Weekly Newsletter
The Real Life newsletter was sent out every Friday. It included brief summaries of essays published that week, plus additional commentary on some of the topics, essays, or conversations about tech that caught our attention. You can continue to receive the newsletter (minus the article summaries) at robhorning.substack.com.
July 20, 2020
Our new essays will now be accessible in full-text audio form. You can listen to them here on the site, on Apple Podcasts, or on all the major podcast platforms. First up: Contracirculation: On rewriting the terms of engagement with images of Black suffering, by Marielle Ingram Symptom Check: Narrating one’s own illness can counterbalance
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April 23, 2020
Even under the best of circumstances, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring makes for grim reading, as a cursory look at its chapter titles suggests: “Elixirs of Death.” “Rivers of Death.” “And No Birds Sing,” “Needless Havoc,” “The Obligation to Endure.” These titles capture Carson’s sense of the urgency of preventing chemical pesticide use, as does the litany
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March 3, 2020
Since we began Real Life in the summer of 2016, we’ve run nearly 500 essays across a range of topics, with a particular focus on the personal and cultural implications of living with technology. Our aim is not to track the news cycle so much as the longstanding social issues that inform and transcend it,
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January 23, 2020
In my feed recently I’ve seen several meme-like deployments of the frame above, from the film Uncut Gems, in which Eric Bogosian’s character is trapped in a vestibule behind a bulletproof glass door. Adam Sandler’s character has locked him there to stall for time while he waits to see if he’ll win a large sports
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December 7, 2019
Recently Netflix has been testing the option of letting viewers watch prerecorded programming at 1.5x speed (a feature that already exists on YouTube) so that users can consume more content in less time. There is no word on whether they are working on the viewer’s ability to accelerate live programming. I’ve availed myself of the
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November 25, 2019
Last week, Real Life published this essay by Ben Schneider about the “experience economy,” a concept premised on the idea that we can consume prepackaged experiences the same way we do goods and services. The more this idea takes hold, the more it can seem as though experiences should consist of discrete objects rather than
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November 15, 2019
It’s not hard to imagine Adorno detesting something like the “like” button, but it was still interesting to discover that he literally argued against one during his years doing empirical sociology in the U.S. in the 1940s. In “Homophily: The Urban History of an Algorithm” by Laura Kurgan, Dare Brawley, Brian House, Jia Zhang, and
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November 8, 2019
Marx famously claimed (in this afterword to an edition of Capital) that with Hegel, the dialectic “is standing on its head,” and it needed to “be turned right side up again if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.” Now, marketing consultant Anna Klingmann is not Hegel and Brandscapes: Architecture in the Experience Economy is not the Phenomenology
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November 3, 2019
When Facebook first began gaining traction — when it was not many years from its original policy of being limited to students at elite universities — danah boyd characterized its popularity as white flight, a kind of digital suburbanization. “Those who deserted MySpace did so by ‘choice,’” she noted, “but their decision to do so
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October 25, 2019
In Installation Art, art historian Claire Bishop describes a work by Vito Acconci called Command Performance (1974): A closed-circuit television camera was trained upon the spotlit chair, filming whoever sat in it; in front of the chair was a monitor playing a tape of Acconci inciting the visitor to step into the limelight and ‘perform’
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October 18, 2019
A few months ago I happened to hear a segment on the CBC radio show As It Happens (the Canadian equivalent of NPR’s All Things Considered) about how a Ford Mustang that Steve McQueen drove in the 1968 film Bullitt was being sold at auction by Sean Kiernan, a more or less random person in
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September 27, 2019
In the midst of detailing how romantic love is both constructed and exploited by advertising, sociologist Eva Illouz, in her 1997 book Consuming the Romantic Utopia, analyzes the trope of “the deserted beach”: While the beach is primarily a construct of the tourist industry, in advertising it is detached from the crowded and highly commercialized
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September 20, 2019
It’s happening more frequently that I will visit someone’s home and they’ll have one of those stand-alone voice-assistant devices — usually Amazon’s Echo; I’ve yet to see a Facebook Portal in the wild. And I’ll think to myself that tech criticism has basically failed. Despite the steady flow of complaints in more and more high-profile media
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September 13, 2019
A few years ago, this Modern Love column by Mandy Len Catron offered a step-by-step protocol for intimacy: It was titled, “To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This.” The process was based on the work of psychologist Arthur Aron, who in this paper provides procedures for “the experimental generation of interpersonal closeness.” Aron’s aim
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September 6, 2019
In recent months, several social media platforms (Instagram, Twitter, Facebook) have announced that they are experimenting with doing away with public-facing like counts. Purportedly, this is from a concern for users’ well-being and to encourage healthier conversations, though I think we can dispense with those motives out of hand. If these platforms were concerned for
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August 30, 2019
This week I’ve been struggling to get things done. The litany of terrible ideas from the tech world proceeds as usual — for example, these AttentivU glasses that read the wearer’s brainwaves and administer jolts when the EEG reading falls out of the normative “attentive” range — but I don’t seem to have any new or
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August 23, 2019
In a recent interview, Nicolas Cage defended his approach to acting, suggesting that a performance made more memorable through a stylistic tic or a definitive line reading is more “truthful” than performances that try for naturalism, that disavow the fact that they are performances: Look at James Cagney in White Heat. “Made it, Ma! Top
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August 15, 2019
When I came back to work after vacation, I found that a telephone-booth-style office for one had been installed in the hallway, in front of a window I used to like to stand at and look out of sometimes on my way back from the breakroom. It instantly felt likea metaphor for something, and I
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July 26, 2019
This past weekend I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York not only to escape the 100-degree heat but also because I wanted to see “Death Is Everywhere,” a Ragnar Kjartansson installation where two sets of twins walk around in a circle singing an endless indie folk song. (It’s more interesting than
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July 19, 2019
It seems like a thousand years ago now, but I used to be an avid reader of Hipster Runoff, a blog about “alt” culture notable for its ambiguous, deadpan approach to language and tone. Here’s how Rob Walker described it in a 2010 New York Times article, about a conference at MIT devoted to “what
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July 12, 2019
It always piques my interest when marketing professionals discuss authenticity. They approach it without any philosophical baggage, taking for granted that it’s a word best used to describe a relationship with a customer or an aspect of brand equity. It’s not an existential concern; it’s just business. In “The Kind of Authenticity Customers Will Pay
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July 5, 2019
Sometimes, when writing about “smart” devices (ones that connect to the “internet of things” regardless of its owner’s wishes) or health trackers (an internet-of-things device where the “thing” is your body), I’ll compare them to carceral ankle bracelets, vaguely gesturing toward the idea that data capture seeks to inscribe us in a behavioristic prison. This
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June 28, 2019
I have started to delete my old tweets. This is something I have been meaning to do for a while, not for any particular reason but out of a general sense of digital hygiene — it seems like a good idea to dismantle archives of personal material that are open to scrutiny by machine learning algorithms
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June 21, 2019
I am one of those recalcitrant people who refuses to use self-checkout machines. If there is one human operating a register, I will wait in that line, no matter how long it is, placated by the serene feeling of self-righteousness that settles on me. They were trying to trick me into paying for this stuff
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June 14, 2019
During Joni Mitchell’s performance at the 1970 Isle of Wight festival (memorialized in this documentary), after already having had to stop for a few moments so that someone having a bad drug reaction could get medical attention (he was “making a sound like the damned, a low bellow” Mitchell explains in retrospect), she is interrupted
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June 7, 2019
Virtually all spectator sports are heavily saturated with statistics. Even before the advent of fantasy sports, which allowed fans to put statistics ahead of the outcomes of actual games, sports broadcasts were filled with numbers and data, as if all the solemn and ritualistic tabulation guaranteed the game’s facticity and the objectivity of its administrators.
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May 31, 2019
It was inevitable that something like the “Drunk Nancy Pelosi” deepfake would circulate, and it’s spurred a range of responses from tech companies (YouTube took it down; Facebook didn’t) and press commentators (for many of whom it has functioned as a Rorschach for their attitudes toward journalism as civics and deplatforming as censorship). Casey Newton
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May 24, 2019
In this essay for Surveillance and Society, Mark Andrejevic distinguishes usefully between panoptic surveillance (as outlined by Foucault in Discipline and Punish, drawing on Jeremy Bentham’s ideas) and the surveillance rapidly being implemented by tech companies today. The aims of these different forms of surveillance are entirely different, even antithetical. One induces internal obedience; the
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May 17, 2019
Recently I’ve admitted to myself that I’ve basically given up on discovering new music. It no longer circulates as social currency so much among the people I know, and I find I don’t have the time to absorb anything unfamiliar. It’s easier to dismiss what I happen to hear as reworkings of stuff I already
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May 10, 2019
Calling themselves Dadabots, researchers CJ Carr and Zack Zukowski have released several albums of AI-generated music, including a death metal album called Coditany of Timeless (lauded as “potentially enjoyable” in this Outline piece by Jon Christian). Their approach involved training a neural net with samples derived from the metal band Krallice, so that it can
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May 3, 2019
Last Sunday, while I was at a baseball game (the Phillies vs. the Marlins, at Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia), the middle-aged couple sitting next to me made it onto the kiss cam. This is when, between innings, hetero couples in the stands are put on the big scoreboard screen as some song like “Kiss
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April 26, 2019
A few days ago, Data & Society posted the transcript of a talk by danah boyd about YouTube as a news source and the platform’s vulnerabilities can be exploited. She notes how propaganda is created to fill the “data voids” associated with search terms that suddenly become popular in the wake of a news event,
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April 19, 2019
Facing intensifying criticism that its algorithmic recommendation system invariably feeds viewers “extreme” antisocial content — conspiracy theories, far right propaganda, and other hateful materials — YouTube, according to this Bloomberg report, is refining some of its metrics, complementing “watch time” with something it calls “quality watch time.” Obviously the company has this situation under control.
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April 12, 2019
When I first went to college, my mother, who worked for a bank, set me up with a credit card. This was not so I could spend money at my own discretion — I didn’t get to carry the card with me. It was so I could establish good credit and start working on my
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April 5, 2019
In a story that should have surprised no one, Mark Bergen of Bloomberg reported this week on YouTube’s history of prioritizing scale and profit over the well-being of its users, harnessing what its own engineers apparently call “bad virality” to optimize for engagement. “The conundrum isn’t just that videos questioning the moon landing or the
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March 29, 2019
At the Atlantic earlier this week, Sidney Fussell reported on Airbnb’s policies toward hosts installing cameras to observe their customers and the platform’s apparent ambivalence about enforcing them. As Fussell notes, Airbnb hosts are permitted to have cameras installed in living rooms, common areas, and outdoor spaces, but not bathrooms and sleeping areas. They are
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March 22, 2019
Pictured above is a work by Vija Celmins, called Blackboard Tableau #9. I saw it at a retrospective of her work at SFMOMA. One of the boards is a found object, a small writing slate from the early 20th century; the other is a meticulously made copy. That is, one is “real” and one is “fake,”
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March 15, 2019
A few weeks ago, the Guardian ran a story by Oscar Schwartz about Affectiva, a company that plans to market “emotion-detection technology.” That phrase, taken out of context, is an effective piece of hype even if it’s meant as a scary warning, as it concisely reinforces the company’s pitch: It suggests that emotions are discrete,
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March 8, 2019
When critiquing social media, I sometimes fall into the trap of assuming that tech companies want to dictate our behavior through some combination of surveillance and algorithmic control, affording merely illusory forms of participation, expression, and agency that have the actual effect of circumscribing them. This would have its apotheosis in a behaviorist nightmare world
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March 1, 2019
In its most recent issue, Logic magazine had an interview with an investment banker who specializes in algorithmic trading that shed some light on what makes data financially useful. It might seem like accuracy — data that allows for a more complete representation of the world — would be all important, but more often data’s
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February 22, 2019
To draw attention to machine learning research, it apparently helps to tout it as “dangerous.” The research company OpenAI received a lot of media attention last week by refusing to release the latest iteration of its text-generating/language-predicting model, GPT-2, claiming it was too good at producing readable text on command. “Due to concerns about large
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February 15, 2019
A few weeks ago, YouTube announced that it was adjusting its content algorithms to “begin reducing recommendations of borderline content and content that could misinform users in harmful ways.” In some quarters, this was hailed as another step toward tech companies acknowledging their editorial responsibility for what their platforms facilitate, and abandoning once and for
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February 8, 2019
TikTok, a Vine-like app for making and sharing videos, has recently been getting the app-fad treatment. Real estate writer Sally Kuchar’s sentiment seems typical: “TikTok is so wholesome and wonderful and good. It’s currently my favorite place on the internet.” Or here’s Julia Alexander at the Verge: “I’ve been using TikTok for a few months
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February 1, 2019
A few recent studies on facial detection and recognition systems, described in this MIT Technology Review report, point to their improved accuracy across race and gender lines and detail their enhanced “measures of facial diversity.” This somewhat terrifying phrenological image illustrates that concept in action: The newfound accuracy of these systems was celebrated in some
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January 25, 2019
Earlier this week, Instagram felt obliged to try to quash a rumor that had been circulating on the platform that the company’s algorithms made it so that only 7% of any given account’s followers would see that account’s posts. This wasn’t the first time: this sort of rumor has been recurrent ever since platforms switched
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January 18, 2019
In a famous image from the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, one man stood in front of a column of tanks to protest an authoritarian government that had declared martial law in part to assert its control over public space. In 2018, in Arizona, another man stepped forward: Charles Pinkham, 37, was standing in the
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January 11, 2019
Hello. This is the first of what will be a sort of weekly “links roundup” of articles on media and technology. My aim is not to provide a comprehensive, objective, or timely list of what everyone is reading or even should read, but instead to trace trends in tech commentary and explore what seem to
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November 20, 2017
In Psyche on the Skin: A History of Self-Harm, Sarah Cheney describes an incident from 1991 in which Richey Edwards, a member of the band Manic Street Preachers, was interviewed by a journalist from the New Musical Express and, after being challenged about his band’s political sincerity, carved “4 Real” into his arm with a razor blade. Though the
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September 25, 2017
I was first exposed to Team 10 — video blogger Jake Paul’s stable of would-be YouTube stars — on the Wildwood boardwalk in southern New Jersey this past June. At the T-shirt stalls, alongside all the other ultra-confrontational T-shirts, amid the nationalistic slogans and the butt shorts that read “E-ZPass,” were a smattering of Team 10 shirts. I didn’t know what
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October 31, 2016
The National Academy of Sciences just posted a paper titled “Online Social Integration Is Associated With Reduced Mortality Risk.” I gave a short comment on the paper’s findings to New York Times reporter Jonah Bromwich, but I wanted to expand on those thoughts here. This paper is of interest to me because, in evaluating whether
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September 26, 2016
Today, the day of the first Clinton-Trump debate, seems like the right time for this photo to go viral: Hillary Clinton, apart and alone on a pedestal, waving to a crowd that has its back turned to her to take selfies. It has perhaps already become one of the iconic photos of the campaign, but
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August 25, 2016
I saw the news this week that Pokemon Go is losing some of its popularity and noticed it’s fallen from conversation more generally. A perfect time to type up some thoughts! (And in general, we hope to use this Dispatches space as a place for Real Life editors to write about topics on our minds,
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June 24, 2016
Videodrome is the best film ever made about the internet. When I first watched David Cronenberg’s 1983 masterpiece, I was studying the sociology of knowledge and beginning to apply these theories to the web, which researchers and everyday commentators seemed to treat as weirdly foreign. I felt that we needed a fundamental shift in understanding when
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