This is part of Disassemble, a philosophy of tech newsletter.
The Fall of the Magician by Pieter van der Heyden
So in my last newsletter I threw out an accusation:
Designers do not design for the legibility of meaning of technologies or the systems they are part of
What this statement shows is that you shouldn’t end a sentence with a preposition. Oh, and that those who create digital services and products are complicit in restricting human action and thought in unhelpful ways.
To drive to this point, I described something called Dasein. It's a word the philosopher Martin Heidegger used - essentially meaning our being-in-the-world. The word 'life' carried far too much baggage for his liking. 'Life' implies a certain intrinsic distinction between subject and object. Heidegger's aim - one of them, at least - was to illuminate this divide as false. He does this by describing how we don’t get a choice - we are faced with a reality, and our thought and actions are afforded, for good or ill, by this reality. Subject and objection are conjoined; the subject is not the subject in question without the object, and vice versa.
Dasein is our possibilities for action — action being how we fundamentally engage and understand our world. And as such, a certain reality is ‘revealed’ - as Heidegger called it - to us. A river is perceived as a method of transportation for timber. A jar is perceived as for storing, as part of the activity of preserving food for a cold, isolated winter. Each thing in dasein is a mode of revealing a larger network of being, including actions, habits and needs.
So what do the things in our world ‘reveal’ to us?
Ours is a world swallowed by an environment of digital information. As such this information environment prescribes and proscribes our actions in uncountable ways. Applying for a job, making a friend, going to school - these activities are not only facilitated by technology, but also create new categories of actions involved in the activities (e.g., friending someone on Facebook, uploading a cv to a website, reading course material on a school portal).
Dasein is a helpful concept here because it eliminates the distinction between the subject of human and the object of technology and allows us to examine the being-in-the-world (i.e. dasein) as unified whole. It explores how our information environment isn't in a state that is separate, apart and final, but rather how we and our information environment are mutually constitutive.
It’s easy to see how this is true - just try to imagine yourself without a technology. For example, it’s extremely challenging to parse how Facebook has impacted your thoughts and behaviour, not in the least because of the plethora of counterfactual impacts you have to account for: how would your life, your mind, society, and the physical world be literally, materially different if Facebook never existed? In trying to do this you can see the extent to which we are intertwined with ‘objects’: how could you possibly understand how the cascade of variables of Facebook’s nonexistence would compile and make you and your reality different?
In this way, we find ourselves in a state that is facilitated toward engaging within the limits of dasein: engaging in 'what to do', and far less so 'why to do'. Our information environment is one that engages us 'to do', not to examine it, us, or the larger system.
Tech workers are complicit in this: they solve for ‘needs of task’, not ‘needs of purpose’. They solve for action within dasein, not for action upon dasein. This is the premise of ‘needs solving’ and ‘consumer demand’ within fields such as user experience and marketing: technology forms solutions for human problems. UX designers work to find problems in human behaviour so that they can be solved by the technological. Marketers work to create desire to be fulfilled by the technological.
Here is a fairly typical graphic about the UX process. The journey is one of orientation, dependency and attachment for and toward the product, a particular part of an information environment.
This is a particularly egregious example, but it evidences the purportedly necessary habituating and need-forming process of product design. User experience design facilitates the above journey through the 'solving of pain points' and 'jobs to be done'.
The issue is that these needs are cultivated to be within a dasein, and toward a particular revealed structure of that dasein. Again, it's about acting in an information environment in a very particular way, not making the information environment legible.
In most cases, this 'particular way' is, quite simply, spending: how can we fulfill your needs in a way that makes you spend money on our products. Usability and utility are the byproduct of a better product, not a better person: I design a more usable search so you can find what you need faster, and we get a higher commission. I design a photo sharing feature so you can share photos with your friends and we get more users, and more money.
And what of digital marketers?
Don’t worry, I didn’t place ads in the newsletter - it’s a screenshot (you’re so habituated to such ads you probably barely saw it anyway). These small blocks, 'personalised' to you, litter websites and search engines.
This is what digital marketers & ad brokers do: they create personalised clickbait that reflect the data in your cookies - your browsing history, inferred or actual demographic data - and pattern the ads toward a hypothesised disposition. In this way, the structure is exacerbating and escalating the pre-existing dispositions toward purchasing, toward worrying, toward, toward reinforcing, rather than tugging on the curtain to reveal what's beneath. You are ‘revealed’ a particular part of dasein, you don't even see how this revealed part of dasein comes about. Action is directed within dasien, because it is predictable, and predictable results in sales.
Of course, it’s not just UXers and marketers; all roles in tech are complicit in directing the user to only engage in the interiority of dasein.
Heather Wiltse and Johan Redström tackles a this in their book Changing Things: The Future of Objects in a Digital World:
As designers will seek to, literally, transcend the experience of an assemblage and push it toward the experience of a totality....this means we will try to more or less mask exteriority relations, and instead emphasize how the components have fused
The goal is the fusing of dasein, a managed holism facilitating dispositions looking within, not looking out. This 'masking' effect is the revealing act of dasein. It reveals what is there to sustain itself, but not to question itself.
So what to do?
How does one disable the constriction of action and thought of this designed dasein? What do I mean to ‘make the system legible’?
Instead of the ad(s) above, I could be shown demographic data that informs me of what people like me are concerned about. I could then make decisions off of that. Alternatively, I could reject it, saying 'this doesn't accurately portray me’. Yet there is no indication of even why I am getting these ads. I can't question dasien, I can only be within it more.
Spotify, for the past few years has provided you with "Spotify Wrapped" - essentially your Spotify listening behavior over the past year. It's fantastic, multi-page visual report that is informative, curious and compelling. You further understand the music you like, your feelings and moods over the past year, and even what different music genres entail. You are able to reflect on dasein.
The thing is, this isn't easily accessible data. Spotify provides this data to you once a year, at Christmas, as a present of sorts. You get to interrogate the larger structures at play, rather than just listlessly engage with an endless stream of music on Spotify, once a year.
Of course, there used to be a website, spotify.me, that provided immediate data on your listening habits. It shut down this year. Spotify.me now redirects to ‘Spotify for Brands’. Joy. There is simply no money in interrogating dasein - only in reinforcing it.
In all, there are depressingly few examples of technology that truly reveals information environments, and how they constrain and enable.
Some might say examination of dasein is centred in the 'quantified self' movement. Apps like Sleep101 and RescueTime allow users to track their time on their various habits and behaviours. Yet this is little more than an another reinforcement of the established dasein; the idea is that you can be more productive, contribute more to dasein rather than reflect on how and why you ‘be-in-the-world’.
Even ethical tech spends its time within the dasein of an established information environment. Most ethical tech tends to focus on privacy and security. Look at the ethical tech alternatives here. There are great apps, certainly, but they aren't focussed on legibility of systems.
It's worth noting here that I'm not just suggesting tech needs to only allow the user to view more of their personal data; understanding a system, understanding oneself in that system doesn't require data, it requires - as is evident by the phrasing - understanding. Understanding can be instigated through the analysis of data, but data alone is insufficient. As James Bridle writes in his excellent book New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future:
Computational knowing requires surveillance, because it can only produce its truth from the data that is available to it directly. In turn, all knowing is reduced to that which is computationally knowable, so all knowing becomes a form of surveillance.
The best that hordes of data can be without understanding is surveillance.
Well, maybe not the best. It can also be digital art. Here is a website Tobias Revell made tracking how we use the much ballyhooed word the 'new normal'. Here's a video that Sam Lavigne made that pulls and compile micro clips of real estate videos that use the word ‘renovated’. I like these pieces, they allow us to see the system, manufactured and self-reinforcing, as it is. But as a whole, they don't allow us to see ourselves in dasein to a great degree. They show us the constellations in the sky, but it isn’t clear what they mean, or if we ourselves are in one.
So, I didn’t really get to many good examples of reflecting and interrogating dasein did I?
To finish off this longer-than-anticipated newsletter let me give you one example that I think is effective.
‘Take a break’ is the name. It’s a new feature on the browser Vivaldi.
This feature is deceptively simple - it just hides all the content and tabs until you re-engage it. All music is paused. All videos halt. It doesn't close anything. In simply empowers users to freeze their dasein - and extract themselves from it to reflect. There needn't be any anxiety related to closing your content - it's all still there. There is simply a pause button and dasein freezes. The information environment is, though not revealed in any way, at least hidden consciously.
You have time to shift your actions to a different way of being. If you want. And if you’re able.
So I turn to you. Do you have any good examples about being able to reflect on dasien? Any tech you can think of that facilitates consciously revealing the information environment and your place, your actions, and your thoughts in it in new ways? Let me know. Cause like the title says - you’re part of it, even if you aren’t a marketer or designer. Even if you don’t build tech, you’re up to your eyes in the ones and zeros of your dasein.
Catch you in a week or two.