Good luck Helen is away to Newcastle to do some Doing of her own. She is I believe going to the Newbridge huts1 for a collaboration job in which the artists work inside the very gallery space and build things during the time of the exhibition, even as the goers walk around! It’s the process chestnut of yesteryear, what one may be tempted to call, following our rationale of breakage at least, ‘old world art’. Nevertheless work of this sort will always be a worthwhile experiment for any game artist and I for one am fascinated by works about process and its details and chances, but will the post Brexit Newcastle members2 still take that bait? I’m not so sure. I’ll report back.
So with Helen away I have been alone with the children and have not had time to think beyond groceries and recovery and during one period of scheduled sloth I consumed a documentary on the Netflix service going by the title of The Great Hack. I chose this work from the seemingly infinite bank of choices based on my no doubt flawed psychological assessment that to escape inside a dramatisation of the world that ordinarily provokes such hopeless mental grief might prove therapeutic.
Alas it was a disturbing non-fictional account into our dismal plight vis a vis election fraud via social media manipulation centring on that gang of knobeds3 Cambridge Analytica.4 It was also a real veil caster from the big tech companies and their storage and use of personal data of social media users but also of the value status of data itself - it's worth more than oil!
It is a light shining, rug whipper of a study, which one might hope will help us regain some collective sanity when it comes to social media use and the question of data. You know the amount of information stored on each individual user of social media, mainly facebook is spine tingling! Cambridge Analytica boast of possessing some 5000 ‘data points’ on every citizen the USA with which they claim they can use to predict the personality and behaviour of each individual and crucially to manipulate and change that behaviour. It is like the sort of file one might imagine is kept on a known and dangerous terrorist compiled by a squad of lawmen working round the clock! Well, my sense of horror as I watched was accompanied by a rumbling smugness stemming from the knowledge that I have never used social media other than for the Open Council face book page which I believe contained 3 posts and the Torpoint Art Service account with one post. I wonder what they have on me? Some farcical art to be sure, a regular checking of sport pages, an illegal streaming of prize fighting and some occasional and boringly orthodox blue pages. (Did you know Van Gogh was disturbed whilst taking one off the wrist en plein air by the boy ‘puffalo pill’ - the very nit wit that supplied the naughty repros and who very probably murdered him?)5
Not a lot to go on to get me I hope, but you know they say they only need to manipulate the ‘persuadables’ which are apparently a surprisingly small amount of people needed to swing an election. Well I do not wish to bore too much further but I can tell you with new confidence that the seemingly sudden rise of contemporary fascism, the alt right and authoritarian governments has been brought about with the aid of these hacks and I am sure that these tactics will be being used in Sweden by the SD and you or someone at Kommune Norrtalje should uncover Sweden's version of Cambridge Analytica because there will be one.
The hack works best to help the far right because it is most effective to play on emotions of fear and anger but lets have it right, the other side have been at this too, political machines will stop at nothing to get an edge after all and how can we forget the new labour obsession with social marketing. That seems quaint now but the point is all the previous manipulations remained within the rules which govern the practice of campaigning but this surveillance and manipulation is unprecedented and now one would hope that with an adjustment of campaign rules we might not suffer so in future. That sounds easy but look here, they say knowledge is power and this documentary provided more take aways than the Ming Kee,6 but for me the main one was that when one of the investigators tried to force Cambridge Analitica to grant him access to his personal data profile they refused point blank to even answer the case! Why? Because if they did then everyone would demand theirs and that would be a blow to the tech companies and all investors in data, and who pours away oil? Data it would seem is a new natural resource and produced by none other than ourselves and used to power the elites of the world. My my, never have the adolesant fantasies of the matrix seemed more apt!
Anyway my attempt to rest my mind with some light viewing instead set it on fire but at least we can use this energy for our themes. I'm thinking that this data meddling or ‘psychographing’ as it is called in the documentary, provides another puzzle piece to the post truth jigsaw and the picture is looking to be more and more dominated by tech companies whose dream or ideology of connectedness has led them and us down a new and bumpy road where the various bogey men we meet, the IRA for example, are simply exploiting the situation. It’s a shame those jock twins didn’t follow their instincts and stuff Zuckerburgs head down the toilet and go off and make their dating app!7 We could have been spared this species altering farce. The view today is the same as Work 7 would you believe.
PS
You know I must take the chance to point to a tinsy winsy little institutional critique gesture performed on the Open Council facebook page where by the OC recognise and thank “all the people at facebook for all their help and advice”. See how their framing of life goes unrecognised.
1 Likely to refer to the Newbridge Project.
2 Members of the public.
3 A course insult - knob heads or dick heads.
4 Discredited Behaviour Change company.
5 That Van Gogh was murdered was the thesis of mmm in their biography Van Gogh: The Life
6 Possibly a Chinese restaurant and a play on the 'take away'.
7 Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss claimed that Mark Zuckerburg had stolen their idea after they hired Mark to work on their Harvard dating app.