There was snow very briefly, but London took its revenge and there was grey slush. Meteorology is complexified by a city that grunts, smudges its makeup, stomps upstairs, slams the bedroom door and blasts Fugazi at full volume any time you dare to say it looks pretty.

You may have noticed some changes ’round here. The footer was bugging me and I’ve messed around with it a bit, moving recent posts over here ←. I’m still not entirely happy. Natalie ran some tests and the tag list wouldn’t fit over there on small screens so I need to find a way to make this thing searchable – mostly because I search it.

This Again?

I was kindly invited to Clubhouse a few months ago by Monika but have struggled to settle into it. I’ve noticed a recent upsurge in people on it but I’m not sure how to use it. I think while we are isolated and atomised it’s providing a great space for people to meet and socialise but my experience of it has oscillated between echo chambers of self-helpy-startupy-vibesy-Californian ‘hangs’, a mix of events from people I hear from and read otherwise anyway (with notable exceptions) or good-vibes-chill-startup-founders-make-money-quickly rooms which may just be a product of the nature of the platform rather than the users.

I suppose it made me think about this pattern of platform-hopping we’ve got used to. Much like the sort of social construction of device obsolescence, we always seem to get to a point where platforms become derided or obsolete then expect to move on: Think of the mass popular exodus from WhatsApp this month. Or alternatively, something with a new gimmick pops up like Clubhouse and is vaunted as the new thing. I’m reluctant to sign up to new things having seen one or two or three generations of platforms descend from verdant pasture to barren desert, (Ello) flooded radioactive ruins (Twitter dot com) or neo-Imperialist dystopia (Facebook). New platforms tend to be attractive because of a new gimmick, a feature of media, privacy or interaction that is genuinely new. Clubhouse’s focus on serendipity, rooms and audio draws on the vacuum left in lieu of IRL meetups but from what I’ve experienced, I haven’t seen a way of it to become sustainable once the big platforms start to copy it and offer the same thing to larger captive audiences or it’s just acquired by one of the bigger sharks and wrapped up into Instagram or whatever.

Look, I remember when we all went to Ello and stood around with our hands in our pockets awkwardly posting pictures of boats and bread. I had maybe eight or nine made-up bands on MySpace. This churn is real and was fine when it was just messing around and being emo but as social networks have become the backbones of communities and organisation tools, the technological uncertainty of them becomes a threat to sustaining sociality. If you establish a community on one of these new platforms, it’s a pretty safe bet it’s going to have a short life span as the platform falls out of favour, is sunsetted, acquired or is shut down. What if, instead of assuming in that sort of unspoken way we do with new things that “this is the one! This is the one platforms/device/update that will solve all my problems!” we just accepted that platforms have a limited lifespan? That just like relationships with work-mates, childhood friends and peers that eventually they will drift apart after a certain time. What if these platforms gave themselves a time-limited feature?

I’ve become more and more interested in this idea that a way to prevent falling into the need to constantly reproduce limited forms of success in projects is just to say; ‘it’s going to end when it meets x criteria or once y amount of time passes.’ We could set up degrees that run for 3 years, do a project and then close them instead of having to re-justify them for the changing world all the time. It reframes disciplinary arguments around the specifics of what’s going on right now in the world. Sometimes, the party is meant to stop and that’s fine. Go home, sleep it off, come back the next day and do something new and fun.

I doubt we’ll see this happen with social networks though because the logics of capitalism (limitless growth) run up against the idea that things are meant to come to an end. I can’t imagine securing VC funding for a new technology that’s meant to stop. Are there any examples? Maybe pharmaceuticals? If you’re going to eradicate a disease then there’s going to be a criteria for the successful implementation of the drug; when there’s no more of that disease.

The alternative then to sustainable or time-limited social platforms is to have ones that allow the users to select the ways they socialise. What features, limitations and times they want to use rather than the pressure of keeping up with new gimmicks. Ironically, this is something very close to Facebook: It has a bunch of features but can be startlingly simple if you want it to be – not forcing you to do anything more fancy than sending someone a ‘Hello’ privately or publicly which they can respond to at any time. Perhaps that’s a reason for its doggish persistence? Rather than innovating new features (for users) it has become a backbone infrastructure of communication amongst the 25+’s by not relying on gimmicks to increase engagement but just maintaining reliability.

By way of comparison, Twitter’s longevity strategy was to implement emergent features that users developed them selves like @’s and #’s. The problem with that is that a decade or so later there’s a baffling array of tacit social rules, complex etiquette and walled gardens that prevent anyone new from getting into it and affirm shitty behaviour.

And Instagram, poor Instagram just keeps adding stuff to keep up with whatever it last saw on Bloomberg: YouTube ‘er- er- er- IGTV?’ Snapchat ‘… stories! TikTok ‘you mean reels?!’

Incidentally, that’s the nicest thing I’ve ever said about Facebook. I risk my cool dude critical credentials if I go further by maybe saying things like it’s helped folks who are older and less connected than ever to stay in touch with people through the isolation of lockdown. They also tacitly support genocide ok let me back in the club.

Short Stuff

• Danah Abdullah has made a call for pessimism in design on FUTURESS: Against Performative Positivity. As well as pointed and accurate barbs against kitschy appropriation of social movements and ideas, she points to the lack of discourse on power in talking about global challenges in design education. You can also sign up to her newsletter here.
• I’d agree that sometimes designers can be misled, complacent or focussed on the wrong thing. I’ve certainly been that way pretty consistently my entire adult life but at least we’re not generally guilty of actual deception and fraud. Nonetheless, Germany had to step in to ban Dark Patterns – deceptive designs that encourage user behaviour that isn’t in their interests.
• Speaking of regulation and design, a rambly chat with Tamar about Shrek’s Law resulted in her sharing this US Supreme Court case with me: A fascinating story of copyright in the world of cheerleader uniforms which pivots on the issue of what is identifiable as design; utility or aesthetics? Literally a legal ruling on whether form follows function.
• Crypto Art is – depending on your outlook – a way of legitimising the material properties of digital art such that it can have value and collectibility or a way of extending the ruthless creep of the financialised art market into digital production. Newly-minted doctor of philosophy Memo Akten has been doing a deep dive into the ecological impact of putting art on the blockchain. It’s a super in-depth analysis of the methods and discussion of his own methodology but basically you’re looking at pieces of art that could power a household for a month. And just as in the real art market, there’s a kind of artificially hyper-inflated value around a slither of artists that could power a nation. Akten’s site Cryptroart.wtf calculates the ecological cost shows you the end product of these calculations for random pieces of Crypto Art.
• ‘Ok, but what did the blockchain ever do for us?’
• Further developments in the question of diegetics and Covid. The issue of representing and dealing with recent and real trauma is more complex than I had previously acknowledged.

Ok. I started this post by writing ‘no long rant this week’ and then wrote a long rant and deleted that line. Life’s a carousel you know? You take what you’re given; sometimes it’s the unicorn, sometimes it’s the helicopter. Either way it’s just fibreglass with faded paint and a bit creepy. Love to you and yours. Speak next week.