How artist Ben Grosser cuts Mark Zuckerberg to size | Social media

[ad_1]

When the history of the early decades of this century is written, there will be few more narrated artworks than Ben Grosser’s Order of Magnitude. In the 47-minute video, Grosser, a digital artist and professor of new media at the University of Illinois, breaks down every general case in which Mark Zuckerberg spoke of “more” and “bigger.” The resulting montage of interviews and presentations is a rapid progression of the rapid growth of Facebook where in the mouth of the CEO thousands become millions and then billions. It makes for a captivating monologue, the story of our time.

Grocer, when speaking to me from Urbana via Zoom last week, suggested, “The idea that Zuckerberg tapped more than anyone else in Silicon Valley, was the need to grow as quickly as possible, to have the largest market share. And everything was subject to that.” The movie is part of a double act. Grosser also broke down all of the moments he found for Zuckerberg at any time he mentioned decreasing numbers or shrinking things. This movie runs for 30 seconds, although in a remake for its upcoming exhibition at Arebyte Gallery in London, it has slowed those seconds so it also runs for 47 minutes.

Zuckerberg’s “A” films feature in a series of projects that have made Grocer the most useful of all social media critics. Besides satirizing Zuckerberg, he’s created a bunch of software that breaks down exactly how you add up Facebook numbers. Facebook Demetricator is an app that any user can use to strip all addictive metrics from the platform, blocking results for likes and friendships that contain the exact substance dopamine. Follow Demetricators for Instagram and Twitter. After I tried the latter for a while, the effect was at first confusing and then liberating. “We’ve been conditioned to focus on numbers and use them as a proxy for how important someone is or how well something is received,” Grosser says. Without these metrics, he suggests, “you should actually read a post to see what you think of it or look at someone’s bio to see if you want to follow them.”

Ben Grosser: “Imagine if any of the artists I’ve admired in the past cared about the first 10 minutes of reaction to their work and used it as a guide.” Photo: Courtesy of Ben Grosser

Grosser, like me, is old enough to remember connections before the Internet. In the 1990s, he was excited about the possibilities of using primitive artificial intelligence to compose music – and played around making “different, weird” sounds he’d never heard before. During his first dotcom boom, he got some job offers from Silicon Valley startups, but preferred the freedom of the academic experience. He remembers being excited at first for the capabilities of Facebook, then Twitter, and the ways they “provided unrestricted interactive access to other humans in ways you didn’t have before.” It was only around 2010 that he became intensely aware of the effects his social media habit had on his brain.

“The first big realization was about the dangers,” he says. “The ways my eyes were constantly drawn to the little red and white notice number on Facebook in the days when you had to log in.” He recognized the addictive pattern of this appearance, the three-step process by which Zuckerberg’s facade compulsively steals your attention: First, “Has anyone interacted with me or paid attention to me while I was away?” A temporary flash of participatory excitement. Then the peak state of that number disappears. Then the subsequent need to publish something else, to start the cycle again. “I’m starting to think, ‘Someone designed this little feedback loop. Who are these? Who benefits?'” Grosser says.

We are constantly on our minds regarding the way we might appear on Twitter

As an art teacher, he was aware that his students had seen nothing unusual in this style. They grew up with her. He can also see how the feedback loop and a constant desire to agree has shaped their idea of ​​what art is: “They see YouTube stars and TikTok stars and think: What can I do will also get the best metric for social media engagement.” This compulsion seemed to stifle their creativity before it even formed.

Grosser poses a question to his students in the first seminar. “Who here deleted a social media post within 10 minutes of posting it, because it didn’t have the metric reaction he hoped for?” Each hand rises. Then he says, “Now imagine if any of the artists I’ve liked in the past paid attention to the first 10 minutes of reaction to their work and used that as a clue as to whether something was going to be scrapped.” If you have original and outlandish ideas, he suggests, the world may need time to adjust to them.

Photo from the Software for Less gallery. Photo: Courtesy of Ben Grosser

Grosser has been testing a platform that might help with that, too. Minus breaks all the rules of meter-obsessed media. Users are allowed only a limited number of posts: exactly 100 across the age and there are no likes or follows. The only way you can interact with another sticker is by replying. His experimental testers have reported some concerns, which sound a lot like the kind of anxiety artists have always felt: “They almost feel like there’s a lot of weight on the prism,” he says. “He’s like, ‘I’m only going to get 100, what if I hit someone on some crap?'” He hopes that the idea of ​​quality might be able to compete with the quantitative alternative: if we stop thinking, he says, “we are called to believe that the Twitter feed will last forever. And so we’re constantly on our minds in terms of how we might appear on Twitter or how something we’re doing right now would look like if I talked about it on Twitter…”

He also has projects that are messing with Silicon Valley’s algorithms that need you for emotion (Go Rando) or undermining NSA surveillance by appending random words to every email that might raise alarm bells (ScareMail). He is, in this sense, one man correcting the data-driven world in which we now find ourselves; His art highlights its limits. “The computational method of research is necessarily the process of defining limits where there may not be any limits,” he says. There is no better explanation for this, he suggests, than Spotify’s desperate recommendations. Data analytics gives you the answers that code can produce, but it completely ignores all the answers that code can’t give you. I might like Led Zeppelin but not like other rock bands in the ’70s.” The show will never be quite up to taste.

Software for Less runs at Arebyte, London E14, from 20 August to 23 October

[ad_2]