Measuring the Immeasurable: Social Media and the Dictatorship of Visibility
INSTITUTIONALLY TODAY’S WORLD is dominated by a slavish adherence to metrics, a ‘Tyranny of Metrics’ as the author Jerry Muller describes it. This contemporary obsession does not represent a logical or natural progression but is a consequence of the impact of what Mark Fisher famously described as Capitalist Realism. Capitalist Realism describes a world, our world, where every action is a-priori regarded as measurable and marketable. Moreover, it is ‘realist’ because it presumes that, to paraphrase a much less nuanced thinker, Margaret Thatcher, ‘there is no alternative.’ There is no alternative to the pursuit of economic growth and personal (meaning financial) enrichment. Every action and every choice is viewed as a strategic and competitive means of rising above others and ‘getting ahead’. In a perversion of Darwinian logic, under the imperatives of neoliberal economism, endless competition is not only necessary but naturalized, as is the constant clamouring for numerical validation at every level.
In this paper I will sketch how the rapid rise to dominance of Big Tech, and the expansion, penetration and naturalization of social media in particular, have rendered resources once considered beyond the reach of markets - thoughts, feelings, day dreams and desires - a virtual goldfield of speculative capitalization. In the world of social media, every player is at the same time an endemic self-entrepreneur, scrutinizing and scrutinizable at all times. From an art world perspective, it is no longer just art or artistic research that is exposed to scrutiny, but the artist’s entire self which is regressively transformed into the ultimate biopolitical commodity.
The impact of social media, especially as they relate to the transformation of notions of impact in the arts, cannot be overstated given that their predominant platforms are auspiciously visual. Therefore, I will also briefly implicate the paradoxes of research impact as far as it is increasingly gauged according to the instantaneity of online interaction and internet browsing behaviour.
On social media platforms like Instagram, the artist sells an image of themselves that is deliberately curated to greater and lesser extents. It may appear more or less casual, more or less formal, and complicit with the pressures of self-entrepreneurialism to varying degrees. Far from the academic deconstruction of presence and identity pursued under various strains of postmodernity, a new ‘longing for presence’ and the ‘authentic’ arises. Now it is the artist’s individual self and no longer simply what they make, that is primarily offered-up competitively online to known and unknown audiences. The scrollable world of social media continually abuts art with artist: the artist at rest, the artist with friends, lovers and partners, on holiday, on residency, at an opening, in the studio, at home and elsewhere, everywhere. Jean Baudrillard once commented on the ironic juxtapositions modern advertising in news journals in particular provoked, mass carnage next to an ad for the latest Rollex or luxury brand alcohol. Such imagist texts flatten and dissolve the real, just as, for example, the artist on Instagram is both a cumulative value and a projected fantasy, a dream and a nothing.
On social media, the artist aims to appeal to friends, family and colleagues, but potentially and more importantly, influential curators, gallerists and collectors: every artist their own business open all the time in the 24/7 world theorised by Jonathan Crary. In a dystopian but nonetheless highly plausible light, it has also been suggested that in the future the algorithms that determine an individual’s impact and popularity on social media, will be deployed more widely to determine basic life prospects like employment. This is a ‘never say no’ world, a world where every situation is immediately projected as a potential private opportunity.
Paradoxical nonetheless about the return of ‘authentic’ artistic presence on social media are the structural conditions that enable the Internet. As everyone is aware but habitually forgets due to the ideological efficacy of its user-friendly and therefore backgrounded interfaces, the Internet is controlled by huge, almost solely US-based corporations like Facebook and Google. Rather than politically ‘neutral’, these corporations and the ‘social’ platforms they support have been implicated in a range of what appears to be an ever-increasing litany of grossly unethical activities and business practices. Such activities include the deliberate fostering of quasi-fictional if not outright conspiratorial ‘hot’ topics, the non-moderated dissemination of potentially dangerous misinformation, the unannounced surveillance and profiling of online users and the sale of user profiles for political purposes as was witnessed in the Infamous Cambridge Analytica case that helped propel the US presidency of Donald Trump as well as Brexit.
At the same time, the scale and sheer networked globality of these media, their very ‘unplaceableness’, seems to render them above the law. So too does their extreme opacity, the extent to which those on the inside are sworn to secrecy about exactly what they do and how they do it. But because they claim to stand for individual freedoms, who would want to get in the way of those when you can pretty much do ‘whatever you want’ online? Right? The Internet is arguably the most evident Commons of our age and yet is overwhelmingly dictated by corporate interest. In the estimation of ex-economist, activist and political theorist Yanis Varoufakis, Big Tech’s rise and rise has engendered a ‘techno-feudalism’ that harks back to much earlier, more absolute, historical forms of primitive economic accumulation and social domination. In the control of a mere handful of privileged, hugely wealthy technocrats, the political structuring of the Internet and its social media offshoots, arguably exceeds the capacity for control and subjugation of the most perniciously austeritarian neoliberal governments.
Thus, the individual artist creatively ‘being themselves’ online is already intimately enmeshed, whether they like it or not, or are even aware of it, as a small but indispensable player in a web of global business interests. At the same time, highly complex automated algorithms glean user-data behind the scenes calculating individual and group desires that can continually be put to work financially. The Internet and social media do not just neutrally facilitate the presentation of creative individualities, but also shapes them. It wants to sell back to you what your online behaviour says about you. Oddly, the incitement to individual expression coincides as well with an online situation in which, as critics like Shoshana Zuboff have made abundantly clear, there is practically no longer any privacy. And if governments and corporations have their way - as testified by a swathe of recently proposed parliamentary bills endorsing the widespread use of biometric and other surveillance methods, and the near-total resistance of Big Tech to any outside interventions that might render their activities accountable or even slightly more transparent - this usurpation will become increasingly complete.
One can only laugh at the hyperbolic pretensions to ‘innovation’ of Zuckerberg’s new Metaverse that, like the majority technological ‘developments’ of this sort, seeks to conceal its true intentions in this case in half-baked retro Sci-fi lingo. The real aim of the seemingly inescapable ‘Zuckerverse’ is the unbridled proliferation of increasingly targeted means of profit maximization and attendant behavioural modification that would ensure that people act at the very least as consumers, in ways that can be quantified and predicted. His ‘brave new world’ (also a furtive attempt at rebranding as Facebook continues to feel the heat from outspoken whistle-blowers), is aimed in actuality at constricting and proscribing the future according to what Big Tech needs to continue to extract as monetizable behavioural data.
Meanwhile, the ambience of autonomy which the fluidity of social media interaction affectively encourages, allows ever-greater penetration of users’ real habits and desires. The, “constant bombardment of signs of success online” identified by Silvio Lorusso, author of the book the Entrepecariat, provokes persistently furtive interaction and identification. The naturalism of such participation is conditioned by forgetfulness and the ‘invisibility’ of the very interfaces that entertain it. Like other contemporary forms of work in which the individual is entrepreneurially called to the fore, it is frequently undertaken, at least according to Mark Fisher, in a spirit of “cheerfulness [that] can only be maintained if one has a near-total absence of any critical reflexivity”.
This lack of reflexivity evident in the phenomenon described as ‘Instagram art’ - art whose foremost impact is calculated according to the scrollable seconds-at-a-time habitus distinguishing that particular interface – is conditioned simultaneously by the elevation of instantaneity to an esteemed value that prioritizes popularity as a measure of that which is most impactful. Where the reigning logic determining impact is weighted towards widest evidence in calculable metrics - means theoretically that everything that is self-evidently popular in is its own time, in the ‘real time’ of social media for example, is implicitly considered most impactful. After all who can argue against the impact of social media accounts that have thousands if not millions of followers, or individual posts (including those of art and/or the artist) that garner the same degree of exposure? As a technological ‘innovation’ these relatively new media - particularly as they might appeal to the reactionary pretensions of modern day Futurists - also have the added ‘benefit’ of inbuilt capitalization that extracts profits from users’ free activity (and I use the term ‘free’ here in full irony). In an age of the extreme relativization of value, cultural or otherwise, it seems the only inarguable value is financial.
Where significant measurable popularity is evident via online interaction, it is almost inevitable that such popularity will have already been capitalized upon. This would also explain the growth of corporate sponsorship deals that social media platforms have exponentially offered to the ‘right’ artists as well, those willing to sell their creative identities for multinational rewards. The impact of these campaigns in terms of audience reach is undeniable. At the same time they indicate an entirely new permutation of Adorno’s Culture Industry thesis as they elide the crass surface exhortations typical of earlier forms of advertising, and make commercial promotion appear instead a natural, organic expression of the promoter’s personal social life.
Of course, the almost infinitely networked dimension of social media relies heavily on cross-promotion. The compulsion to cross-promote upon which the functioning of social media depends, also means the border between the personal and professional are considerably blurred. In fact, with the general accelerated professionalization of both art and social media platforms - part and parcel of the latter’s intrinsic financial intent and a greater Post Fordist scenario in which it is difficult to say where work ends and life begins - personal relationships too are increasingly professionalized. These tend to be pushed like everything else into competitive territories, this time of a minor, quasi-mafia variety; ‘if you like mine, I’ll like yours’. This is an unspoken contract binding individuals into relationships of mutual self-interest that are simultaneously awkward and self-exposing to leave.
Unfortunately, for art and/or artistic research that privileges difficulty, criticality, opacity and politicisation over presumptions of the positively calculable outcomes of capitalist acquiescence, impact legitimacy may be questioned in terms of a failure to capture an audience’s imagination by being too ‘negative’. Even contemporary socially conscious art is frequently couched in terms of the absoluteness of its positive responsiveness, its attempts to solve problems that are way bigger than it, and which belong more properly to the realm of political leadership and governmentality, institutional areas un-coincidentally primarily beholden today to the unpredictable vagaries of ‘free market’ speculation.
Numerous examples of such art, even though they may realize they can never achieve the practical outcomes they project, may at least signify their implied and unimpeachable ethical superiority. Again, who can deny the impact of art that can be demonstrated to have been understood instantaneously and mass ‘liked’ on social media just as immanently? How could this not benefit worthy related causes that at the same time happen to engage its entrepreneurial methods? Is this not a means of reaching more people, and is this drive not foundational to any cultural expression? Or at least so the social media argument goes.
The notion that art as non-traditional research could also intentionally irk, disturb, confuse, irritate or alienate its audiences, or agitate the institutional conditions of its realization – all of which, curiously, much advanced art of the 20th century did – from this viewpoint seems not only an outmoded indulgence but self-defeating. In fact, from an art historical perspective, this situation represents a total inversion of any critical claims of the allegedly failed avant-gardes whose trans-disciplinary testing of socio-cultural norms typically required significantly more intellectual, and on occasion, political engagement than more commercially féted art of the same period, whilst, unsurprisingly, being notably less known and less popular with non-inducted audiences.
While it would seem that the output of the former, for its rigour and critical testingness, would qualify more genuinely as ‘research’, today it as though the opposite has occurred: incontrovertible, evidence of popularity reigns supreme as it is easy to measure algorithmically online and to incontestably prove elsewhere. It can, apparently, be proven ‘scientifically’ just like the neo-classical, basically theocratic pretensions of the neoliberal econometrics. Unlike most serious and challenging art of prior decades, now popularity, personal and professional, has been raised to the status of a genuine ambition, curiously granted a precedence comparable to that awkwardly entertained by many in their teens and early twenties.
An added paradox of this impact-scenario is the contemporary existence of proliferating online bots, phantom accounts behaving like proxy endorsements, and ‘click farms’. The latter employ poorly paid workers drawn mainly from so-called third-world economies to sit all day at computers clicking the ‘like’ button for online accounts who pay for the privilege of artificially raising their online impact. For them this is simply subsistence labour, a gift of ‘technology’ from the ‘developed’ world. While it is unlikely that individual artists or researchers would go out of their way to pay for this guaranteed inflation of their online profiles, it is not necessarily beyond the realm of possibility. Indeed, there are many privately wealthy artists out there desperate also to be taken ‘seriously’ as authentically impactful artists. It is at times like these (but not only) that the deployment of the ‘Crap Detecting’ apps proposed by social media theorist Geert Lovink would be of most use.
When the concept of impact is pinned to the measureability of sheer visibility, surplus value in the social media sphere will inevitably be extracted from areas of private knowledge and experience previously considered unreachable and inappropriate to mine. Where neoliberal demand is for normativity and standardization (and this incidentally does not discount difference as far as difference ‘in itself’ has been transformed into one of the market’s most profitable functions), impact will most likely be assured by adhering precisely to those metrics that guarantee thinking does not stray too far out of the box and into the real world – by specifically identifying endemic fixation with metrics and marketization as critical research problems that should be rigorously questioned if not undermined, rather than accepted as naturally inevitable, for example. The de-emphasis of art and/or research as critique aligned with broader econometric ideology, prefigures it instead as consensually, unproblematically, success driven, pursuing every channel by which it may concur with what already exists.
Here the potential impact of a work is aligned with its willingness to seduce or be seduced by the status quo, as far as the institution also can only do and say certain things. Indications of this scenario are even more emphatic when dealing with contemporary practices associated with varieties of institutional critique that call into play contemporary art’s embeddedness in networks of often dubious socio-political or ethical import. While certain quarters may question the contemporary validity of such practices - a weak challenge coming from those who would never question the immortality of easel painting or the dominance of the commercial art system - there are others, like ultra-impactful contemporary artist/theorist Hito Steyerl (a few years ago ironically voted ‘most influential artist in the world’ in one of those ludicrous press pols the celebrity-culture aping avenues of the art world so loves) who state outright that at no other time is the expansion of such critique more necessary and should go further.
I am not saying the Internet and its social media offshoots are the devil, or decrying their existence although one cannot help fantasize about what change mass exodus from social media’s main corporate platforms would instigate (probably just another monolithic business acquisition of what once was an alternative). I do not mean to suggest either that interesting, informed, critical, political or oppositional content does not appear on social media, it most clearly does. Its existence and appearance here however is undermined by what could be called the ‘dark brilliance’ of a network and interfaces capable of transforming absolutely anything into massive profits for a very few.
@avocado_ibuprofen
To put this in a broader contemporary context, we could consider the centrality of financialization to the neoliberal economistic agenda. The escalated financialization of the global economy meant for one thing, that in 2020 amidst the first waves of the Covid-19 pandemic as mass unemployment of an extent not seen since the great depression spread, and GDPs the world over were massively devalued almost overnight as real economies plummeted – a latent possibility due to decades of declining productivity and wage stagnation - the stock market on the other hand, soared to unimaginable heights. For the first time in the history of capitalism stock market activity was demonstrably de-hinged from events in the real world. How is this even possible? It is possible because today’s incredibly rich have the resources and are simply rich enough to speculate and profit on stocks regardless, and in spite of, what is actually happening in the world. The dramatic social stratification such a situation reveals is increasingly being compared with that evident during the 19th Century at the time of the industrial Revolution, when a new class of industrial capitalists simply took what they wanted without excuse.
The classical capitalist formula MCM, where M is money used to develop and sell commodities (C) for more money and so on, has been replaced by the formula MM, which means it is money ‘itself’ that begets more money without the necessary intervention of production. This financialized realm is intimately linked to the culture and profits of Big Tech. For instance, an online algorithm that can reliably predict online user behaviour is worth considerably more on the stock market as pure speculative value, than any amount of money generated by people’s virtual shopping habits. In something akin to a weird twist on the dematerializing tendencies of historical conceptualism that aimed to foreground the Idea over art’s intensifying commodification, it is now the immaterial Concept that generates most capitalist value as financialization. One of the greatest ‘innovations’ - and again I mean this in a negative sense - of the capitalization of the Internet, is the fact that so long as people have computers and continue to do ‘what they want’ online, and even if they don’t buy anything, they will continually produce profits for Big Tech regardless. This is especially useful for contemporary capitalism as global unemployment soars.
When the metric measurability of art and culture are used to justify its existence for the benefit of allowing those who practice and research in these fields to stay employed, the very definition of what constitutes art and/or research is called into question. When an artist is institutionally lauded for example, for their willingness to play second-fiddle to industry instrumentality – when hypothetically, an institution might wax lyrical about the Virtual 3D Ultra-High Definition Real-Time Digital Graphics an artist develops to serve an admittedly laudable objective, like medical research say – the real question vis-à-vis art is, how is this still ‘art’? That is, when art has been shorn entirely of any vestiges of its historical autonomy and any lineages to the autonomies of philosophical thinking, when art is simply put to work.
If art must be made use of, then, by implication, philosophy as a related active thinking, will also need to prove itself by generating calculable value. Maybe the real use-value of philosophy is as self-help. Who knows, Alain de Botton’s saccharine, instantly comprehensible paeans to individual self-improvement might be granted greater precedence, aligned to neoliberalism’s agenda that regards all problems as ultimately individual and under no circumstances, political or institutionally entrenched. It is no surprise that self-help is one of the global publishing world’s biggest money-spinners.
In an economy-culture dominated by the imperative to calculate the hierarchical value of everything, maybe we should really start talking about “thinking for a living” and “job-ready art.” Certainly one could fantasize about having that conversation with Duchamp or any other Dadaist. I’m sure Guy Debord would be impressed too, as would any artist who ever produced or performed anything under the Fluxus umbrella, or indeed produced anything no matter how inventive, that might have offended institutional morés. Of course, ‘job ready’ is the opposite of workerist. Rather, it is technicist, instrumentarian, rareified and fetishistic in its furtive attempt to categorise absolutely, the value of what an artist, or artist-researcher in this case, can do or say and to delimit the conditions of what is done and said. It is always ironic for instance when the technologically cutting-edge and self-consciously innovative is simultaneously always already at the service of the market, and where there is no gap at all between the production of new knowledge and its real-time consumption. The demand for instantaneity draws an a priori line around the possible.
The ironic obverse of this drive to determine a quantifiable use-vale for the arts in the present (as for every other human endeavour) is a parallel one that clearly indicates the dramatic dwindling of jobs in the near future. As has been convincingly argued by a range of contemporary theorists from Nick Snircek and Alex Williams to Aaron Benanav, Andrea Komlosy, Aaron Bastani, David Frayne and Peter Fleming the speculative extractivism of financial capitalism benefits ever fewer areas of expertise. Not surprisingly these exist predominantly within the fields of predictive Internet technology and AI. Equally unsurprising, given this trend is a product of financialist imagining that grants priority to the Formula over the user, is the fact that these fields’ very aim is to dispense with the need for human labour as much as is functionally achievable. Which is more impactful, the job that allows the artist-user to strategically expose themselves as widely and frequently as possible? Or, the developer for whom such an individual is an abstract behavioural statistic supplying data-turned-to-profit via third-party interaction?
Where does that leave us? Some have mentioned that the notion of an offline world as a realistic collective option is impossible by now: once you’ve opened the Pandora’s Box of instantaneous trans-geographic communicability there is no re-imagining a world without it which would inevitably seem impoverished in comparison. Naturally, such an argument does coincidentally forget that there are many people and many places on the earth where access to computers and the Internet is beyond reach. More uncoincidentally, some of these locations include regions where the technology and hardware that enables the Internet in the first place is actually produced (a paradox reminiscent of a recent situation whereby certain so-called peripheral nations producing Covid-19 vaccines for wealthy countries, have no access to these themselves). In any case, in wealthy nations it seems as though the imperative to continually expose ourselves online via social media as though this had genuine impact is with us to stay.
As a contrast, and drawing to my conclusion, I want to briefly reference an early legal case that was aimed specifically at resisting the constant exhortations of Big Tech. The movement and subsequently inscribed legal clause, originated in Spain and was called ‘the right to be forgotten.’ This clause targeted Google’s operations in particular and what was then the common occurrence whereby anyone using Google’s optimized search engine could potentially find out anything about anyone, so long as a digital trail existed. Thus, if you had said or done things in your past that you would prefer forgotten, perhaps a minor legal infringement that might effect your chances of future employment for example, even an embarrassing photo or video, you had no right whatsoever to have that information redacted. This specific localized case was successful in forcing Google to put a limit on how long it could make potentially legally compromising material readily searchable to the general public. Still Google remain today conspicuously known for their almost total imperviousness to outside communication – that is to say you cannot just call up (or, funnily enough, email) Google and request they do something for you as a user of their services. Transparency clearly only goes one way.
In fact, avid social media users often forget that everything they post to these corporate platforms, including material of a highly personal nature, is technically then owned by those corporations: memories, goals and dreams, tragic and happy, all recorded and archived in massive energy-sucking servers hidden away in purpose-built sheds in remote areas out of sight and entirely inaccessible to their producers. This right to be forgotten could be compared with the right to privacy or the legitimate right to professionally withhold research, including art, from its networks. If this means trading calculable impact for increased autonomy then so be it. Just remember that the results of that survey your institution is asking you to fill out using proprietary software about how you feel about aspects of your work situation, are also being passed on instantly to third party companies (virtually no one reads the fine print for obvious reasons) for profit, or that widely deployed academic tools like Google Scholar are at the same time algorithmically trawling your research for indicators of profitable outcomes. For them.
Alex Gawronski
Originally presented at the conference ‘Impact’, the Art Association of Australian and New Zealand (AAANZ), the University of Sydney, Australia. Thursday, December 8, 2021.