Introducing friends who talk about…: an editorial series where I invite friends from all corners of the world to spontaneously muse on topics we have edgy thoughts on. (Like a culture podcast but the episodes are in writing and there are visuals! I'm working on a non-clunky way to say this!)
The first issue is on the aesthetics of tech, and how we might live ethically with technology, material, privacy, data, and the looks of it all. Read to the end to earn the treat of our uneasy 2022 resolution. Contributors:
- Words: Kelly Pendergrast is a writer and researcher living in San Francisco. She loves going to the movies and her favorite research tool is Google Images.
- Words: Kyle Paoletta is a critic and journalist in Cambridge, MA. He thinks book jackets peaked in 1987.
- Words: Me, an editor, designer, and strategist based in Brooklyn. She is a proud owner of a dumb beautiful speaker.
- Photo: Behzod Sirjani is the founder of Yet Another Studio where he helps organizations build intentional practices of learning. He lives in Seattle, which is perfect except for its lack of Blue Bottle Coffee.
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Vicky: Thanks again both for joining me in this experiment! Starting us off with our prompt, an except from Kelly's piece on cozy tech for Real Life Mag:
"Smart fabrics and the luscious textiles that cover smart home assistants are, if anything, doubly alienated. After the transition of raw material and labor to commodity, the fibers are embedded with sensors or draped over internet-connected speakers, far removed from their earlier function as a cloth that warms and protects, connected to global systems of data collection and capital. What repressed horrors might bubble and reemerge with these strange new fabrics? What animating forces might be smuggled beneath the light-dappled cloth? Perhaps it’s just cloth. But with cloth comes a long history of labor, industry, computation, commodity fetishism, and fantasy. It’s never just cloth."
Kyle: Before we get into the specific questions posed at the end of your essay, Kelly, I thought I'd throw out a quote that was in the product design video for Google Home that you linked to. Isabelle Olsson, who leads their Design for Home division, says that her ultimate goal is "that the products we create become so natural in your life that you don't think about them as technology anymore."
That's an ambition that I think a lot of tech companies share, particularly the dominant ones, and I think it ratchets up the stakes of the questions on the table here.
Kelly: Yes! I'm still obsessed with that Google Home video (as an aesthetic object in itself, and as an ideological text). I do think a throughline of the Cozy Tech piece was about technology that is designed to obscure itself.
Vicky: Adding in the final quote of the video: "I think technology will eventually be invisible. The design challenge is to make that transition smooth and beautiful."
That brings up a new question for me: But is invisibility…good?
Kyle: Absolutely not!
Both because of the real-world impacts I just mentioned and because I think invisibility further obscures the real profit center for most of these companies, which is harvesting personal data and selling it to advertisers. We already exist mostly as consumer profiles in the digital world, so I guess I fear that fully integrating tech into our homes threatens to extend that into the physical world as well.
Kelly: Great question. I feel like tech boosters often counter this kind of critique, Kyle, with "well the old way of doing things was bad and exploitative as well, so why are you complaining about this cool innovation."
I think invisibility is inevitable to an extent — not necessarily literal invisibility (as in visually hidden) but naturalized to an extent that it no longer appears as 'technology.'
Kyle, yesterday I was reading "The New Pornographers" report that you contributed to, and thinking about the aesthetic lust that iPhones are designed to induce, moreso even than excitement about the technical specs. No fabric there, but a carapace of crave-able materials and shiny screens. Again, tech that makes itself about surfaces.
Kyle: Either way, tech does an amazing job of obscuring the horrific labor conditions and environmental degradation that goes into the creation of every product.
Vicky: Kyle, your thoughts remind me of a passage data artist Jer Thorp narrates in his book Living in Data: "What I've learned since my travels in Angola [as a National Geographic Explorer] is that all of us who live in data need to be better at imagining futures. Not only techno-utopian ones in which our work serves the greater good, but less hopeful paths in which our actions put people and environments in the face of harm. We need to understand that the act of collection does, in a real way, touch those who live in data. It touches them—us—in ways that can be immediately threatening, but also in small, repetitive, persistent, quotidian ways that accrue harm over time."
Kelly: Vicky, the thing that first jumped out from that passage (and I loved Thorp's book) was the "travels in Angola as a National Geographic Explorer" bit. I'm not sure of the context of his trip, but it does seem to speak to the challenge of understanding how data and tech touches people at different places in the supply chain or global economy.
Vicky: Yes — and also interesting that Thorp learns this from his experience in on-the-ground data collection in Angola — what might be considered a third world country to Americans. And yet "developed" countries fail to see the parallels between us, regardless of social stature or country development. It's like we unconsciously believe our relative wealth protects us from negative externalities, when in fact we're also so close to them.
Kyle: And we're all living in data now, for better or for worse. If I'm imagining the logical endpoint of the full integration of a product like Google Home or Amazon's Alexa devices, I think it would be something like a jug of milk being delivered to your door a few hours after you mention to your spouse that you're almost out. As this quote gets at, that's a utopia to some and a dystopia to others. I guess it depends how much you're willing to compromise your own autonomy in the name of convenience.
Right now we're making a choice to buy fast fashion or GMO grapes. What happens when we lose the opportunity to make those decisions for ourselves?
Kelly: Yes! I think there's an opportunity in the moment that new technologies are emerging to look at them critically and imagine their potential implications or unintended consequences. Eventually the new tech becomes old tech and it's no longer possible to "see" it in the same way. So, I think we need to grasp the chance to critique, even if we end up looking like goofy alarmists in the future.
Vicky: Oooof, don't get me started on our need for speed and crave for convenience. I don't understand it, at least for those who are conventionally able-bodied and without dependents. Though delivery services are another convo. Looping back around to smart tech—I think of a personal story:
I've never purchased a smart speaker, though I own a Google Home mini that a dear friend gifted to me years ago, intended as a space efficient speaker when I moved to NYC. I'd been using it in my bedroom, and one night as I was going to sleep, it started beeping and flashing lights. (It probably just lost wifi connection.) In my half-asleep state, I freaked out and ripped it out of the outlet immediately and wasn't emotionally ready to plug it back in until like a week later, lol.
I also realized I wasn't using it for anything other than playing music, and years later, I finally got myself a proper Marshall speaker.
Kelly: A Marshall! How musical/audiophile of you! Is it "smart"?
Vicky: Hah, it's blissfully dumb. Years later and still traumatized so I was going for a stupid beautiful speaker. I didn't realize until browsing the Marshall website that of course they already have speakers with Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa integrated.
Kyle: I haven't seen those before! I have a Sonos system that I absolutely loathe the look of (and experience of using, but that's a story for another day). I feel like doing something as simple as including a fabric front makes that product so much more appealing. Which is of course Kelly's whole point.
Kelly: Interesting how speakers are such a big space for aesthetics. Vicky, your acquisition of a Marshall (mid century chunky look with a proud rock and roll history) reminds me that it isn't just smart speakers and contemporary tech companies who are invested in speaker look and feel. There's a whole history of audiophile aesthetics to get invested in too. And fabric has been present all the way through, since it's a medium that allows sound to pass through.
Kyle: On a similar note, I've been struck by the Facebook/Ray-Ban sunglasses as a similar way to wed an established brand with futuristic technology. That seems like a pretty obvious attempt to skirt the problems with Google Glass by making the "smart" elements of the sunglasses invisible, never mind the attendant privacy concerns.
Kelly: Yes! It's almost surprising that it took this long to integrate smartness and new tech into these classic styles. Seems like until recently the focus was on pairing new tech with futuristic aesthetics.
Kyle: A much clunkier version of this is the ridiculous Bose Frames Tempos that we talked about in the Components piece, which feel very Sky Mall.
Kelly: Those Bose frames made me laugh out loud! So Sky Mall.
Vicky: Wow, I'm 110% not the target market for those.
Kyle: I feel like a lot of these products really teeter on a knife's edge between revolutionary and ridiculous. I want to say the Facebook Ray Bans are ridiculous, but I can't be sure.
Kelly: I'm truly not sure — with smart glasses, we may not know what's ridiculous and what's revolutionary until one of the models finally takes off in a big way!
Kyle: Probably the bigger issue is the fact that you're able to record people without them knowing it. Not a privacy issue for the consumer, and thus not one the company needs to pay lip service to, but still alarming.
Kelly: I also think "privacy" is a bit of a red herring with things like this — there may be some degree of data privacy and ability to control settings, but you're still bringing yourself into a whole ecosystem of data collection, extraction, and aggregation.
Although I have to admit that when the Ray Bans launched, the issue of recording people without their knowledge/consent barely crossed my mind, whereas with Google Glass it was a huge issue (and one of GG's downfalls). Perhaps that bird has flown?
Vicky: But baby bird's not ready to fly! The FB x Raybans came out around the same time I was looking for a new speaker, so I was already in a 'keep it simple, stupid' mindset. As a past marketing person, it made me wonder: if companies are gonna keep making smart stuff, they're gonna need to get better at accessibly engendering trust with people beyond just…a marketing microsite. Nicely packaged corporate communications have a history of smartwashing the gritty truth. Like greenwashing, but make it privacy?
Kyle: Kelly, what did you make of the Components "The New Pornographers" piece's treatment of tech's disposability? That seems to go together with your Real Life Mag essay on your OXO corkscrew.
Kelly: The Components approach to disposability really resonated with me! I appreciate the way repairability was tied in to questions around what truly user-focused tech would look like.
Kyle: I think we're all conditioned to think of an object like a corkscrew as having a finite lifespan, but we get annoyed when our devises stop working and need to be replaced. The more tech we have, the less annoyed about that we'll get, I wager. And that's probably not going to help us get to a more user-centered version of tech.
Vicky: On that note, quoting the fifth slide from the end in "The New Pornographers": "A truly user-focused review paradigm would map out the ways a user seeks to channel their will through an object and examine how that object potentiates or blocks that volition. This sounds simple and straightforward; reviewers would likely argue that they already do this. But if they did, the products they evaluate wouldn't be assessed as works of art on a relativistic score distribution, mostly good, many great. Instead, they'd be treated as tools that can either help or hinder the user, scored entirely according to where they fell on the continuum between useful and useless."
Kelly: Yes! That's what I was thinking about Vicky.
Kyle: Similarly, the more fuzzy and warm the design of consumer tech gets, the more distance we'll get from the idea that devices are supposed to be tools for doing certain things. Your Alexa speakers will just be like a lamp that sits in the corner until you go to use it and it doesn't work, at which point a newer, most pleasing designed version will already be on the way.
Kelly: Exactly — the workings of the smart phone and smart speaker are both obscured, whereas the corkscrew is out there in the open. If it breaks, you see why. But the Alexa feels like a mystery — if it stops working you may never find out why, but instead will feel ok to just chuck it and replace it (especially since desire will have been built for the new cooler model).
Vicky: Desire! At what point do our desires detract from our experience? From valuing and respecting the utility that's already in front of us?
Kyle: It's a physical manifestation of the way data gets defamiliarized from its source by analytical models (which I've written about in relation to elections and weather forecasting for Real Life Mag). It becomes so easy to lose track of the root of the thing once you have all these pretty pictures to admire.
Kelly: And why should we each have to keep track of the root of everything? It's an impossible burden!
Vicky: Burdens that we're perhaps not meant to meticulously track and carry.
Kelly: Also, and to your earlier point Vicky, objects like Google Home Mini are so easy to come by. Google is always trying to send me one! It's almost a challenge to keep them out of your house.
Vicky: Yes! It's like they're free—er, subsidized by ad profits.
Kyle: You know what they say, if the service is free, then you're the product.
Kelly: Now in weirder and more abstracted, datafied, ways than ever!
Vicky: Thinking about the new year and new year resolutions — for example, that we must constantly improve what's unsatisfactory about our lives — and matching that to the narrative that product companies often sell — "here, a thing that will solve for your deficiencies" — it makes me aarrrrgggghhhh.
Kelly: Me too! I started January with plans to do a month of gentle cleaning/apartment organization, but have already given up. The conflicting imperatives of minimalism, product fetishism, and aesthetics were too much for me!
Kyle: I can totally relate to Kelly's feeling. I find it impossible to disentangle anything I own from the devilish supply chain that brought it to me, the waste stream, or the ways in which is provides a way for other companies to make more money off me. If I'm a techno-sceptic, it's because I just don't believe the core tenant of consumerism: that the way to fix what ails you is to buy a product.
Vicky: Kelly, curious to what your closing thoughts to this might be. When it feels too much, what's just enough?
Kelly: I'll tell you when I find out! I'm hoping there's a point where I don't imagine half the objects in my apartment vibrating with unease — unease about their provenance or function, or about their aesthetic deficiency, or about my own relationship to them.
Vicky: Vibrating with unease! Yes. That something doesn't quite feel right — an inner rumbling that we all feel in varying intensities. But if anything, I think feeling at ease is the more dangerous mood to be in. So the queasiness must mean we're onto something — and I suppose that can be our solace.
With that, our 2022 resolution: Vibrate with Unease. 😅
Kyle: Love it! Thanks guys, this was fun.
Kelly: Also love it! Thank you Kyle, thank you Vicky!! 🥂 Here's to finding the good vibrations.
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