Is This Ad Relevant To You?

Ian Besler Design Research & Process Los Angeles

[isthisadrelevanttoyou]

Facebook allows users to turn off the company’s ability to use the data it collects from third-party apps and websites for targeted ads. There is currently no way to stop the company from collecting the information in the first place, or using it for other purposes […]

Sam Schechner and Mark Secada, “You Give Apps Sensitive Personal Information. Then They Tell Facebook,” The Wall Street Journal, Feb. 22, 2019, web [https://www.wsj.com/articles/you-give-apps-sensitive-personal-information-then-they-tell-facebook-11550851636]

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“So, in a blatant act of fake-news making, he flipped the story. He had the Union uniforms recolored gray, and the Confederate uniforms painted blue. In a scene showing the capture of a Confederate flag, the flag was painted out. He advertised ‘The Battle of Atlanta’ as a Confederate victory.”

Holland Cotter, “A Victory for the Civil War ‘Cyclorama’,” The New York Times, Feb. 21, 2019, web [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/21/arts/design/confederate-monuments-cyclorama-atlanta.html]

[isthisadrelevanttoyou]

The primary self-narration of one’s life shifts in its fundamental composition. Instead of a formulaic sequence of places and events associated with family, work, and relationships, the main thread of one’s life story now is the electronic commodities and media services through which all experience has been filtered, recorded, or constructed. As the possibility of a single lifetime job vanishes, the enduring lifework available for most is the elaboration of one’s relations to apparatuses. Everything once loosely considered to be ‘personal’ is now reconfigured so as to facilitate the fabrication of oneself into a jumble of identities that exist only as effects of temporary technological arrangements

Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, Verso, 2013, pgs. #58-59.

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[…] people seized on a minute detail of her shared screenshot: the ‘search’ icon in the upper left corner. Its presence suggested that the published note was one of many drafts she had carefully constructed with professional help, thus undercutting her attempt to appear off-the-cuff.

Lindsey Weber, “How We Apologize Now,” The New York Times, Jan. 12, 2019, web, Jan. 14, 2019 [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/12/style/notes-app-celebrity-statements.html]

[isthisadrelevanttoyou]

Amateurs have long provided much of the patchy knowledge we have about nature. […] As technologically advanced as we are, the natural world is still a very big and complex place, and the best way to learn what’s going on is for a lot of people to spend a lot of time observing it. The Latin root of the word ‘amateur’ is, after all, the word ‘lover.’

Brooke Jarvis, “The Insect Apocalypse Is Here,” The New York Times Magazine, 27 Nov. 2018, web, 8 Dec. 2018 [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/27/magazine/insect-apocalypse.html]

[isthisadrelevanttoyou]

Society members dislike seeing themselves described, over and over in news stories, as ‘amateurs.’ It’s a framing that reflects, they believe, a too-narrow understanding of what it means to be an expert or even a scientist — what it means to be a student of the natural world.

Brooke Jarvis, “The Insect Apocalypse Is Here,” The New York Times Magazine, 27 Nov. 2018, web, 8 Dec. 2018 [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/27/magazine/insect-apocalypse.html]

[isthisadrelevanttoyou]

My face is in the original database.

Hou Xiameng in Li Yuan, “How Cheap Labor Drives China’s A.I. Ambitions,” The New York Times, 25 Nov. 2018, web [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/25/business/china-artificial-intelligence-labeling.html]

[isthisadrelevanttoyou]

The machines aren’t smart enough to teach themselves yet.

Yi Yake in Li Yuan, “How Cheap Labor Drives China’s A.I. Ambitions,” The New York Times, 25 Nov. 2018, web [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/25/business/china-artificial-intelligence-labeling.html]

[isthisadrelevanttoyou]

All the artificial intelligence is built on human labor.

Liang Rui in Li Yuan, “How Cheap Labor Drives China’s A.I. Ambitions,” The New York Times, 25 Nov. 2018, web [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/25/business/china-artificial-intelligence-labeling.html]

[isthisadrelevanttoyou]

We’re the construction workers in the digital world. Our job is to lay one brick after another.

Yi Yake in Li Yuan, “How Cheap Labor Drives China’s A.I. Ambitions,” The New York Times, 25 Nov. 2018, web [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/25/business/china-artificial-intelligence-labeling.html]

[isthisadrelevanttoyou]

I used to think the machines are geniuses. Now I know we’re the reason for their genius.

Hou Xiameng in Li Yuan, “How Cheap Labor Drives China’s A.I. Ambitions,” The New York Times, 25 Nov. 2018, web [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/25/business/china-artificial-intelligence-labeling.html]

[isthisadrelevanttoyou]

Sometimes I lie in bed at three or four in the morning and I imagine myself flying miles above the earth, very cold, and one of those black secret spy planes is up there with the huge round engines with the spinning blades in it, the blades that look like the underside of mushrooms? The black plane’s going very fast in the opposite direction and we intersect, and I fly right through one of those jet engines, and I exit as this long fog of blood. I’m miles long, and, because it’s so cold, I’m crystalline. […] And then I recondense in bed, sshhp, as my short warm self. […] But that’s what telephone travel would be like out there, I think. What am I saying, that’s what it is like.

Nicholson Baker, Vox, New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1993, pgs. 95-96.

[isthisadrelevanttoyou]

The Lantern Assisted Living & Memory Care

Larissa MacFarquhar, “The Comforting Fictions of Dementia Care,” The New Yorker, Oct. 8, 2018, web [https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/08/the-comforting-fictions-of-dementia-care]

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As I walked out of the office-supply store, I became aware of the power of all these individual, simultaneously pending transactions: all over the city, and at selected sites in other states, events were being set in motion on my behalf, services were being performed, simply because I had requested them and in some cases paid or agreed to pay later for them. […] All of this and more I could get the world to do for me, and at the same time all of it was going on, I could walk down the street, unburdened with the niceties of the individual tasks, living my life!

Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine, New York: Vintage, 1988, pgs. 21–22.

[isthisadrelevanttoyou]

Apparently my shoe-tying routine was so unvarying and robotic that over those hundreds of mornings I had inflicted identical levels of wear on both laces. The near simultaneity was very exciting—it made the variables of private life seem suddenly graspable and law-abiding.

Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine, New York: Vintage, 1988, pg. 15.

[isthisadrelevanttoyou]

I like elements which are hybrid rather than ‘pure,’ compromising rather than ‘clean,’ distorted rather than ‘straightforward,’ ambiguous rather than ‘articulated,’ perverse as well as impersonal, boring as well as ‘interesting,’ conventional rather than ‘designed,’ accommodating rather than excluding, redundant rather than simple, vestigial as well as innovating, inconsistent and equivocal rather than direct and clear. I am for messy vitality over obvious unity. I included the non sequitur and proclaim the duality.

Robert Venturi, “Nonstraightforward Architecture: A Gentle Manifesto,” in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1977, pg. 16.

[isthisadrelevanttoyou]

Our sense of spatial and temporal orientation has changed dramatically in recent years, prompted by new technologies of surveillance, tracking, and targeting. One of the symptoms of this transformation is the growing importance of aerial views: overviews, Google Map views, satellite views. We are growing increasingly accustomed to what used to be called a God’s-eye view.

Hito Steyerl, “In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective” from The Wretched of the Screen, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012, pg. 14.