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WWhen the history of the first decades of this century comes to be written, there will be few works of art more meaningful than the film by Ben Grosser. Magnitude. In the 47-minute video, Grosser, a digital artist and professor of new media at the University of Illinois, brought together every public forum in which Mark Zuckerberg spoke of “more” and “bigger.” The resulting montage of interviews and presentations is a quick step forward in Facebook’s rapid growth because, in the CEO’s mouth, thousands become millions and then billions. It is a haunting monologue, the story of our time.
“The idea that Zuckerberg held onto even more than anyone else in Silicon Valley,” suggested Grosser, when telling me about Urbana via Zoom last week, “was the need to grow as fast as possible, to get the biggest market share. And it was all subordinate to that. The movie fits into a double act. Grosser also put together all the moments he can find of Zuckerberg mentioning dropping numbers or stuff. This film is 30 seconds long, but in a new version for its next exhibition at Arebyte Gallery in London, it has slowed down those seconds to also last 47 minutes.
Zuckerberg’s films are on display A in a series of projects that have made Grosser perhaps the most valuable of all social media critics. Along with Zuckerberg’s satire, he’s created a line of software that deconstructs exactly how Facebook’s numbers add up. Its Facebook Demetricator is an app that any user can use to remove all addicting metrics from the platform, thereby blocking micro-dopamine hits from likes and friendships. Demetricators for Instagram and Twitter followed. After briefly trying the latter, the effect is first disorienting and then liberating. “We’ve been conditioned to focus on the numbers and use them as an indicator of how important a person is or how well something is received,” says Grosser. Without those metrics, he suggests, “you have to actually read an article to see what you think about it or look at someone’s bio to see if you want to follow it back.”
Grosser is, like me, old enough to remember communication before the Internet. In the 1990s he was excited about the possibilities of using rudimentary artificial intelligence to create music – he had fun creating “different and strange” sounds that had never been heard before. During the first dotcom boom, he received a few job offers from Silicon Valley startups, but preferred the freedoms of academic experimentation. He recalls being excited first about the possibilities of Facebook, then Twitter, how they “provided unhindered interactive access to other humans in a way you’ve never had before.” It wasn’t until around 2010 that he became fully aware of the effects his social media habit was having on his brain.
“The first big realization was about notification,” he says. “The way my eyes were constantly drawn to the little red and white notification number on Facebook around the time you had to log in.” He recognized the addictive pattern of this gaze, the three-step process by which Zuckerberg’s interface so compulsively steals your attention: First, “Has anyone reacted or paid attention to me while I was away?” ? and the moment of participatory excitement. Then the anticlimax of this number disappears. Then the later need to post something else, to start the cycle again. “I started to think,” says Grosser, “someone designed this little feedback loop. Who are they? Who does it benefit from? “
As an art teacher, he was aware that his students saw nothing unusual in this model. They had grown up with it. He also got to see how this feedback loop of constant desire for approval shaped their idea of what art could be: “They see YouTube stars and TikTok stars and they wonder: social media,” he said. This compulsion seemed to restrict their creativity before it took shape.
Grosser asks his students a question during their first seminar. “Who here deleted a social media post within 10 minutes of posting because it didn’t have the metric response they hoped for?” Each hand goes up. Then he said, “Now imagine if any of the artists from the past that you admire paid attention to the first 10 minutes of reaction to their work and used it as a guide as to whether to throw something away.” thing. If you want to have original and weird ideas, he suggests, the world might need time to adjust to them.
Grosser tested a platform that could help with this as well. Minus is breaking all the rules of metrics obsessed media. It only allows users a finite number of posts: exactly 100 in a lifetime and there are no likes or follows. The only way to interact with another poster is to reply. Its beta testers reported some anxieties, which are very similar to the kind of anxieties artists have always felt: “They almost feel like there’s so much weight on a post,” he says. “It’s like, ‘I’m only going to have 100, what if I blow one up on some bullshit?’ , “We are urged to believe that our Twitter feed will last forever. And so we are constantly thinking in our heads about how we might appear on Twitter or what the thing we are doing right now would look like if I was talking about it on Twitter. … ”
He also has plans that disrupt Silicon Valley algorithms that need you to emotion (Go Rando) or that undermine U.S. National Security Agency surveillance by adding random words to each email that could sound the alarm bell (ScareMail). It is, in that sense, a unique fix in the data-driven world we all find ourselves in now; his art highlights his limits. “The way of looking at computer science is necessarily the act of setting boundaries where there may not be,” he says. There is no better illustration of this, he suggests, than Spotify’s stubbornly desperate recommendations. “Analyzing the data gives you answers that the code can produce, but completely ignores any responses that the code cannot produce for you. I may like Led Zeppelin but not the other rock groups of the 70s. The software will never live up to the tastes.
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Software for Less takes place at the Arebyte Gallery, London E14, from August 20 to October 23
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