The Room Where Averages Break
A peculiar phenomenon haunts the digital age - the way attempts at personalization lead deeper into standardization. The tools built to express individuality have become instruments of conformity, operating through "far-from-equilibrium conditions"[1], creating an illusion of endless possibility while enforcing subtle standardization.The mechanisms of this transformation operate through soft control, that gentle force that "applies a minimum amount of force, and modulates 'specification vs. creativity, closure and replicability vs. open-endedness and surprise'"[2]. This control manifests in systems where "being out of control does not mean to be beyond control"[3], crafting an environment of apparent freedom within carefully defined boundaries.
Digital spaces present themselves as infinitely customizable, yet they operate through "an imposed and inescapable uniformity to our compulsory labor of self-management"[4]. Users navigate these spaces experiencing "sudden and frequent shifts from absorption in a cocoon of control and personalization into the contingency of a shared world intrinsically resistant to control"[5]. These cocoons become comfortable prisons of curated content and predictable pleasures.The marketplace exemplifies this paradox, where "Products are hardly just devices or physical apparatuses, but various services and interconnections that quickly become the dominant or exclusive ontological templates of one's social reality"[6]. Modern services demonstrate this with their "10,257 products range from postcards of crawfish to bumper stickers featuring a piece of cheese"[7], all generated by "feeding some obscure database of natural images into product creator and waiting to see what sticks"[8].
The infrastructure supporting this process reveals that "Control is located at the two ends of the process: at the beginning, when a set of local rules is carefully put together and fine tuned; and at the end, when a searching device or a set of aims and objectives aim at ensuring the survival of the most useful or pleasing variations"[9]. Within this structure, "conformity to reality, adaptation to power, are no longer the result of a dialectical process between subject and reality but are produced directly by the cogs and levers of industry"[10].
The digital environment creates a situation where "the individual has to invent a self-understanding that optimizes or facilitates their participation in digital milieus and speeds"[11]. This self-understanding develops within systems where "docility and separation are not indirect by-products of a financialized global economy, but are among its primary aims"[12].In this context, "it is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real"[13]. These systems generate what appears as enhancement: "technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself"[14].
Faced with this complexity, users often respond by seeking more technology: "overwhelmed by the pace that technology makes possible, we think about how new, more efficient technologies might help dig us out"[15]. This creates a cycle where "the experience of these shifts inevitably enhances one's attraction to the former, and magnifies the mirage of one's own privileged exemption"[16].The economic forces driving this standardization create "a spontaneously productive and autonomous force"[17] that shapes behavior while claiming to merely reflect it. This force operates within "the formalism of this principle and the entire logic established around it stem from the opacity and entanglement of interests in a society"[18].
Digital mirrors have transformed into mechanisms where "the open network is a global and large realization of the liquid state that pushes to the limits the capacity of control mechanisms"[19]. While "a multitude can always veer off somewhere unexpected under the spell of some strange attractor"[20], these deviations occur within "an experiment in the control of systems that respond violently and often suicidally to rigid control"[21]. The tools designed to express individuality have become the very mechanisms of conformity, The process remains unfinished, operating in a space where "the problem of fine-tuning the machine is both nonlinear and highly coupled: changing one variable in one direction might produce unexpected results"[22].
References
[1] Terranova, T. (2004) Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age, London: Pluto Press, p.129.
[2] Terranova, T. (2004) Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age, London: Pluto Press, p.126.
[3] Terranova, T. (2004) Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age, London: Pluto Press, p.121.
[4] Crary, J. (2013) Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, London: Verso, p.57.
[5] Turkle, S. (2011) Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, New York: Basic Books, p.100.
[6] Crary, J. (2013) Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, London: Verso, p.42.
[7] Bridle, J. (2018) New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future, London: Verso.
[8] Bridle, J. (2018) New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future, London: Verso.
[9] Terranova, T. (2004) Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age, London: Pluto Press, p.125.
[10] Horkheimer, M. and Adorno, T. W. (2002) Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, Stanford: Stanford University Press, p.191.
[11] Crary, J. (2013) Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, London: Verso, p.99.
[12] Crary, J. (2013) Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, London: Verso, p.42.
[13] Baudrillard, J. (1994) Simulacra and Simulation, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, p.3.
[14] Benjamin, W. (1969) The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, New York: Schocken Books, p.4.
[15] Turkle, S. (2011) Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, New York: Basic Books, p.299.
[16] Crary, J. (2013) Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, London: Verso, p.100.
[17] Terranova, T. (2004) Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age, London: Pluto Press, p.125.
[18] Horkheimer, M. and Adorno, T. W. (2002) Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, Stanford: Stanford University Press, p.44.
[19] Terranova, T. (2004) Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age, London: Pluto Press, p.125.
[20] Terranova, T. (2004) Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age, London: Pluto Press, p.112.
[21] Terranova, T. (2004) Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age, London: Pluto Press, p.115.
[22] Bridle, J. (2018) New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future, London: Verso.