Mind the Gap—Technology and the Multiplication of Space/Time

Sitting on my desk is a book that I page through when I have a moment:Quantum City.  It’s not something I’m going to assign in classes—it’s really a manifesto, with quantum  looking a bit like a brand-name than a serious application of quantum mechanics to urban planning.  But it reminds me how important anthropology has been to thinking about space and time as an indivisible whole embedded in everyday life.

Frame from the film Man with a Movie Camera (1929) by Dziga Vertov. Photo courtesy wikicommons

If we think of 19th century anthropology as the effort to produce time and space as a classificatory grid into which we might slot cultural alterity, then the twentieth century suggested a fairly successful effort to challenge that orthodoxy through a cultural relativism that also occasionally included space/time relativity, the idea, in other words, that space and time form a folded topology in social and cultural life rather than distinct variables in a linear equation.  These are not new insights for ethnographers who are steeped in what Bergson called “duration.”  On the other hand, as Fabian pointed out long ago in his Time and the Other (1982), these insights into temporal relativism often came at a cost, imprisoning “the Other” in bubbles of time/space that made anthropology’s interlocutors even more vulnerable to power and manipulation.

But when applied to the city’s spaces, anthropology anticipates many of the insights and critiques of Henri Lefebvre and others, namely that capitalism seeks to impose ideologies of homogeneity on the city’s diverse rhythms, practices of space and time which, paradoxically, capitalism generates through highly differentiated productions of commodified spaces, work schedules and mobilities.  For Lefebvre, recovering the “rhythms” of our actual lives is antidote to this ideological reduction.

Within these interstices of space/time lie new possibilities for challenging hegemony.  On the other hand, each juncture suggests new possibilities for commodification and profit, with differences in the production of time and space exploited through arbitrage strategies that commodity them.

Nowhere has this been truer than in the development of mobile computing and social media.  On the one hand, our mobile handsets promise homogenous instantaneity, where physical presence is just a phase embedded in a spectrum of virtual presences, and every corner and relationship is reduced to a node in a web of commodified information.   On the other, these ubiquitous technologies generate countless fractures and interstices in space/time, with each technology generating absences and lacunae right alongside transparency and surveillance.  Far from complete homogeneity, social media makes our urban perambulations more like a lattice of Wi-Fi coverage—with people moving in, out and between charged fields in ways that multiply connection, continuity and ubiquity, but that simultaneously construct their opposite: disconnection, discontinuity and schism.

There are numerous, well-known examples.  In 2012, Facebook forced all of its accounts into its “timeline”—a chronology of your posts that scrolls down your screen.  At the same time, it introduced gaps in that chronology: the time before your Facebook account, or the times when you’ve been less active on the social network.  Foursquare users “check in” at different intervals with their status and location, but the social media simultaneously introduces gaps and inconsistencies before or after “check-ins”.

Some of these discontinuities may tease out the ghosts of alternative possibilities.  After having been accused and harassed for months by the FBI, the artist and University of Maryland professor Hasan Elahi began his own “sousveillance,” calling the FBI before his trips abroad and updating his whereabouts constantly on his website/art installation, “Tracking Transience.”   There are (reportedly) more than 20,000 photos on his site—an eloquent protest against a government obsessed with the surveillance of ordinary people.  But there is also an element of “intransigence” here as well, for each photograph is simultaneously the creation of an infinite number of movements and practices that are off-frame—the spaces and times between the photographs that proliferate despite the Orwellian state.

Of course, these rifts in time/space are more often ambiguous in their ultimate significance.  I think of driving around last week in Baltimore in a friend’s car with GPS.  We follow its deadpan directions through West Baltimore and then suddenly balk when it prompts us to drive through the parking lot of a strip-mall.  Did this lead me to critique of the commercialization of public space?  Does the GPS help me to question the legitimacy of the strip mall to interrupt the maximum efficiency of our route?  I remember feeling annoyed, but also wondering if I shouldn’t stop and buy something.

But that isn’t atypical.  Space/time discontinuities are routinely exploited by an advanced capitalism forever expanding into new frontiers of accumulation.  A few months ago, a big box store in Seoul (HomePlus), installed  virtual shopping along the walls of the subway station at Seonreung Station, allowing commuters to use their smartphone to click onto pictures of groceries that get delivered to their homes that evening.  The success of the virtual store depends not on the homogenization of different temporalities, but on their exploitation.  By moving into the space of competing urban rhythms: work, commuting, shopping, delivery, HomePlus seeks to colonize the temporal fragments that mark the borders of one type of mobility and another.

Undoubtedly, we will see more of this.  While the promise of ubiquitous, mobile computing is the perfect synchronization of our digital and material lives, the exact opposite is also true, with each mobile technology delivering disconnection and rupture right alongside promises of transparency and connection.  There are also reasons to hope that an anthropology sensitive to time and space practices as generative of difference and heterogeneity will continue to use these gaps in order to evoke critical topologies, but it must do so nimbly.  By the time we step in, disruptive time/space may have been already (re)colonized as productive time/space.

[published previously in Anthropology News]

You Ruined My Game

(previously published in Anthropology News)

As the brief, terrifying passion for MOOCs slowly dissipates, your university administrators may be casting around for some other technologically enhanced pedagogy.  Might I suggest gamification?  It’s not a new idea, by any means—people have been applying game-based mechanics to learning for some time, but its latest incarnation focuses on online games, from single player to collaborative, multiplayer experiences.

Of course, there’s a good deal of potential for gamification to follow on other technologically-driven changes in university teaching—ie, towards another wave of expropriation as public universities “partner” with private capital in order to undermine the autonomy of faculty.  But I believe there’s subversive potential here for anthropology.

A screenshot of Manic Digger image courtesy Pierre Rudloff and wikicommons

I’ve been thinking a lot about games and subversion recently, mostly because my children have entered their online gaming stage of child development, and are spending inordinate amounts of time either playing Minecraft or watching other people play Minecraft on screencast videos uploaded on YouTube.

Among the innumerable screen captures with stammering, preteen voice-overs, there are other, less innocent uploads that chronicle the efforts of teams of tricksters to trap, harass and prank other players.  This “griefing” runs the gamut from facile to sadistic—and if you play in any multiplayer environment, you’ll certainly have encountered behavior like that.

And while some of this simply looks like cyber bullying, I have begun to think of it in terms of anthropological approaches to gamification.  The true subversion of griefing is not that various pranksters refuse to play by the consensual rules of a multiplayer environment (although there are many, ham-fisted examples of this), it’s that the victims of their pranks believe that they’re playing one game, when in reality they’re part of other gaming logics of which they know nothing.  The humor (if it is that) lies in the victim’s realization that the game they thought they were playing is no longer possible and has been overturned

One of Gregory Bateson’s most interesting contributions was his theory of the “double bind,” the logical and discursive forms that trap victims in a vicious feedback loop where their behavior is castigated no matter what they do.  He initially theorized that double binds would precipitate schizophrenia, but later in his career began to explore the potential of double binds to stimulate creativity.  In particular, in Bateson’s theory of learning, “learning how to learn” (what Bateson later calls “Learning II”) can settle into a self-affirming cycle where positive or negative stimuli both serve to bolster a particular representation of the world.  The only way out of this would be to undermine the contexts of that understanding themselves—to move beyond rewarding or punishing behaviors and actions to calling into question not only what we might mean by reward or punish but the entire system of thinking upon which that logic rests.

In an anthropological approach to gamification, what might we be trying to subvert?  There are several: that play is competitive, composed of winners and losers,  that the environment around us needs to be exploited for personal gain, that winning and losing can be quantified as points.  Games that people play reinforce (and reinforce again) dominant understandings of people and the world, not only in terms of the politics of representation (e.g., depictions of gender in games), but at much deeper levels of game play.

For the last twenty years, people have been developing a whole species of pedagogical games (or serious games) that seek to unmask these dominant assumptions, and by confronting players with a double bind precipitate a critical understanding of the world.   For example, “Spent” (developed by an ad agency for the Urban Ministries of Durham) challenges players to survive economic hardship.  But there are no winners, really; even if you win, you end up with a couple of dollars left over at the end of the month and the challenge to survive begins again.  The message: if you are un- or underemployed and lack a place to live, you simply do not have the ability in contemporary society to pull yourself up.

Serious games like this can have a laudable impact on understanding, but anthropology, perhaps, can push critique even further, past the subversion of the game to undermining what we even mean by a game.  Something very much like the Situationist dérive, with its deliberate subversion of walking and living in the city by acts of randomness and deliberate refusal.   The idea that you might be walking in Paris following the dictates of social class and capitalist accumulation while the people walking alongside you follow the improbable logic of the dérive is profoundly unsettling and defamiliarizing.  That is, the game you thought you were in turns out to be a different game altogether.  Even various guerilla performances (like the No Pants Subway Ride) still fall short of questioning the city as primarily a growth machine.

Anthropology has long defined itself along a vector of cultural critique, although this has meant various things at various times, from a mild cultural relativism to a more piercing unmasking of the exploitation at the heart of processes of globalization.  With gamification, anthropology has an additional opportunity: to ruin someone’s game.