#jack self

If our lives are hyper-extended into social media, has that become another medium for where life exists? Life online and offline has become nearly indistinguishable as social media is a medium where we flex and show our everyday lives. It is also a medium for the real and unreal. 

Social media is a mix of ourselves through performance and representation through our identities shown to the internet’s public domain. 

We place ourselves in a theatre of streamlining our narratives – where it can be all shows don’t tell. Consequently, users have created a theatre in social media that blurs out the distinguishable lines between real life and an act of posing to flex or tell a specific narrative. Our everyday life has become a mode of self-commodification for internet affection. The birth of Kardashian Kolloquium by MJ Corey pins points out how every day has been commodified into some form of capital through her Instagram page that does media theory analyse of the Kardashians and their reality TV show. The Kardashians are the embodiment of self-commodification and taste-making their everyday life for mass consumption. From reality TV shows to social media, the norm is publicised and directed through causal Instagram, where marketers have capitalised on our displays of the mundane as a space for product placement. Think Emma Chamberlain and her “photo dumps” which have cascaded us into posting mundane “fit pics” and accidental photos on the Gram. Per the Digital Fairy, causal Instagram has shifted the marketing standards to products that fit effortlessly into our lives through social media. Social media “recontextualises what already exists” to be re-commodified into our lives in a different way (Jack Self).

With social media’s power to commodify our experiences, we are convinced to buy products not because we need them - but because we are marketed like we have to have them. Per Julie Megretu & Henri Lefebvre, we no longer consume what we need because traditional institutions have become out of sight and lost their relevancy in the age of social media where AI and algorithms convince us of what we should want but not need; along with the dilution of traditional institution’s powers on directing us on what we should do - we now have social media to do that as it is a main source of trafficking and controlling how our and other people’s data can be commodified into a purchase. It is unsettling that our feeds are dictated by algorithms and feeds - there is this loss of self-agency and autonomy over what information is fed to us.

In defence of social media, it is only a facet of a highly curated look of the self that does not represent our realities. It can often seem to represent other's whole realities as we are so fixated on curating our image online, no matter if we are active or inactive. It seems connectivity inherently causes conflict within ourselves, but it is how we use the technology, not how it uses us.

The metaverse offers the narrative that life can happen online. It is enticing how we can build new worlds and new identities within the virtual space; the metaverse can fulfil an extension of who we are and our desires, per Herman Narula (CEO of Improbable a company building metaverse infrastructure and software).  Could “virtual reality becomes the next collective dream destination?” per Shumon Basar? Or will life online be distinguishable between two realms? The metaverse seems like a pipedream for now. But as of now, social media is our daily lives - it has become indistinguishable from the present and online.

Jack Self on technology, labor, and the internet of things:

The problem with the new-fangled gizmos pioneered in San Francisco is that their benefits are not obvious. Smart fridges that can make automatic shopping orders, or artificial intelligence “personal assistants” such as Alexa, Cortana and Siri, seem less concerned with fundamental liberation and more with incremental convenience. They don’t have any existential purpose. They either streamline tasks that were already marginal, or they solve problems created by the device itself. Increasingly, new categories of home technology require and collect large amounts of personal data to perform their meaningless functions. It turns out Big Brother is a corporation.

The only contemporary vision for the future of the home is the so-called “Internet of Things”, in which every object is able to communicate its status to every other object in a network. Unlike the relentless advance of labour and leisure, the Internet of Things doesn’t have any social agenda – it is not trying to reduce work, or increase entertainment – but sees the creation, collection and management of information in the domestic ecosystem as intrinsically useful. Mysteriously, the data is its own end.

On this week's episode of my podcast, Scratching the Surface, I have a really fun and interesting conversation with Jack Self. Jack is an architect and writer and publisher of one of my favorite new publications, The Real Review. The Real Review is a publication about contemporary life and what it means to live today by looking at architecture and the built world. In this episode, Jack and I talk about his background and how his career has flipped back and forth between architecture and writing, his goals for The Real Review, and the types of discourse we'd like to read around architecture and graphic design.

Kristin Capps, writing for City Lab in a piece excellently titled, The Paranoid Style in American Architecture, looks at the design and mystery around the NSA headquarters:

The NSA headquarters building is as compelling as it is unsettling—much like the J. Edgar Hoover Building, the headquarters for the FBI. The hundreds of cars parked around the building stand in for the thousands of intelligence workers inside—the serfs of the deep state, as it were. The photo anonymizes them: It’s not possible to make out the make or model of most of the vehicles, much less any information about the lives of the employees who drive them. Dots of colors of vehicles reflected in the mirrored building envelope betray nothing about what happens inside. Fort Meade looks like it might be the end of the earth, an exurb you never hope to have reason to visit. Like the FBI Building, the NSA headquarters is a metaphor for the agency it hosts.

Capps quotes and links to another piece on the building — one from 2015 by Jack Self (now editor of The Real Review) who uncovered many of the details known about the building:

But rumours and hearsay aside, the authorised information available on the building could practically be published in a single tweet. There is only one official photograph (although it is not known when it was taken) and nothing is known about who designed the building or when it was completed. Nonetheless, it is clearly visible on Google Maps and the collection of vintage aircraft mounted in the car park can be freely photographed (albeit only from approved perspectives).

This strange condition of being both very much in the public domain, and yet totally unknowable, intrigued me a good deal. Yet the more I researched, the more I realised how tightly information was being controlled, and this only piqued my interest further. I wanted to unravel this architecture, but without a contact or lead I wasn't sure where to start. So I emailed [email protected].

My question, "who designed your headquarters, and when was it finished?" was met with appropriately profound suspicion and a cold politeness. The response email, title "re:CLASSIFICATION:UNCLASSIFIED," read simply, "Dear Sir, we can neither confirm nor deny that the referenced project has been completed." Subsequent correspondence from the press office was polite, but understandably curt and frustratingly uninformative.

I'm reminded of this excellent piece from The Intercept last year on 33 Thomas, the mysterious New York skyscaper that is widely believed to be an NSA surveilliance site. (I previously linked to that piece here, and by coincidence, walked by it just this week and took a few photos.)