#usership

The computer was invented by scientists and in its early days it looked as though it would remain the machine controlled by men in white coats, controlling all with their arcane knowledge. But this was never the vision of Turing, the British inventor of the computer. He always saw it as the ‘universal transformation’ engine. The transformations that it can achieve depend on what is asked of it. The whole history of IT has in fact been that of a tug of war between the scientist specialist and the amateur enthusiast. Or perhaps more importantly, between science and commerce. The original creators of computer systems were happy enough to speak to their machines in the highly complex machine code. It was business demand that turned it into the engine that could be manipulated by all in the office, and then in the home.

Historians have never been the only users of archival collections (they were not the intended users in the first place, of course), but they have (rightly) been used to archival institutions whose mindset was tuned in on the possible use of their collections for historical research. The necessary context for understanding the collections was provided often with the scholarly community in mind. With archival institutions’ focus on creating easy access for much broader user-group, historians may experience a loss of context when searching and finding sources digitally, because it is not provided as part of the way sources are found by searching full text or metadata using keywords. Thus, if historians, no matter their sub-discipline, want to make their (scholarly) interests matter in the creation of new digital archives, they have to become users who are actively engaged in the discussion about digital archives.

Users are not paid for their labor, nor do they operate the means of production. Finally, people often say that the user is the “product.” This is also misleading. Users are not products, but rather we are the sources of raw-material supply. Surveillance capitalism’s unusual products manage to be derived from our behavior while remaining indifferent to our behavior. Its products are about predicting us, without actually caring what we do or what is done to us.

With our definition of agency in mind (the ability to interrupt behavior and break automatisms), we might come to a surprising conclusion: within a certain system, the non-user is the one who possesses maximum agency, more than the standard user, the power user, and maybe even more than the hacker.