RANT: THE SOCIAL-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

COMPLEX SOCIAL ARCHITECTURES REQUIRE EMPATHETIC INVESTIGATION.

We are surrounded by over-designed and heavily-engineered objects and systems (both valuable and problematic) that create complex social constructs with native codes, rules, and certain participatory expectations. They are truths in themselves about reality because for better our worse we choose to energize these systems with our psychic energy.

Systems Overload

I use the word construct deliberately as most of the systems shaping our reality today lack ethical and empirical rigor. They are ideas, often fueled by power/profit-centric motives, about how the world can and should work. Our reality flows through categorizations and rules based on subjective perspectives, rather than contextually objective truths. Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote about this several years ago regarding race as a social construct. In his social critique of intelligence testing in respect to categorizations of race he states that “race”and “intelligence” are in fact social constructs based on what those in power believe to be true and valuable to human progress. “They” as a select few determine the way life moves. Ever stand in a line with official documents to confirm your identity? You live in a system designed by someone who doesn’t know you. We create our realities, and then agree to live in them and populate them with human content. The measure of a test, is only the measure of a set of gatekeepers. Race (while not disregarding the biological factors) is a construct of those in power. Black, brown, and indigenous peoples are controlled through various fear narratives and state sponsored violence. Black men are victims of police brutality and manufactured social fears. Channeling Coates, all tests are biased and the black/brown “race” is criminal in nature. These are dangerous social constructs that we all agree to live within and support.

For example, social media platforms, the predominate form of social interaction in today’s reality, people en masse can contribute directly into virtualized media landscapes where they had once been separated by corporate gatekeepers and limited channel curation. Tehse are essentially shared spaces, a digital commons, stewarded by us. What has also been called the Control Revolution by Jame R. Beniger where “ traces the origin of the Information Society to major economic and business crises of the past century. In the United States, applications of steam power in the early 1800s brought a dramatic rise in the speed, volume, and complexity of industrial processes, making them difficult to control. Scores of problems arose: fatal train wrecks, misplacement of freight cars for months at a time, loss of shipments, inability to maintain high rates of inventory turnover. Inevitably the Industrial Revolution, with its ballooning use of energy to drive material processes, required a corresponding growth in the exploitation of information: the Control Revolution.”

Now, we the people control media narratives without a clear understanding of the ethics and standards these platforms require. A well timed post can actually alter reality and yet we use them reckless abandon like curious child behind the wheel of a car.

Provocation

What if users of social media had a deeper understanding of the relevant terms and service agreements and the resulting civil policy implications? What if the average user understood the market implications of signing away their data, security and privacy to for-profit institutions? What of users understood how their behaviors are being manipulated?