Design, Phenomenology, Capitalism & sucking at newsletter titles
This is part of Disassemble, a philosophy of tech newsletter.
In Capitalist Realism, cultural theorist and philosopher Mark Fisher noted that capitalism is:
"more like a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action."
Mark Fisher spent his life - cut far too short - exposing the harms of this 'invisible barrier' that he saw as so dictating both our personhood and the society that engendered it. Half a century earlier the Frankfurt School philosophers said much the same thing. In Dialectic of Enlightenment they discussed how capitalism's products are created to appeal to the masses and encourage conformity in consumers. The parameters of action, they noted, were dictated by products, especially 'cultural products' - television, film, and the like. Choice is merely between slight variations of these products, which are all involved in a grand narrative that reinforces established capitalist mores.
We're all aware that these are hardly revolutionary ideas anymore. Even those who question their truthfulness admit that consumer-hood underscores our 'being' in the world.
But there can also be limits to how effective it is to discuss capitalism as a generalised monolith, in part because it has an array of impacts that can be interpreted as both good and bad, depending on how they manifest, and depending on the perspective in question.
Still, it is highly fascinating how little we care about this widely accepted truth. Perhaps this is due to the necessary immediacy of thought and action that precipitates from the 'capitalist realism' that defines us: it's hard to think of anything but ‘the now’. It feels as though we don't care about the context of why things happen so much as what is happening. So little effort is geared toward seeing why things have to be this way, how our actions constrained and enabled by the system, and how we are complicit in the system’s mechanics . What even is this system?
For a tech worker like me, the most apparent manifestation of the 'invisible barrier' Mark Fisher discussed is.....well, technology. Aside from some concerns about surveillance tech, technology, we think, expands our horizons of freedom. We believe our choices and actions are instigated purely by our minds, themselves impassioned observers in a chaotic word.
To show how questionable this assertion is, I'm going to investigate how tech workers are involved in creating systems that constrain and enable.
It may seem sensible to start by examining this by looking at technology and its impacts. You often see this approach in the media and in the social sciences. Another method is to discuss reified concepts — e.g., capitalism and technology — as Mark Fisher and the Frankfurt school did.
But in order to understand the effects of which we are willing facilitators, we need to look at the conditions of technology ‘being’ in our lives. Simply put: Why are things are the way they are vis a vis technology? In this sense it's helpful to take a phenomenological approach.
We can start this approach by using what Heidegger called dasein.
Dasein sees us humans having a sort of 'forestructure', a way of being in the world, that is defined by our environment. In other words, there is no separating the mind from the context within which it sits, as minds are embodied in a world, coping with a world, in the first instance. In this way, the phenomenological approach sees the mind and body as unitary - as one essence.
Dasein’s isn’t disposed toward examining the properties of objects, but rather engaging with the world for a specific purpose. The specific properties of an object are less relevant for completing an action - what is important is that it supports such an action. And we don't pick and choose the domain of objects with which we engage, we merely engage in a world that includes 'objects' and cope as best we can.
User experience and design take on a key role here. In this stage they are constructing dasien very explicitly. Specifically, UX and design are building an information environment; all the products and services that form the digital world around us. Twitter, Slack, Amazon, your business’ intranet - all websites, apps and digital services are involved in the making of our world, as much and indeed more than a chair or a building does.
UX is essentially about allowing us to cope in dasein as smoothly as possible. It's not about what it allows us to do so much as helping us to do it easily. UX and design explicitly encourages ensuring that the nature of dasein remains un-investigated by the user. Making things as seamless as possible is the goal.
Much like parameters of actions are embedded in our cultural products, they are also manifested our information environment, which, of course mixes with the cultural products in byzantine ways. QAnon was able to come about because of the ease-of-use and popularity of Reddit. Huge numbers of celebrities got their start on Youtube or TikTok. Indeed Youtube and TikTok are premier echelons for celebrity - there is nowhere ‘up’ for many of these stars. It's not just these high profile apps, but all the apps that contribute and integrate with them that create the information environment of dasein.
The creation of this information environment is the first stage of design's dasein impact: ‘needs solving'. The idea is to make things easier or more useful to support....capital accretion? In this way ‘needs solving’ is supporting the thickening of information environments. Our world is primed for accumulation of digital information and services, and the erasure of friction against affordances that allow for spending within this information environment. Dasein is composed of selecting between services and information; it is addressing the need of a person acting within the boundaries of the system, but not the need to understand the nature of the system.
And this is the crux of the argument. Designers do not design for the legibility of meaning of technologies nor the systems they are part of. Sure, a weather app may provide you with granular detail on what the weather will be like, but it won’t interrogate what that temperature feels like to you, nor will it empower you to understand the impacts of temperature. Youtube will feed you any clip you can imagine, but it doesn’t provide the tools to scrutinise authenticity, authorship, influences or genealogy (to quote Mark Fisher again we ‘experience of pure material signifiers, or, in other words, a series of pure and unrelated presents in time’.) The way we are able to consider and think about what and how is constrained, biased toward some areas and not others.
So how do we investigate this, or allow the user to? More on that in my next newsletter.
Some great books that inspired this topic include:
Design for Dasein by Thomas Wendt. It’s not well know but it’s a great book:
Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher. Should be required reading if you’re ever purchased anything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_Realism
The drawing of Heidegger is from here: