Clognition
Sorting and cleaning and tossing and musing
I’ve never been much of a desk drawer person. For whatever reason, my organizational strategies have tended more towards surface than depth, which is to say that I’ve always been one of those “messy” people who “remembers where I put that book” instead of having any sort of coherent scheme for being able to tell someone else where to find it.
That’s not to say that I don’t have drawers—I have an old desk inherited from my father, kitchen drawers, a couple of storage trunks that function as large drawers, etc.—but their function tends to be purgatorial for the most part. That is, my drawers are basically waiting rooms for the trash bin. They’re full of things that I’ve persuaded myself I might need later, or things that I can’t bear to throw away just yet, or things that I could just as easily replace (or find online in the case of instruction manuals).
And that means that, periodically, I must excavate these spaces and put all of my things to the test. Did I really need that blank postcard? That phone charger that no longer has the correct port? That conference program from 11 years ago? That bundle of Christmas cards?
Well, I’m using the postcard as a bookmark now, but most of the stuff went straight into the bin. I did come across a folder, though, that I wouldn’t have thought to look for in my drawers. It contained all of my materials for a keynote address that I gave in 2015 at the Indiana Digital Rhetoric Symposium. (I say a keynote address, but given that it was the first time I’d keynoted a conference, and will likely be the last and only, I tend to think of it as the keynote.)
The organizers of the conference encouraged us to create our own posters for our talks, which was both fun and right up my alley:
“Cognition in the Wildfire” was a play on the title of Edwin Hutchins’ book from the mid-90s Cognition in the Wild, which introduced a lot of us to the idea of “distributed cognition,” the idea that thinking, especially that necessary for complicated activities, often requires not only multiple people acting in concert but some of which is off-loaded into our artifacts and environments. My talks were never really about just one thing, but if I had to boil it down, I guess that the talk was intended to prompt us to engage critically and carefully about how our emergent, virality-positive culture was changing the ways that we thought.
The opening gambit for the talk came from artist Julian Oliver, who wrote that “Infrastructure must not be a ghost. Nor should we have only mythic imagination at our disposal in attempts to describe it.” Oliver’s example is the Cloud, which he calls a “dangerous simplification…akin to a children’s book.” His point was not that we shouldn’t draw on metaphors to make the digital more accessible or comprehendible, but that at a certain point, those metaphors can interfere with our critical faculties. They can keep us from being honest with ourselves about the forces we unleash.
It was fun to go back and look over the slides and notes that I’d prepared, and honestly, the talk’s a bit dated but it still holds up mostly. My biggest worry at the time was that “going viral” was such an unproblematic measure of success that it would begin to warp our infrastructure. The naive understanding of virality at the time was that, if something was particularly interesting or important, then well, of course, it went viral. The problem comes when you reverse that, and assume that if something goes viral, then it must by definition be meaningful. Or as I put it then,
virality is recognized as a desirable outcome, something to be achieved, a measure of rhetorical success. It’s kind of like someone who buys a lottery ticket and convinces themselves, after they’ve won, that it was meant to be or that they somehow deserved to strike it rich.
And that model of value was all over the place back in the mid-2010s, even as every social media “expert” was touting their ability to deliver virality to their marks. In other words, virality itself was never a “natural” phenomenon, it was always distributed (and manipulated), and the virus metaphor encouraged us to ignore the (human, digital) infrastructure that generated it.
Reading over my notes, they clicked for me with a recent post over at Ryan Broderick’s Garbage Day, where he talks about Threads, the new Twitter clone from Meta:
Broderick’s entire post is worth your time, but his initial impression of Threads is pretty devastating:
Without followers, Threads’ algorithm continues to only show me users that crawled out of the bizarre netherworld of Meta celebrity…All of them eventually end up producing the same anti-culture nothingness that does well on Facebook or Instagram or, now, Threads. They have millions of “followers,” and yet nothing they create goes anywhere or matters in any tangible sense. It’s like watching two large cryptocurrencies trade with each other. No cultural value is ever really generated, but the numbers go up.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I was predicting anything in particular back in 2015, but I think I nailed the vibe. Virality so captured the imaginations of tech bros and their investors that social media has been warped to the point where there’s very little “there” there. They are simply machines for generating likes, shares, and, if we believe the monetizers, influence. Content generation on these platforms has adopted the strategies once reserved for 419 scammers, where even a vanishingly small audience provides a net positive if you’re operating at a huge enough scale. AI can now replicate the daily output of a cubicle farm in a matter of seconds, making this anti-culture sludge even more profitable and the costs even less prohibitive.
(Don’t think that it hasn’t already started. Neil Clarke is probably right to say that “This isn’t a game of whack-a-mole anyone can ‘win,’” and our culture’s about to be a whole lot poorer for all the people who (rightly) refuse to play.)
And on that happy note, maybe it’s time for me to get back to cleaning out my drawers. Maybe I’ll find another blog entry in there, peeking out from between old copies of Harper’s and all of the “After Visit Summaries” I’ve generated from the past several years of doctors’ appointments.