Consuming Your Self
Since I started kurios & käuflich 12 months ago, the idea is to use it as a finger exercising tool for structuring my thoughts around a larger project I’m pursuing, which is to better understand the culture and technology we are living by along three dimensions of integration:
Integration with our physical umwelt: we are embodied beings shaped by natural evolution, however, physical nature doesn’t have any meaning on its own, but all meaning is consistently being negotiated between us embodied beings, having profound implications for how we shape our physical environment by means of technology and infrastructure.
Integration with our social umwelt: we are the only species on earth capable of flexible cooperation in large numbers (Yuval Harari). Behavioral science shows that human toddlers at an age of 2,5 years have comparable skills to chimpanzees in navigating the physical world, but are disproportionally better at navigating the social world. Social technologies from language and legislation through brands and blockchains are really about trust as the fundamental social currency.
Idiosyncratic integration with our Self: the ability the reflect the Self is most pronounced in humans compared to all other species. Ironically, a central finding of this capability is that we are not very good at consciously reflecting and verbalising our motivations, beliefs, or intentions. Instead we’re very good at spinning rationalisations and other narratives. Mirrors, diaries, and selfie sticks are obvious examples for idio-technology we use for trying to integrate with our Selves. Another example are SUVs, which are much more frequently used as identity vehicles rather than driving off-roads.
During the past 12 months I repeatedly noticed that something is fundamentally missing from this 3D model of welt integration. The increasing accessability and speed of communication seems to have emergently generated a fourth dimension, entangling social and idiosyncratic integration in a powerful way:
Virtual integration: we seem to care a lot about reality, but then again, do we really? Don’t we care a lot more about plausibility, consistency, and when being honest with ourselves, most of all about the existential safety of simplicity, ie. the qualities we’re last likely to find in actual reality (whatever that is supposed to mean to begin with)?
The more I keep thinking about the question of virtual integration, the more growing is my impression (rather an insight) of being pretty late to that particular party. From Plato’s Cave to Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle and Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, many thinkers have provided concepts to explain the ways we substitute conceptualisations for veracity, the real thing.
But an important part of the question is, do we really care, even when we say we do?
Canadian philosopher Mark Kingwell, in his excellent as timely I Wish I Were Here: Boredom and the Interface (2019), refers to the witticism that it was the Romanticist landscape painter William Turner who ‘invented’ the sunset, in that he turned a literally everyday astronomical phenonemon into a gooey icing of mediated meaning of mortality and nostalgia.
In 2022, while Turner’s descendants might be busy minting a limited 10 jpeg sunset NFT collection on OpenSea, the rest of us can enjoy countless jpegs of sunsets over the sea on what is now called the web2 internet, most of which look nearly identical to most people, that is, excluding the one person who shot the photograph and uploaded it on the internet.
So, when taking and sharing a photo of a sunset, do we really care about it (we could just look at it, ie. integrate with the real thing in that very unique moment it is happening) or do we instead integrate with ourselves in way that we are consuming ourselves?
Kingwell suggest that the very conception of our Self becomes a product comparable to a video game or a Netflix series, and that those of us sharing our stories on social media, more or less secretly wish we would be cherished on a million Dollar marketing budget just like entertainment products.
As Kingwell notes,
“Today the challenge is urgent in a new fashion, since our selves are deliberately scattered data-fragments - Twitter feeds, Instagram posts, shopping preferences, and text-trends captured that seem to know us better than we do ourselves. What hope is there for integration and stability under such conditions?”
kurios & käuflich 2022 will continue to help exploring this question.
I hope you’ll bear with me,
Daniel