Real Life: Audio Edition

The auto industry used political leverage to remake the physical world and embed future demand for its products, despite their self-evident destructiveness. Now the tech world is trying the same trick with phones and apps.  Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag

If trauma seems ubiquitous online, that's because it has become the authentic experience par excellence — uniquely able to hold our gaze and compel us to keep watching. This casual misuse shouldn't distract from the fact that “trauma" refers to a real mode of experience that demands seriousness, but we need to unpack the ways it has become synonymous with “the real." Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag

The main strategy of the children's culture industry — transforming free play into a mania for collectibles and "commoditoys" — has been adopted by crypto startups, whose toy-like aesthetics are necessary for a digital asset class backed by nothing more than flows of sentiment.  Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.

The social app BeReal promises respite from the pressure to perform, but its gimmick of forced spontaneity merely refines it in an effort to re-enchant the practice of posting to platforms. Obedience to the platform's rules doesn't cancel competition for clout among its users.  Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.

A fantasy life of push-button convenience and technological coddling is just as much a “virtual world” as any metaverse. With the gig economy as their operating system, these "userverses" isolate consumers from each other and protect the exploitive system tech companies and venture capital have built.  Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.

So far, audio-based social apps have not had major success. Perhaps this is because the human voice has contrasting associations: intimacy, on one hand; and the public-facing self, on the other. However, we should be vigilant: both associations operate on the notion that there is something “pure” about spoken forms of communication, and both are highly co-optable.  Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.

Although sleep wearables seem to promote rest, what they actually promote is rest reconfigured as productivity. A properly-charged wearable is always awake, acting as a sort of surrogate, low-level consciousness that keeps running and recording even while you temporarily abdicate your own.  Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.

As algorithms are deployed across society to assess and predict behavior, older modes of control based on normativity are in eclipse. The way we experience control has changed accordingly — it registers more in terms of "vibes" and "cringe" — as have the ways it can be resisted, not through revaluing antinormative behavior but through extending care-oriented practices like mutual aid.  Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.

The sales pitch of "Web3" depends on its having its own aesthetic to counter the "Instagrammability" aesthetic that social media has spawned. But all crypto can generate is self-referential hype and boiler-room sales pressure to sustain its many Ponzi schemes.  Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.

Images of suffering compel a reaction. "Crisis actor" conspiracy theories show that it's sometimes easier to claim they are "fake" than to respond appropriately, or to deal with the cognitive dissonance of not knowing how to respond at all.  Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.

Against the self-reinforcing metaphor of communication as penetration — the hypodermic needle by which information can be injected into other people's minds — other scholars have offered alternative framings that emphasize reciprocity and collaboration.  Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.

Reaction videos are pleasantly numbing — they ease the constant pressure to "react" to people and events online. This sort of content arrives to us pre-metabolized: all we have to do is absorb it.  Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.

The NFT hype is not about present-day utility or novelty but an experience of collective faith in an age of taxing isolation. Web3 provides an optimistic story about a future to believe in, and NFTs act as frames for these emotions, serving as sacred spaces for a community of believers.  Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.

To refer to a disaster by name is to be guided by an imaginative infrastructure that sets these events apart as exceptional. This reaffirms the normalcy that has been excepted. But disasters increasingly exceed our capacity to contain them in a title.  Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.

Stafford Beer, a cyberneticist who worked with Chile's socialist government, sought to find a balance between scale and individual autonomy in large social systems. His work sets an example for how we might accept responsibility for the internet and make it reflect the fullness of our humanity rather than reduce us to Like/Subscribe/Share cogs.  Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.

Amid renewed anxieties about the prospect of nuclear war, we might consider the Cold War theorist Günther Anders, who argued there is nothing wrong with fearing the worst-case scenario — in fact, we must fear the worst. We ignore it at our peril.  Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.

Adding a networked surveillance camera to a work truck takes all the problems and incipient paranoia that comes with Ring doorbell cameras and makes them mobile. Fear and distrust can be imported into any neighborhood.   Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.

For many years, readers have loved to declare the death, or demotion, of narrative itself. What this tells us is that the fate of narrative is yet another narrative. What makes it such a compelling one?  Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.

"Creator" has emerged as an all-purpose aspirational descriptor for people who make internet content. It seems to promise a work life of artistic autonomy, but in practice it subjects workers to algorithmic control and exploits them to the point of burnout.  Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.

Our online spaces are littered with ruins, dead websites, and broken links. The attempt to conceal this chaos creates a creeping sense of unease, but by looking at it directly, we become more alert to the mechanisms used to conceal it; and to the internet's ultimate mortality.  Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.

While the “goggles and gloves” model of virtual reality has lingered in our cultural imagination since the 1980s, haptics devices probably won't ever live up to the idea that they can replicate physical contact. They could, however, implement a simplified version of touch subject to quantification and surveillance.  Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.

YouTube gives the viewer the sense that they — and they alone — are always in the process of “authoring” their own experience. Conspiracy media, like those in the lineage of Loose Change, can easily leverage this sense of authorship, making us feel like we're playing a far more active role than we actually are.  Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.

Tech companies present the metaverse as an irresistible paradigm shift akin to the move from desktop to mobile computing. Or they present it as a challenge to the limitations of physical reality itself. In practice, it's just a struggle among those companies for a larger cut of the profits from the same old business models.  Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.

Google has kept its "I'm Feeling Lucky" button as a whimsical artifact of its past. As the company's power has grown, however, the button has taken on a manipulative function, conjuring a sense of autonomy within Google's bullpen, hearkening back to a deceptive sense of freedom.  Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.

Using AI to diagnose conditions like autism is not simply a matter of automating the same kinds of diagnostics used by clinicians. The definition of the condition itself is always contested terrain. AI developers may believe their work is apolitical, but inevitably they become key players in a political struggle over how care is conceived and distributed.  Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.

Relationship apps teach us ways of loving that privilege efficiency over depth, quantifiability over knowledge, and success over joy. They sanctify the institution of the “couple,” while shrinking down the experience of love until it conforms to neoliberal rhythms.  Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.

Hype about the metaverse and virtual reality propose screens as a mode of escape from physical environments. But it is far more likely that new kinds of screens will be implemented in physical environments to reshape our experience within them.  Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.

The pre-crash housing bubble was abetted by propaganda about an "ownership society" that linked personal property to autonomy but in practice widened inequality. The Web3 hype has seized upon similar rhetoric and is yielding similar results, only now it's conflated with ideals of collective ownership that deserve to be considered apart from the speculative mania of crypto.  Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.

Asked what color the internet is, different generations would give different answers. This question is more meaningful than it seems: giving the internet a color gives us a coherent, if mutable sense of what it is, and a better way to critique it.  Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.

Robots are being used more and more to provide elder care, often as a means to assuage social isolation and loneliness. Critics find this dehumanizing, but that may stem from their seeing the robot as replacing human care rather than serving as a medium for conducting it.  Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.

While nominally a fiction writer, W.G. Sebald's work remains theoretically prescient. Long before social media, he understood the suspicious anxiety inherent to learning about the world over social media. His works embrace this unease, accepting the unreliability of all individual sources, but also the obligation to make sense of them.  Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.

Images were once too scarce to be deployed rhetorically; they seemed to be more documentary by default. Now communicating continually with images is common, which generates a nostalgia for when images could speak something other than what the photographer meant to say.  Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.

Much concern has been raised around teens spreading misinformation on TikTok. But fear, and a sense of abandonment by the authorities, can drive compulsive behavior online. Young people — facing just as many threats as adults, but with less power to protect themselves — are just as susceptible to this as their elders.  Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.

Sidewalk Toronto is dead, but its legacy is instructive. It shows that surveillance systems aren't so much documenting as producing a desired reality — and that erasing these images, rather than increasing privacy, only makes that constructed reality harder to audit.  Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.

Proponents of "Web3" often claim that their crypto-based platforms will eliminate some of the problems associated with conventional social media. It will replace big tech companies with decentralized systems, replace the drive for virality with a commitment to community. But Web3 remains entirely dependent on existing platforms to attract users, and relies on the same dubious incentives to build hype.  Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.

Watching old movies reveals a chasm between seemingly once-possible "off-grid" experiences and the continuous connectivity that persists today, arching between childhood and later stages of life. The way our timelines excavate our own pasts for us not only makes remembering from a distance less possible — no longer are we narrators remembering a singular bygone era — but contemporary storytelling too is morphing away from the "closed chapter" adventure into narratives that take this sustained connectivity into account.  Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.

Conversations about technology tend to be dominated by an optimistic faith in technological progress. There is endless encouragement to think about all of the exciting benefits of new technology, but significantly less attention paid to the ways things might go spectacularly wrong. That's where Paul Virilio comes in.  Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.

Those who view “real life” as distinct from images might prefer to believe that undocumented experience is the “truth.” They might suggest that experiences contrived to produce photogenic images are false, an “as-if” experience, LARPing in the pejorative sense. But the life they are describing — a way of being in the world that is untouched by performativity and projection — is the biggest LARP of all.  Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.

The concept of “the offline" is deeply enmeshed with that of "wilderness." Both concepts offer a fantastical escape from the hazards of a globalized world. But in setting up a binary between the corrupted, digital self, and the pure, disconnected self, they both perpetuate a hazardous logic.  Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.

Beauty filters like "Belle" are praised for providing better representation. But the underlying technologies are historically steeped in bias, which raises the question: Is this sort of representation desirable in the first place?  Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.

In the early 2000s, optimistic commentators expected the internet to generate a more participatory culture, in which fans gained more control over the entertainment properties they were invested in emotionally. But participation is not an intrinsically positive force: It has since become a means of fostering overinvestment, obsession, and frustration — volatile social energies with unpredictable social consequences.     Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.

After school shootings, the surveillance industry mobilizes to sell school districts on more intensive monitoring schemes that they claim could help prevent future tragedies. But rather than successfully predict future crime and protect kids, increased surveillance in schools targets students of color for exclusionary discipline.  Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.

Communities can form around illnesses that are ignored, or contested, by outside authorities. Havana syndrome differs from other contested illnesses: not only for its proposed cause, but for the massive institutional investment in its narrative.  Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.

For decades, popular imaginings of the future have promised difference, but delivered more of the same — recycling technical functions but also, more perniciously, their underlying social relations.  Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.

To help users make sense of massive volumes of content, streaming services rely on recommendation algorithms, which depend in turn on breaking both content and consumers down into component variables. This process manifests as a new kind of nostalgia — a continuous repacking of past pleasure in new permutations rather than an impossible desire to return to a "better" time and place.  Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.

The concept of "telepathy" appeals to tech consumers and tech CEOs for different reasons: consumers are wooed with the idea of seamless, clearer and more intimate communication; to CEOs, telepathy represents a more complete form of surveillance.  Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.  

Paper maps positioned the viewer outside the territory mapped, but mapping apps situate the viewer within the map, not only as a blue dot at the center but also in terms of what information is displayed. The subjective dimension of maps has become more pronounced; they have become more manipulative in telling you where as well as how to go.  Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.

Rocky IV is not only a film about the Cold War; it's a film about robots:  Drago (the robotic human) and SICO (the humanoid robot), and also Rocky himself, who must disavow his dependence on technology to assert an idea of himself as humanity's last hope against cyborg-ization.  Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.

Micro-mobility devices like scooters and e-bikes were supposed to replace cars, but in practice they often reinforce the excesses of car culture: They intensify the confusion and clutter on existing roadways without reducing the total number of miles traveled. The micro-mobility industry is still a capitalist industry, intent on maximizing use and profit at the expense of sustainability.  Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.

The concept of a "normal" on the other side of Covid has merged with the concept of a "real world" beyond the screen — ridiculous but emotionally convenient. After so much loss and disruption, to feel “normal” would be much stranger than whatever it is we feel.  Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.

Gender online is no longer something that is witnessed so much as something that is felt. Memes that seem merely playful at first open up new ways of defining and embodying gender, returning the means of construction to users — as something less like a binary characteristic, or even an item in a list of options, and more like a "mood" or a “vibe.”  Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.