Alfie Bown
Autor von The Playstation Dreamworld
Über den Autor
Alfie Bown is a Lecturer in Digital Media at Royal Holloway University London. His journalism has appeared in Tribune, New Statesman, Paris Review and the Guardian and his other books include The Playstation Dreamworld.
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- Bown, Dr. Alfred
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- Hong Kong, China
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- University of Manchester (B.A.)
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- Hang Seng Management College, Hong Kong
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The way they have done it is to broaden love to desire, he says. If you can't find actual love, let them stimulate more desires in you. Endless scrolling, the reward of the occasional like, retweet or even a response, keep billions away from other people and glued to their devices instead. Best friend and lover chatbots using artificial intelligence tell you what you want to hear. Endless porn shows you what you want to see. Combinations of both are readily available now. He repeatedly refers to the example of trump.dating. The gigantic dating industry presents a meat market of clickbait - scrolling, commenting, interacting. Meanwhile, actual love is not available. Bown says "we live in an arcade." That is the future of desire.
It has come to the point where the data is sufficient to change the whole set up. Unfathomably deep data is available to all who will pay. It can be sliced, diced and manipulated as needed to take desire to whole new paradigms. Bown says there is something called Q-ser, qualified communities of quantifiers. They edit the data into new lifestyle patterns, looking for ways to get more people clicking at more customized choices, looking to satisfy more desires, inventing them as they go. And there's always more to invent to consume users' time.
Imagine, Bown says, if dating sites were run not as markets where everyone they let you see likes the same things you do, but instead is in the format of a game, where your clicks take you on an adventure of discovery, seeing more kinds of candidates, interacting with them in the game context. As long as you keep clicking , satisfying desire is just around the next corner. Just make it desirable and they will come.
Not only does this trivialize matchmaking, it is as insulting as the dating industry already is, with its infinite scrolling and no going back, reductionist questions and dehumanizing processes that cause people to click away at the slightest difference that catches their eye. Bown cites the almost perverse example of a hacker who broke into a dating site in order to find someone who was not like him in every way. Seeking virtual perfection, people come away with nothing but unsatisfied desire. So they come back for more. This is the society tech has spawned.
Bown says that sexting and dick pics are little different from the ads that creepily follow people around the internet: "The digital objects of consumer capital, then, function like an unsolicited dick pic and so it may be contemporary capitalism that is the truest pervert." Sexting is an adolescent game that prepares kids for the adult online dating world, with unattainable desires galore.
He discusses the valuation of daters as Sexual Market Value. SMV ranks people and can present them according to need, desire and budget. All this might be offensive, but escaping the offensive has become the Everest of the internet. Unwanted dickpics Airdropped onto unsuspecting phones are the new normal in this scheme.
The book is not a dating site analysis; it is a leftist analysis. And not only leftist, but psychoanalytic. This seemingly odd combination leads Bown through countless citations from papers in both those fields. It's online dating with Freud, Lacan and Deleuze vs Marx, Engels and Badiou, if you can imagine that.
The internet has been prepping people for this for decades: "It is Uber that dictates the path of our taxis, Google Maps that selects the path of our walks and drives, and Pokemon GO that (for a summer at least) determined where the next crowd would gather." And that is just the start. Rewarding people with privileges in their real world lives - or denying them - has become reality. The Chinese have implemented this concretely, causing citizens to always be on their best behavior. Literally playing for the cameras, microphones, and spies. Failure to do so can result in being banned from public transport, reserving tickets early, blocked from restaurants and endless other insults. For example, 27 million have been barred from purchasing plane tickets, as of 2019.
Life is mutating towards gaming. More and more entrepreneurs adapt this model to sell their goods and services. Very often, it is those clicking away who are the product being sold, to others who will manipulate the data for their own new ventures. Whatever it is in real life, we have learned to click our way to it, feeling some modicum of satisfaction in getting what we came for: stimulation. As we become accustomed to it, there will come a time when we can't do anything without checking online first (where that will be recorded). The quickest path for all desires will be clicking.
At the same time, data collection will become even more intrusive. Smartwatches will send body data to match the clicking. Heartbeat, blood pressure, respiration, perspiration and so on, while the phone camera sends expression and emotion to round out the effects of every click. Phones already have sufficient penetration but watches might have to be made mandatory to get to the same point faster. It will of course be framed as for your safety and protection, the fastest way to acceptance.
And all along, humans have been giving up on humans: "When Allison de Fren studied the early online Usenet group alt.sex.fetish, she noticed two patterns: those who desire robots and those who desire to become robots." The virtual world has become the refuge for desires: "The digital as infinitely reproducible media of virtual desire-experiences which not only respond to but construct the desire of its users," he says.
He has found an online dating service called Affectica, which has reduced emotions to just four: happy, confused, surprised, and disgusted. These four are "perfectly sufficient and successful at predicting and anticipating human emotion and desire." All the rest are superfluous, merely variants of the big four, and unnecessary for finding a mate, apparently. This has the potential to streamline online dating, or at very least, offer an approach different from the mass of dating services now available. And yet, it is just a further invasion of the psyche.
And sooner or later, it's not enough: "Deconstruction teaches that the digital object is never as good as the real-world one it represents, but psychoanalysis teaches that the actual object is never as good as the digital information which represents it. At the same time, digital objects like those that have become ubiquitous only since ... 2001 seem to offer another way of thinking through the relationship between objects and their signs. In cases of today's information-objects, both statements seem true."
Bown tries hard to merge Marx and Freud: "What psychoanalysis offers is a way to make visible how we are being tricked at a psychic level by the economies of desire found in capitalism." Capitalism doesn't care. It will exploit any gap it finds. But the value of psychoanalysis in the argument remains clouded, at least for me.
The book is a classic leftist screed, a tangle of ideas, citations and concepts from other leftists. Bown himself is a gamer, and comes at this with that bent. It all makes for a complex and busy book. Not necessarily an easy read, but chock of full of different angles.
It is true, but is it valuable? I am less than convinced.
Ultimately, he says "We are left with little desire, undertaking the endless expenditure of capital in small zombified gestures of unfulfilling, micro-pleasure-yielding moments that characterise contemporary life."
That is a depressing thought to end with, so I offer a little Haiku from comic Amanda Lund to put it all in perspective:
“Human connection
Is what life is all about”
she typed on her phone.
David Wineberg… (mehr)