On October 28th 2021, Facebook announced that it would change its name to Meta, short for Metaverse, in a bid to publicize their dedication to being a Metaverse-focused company. The move shocked many analysts as Facebook’s virtual reality business is not profitable compared to its other endeavors, namely The Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp. Evercore ISI analyst Mark Mahaney estimated that at an approximate $5.4-6.4 billion dollars in operating losses this year, the bet on VR would eat 5-6% of the company’s operating margin.

Why then bet on virtual reality headsets?

1. Facebook runs an advertising business: they make money selling views, impressions and clicks.

2. That business model is under attack.

   1. Apple’s privacy changes have, through its new App Tracking Transparency feature, hinders the ability for mobile apps to track its users and confirm whether purchases or a download was made after seeing an ad, basically rendering conversion tracking impossible. 

      1. Facebook estimates the changes will result in a $10 billion dollar revenue loss this year

   2. It’s been a Pulcinella’s secret that digital advertising is not as efficient as many of the tech giants purport it to be. According to a 2-year study conducted by PwC, only 12% of impressions companies pay for could be traced. Moreover, there was a 15% unknown delta on average of spend that couldn’t be attributed to the fees disclosed by the companies.

Consider this: what is an impression really worth when users’ attention is constantly being divided between television, tablet, phone, console, laptop, etc.

If attention is a unit, in the age of attention, as the average number of devices per household increases, it splits the average user’s attention unit. Thus, when average number of connected devices in American doubles from 2019 to 2020, from 11 to 25, there is an inverse proportional decrease in the average attention unit.

How, then, should a company in the business of capturing attention position itself?

Future devices in the age of attention need to deprive users of some senses in order to capture their full attention.

When using the Oculus, users’ attention is focused, by occupying the user’s eyes the Oculus becomes all-encompassing. Under the mental model of the attention unit, would an ad in Oculus not be worth more than an ad in Facebook? How much would you pay for, hypothetically, 1/25th of a user’s attention versus a user’s full attention?

If virtual reality devices, in Meta’s case Quest 2, reach critical mass and displace even tablets, it would drastically upend our current attention economy, and Meta’s bet would prove highly fruitful.

In 2003, Russian artist Alexie Shulgin, a pioneer of Net Art, created Privatronics, a web page for a factitious eponymous corporation that produced and sold human-like masks like the one featured in the header image. Its goal is to protect its users from face recognition-based modes of surveillance.

The company’s blurb reads:

“Fed up with constant observation of your private life? Aware of modern surveillance and face recognition technologies? Not happy with thousands of cameras following your every step? Privatronics® Personal Security System™ will protect your privacy, will make you feel more secure in any situation of your everyday life.”

For $99.99, one could create a mask to avoid the ever-watching gaze of surveillance technology. The project can be understood as an artist’s responses to the growing presence of surveillance in the early aughts. That period was a rich breeding ground for both actual implementations of CCTVs in public spaces but also for its cultural representation through an aesthetic named Nokiawave by graphic designer David Rudnick.

Intentionally or not, this art piece also hinted at a specific shift in our common understanding of how to respond to surveillance and facial recognition technologies. Frequently, we speak of surveillance as something to be tackled on a structural level, through national legislation and policies. Privatronics anchors this fight in the domain of the individual providing through the piece a chance for every citizen to disencumber themselves from the heavy gaze of Big Brother.

Making every citizen the master of their own anonymity.

American Independence

The theme for this year’s MET Gala was “American Independence”. A rather loaded term. Vogue recommended coyly to wear one of Vaquera’s flag dresses, as a literal interpretation of the theme.

But what does it mean to be American and Independent?

If you had to distill the essence of Americanness to one look, what would it be?

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

- American Declaration of Independence, July 4th, 1776

To anyone looking at the foundational text of America, the afore-quoted “Declaration of Independence”, and being familiar with American culture, it is evident that this second unalienable Right is the crux of modern American identity. From the right to bear arms and no mask, individual freedom is front and center of the American self.

Who then at the MET best represented those ideas?

I believe Kim Kardashian wins this challenge, hands down.

Kim arrived at the ball clad in a night-black Balenciaga gown that hid her face and covered her entire body.

Compared to the other guests, Kim’s outfit was modest, a sign of effacement, drawing attention away from her visage, hinting at the desire not to be seen. What can be made of this aesthetic gesture?

Today’s celebrities are hypervisible. Their every move is tracked by the paparazzi and they are compelled to continuously share details of their lives. We live in a hypermediated age anchored on the abundant proliferation of information and images, which in turn increases the visibility of those who produce and disseminate those images. The overwhelming societal impetus seems to be “Everything must be exposed”. Celebrities, for all intents and purposes, trade the solace of a regular life and the freedom to engage in your daily deeds with little to no impediment for fame and wealth. Celebrities managed by agents and publicists, constantly surveilled, are not really free. They don’t really have a life. Everything has a price. Life and Liberty for Money.

What is signified then in the renunciation of identity, in the refusal to show one’s self?

Opacity

We clamor for the right to opacity. - Édouard Glissant, “Poetics of Relation”, 1928

Opacity is a concept adduced by Martinican writer Édouard Glissant who sought to question the possibilities of intercultural communication. To him, in a multi-relational world, noting differences does not imply understanding Otherness, thereby rendering it transparent, rather it leads to the acceptance of unintelligibility, impenetrability, and confusion that characterizes cross-cultural communication. Opacity seeks to overcome the danger of diminishing the idiosyncrasies of cultural differences by comprehension. I believe this concept can help us understand human interaction on an intrapersonal level. Through most interactions, we tend to diminish the Other through comprehension. To use the Sartrian existentialist vernacular, we reify the Other through our Gaze when we engage with them. No one is more gazed at than American celebrities.

Opacity then can be understood as a form of resistance deployed by Kim and Demna Gvasalia, the Creative Director of Balenciaga, to overcome the assimilation to the sameness of the absorbed look. It is an invitation to difference. It proclaims individuality. Through it, she is becoming the master of her own anonymity. Through it, Kim regains her quintessential American characteristic, her Individual Freedom.

Specifically, I was interested in how users were able (or not) to achieve their goals of “Playing Music” using an iPod, the original portable music player released by Apple in 2001. I was curious to see if 20 years later the intended experience was still intelligible by a much younger audience. Most people in my class were 1 when the iPod was released.

In evaluating the playtest, we looked at actions, goals, challenges, information spaces, feedback, decision-making, player perceptions, contexts of play, takeaways, and emotions.

After the playtest, we incubated and brainstormed on potential improvements to the first iPod.

Following the playtest and iterative incubation session on the iPod, I presented the STEM player, a new audio player designed by KANO, to the class, with no introduction or instruction besides that the device was on and could play music. The STEM player is an interactive audio player that allows the user to remix the song they are playing. It comes loaded with Kanye West’s latest album “DONDA” but any song can be uploaded to the device. The songs on the device are split by their stems: drums, bass, synth, vocals. Users can control each component as well as create loops and control pitch and speed. Finally, the player is also a recorder meaning the user can record and save their newly created remixed track.

Insights from the iPod playtest

Here are some of the insights the class adduced with regards to the iPod.

In terms of Actions, answering the question of whether they knew what they could and could not do, users, at first, found it difficult to understand the directions when using the wheel. However, it does not take long for the user to gain familiarity with the repetitive motions of the wheel. The main challenges they faced were in adding music using the iTunes software and using some of the Settings functionalities such as date- and time-changing.

Behind the iPod

The iPod was a device that attempted to correct the mistakes of its predecessors. The team behind its design, Steve Jobs, Sir Jonathan Ive, Jon Rubinstein, and Michael Dhuey, sought to create a “better MP3 player”. It was made possible by technological advancements in hard drives, as well as a will to create an accompanying music store to facilitate the music transfer process. Up until now, other flash players were mostly drag-and-drop and storage capacity for portable players was limited.

The competitive landscape was fragmented amongst many electronic companies.

This table from Wikipedia shows some of the specs of the different media players and a better overview of the market Apple was entering in.

Each media player had a set of features it inherited from previous media-playing technologies, such as cassette players and CD players. A player should allow users to “Play”, “Pause”, “Stop”, “Go to Next Track”, “Go to Previous Track”, “Raise Volume” and “Lower Volume”.

Although the goal was to create a device with the above features as well as improved memory and a computer interface for music transfer, the team at Apple sought to differentiate the product not only technically but also aesthetically. While the design of other media players borrowed from futuristic aesthetics with bright colors and advanced plastics, Apple’s design team borrowed from the past to create a product that was as beautiful as functional. Namely, they drew inspiration from Western European designs such as Dieter Rams’ work at Braun and the luxury home technology products of Bang & Olufsen.

The STEM player

After this long preamble presenting the iPod, I introduced the STEM Player. Here are some videos of the playtest.

First Impressions

Here are some of the tester’s first impressions following the experience:

• In comparison to the iPod, they felt in much less familiar territory

• The product has no language which makes comprehension more difficult (language-free)

• It took about 4 minutes for the users to figure the basic features and commands of the STEM player

• The sound was subpar

• Users felt guided by the haptic feedback in the player

• Its toy-like design made it more approachable than the iPod

• Even after providing them with the user guide, the testers felt like the drawn instructions were insufficient to completely figure out the product

Design comparison

Near the end of the seminar, I invited the class to compare both products

• Aesthetic

  • The iPod has a Western European aesthetic inherited from Braun and Bang & Olufsen. Its shape is geometric and the edges slightly rounded.

  • The STEM player veers towards natural design, both in terms of colour, the player is sand-coloured, and shape, it is shaped like a pebble. (We were having a harder time finding the inspirations here…)

• Materials

  • iPod: Glass and aluminium

  • STEM: silicon

• Design Associations (what words does the product bring to mind?)

  • iPod: House technology, fragile, luxury, style

  • STEM: Toy, bouncy, hard-to-break, soft, safe for children

• Emotions (how does the product make you feel?)

  • iPod: Satisfied (it helps me achieve my goals in a straight-forward fashion with little fuss)

  • STEM: Curious (it puts me in a more exploratory mood, it feels ludic and open)

What do both of these objects say about their users?

The iPod user is a tech-savvy individual who utilizes the product’s simple design and UX to achieve their goal in a defined and concise manner. The iPod user is a consumer but a discerning one, one who buys into the Apple brand for its promise of beautiful albeit closed objects. They live in a set of boundaries that are hard to break. The tool does not really allow the user to break free from the product’s designed walls.

In 2017, I presented a talk at the University of Quebec in Montreal, where I spoke about fan-based shitposting groups and their artistic practices. Specifically, I presented a “Manifesto for Shitposting” that adduced the idea that the members of these groups were a new type of audience, they were no longer passive, their practice was heavily participatory.

I quote from the Manifesto for Shitposting (2017)

Nothing stands in the way of the consumer-become-creator Nothing stands in the way of your hollowing out the peach's pit and turning it into an apple We are no longer passive We are the new creators There are sequels to variations and variations on these variations Sequels to these sequels We have created a franchise outside of the franchise We have created a universe outside of the copyrighted universe There is no author the author is dead there is no author only participants there is no author only creators only hollow words only hollow images waiting to be filled with new meaning

the franchises of the future are our franchises

You may see where I’m going with this but these two products differ in how they conceive of their users. The STEM player represents a new paradigm for audio media players in that it treats its audience not as listeners but as producers. It allows them to create the strongest connection one can have with a piece of music, making it your own. I have no idea if the player is part of a larger corporate strategy or just marketing from Kanye’s last album. However, I am very excited for this future of music that allows users to directly engage with music in an active manner.

Kanye, even after releasing the album, has already changed and tweaked many of the songs on DONDA. Now, so can you.

Le moi est haïssable - Pascal in Pensées (1670)

Self Under Siege

Ever since it glanced at itself in the mirror, the self has been uneasy. This essay explores two different types of visual representations of the Self, the painted portrait through art history, and the display picture on Facebook to explicate a third, the Crypto-profile-picture (from now on called “Crypto-PFP” or simply “PFP”) mainly used on Twitter and in adjacent networks such as Discord.

Portraiture is integral to the history of art in the West. In a nutshell, in our pre-photography world, getting one’s portrait taken was an event. This practice somewhat illuminates the importance the Self, noble selves specifically, played in artistic production from Antiquity to the invention of the camera. The most famous painting in the Western World is indubitably the Gioconda or Monna Lisa, a portrait of an Italian noblewoman commissioned by her husband, a silk merchant.

The goals of portraiture, before the advent of photography, were, on one hand, to be remembered, the painting often became the only visual representation of one’s self after death, and, on the other, to signal one’s wealth or social standing. Given the cost associated with commissions, portraits were, more often than not, reserved for aristocrats and bourgeois, who ensured their belongings and possessions were also represented in the portrait. These were fundamentally idiosyncratic visual representations of the subject’s individuality as expressed by class signifiers. The Self was well and alive.

Of course, we live in different times now. It is however worth asking what the function of Crypto-PFPs is: memento, signal of wealth or both?

According to Frederic Jameson, up until the “end” of Modernism, the self was enjoying its own presence, reveling in its unicity. He writes in “Postmodernism and Consumer Society”: “The great modernists were, as we have said, predicated on the invention of a personal, private style, as unmistakable as your fingerprint, as incomparable as your own body.” He wrote this in 1982. In the same essay, he describes the “death of the subject”, one of the symptoms of postmodernism. What he chronicles is the shift from the bourgeois cult of individualism, which to some degree birthed the portraits above, into a world of grey bureaucracies and homogeneous American life. This world is perhaps best depicted in movies such as Being John Malkovich, Fight Club, or even Edward Scissorhands. What Jameson deplores is the impossibility of novel creation and the tendency post-modern culture has to veer into pastiche, which he best describes as “unironic satire”. This cultural obsession for the retro, the nostalgic pushes the self into a consumerist retreat.

Revenge of the Self

Jameson failed to predict that individuality would come back with a digital vengeance. 22 years after his essay, a website predicated on personal profiles launched in a Harvard bedroom, so it goes. The advent of social networks engendered a resurgence of the Self. The call for a “display picture” on Facebook enabled all users to engage in digital portraiture, showing themselves, their clothes, and signifiers of identity in the background.

Moreover, whereas early portraiture was constrained by the labor involved in painting thereby reducing the number of representations one could have of themselves, Facebook’s rise concurrent with the advent of digital photography allowed for all to generate more and more portraits. One of the consequences of this new affordance was that one’s representation of Self became less fixed are more malleable. In Lacanian terms, with every new display picture (DP) posted on Facebook, we create an Ideal Digital Self (Imago) from which our Real Self (Ego) and our Reflection are alienated, ad infinitum. A continuous recreation of the childhood mirror stage, every new DP post, ad nauseam.

If so then what is the Ideal Digital Self we present when we choose a CryptoPunk as a Profile Picture?

Attack of the Selves

This question is crucial in understanding the motivations behind this phenomenon we are observing. I’ll take Punks as an example by PFP-mania can also be extended to Toads, Apes, Squiggles, etc.

Barthes, in “Leaving the Theater”, presents an interesting hypothesis:

In the movie theater, however far away I am sitting, I press my nose against the screen's mirror, against that ‘other’ image-repertoire with which I narcissistically identify myself

Do Punk owners subconsciously press their noses against the screens, identifying with the creature they possess?

One can understand the engouement for these NFTs as mimetic desires enacted in digital space. “My peers desire this object, therefore I, too, will desire this object. Its being-desired renders it desirable to me.” In a Girardian way, this might provide a basal understanding of why people flock to them. One might add that mimetic desire is amplified by the transparency of the medium, the Ethereum blockchain, as well as by the platforms such as auction houses which shine a spotlight on the social nature of desire furthering the amplification.

This does not however fully illuminate what the object of desire is or what this Ideal Digital Self represents.

Deleuze and Guattari in “Anti-Oedipus” provide us with more clarity on the phenomenon of socialized desire through their concept of “production désirante”:

There are no desiring-machines that exist outside the social machines that they form on a large scale; and no social machines without the desiring machines that inhabit them on a small scale.

Considering D&G’s position that desire cannot exist outside of the social networks that they form on a large scale and that these PFP projects in a way are their own sub-networks within platforms such as Twitter, linking desiring-machines to one another, can we not say that this Ideal Digital Self is not a Self, but a Network?

What is loved about a CryptoPunk is not the Punk itself, but the Punk-s, plural. The network. What is desired is what engenders the desire. This can be understood as a refusal to abandon the Self, but an apprehension to espouse it wholly. Somewhere between bourgeois individualism and post-modern subjectlessness, we have the Crypto-PFP. It is an obfuscation of the cult of identity that ruled Web 2.0 platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, in favor of the group, which to some may become the social unit of Web 3.0.

For instance, all 10,000 Punks are unique, but their unicity is a post-industrial unicity, if you will, these are not 10,000 handmade drawings, rather 10,000 mechanized outputs of a set of parameterized characteristics. This is unicity within a strict aesthetic and technological frame. A self within strict constraints. This frame is what gives it its social intersubjective value, what links it to others in the network, what makes it a real Punk, this frame is why it is desired. This frame is the code that generated it. The owner of an NFT who uses it as PFP isn’t signaling their individuality, they’re signaling that they are a part of something larger than themselves.

The Ideal Digital Self is not a self, it’s a Network.

The unease comes from staring at the mirror alone, with others, selves feel at ease.

L’enfer, c’est les autres. Sartre in Huis Clos (1944)