillance makeup that imitates the contrasting stripes of dazzle camouflage is as perennially popular as it is impractical. It plays into a fantasy of an individualistic fashion statement serving as effectual tech resistance, while perpetuating the neoliberal insistence on "personal responsibility" as the response to every crisis. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Long before smartphones and social media, the social critic Lewis Mumford put a name to the way that complex technological systems offer a share in their benefits in exchange for compliance. He called it a “bribe.” The danger, as Mumford wrote, is that “once one opts for the system no further choice remains." Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
The voice is thought to have a privileged relationship with the body, and by extension the self — it is connected with the most fundamental aspects of who we believe ourselves to be. For that reason, its severance from the body, and mobility through space or across social media, can feel particularly unsettling. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Given the scale of problems the world faces, it's tempting to look to "planetary computing" and "data-driven governance" for solutions: AI models that can take in data at a global scale and intervene with solutions that won't require further debate or political negotiation. But such models would neglect local knowledge and inevitably enact unimaginable and unpredictable forms of oppression. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
The “biogenetic turn," exemplified by the rise of consumer DNA testing, risks placing genetics at the center of selfhood, and all it might involve. This shift has led to more of the public misunderstanding genes as the essence of identity, challenging decades of activism and scholarship, and undermining progressive conceptions of family. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
The social media profiles of the dead persist after they are gone. They have become pilgrimage sites for mourners who come to them and post messages addressed directly to the deceased, in second person, as if they were a portal to them. This amounts to a mainstreaming of a form of public mourning that had been marginalized to seances and encounters with psychics, in which speaking to the dead is seen as an ongoing open conversation. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
The ubiquitous presence of touchscreens in airports, doctor's offices, and other sites of modern life is explained by their status as stand-ins for progress. They are monuments to technology, which provide a sense of physicality, even while doing little for the consumer. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Slack is not just a workplace app, but a workplace drama written by its users. This drama mainly consists of endless banalities that only one's employer can read in total, and in which we are all doomed to play a predetermined role. A new novel attempts to redeem this gibberish, while reproducing, in fantastical terms, the feeling of using Slack. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Vibes are often seen as feelings that can't be explained or narrativized; they instead emerge from chance concatenations of stimuli and cohere as a mood. Not coincidentally, this is basically how machine-learning models work, surfacing statistical correlations that can't be explained in terms of causality but are nonetheless usable in algorithmic recommendations or predictions. Vibes are feelings imputed algorithmically, divorced from causes or consequences; emotions rendered useless for action. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
The transcendent view of nature — which severs the natural world from the world of human affairs — has long been standard in Western art and entertainment. This view makes it easy for us to neglect and exploit the world around us. In this moment, it is critical to engage with these representations, and imagine new ways of seeing in the Anthropocene. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Vaccine refusal can’t be understood outside the context of the broader medicalization of society: how health has been construed as a universal ground truth that can override or sideline the need for politics rather than being recognized as a form of politics itself. If it appears that all power rests with medicine, it may seem to some individuals that the only way to manifest and express their power is through self-diagnosis and self-medicating. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
The idea of “living with Covid” means inhabiting a position that is fundamentally unstable — accepting that we do not know what the future will look like, or whether a "return to normal" is even what we're trying for. Ultimately, it requires us to give up the idea of closure in favor of a truer ambiguity. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Beauty technologies are often judged by their results. Like other tech gadgets, however, their meaning lies as much in their designs, their histories, and the performance of their use. Beauty can be thought of as a process, not an end — the opposite of optimization. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Compared to earlier technologies of escape, parasociality offers something closer to direct interaction — a more powerful illusion of connection. Parasocial escapism is not so much a retreat from intimacy into consumerism, but a way of consuming intimacy as a product. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
For those who came of age with the social internet, a long digital trail lingers behind one's every move. Memes that riff on the idea of "not being perceived" get at something deeper than they seem to: namely, a vision of the internet free from compulsory body awareness. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
The "conspiracy wall" meme offers a cinematic interpretation of how conspiracies spread. However, it is ultimately misleading: those who subscribe to the kinds of theories peddled by Alex Jones and the like are not looking for logical explanations, but rather for permission to feel how they want to feel. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
The U.S. Department of Commerce is developing an approach to defining people's trust in AI. But rather than define trustworthy systems with respect to their consequences or differential impacts, it focuses on how they are perceived by “users” (not whom they are used on) and does not bother to ask if the systems themselves are worth trusting. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Ted Kaczynski’s most significant contribution to the work of 20th century anti-industrial thinkers is the fact of the bombings. In refusing to grapple with that, contemporary apologists fail to capture a difficult truth: that the decision to uplift his message roughly vindicates his conviction that violence was an ugly but effective medium. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Host-read ads on podcasts — when the hosts ad-lib and joke around with the copy provided by sponsors — are a kind of "parasocial" advertising, in that they use the sense of intimacy and pseudo-friendship podcasts produce to overcome the listener's defense mechanisms against marketing. Joking around with the ads makes those ads integral to the sense of community that listeners derive from podcasts and the sense of belonging they generate. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Women’s home-based work is often invisible and undervalued. This has been the case for much of its history, and today it includes platform labor. Reconsidering more feminized, pink-collar forms of online work helps broaden the definition of "tech worker," which is still often perceived in narrow, masculinist terms. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
The stereotype of tech people is that they are indifferent to fashion, dressing in austere uniforms to signal how they don't have time for it. But what they don't have time for is the idea of a commons that fashion, as a collective investment in public display, can stand for. When public space is privatized and digitized, tech companies are eager to sell fashion as customization. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
To make engaging with the stories of Holocaust survivors more "interactive," a new project uses machine learning analysis to process an audience's questions to synthesize answers out of a survivor's pre-recorded testimony. But this "solution," in blurring the lines between simulation and reality, disrupts our understanding of the past and undermines how we perceive the survivors themselves. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
It's obvious that Peloton sells a kind of self-optimization — exercise as time discipline. But Spotify (a streaming service like Peloton) also trains listeners in how to attune emotionally to states (or vibes) that employers have deemed productive or speculatively valuable. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
In a society that conflates work with identity, the fear that one's job could become obsolete is fear for one's very self. Consider the work of Ivan Illich, who advocated, among other things, for "the right to useful unemployment" — the freedom to pursue non-economic means of living. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Phones are often treated as though they have disrupted how museums operate, causing them to radically alter themselves to accommodate the phone's implications. But the inverse is also true: the way of seeing promoted by museums has shaped the way we have come to use phones, to capture "visual interest" and strip it of its original context. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
The new players in real estate operate much like Spotify, Netflix, and other platforms that charge a subscription for temporary access to more than you could ever buy outright. Unlike Netflix and Spotify, however, the platformized real estate industry has the power to determine where and how we live. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
The internet's early history is often misremembered as a time when decentralization allowed for a more genuine form of sociality, free from corporate and commercial pressures. But this misplaced nostalgia not only overlooks how free-market ideology drove the internet's development; it also ignores the more centralized alternatives that were directed from the start by a different kind of politics. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
More and more, paranormal tech horror centers around stories of possession: a self taken over by forces that are external to it and yet deeply familiar. These films speak to the sense that the 21st century body is inescapably hybrid, possessed not only by the ecological non-human, but also by the technological non-human. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
There is always a new "incident" to report of how a tech company's product led to some instance of harm — algorithmic bias or intensified surveillance reproducing social injustice, gig economy platforms prompting abusive labor practices, disinformation leading to violence, and on and on. Reform seems insufficient, so what lessons can tech criticism draw from abolition movements? Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Street View offers a reflection of the everyday social relations of pandemic life. It is insufficient in all the ways we might expect: lacking in narrative, devoid of intimacy, filtered through a screen. But its flatness reflects a feeling associated with 2020, and this is the record we have. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
The idea of a "professional managerial class" emerged from a 1970s analysis that sought to assess the rise and function of middle managers and the degree to which they could be politically mobilized. Recently, it has become a pejorative directed at tech and media people who are prominent in "the discourse" and are held to be steering it toward self-serving conflicts. But demonizing this class won't undo the socioeconomic structures that produce it. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
The "digital footprint" metaphor lulls people into a false sense of control over their digital representations, removing attention from the networked and institutionally driven operations that largely shape digital impressions. Instead, the “digital wake” — as in, the churn and ripple created as a boat moves through the water — might provide a more fruitful, and politically useful metaphor for thinking about digital data flows. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Tracking devices like fitness trackers and smartwatches are a form of external surveillance, strikingly similar to ankle monitors. Users who choose to wear them are proclaiming something about their privilege: They can opt in to "luxury surveillance" because they are already aligned with social power, and their acceptance of it extends a more intensive net of surveillance over everyone. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Friendship is not an unchanging concept; changing economic conditions and technological possibilities facilitate different demands for connection and structures of belonging. "Parasociality" — feeling an unreciprocated intimacy with media personalities — is one such structure of belonging, but its asymmetry always tilts into economic exploitation or explosive fan rage. The same media forms that nurture that rage are also capable of amalgamating it into a potent force of social disruption. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Social media accounts by white users pretending to be Asian represent a mutation in the logic of appropriation. The Asian body, historically reduced in the white Western imaginary as machine-like, is held up by the emerging techno-culture as an uncanny cyborg ideal. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Multiplayer games like Call of Duty: Warzone are blatant propaganda, but it feels like there are ways to play them "critically," reaping the positive social and collaborative benefits while supposedly filtering out the ideological effects. However, these games are designed to operate beyond the explicit and rational, and the more you play, and the more deliberately you marshal your psychic defenses, the more susceptible you risk becoming to these other persuasive mechanisms. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Drawing on the libertarian vision of "charter cities," venture capitalists aim to re-establish the city as a commodity produced from scratch: "urban life" as a product available without the bother of actual urban communities, politics, or commons. This fantasy is being used to place pressure on existing cities, forcing them to compete in the lifestyle market rather than provide a just and stable municipality for citizens.
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Social media train us to go through life in constant anticipation of a potential audience. That's as true for sex as it is for friendship, travel, eating, and "being oneself." The spectacularization of sex, for those who don't have it professionally, might seem like a new frontier for public living. But within this immersion lies the possibility of a perfect privacy. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
In tech design, a turn from sleek metal and glass to cozy textiles serves an ideological purpose: making consumer technologies, with all their surveillant properties, feel like a natural, intimate feature of home. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
"Influencer” and “creator” aren’t really different jobs, but the opposition of the two terms helps structure a variety of hierarchies: Less experienced or female content producers or competitors are more likely to be "influencers," while "creators" testify to the economic generativity of social media platforms and entrepreneurial opportunities for audiences. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Techno-utopianism has held longstanding appeal to the left, both as a means of keeping faith alive and of deflecting familiar critiques. As Gavin Mueller writes in his new book, however, this strain of thinking is deeply flawed. Is breaking machines the better way to build a better world? Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
The idea that the present should always be sacrificed at the altar of future innovation, and that this should guide IP, dates roughly to the 1960s, not to eternity. These decisions can be made differently. Neoliberal prerogatives of privatization need not be treated as immutable or even logical on their own terms. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Protection, direction, influence, and even management can easily be perceived as aligned with "care," if not inseparable from it. Be it for our children, partners, or property, surveillance promises peace of mind — that we can think of ourselves as better caregivers. But when "care" is used to account for, rationalize, and promote surveillance technologies that ultimately cause vastly more harm than good, this amounts to care's weaponization. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
The idea that a person's total potential could be quantified and reproduced by algorithm — without agency — reinforces the sense of futility characteristic of neoliberal capitalism, and which can worsen depression in the first place. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
The underlying aim of NFTs is to empty content of whatever it contains that makes it circulate and reduce instead to a moment of property, an assertion of the self who owns it over its potential social significance. That is, NFTs make the social significance of any digital artifact the simple fact that it can be owned and valued. Cash is king. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Previous generations considered future peoples disposable, while at the same time idealizing them as saviors. Confronting the ghosts of the past, how do we prepare to look the future in the eye? Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Dating apps have become part of the infrastructure of the social world, and crafting a profile for one of them is a rite of passage into a certain kind of social visibility. But the algorithms that drive them force us to balance our desire for intimacy with the desire for publicity. They feed on the romantic illusions that they dismantle at the same time. Read more essays on living with technology at www.reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
"Synaesthetic" technologies — from instruments that seem to draw sound from plants to smart cities — promise to "translate" the nonhuman world, facilitating a deeper interactivity. What they really do is force the world to "speak" to us in our own language, while commodifying connection itself. Read more essays on living with technology at www.reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Phenomena like crypto, NFTs and meme stocks have been touted in some quarters as a democratization of finance, allowing ordinary people to participate in speculative markets and use them to their own ends. But these practices are not foundational to a sustainable and equitable society; they mainly offer a feeling of revenge to help compensate for the otherwise helpless feeling of being financialized against one’s will. Read more essays on living with technology at www.reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
This essay explores the chasm between the data-heavy objectivity of weather prediction apps and our experience of the weather day to day. Weather apps create a soothing aesthetic of reliable information, dulling the feelings of helplessness and uncertainty intensified by climate change. Read more essays on living with technology at www.reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Ambient works once sought to intervene in an existing environment and re-attune one's relationship to it — they function like augmented reality. Ambience videos on YouTube (think "lo-fi hip hop radio" or "Rainy Night Coffee Shop Ambience") are more like virtual reality, promising an off-the-shelf escape from the environment you're in. Ambience ceases to be something shared and becomes instead something consumed. Read more essays on living with technology at www.reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
"Appropriate technology" was a movement beginning in the late 1960s that aimed to shift the emphasis from mass technology to smaller-scale, affordable technologies, informed and targeted to local needs and customs. Many of its ideas are as relevant today. So is one of its major shortcomings: why would we rely on technology to mitigate the harm technology does?
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With the advent of the internet, some predicted that intellectual property would become outmoded, but this has turned out to be backward. Instead it has allowed for the conception of everything as IP. Anything can become "content," which now means anything can be conceived as a speculative instrument, as with NFTs. Web 2.0 — the "participatory web" of social media platforms and user-generated content — is being subsumed by what's called Web3, an initiative to build blockchains and payment protocols into the internet's fundamental architecture.
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Social media platforms offer visibility features that show who is "lurking" on you. Because they offer the smallest possible units of attention — literally, "seen by" — they offer unlimited possibilities for narrativizing and mythologizing our relationships with others. Read more essays on living with technology at www.reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Technologies that write text for us aim to eliminate ambiguity from communication and make it more efficient. But the more popular these technologies become, the more they place all text under suspicion of being lazily produced, without any sincere human effort or intention behind it. Rather than becoming clearer, it becomes utterly inscrutable. Read more essays on living with technology at www.reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
NFTs are made to seem intricate, innovative, and complicated, but they are merely a new manifestation of a very old form: the financial bubble. The crypto-driven machinery by which NFTs are supposed to acquire their value disguises the dispossession that all forms of capitalist accumulation entail. The value of crypto (and apps) is not in electricity but in the human labor they displace and appropriate. Read more essays on living with technology at www.reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Each age brings a new format for speculating about celebrity affairs, and over the decades, gossip has found new ways to justify its own existence. In recent years, the nastiness that marked early-aughts gossip has seemed retrograde. But the pursuit of sensitive gossip might be a vain one. Read more essays on living with technology at www.reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
The origins of everyday household junk are uncanny in their endlessness and inscrutability. This encourages a kind of object orthorexia: alone at home amid possessions one can't easily be rid of, it is easy to obsess over the extractive beginnings and horrid afterlives of cheap objects. Read more essays on living with technology at www.reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
"Convenience" is often discussed as though it is what consumers naturally demand — a way for them to save time and energy. But convenience and its logic of efficiency as an end in itself derives from the imperatives of production at scale. To misread "convenience" as our own desire, we must be brought to misrecognize the vast logistical landscape that makes "frictionless consumption" possible and that is slowly devouring the countryside. Read more essays on living with technology at www.reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
The ideal of design as politics, as encoded in movements like "design thinking," operates just like political centrism. It relies on the fantasy that innovative design solutions could eliminate ideological conflict and change the world by merely shuffling around its parts. Read more essays on living with technology at www.reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Crowdsourcing is often presented as novel, but its history precedes the advent of digital computing. The history of “human computing” — using the division of labor to solve complex math problems — shows how crowdsourcing fits into a longer pattern of deskilled, invisible, and exploited work. Read more essays on living with technology at www.reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Woodworking — and crafting more generally — holds appeal as something outside of the everyday experience of capitalism. This mode of thinking has a long history, one traditionally more concerned with middle-class discontents than the material conditions of capitalism itself. Read more essays on living with technology at www.reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
When image-manipulation tools like the recent "Deep Nostalgia" gain notoriety, they are often described as either "cool" or "creepy." But such privileged reactions sidestep the expropriation involved in representing people without consent, and the way such transgressions disproportionately affect marginalized people. Read more essays on living with technology at www.reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
The images that come preinstalled on devices aim for a generic appeal that could appeal to any user without being too distracting. Often images of landscapes, they evoke a collective appeal, a well-being in ordinary belonging, that transfers to the device itself. But landscape imagery also taps into longstanding ideas of dominion and mastery — of human transcendence from environments that we exploit rather than inhabit. This is a dangerous way to think by default. Read more essays on living with technology at www.reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Supply studies attempts to distill and make legible the global networks that manufacture and deliver our electronics, and form the infrastructure that organizes our society. It provides a crucial lens for understanding the real origins, and the real impacts, of our devices, whose complexity obfuscates their harm. Read more essays on living with technology at reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Since the pandemic began, there have been a rash of posts that emphasize embracing a certain “main character energy” — a way of conveying an impression of inner depth when we mostly appear to each other on screens. These have their roots in the fantasy of living in the movie of your own life that cinema has worked hard to establish, and which has become harder to sustain under the conditions of social media, where we are routinely confronted by our marginality in the lives of others. Read more essays on living with technology at reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Tech companies tie their origin stories to scientific master-narratives of the earth and the universe. By co-opting the totalizing authority of astrophysics and scientific cosmology — the “purest” and most conceptual of the sciences — they naturalize their own role in shaping earth's futures. Read more essays on living with technology at reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Two issues marked the release of last year's most hyped game, Cyberpunk 2077: its racist, transphobic marketing campaign; and the exploitive labor conditions under which it was made. These must be understood not as independent problems but intrinsically related: Transphobia’s profitability can help instill labor discipline; exploitive labor conditions allow fascist gender politics to flourish more broadly.
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Parents must watch their children, while surveillance is conventionally associated with state power and its abuses. But in tracing the history of child monitoring and its technologies, we can see that these two forms of observation are less distinct than they appear. Read more essays on living with technology at reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Music is a public good: It brings people together, it provides an outlet, an archive, and reflects the tenor of society at any given moment. We don’t currently conceptualize universal access to music as a public good, to be managed in the public interest with public funding. We should. We should think about socializing music streaming. Read more essays on living with technology at reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
To advertise the idea of better picture quality or basic desirability, marketers often make recourse to the "glint" — an elusive flash reflecting off surfaces to convey a product's enhanced presence. This glint figures the idea of having our attention captured without specifying what captured it; it intimates in a flash that we've already seen what we want and know why we want it. Read more essays on living with technology at reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
On TikTok, users "emojify" their faces — abstracting facial expressions into blank, universal icons that nonetheless provide a hit of personality, and estranging the most basic and embodied mode of communication from the body. Read more essays on living with technology at reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Older open world games, at their best, offered "cognitive maps" of contemporary capitalism. Today's open worlds — even when they take inspiration from anti-capitalist literary genres like cyberpunk — are more like gig economy platforms, offering "freedom" in the form of being able to choose among an endless series of tedious tasks. Read more essays on living with technology at reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
When algorithmic feeds begin showing users content pertaining to specific health conditions, users will likely feel as though they are being diagnosed with them. Within social media's systems of self-differentiation, every kind of content can be understood as a symptom. Identity becomes a kind of chronic disease that is constantly trying to cure itself. Read more essays on living with technology at reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
The SAD lamp is a technology that claims to provide us with the sunlight we miss during the winter months, treating Seasonal Affective Disorder. While its benefits are unclear, it is part of an overarching attempt to calibrate the human body through science to a perfect synchronicity with the rhythms of nature. SAD lamps tap into our desire to believe in ourselves as part of wider ecologies, and also position consumer goods as necessary mediators of this relationship.
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Tech companies were once quick to deploy utopian rhetoric about how they could solve the world's problems, but this has been revealed as mainly an alibi for the pursuit of profit and monopoly — a dystopia for everyone else. To escape will require utopian thinking premised on a different set of values, exemplified by organized resistance to tech's hegemony. Read more essays on living with technology at reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Board games have long been used to simulate war, serving as an aspect of military training. But as researchers at the Rand Corporation would determine, the most effective simulations were not the most accurate depictions of war, but the most traumatic experience of stakes. At the same time, the terms in which war has been re-created in games have subsequently shaped how actual war is mediated, conducted, and perceived. Read more essays on living with technology at reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Predictive text AI upholds a view of human communication as mathematical and mundane, exerting an insidious influence on the way we communicate, and the way we think about communication itself. Read more essays on living with technology at reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Like the snapshot, the screenshot is a way of metabolizing the world around us, framing intimate spaces that are controlled, nevertheless, by outside parties. Counterintuitively, it provides a brief escape from computational logic.
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The practice of influencers is not some marginal form of social media marketing but a form of cultural production and a mode of self-employment that is becoming paradigmatic. Algorithmic tools designed to determine influencers' "brand safety" — essentially their ability to work — reproduce existing forms of discrimination, linking "safety" and profitability with whiteness. Soon all workers may be subject to such scrutiny. Read more essays on living with technology at reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
This essay is about the note-taking app Roam, and the consequences of life conceived as an endless process of annotation. Like other productivity apps, Roam can seem to do the work of synthesizing your stray thoughts into a larger, more coherent structure. But the very ease with which that index is generated makes it not only unwieldy at scale, but begins to circumscribe your thinking instead of adapting to it. Read more essays on living with technology at reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
It's common to hear startups or tech company cultures described as "cultish." But using "cult" as a pejorative not only imports a dehumanizing and carceral line of critique; it also separates the companies being critiqued from the larger historical and political forces that shape them. Read more essays on living with technology at reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
The myth of “organic” experience has been sold by tech companies for almost two decades to differentiate between advertising’s “paid reach” and the other kinds of content that appear in one’s feed. This suggests that everything that happens on a platform is naturally ordered, as if once you removed the ads, what would remain is a garden of wildflowers. But the rhythms of media consumption are designed and induced; they don't simply happen. Read more essays on living with technology at reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
Search engines foster the illusion that every question has a retrievable answer. This creates a false sense of understanding, and obscures the certainty of uncertainty, reducing knowledge itself to that which Google can provide. Read more essays on living with technology at reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
As Zoom shifts the nature of the relationship between viewing and being viewed, it also shifts our awareness of it: It makes us more conscious of how visibility is mediated by technologies in general. Right now, it is imperative that we consider what the Zoom gaze accomplishes — whose perspective it seeks to naturalize, whose subjectivity it centers, and what it conditions us to see. Read more essays on living with technology at reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.
We think of media as means for transmitting information, assuming that information's freedom is intrinsically and positively correlated with our own. In reality, media are — and have always been — primarily about affect: they are ways of cocooning ourselves, providing freedom from pain and discomfort. This misconception has had disastrous consequences.
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Subscription services often hinge not on a better deal but on an escape from having to make deals. Rather than falsely describing a transactional arrangement as a matter of loyalty (as with "loyalty programs"), subscriptions impose a kind of loyalty without requiring a transaction at all. But transactionality offered a kind of freedom — of an anonymous, ephemeral exchange — that is disappearing from a connected world.
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Like all technologies, light reflects much larger expressions of power, carving up a whole architecture of visibility that shapes the ways our lives are led at night, providing shelter for some and a harmful, even deadly, exposure for others.
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This essay is part of Home Icons, a series about the cultural and material histories of domestic objects.
Over the course of history, scent has been imbued with medical properties it doesn't possess, but it can also have very real physical and psychological effects, including unanticipated ones; and it can at least suggest the fulfillment of our needs and desires. Once it was said to ward off miasma; now it gives texture to otherwise formless days during lockdown and makes otherwise uninhabitable spaces feel like home.
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This essay is part of Home Icons, a series about the cultural and material histories of domestic objects.
The allure of the once subversive technology of radio transmission for its seemingly inherently revolutionary qualities in fiction and in real life, falls short when set against today's revolution. It, like many coalitional mediating technologies now, is secondary to and serves the always-evolving work of care and resourcefulness.
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This essay is part of Home Icons, a series about the cultural and material histories of domestic objects.
The kettlebell, a centuries-old device with Soviet associations, is wildly popular in modern Western gyms; since the pandemic began, it has been so coveted for home workouts that suppliers have barely been able to keep it in stock. More than a practical piece of equipment, it has become a talisman of strength and wellness, and it represents the duality at the center of "working out" as peddled by bourgeois fitness culture: the residue of militarism, of training for something, and hyper-individualism, of optimizing one's own body in the face of general precariousness, without any reliable collective mechanism for solving the problems we face.
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There is a glaring discrepancy between how we monitor the earth and how we respond to signs of the biosphere’s collapse. After decades of political indifference, a growing number of advocates have sought ways to automate environmentalism to bypass institutional resistance to urgent change. But it's not clear how to "optimize" for a “winning” ecosystem, or who decides what that should look like.
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The dream of predicting human behavior like the weather has a long history, sometimes overlapping with that of weather prediction itself. But treating public sentiment as a natural phenomenon, to be studied and exploited, means failing to grasp the material and political conditions from which it arises.
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