阿尔菲·波恩 Alfie Bown Hangzhou Paper.docx

Lefebrve is much the driving force behind the paper, though he is not directly invoked in what follows as often as are others. The paper comes from the perspective of Lefebvre’s volume Writings on Cities, which is a fragmented and yet comprehensive text compiled by Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas and which includes his three-volume Critique of Everyday Life, published in 1947, 1962, and 1981, taking in over 30 years of life in everyday Paris. Kofman and Lebas summarize the overall project very well, as far as such a thing is possible, writing:

Lefebvre addressed the feeling of malaise and crisis and the transitory period into a new society, that is a society of difference, of which he saw the dangers and the positive aspects, but also lucidly reminds us that the institutions with homogenizing power, especially the State, are very much with us.

There are some differences between Lefebvre’s moment and our own. The State – for example – is more complexly related to what Nick Srnicek calls ‘platform capitalism,’ as power, in both the East and the West, transfers from the traditional state apparatus to the multinational corporation itself closely linked to new methods of social governance. Still, his project describes – more or less- what we face today. This is a transitory period of crisis and malaise, and one which offers both great potential for social transformation and great danger of increased homogenization and increased state/corporate control of our movements and ultimately, our consciousness.

I’d like to start with a digression into the phenomenon of Pokémon Go to introduce what I am going to argue for here, which is a kind of reorganization of identity – a disruption, mutation and evolution of consciousness itself taking place via our mobile phones.

In 1981 French theorist GuyDebordwrote of the ‘psychogeographicalcontours’ of the city which govern the routes we take, even when we might feel we are wandering freelyaroundthe physical space.

Architecture, in 1981, was the principle force which controlled and governed theseinvisible contours of the city. Architecture wasthe city’s unconscious, whichdictatedthe paths wetook, and the zones we ingress (enter) and egress (exit). Today, this regulatory job is carried out bythe mobile phone.

Niantic – the producers of Pokémon Go - have been working on mobile phone psychology and social organization for several years and a lot of what has been realized in Pokémon Go is anticipated in its lesser-known forerunner Ingress (iOS and Android, 2011).

Playing a kind of testing role in the process, Ingress and Pokemon GO looks forward to what is referred to as a ‘smart city,’ defined accurately by Wikipedia as ‘anurban developmentvision to integrate multipleinformation and communication technology(ICT) solutions in asecurefashion to manage a city’s assets.’In short, this means controlling the actions and paths of people to best produce profit for the city, something that is now done primarily via our phones and via entertainment.

Released five years earlier, Ingress is one of the most important games of recent years and is a key ideological tool for Google; one that, unlike Pokémon Go, was little publicized. Ingress has seven million or more players as of 2016 and although this may be a small pool by comparison to the one hundred million who have experienced Pokémon Go.

In Ingress, the player moves around the real environment capturing ‘portals’ represented by landmarks, monuments and public art, as well as other less-famous features of the city. The player is required to be within physical range of the ‘portal’ to capture it, so the game constantly tracks the player via GPS. It reflects a trend of mobile phone application development (which includes Google Maps and Uber, among other well-known apps) designed to regulate and influence our experience of the city, turning the mobile phone into a new kind of unconscious: an ideological force driving our movements while we remain only semi-aware of what propels us and why we are propelled in the directions we are.

Importantly though, it less about monitoring where we go and more about developing the capacity to direct us where it wants us to move.

Of course, Google’s algorithms have long since dictated which restaurants we visit, which cafés we are aware of and which paths we take to get to these destinations. Now though, Google is developing new technology - Google Now - that predicts where we will want to go based on the time, our GPS location and our habitual history of movement stored in its infinitely powerful recording system. This, like Ingress, shows us a new pattern emerging in which the mobile phone dictates our paths around the city and encourages us, without realizing it, to develop habitual and repetitious patterns of movement.

A series of hysterical and ostensibly concerning events quickly arose from the release of the game, as had earlier been the case with Ingress.In the case of Ingress, academic study has been dedicated to the fact that the game has sent young children into unlit city parks after dark. With Pokémon Go, some examples of its effects include the fact that police have had to respond to a group of Pokémon trainers trying to get into a police station to capture the Pokémon within, people finding a dead body instead of a Pokémon and many people getting into car accidents while staring at their phones. Yet, our greater concern with both these games ought not to be the occasional bizarre story to emerge, but the psychological and technological effects of every user’s experience.

One of the major appeals of these ‘games’ (and indeed of all mobile games), is their repetitious patterns. This repetitious function of videogames can be illuminated by an old philosophical idea: the idea of dromena. Dromenaliterally means ‘things which are left running,’ but it is also to be taken with its onomatopoeic implication: things which drone on and on, repeating again and again in endless cycles. In his recent book on the role of the pleasure principle in contemporary culture, Robert Pfaller gives the example of schoolchildren forced to repeatedly write lines such as ‘I will not fidget during class’ as a punishment for fidgeting. After writing the line a hundred or so times, we seem to imagine, the idea will stick in a more unconscious way compared to writing it just once and the child will no longer fidget in class. Likewise, clicking thousands of times in a capitalism simulation game such as Virtual Beggar or Cookie Clickermay unconsciously encourage you to click more efficiently on your work computer as well.

Similarly, shooting a million bullets in the service of American foreign policy, no matter what your conscious objections may be when you are not playing the game, may ingrain the ideology at another more unconscious level. Or so the typical argument would go.

Yet, Pfaller also makes the more interesting case for the exact reverse of this argument: that ‘the repetition of symbols can also cause one to have as little as possible to do with these symbols and the situation they describe.’ Slavoj Žižek has written similarly that while going through a process of dromena,‘the beauty of it is that in my psychological interior I can think about whatever I want’.

The insight is particularly pertinent for a discussion of videogames, which can also be very clearly seen as a kind of repetitious dromena, with cyclical repetitions, level after level, sequel after sequel, which we opt to compulsively reenact. Could it not be in exactly this way that videogames appeal to us? By inviting us into a process of dromena, we can go wherever we want psychologically, and thus games can offer us a kind of escapism which goes beyond that offered even by the most involving book or cinema.

Neither the idea that dromenaingrains its symbols into us via repetition, nor the opposite idea that dromenafrees us from the need to think about the symbols it repeats, seems to be at all sufficient. On the contrary, it is in the relationship between these two apparently opposing ideas of dromenawhere we find a third and more satisfying answer to how dromenaprocesses work on us as subjects. Perhaps we can say this: is precisely the feeling of freedom that these processes give me, the invitation to send my psychological interior where I want, which enables ideology to be effectively imposed by the repetitious patterns in the experience. Yes, gaming appeals not because it gives us something to care about but on the contrary, because it frees us from our other concerns. However, what I ‘freely’ think while my mind drifts from the dromenaof gaming is not as free as it may seem, so that I cannot really ‘go where I want’ psychologically.

What I suggest here that that such products as Pokémon Go – and I will relate this to other ubiquitous mobile applications like WeChat and GoogleMaps later- are designed primarily to induce a peculiar mental state, a mental state caught between consciousness and unconsciousness in the strict Freudian terms, and something particular to our technological moment. Here I have tried to describe it in terms of dromena, earlier in terms of psychogeographical contours, and later I will approach it finally via the idea of preconsciousness.

Our videogame consoles and our mobile phones and the technological advances that go with them pretend to be about fulfilling our every desire, giving us endless entertainment (games), easy transport (Uber) and instant access to food and drink (OpenRice, JustEat) and even near-instantaneous sex and love (Tindr, Grindr). Yet, what is much scarier than the fact that we can get everything we want via our mobile phone is the possibility that what we want is itself set in motion by our mobile phones. While we think we are doing what we want, as if our desires already exist and that we are simply using our phones to help realize them, in fact Google has an even greater power, a truly revolutionary one: the ability to create and organize desire itself. Here, the traditional view of the unconscious is the ally of Google, since it encourages us to see our desires as our own internal impulses and Google as our great friend who facilitates the realization of such desires. On the contrary, the Lacanian unconscious would operate as the enemy of Google, showing us Google’s ability to organize our desires.

The development of Pokémon shows that dystopian visions of what technology and videogames would lead to seem to have got something completely wrong. Depictions of the dystopian videogame future have always tended to see the future as involving each individual isolated from the rest and sat quietly alone in a small room hooked up into a computer through which their lives are exclusively lived. In other words, we expected the importance of the physical environment to recede in favor of the imaginary electronic world. On the contrary to these predictions of the future, we now live in a dystopia where Google and its subsidiaries send us madly around the city almost non-stop in directions of its choosing in search of the objects of desire, whether that be a lover on Tindr, a bowl of authentic Japanese ramen or that elusive Clefairy or Pikachu.

Second, it shows the possibility for the electronic object to replace the real one. The objectivity possessed by the Pokémon is genuinely comparable, in a certain sense, to the objectivity of any other ‘physical’ object of desire. Whilst the Pokémon may not have the physicality of a lover who can be accessed via Tindr or a burger that can be located via JustEat, the burger and the lover certainly have the electronic objectivity of the Pokémon.

To prove this point we need only refer to the relationship between food and Instagram. Whilst Instagram ostensibly celebrates or showcases tasty food, it also obviously plays a role in the transformation of how the foods repeatedly represented actually taste. As common chatter often reminds us, taste is 70% determined by smell. As Freud knew, the olfactory – far from being natural – is the most ideological of the senses. The repetitious images on Instagram, then, give the food displayed an electronic objectivity, transforming the object by an endless repetitious sharing of the image which eventually has a concrete effect on the actual taste of the ingredient. Such images –like the image of the Pokémon - must be repetitious in order to function as they do. As an example, lets consider the butternut squash or the avocado. The avocado has only been able to take on its cultural significance and its delicious taste in 2016 as a result of its cycles of reappearance in images such as those circling on Instagram and Buzzfeed. Of course, it is correct in a straightforward sense that the ingredient is being used in more interesting ways, thereby changing its taste. It is also the case that the ideology surrounding the ingredient transforms the response of the taste buds when biting into it. Desire for the object, the experience of acquiring it, and the ability to re-share your own consumption of the image you consumed, have all been transformed by these technological cycles of repetition. The same - in each of these cases - holds true for a Pokémon. Let us take 3 objects of desire that are being regulated and reorganized by Google and its allies at the moment.

1. Food – restaurant search footage

2. Pokémon - footage

3. Sex – Grindr footage

You can easily, I think, see the visual and structural parallels – repetitions – between the three.

I turn now to the SuperApps, and to a comparison between three cities.

At lastyear’sMelon HK, five leading tech developers from China and the US agreed that it will not be long before mobiles have rendered computers and consoles relics from the past. Mobile “SuperApps” are a particularly vital part of this technological future. The phenomenon ofTencent’s WeChat — firstdeveloped in 2011 and already by a huge margin the most-used application in China — is the first truly successful of such “SuperApps,” the basic premise of which is that various applications (chatting, social media, blogging, restaurant review, travel, online bankingand more) are all rolled together into one single program. Whereas Tencent’s older QQ was a mere knock-off version of Microsoft’s MSN Messenger, its latest software takes app technology to the next level. WeChat has recently gone international, and a number of similar SuperApps modeled on WeChat are now in development across the globe. Facebook – with its new review features, diary, SMS service and forthcoming fundraising facility – is working hard to occupy this space in the West. WeChat is marketed in the name of increased user convenience, but the dangerous side-effects of such all-consuming applications can hardly be overestimated.

For one thing, it introduces a new level of synthesis between data collection and movement monitoring, where all data is now directly collected in a single service. Of its 1.1 billion users, more than half access WeChat 10 times a day or more, while many users leave the app active continuously, using it to map, shop, bank, date and play. WeChat’s logic is embodied by its seemingly strange “heat map” feature, designed to let users see where crowds are forming in real-time. The feature is packaged as a convenience tool, as if it has nothing to do with control: the objective is simply to help us access the least crowded shopping malls and avoid human and vehicle traffic congestion.

The problem is that this crowd data is visible to authorities as well, and its true potential is as a preventative measure against protests, occupations and riots. The data can alert authorities when crowds are gathering in the wrong places (i.e. protests or riots), leading to a preventative police presence, for example. Additionally, the data can be used to offer alternative routes to those looking to circumvent any blockages, which could be particularly important in the Hong Kong context where occupation of the business district in events like the ‘Umbrella Revolution’ of 2014 is a significant tactic of progressive opposition. With the movement data of so many people, authorities can minimize the disruptive power of such protests by anticipating blockages and offering substitutes, reducing the financial and practical cost of protests and thereby reducing the power of opposition to the state. As a side benefit there are corporate beneficiaries as well as governmental ones, since the data can of course maximize profit, sending consumers to the less crowded McDonalds or Starbucks, inducing consumers to optimize their behavior from a revenue generating perspective.

There is a dangerous feeling in the US and Europe that such patterns are uniquely and typically Chinese but still some way from the function of new technology on their own shores. For instance, the “social credit” game system planned for implementation in Beijing to rate each citizen’s trustworthiness and give them rewards for their dedication to the Chinese state received media coverage and expressions of shock from the US and UK. While in China the links between the new “SuperApps” and the state are more open, in the US the illusion of privacy remains paramount. When WhatsApp announced last year that it would no longer pass information to the police, media in Hong Kong voicedconcern that this would make things difficult for the state, whereas in the UK there was an inverse reaction: the press expressed betrayal that WhatsApp had ever shared such data in the first place. This suggests that the key difference between China and the West may be not so much the restrictions of freedoms in China but the illusions of freedom in the US and Europe. Contrary to this assumption, electronic structures of mapping and controlling the movements of users already operate along a similar framework in major Western cities too.

London and New York serve as two illustrations of this. As I discussed inan earlier piece, a Transport for London talk considered “gamifying” commuting, discussing the possibility that if a particular tube station is becoming clogged up due to other delays, TfL could give “in-game rewards” for people willing to use alternative routes. Whilst traffic jam prevention may not seem like evidence that we have arrived in a dystopian future, it actually shows the dangerous potential in such technologies. If inner-city congestion can be smoothed out, then so too can potentially subversive uses of the city space like those just mentioned. Likewise in New York, while theNew York Timesspoke of WeChat’s ‘heatmap’ as a dangerous and dystopic feature, it perhaps didn’t know that the NYC appAvoidHumansoffers New Yorkers the same service and therefore runs the same risks.

Furthermore, the new and fast-growing culture of in-game rewards carries significant potential to organize citizens and is not so far from the system designed for Beijing. Even in China it seems that private corporations, rather than governments, areleading the way with such schemesand the same can be seen in the UK and US. We might be at the beginning now, but it is not difficult to imagine a not too distant future in which digital rewards and punishments characterize the smooth functioning ‘smart cities’ of the future where all movements are centrally organized to maximize profit and prevent non-conformity. Just last week US mediareported China’s financial rewards for turning in foreign spieswith typical expressions of shock, but New York already has an official state mobile app, ‘See Something, Send Something, which digitizes this very process by allowing users to conveniently report anything suspicious. In fact, New York has more than 15 official government applications, suggesting very strongly that apps marry consumer convenience with state interests in the US too.

On a more subtle level, whileTimemagazine reported onhow useful Google Map’s new feature of predicting where the user will want to go might be, they neglect the dangerous side effect that such programs will encourage citizens to repeat cycles of the same patterns. In the same way that more innocent ‘predictive’ applications like Spotify keep the user listening to the same types of songs and then ‘sell’ them new material based on the creation of a pattern, Google’s new feature will ensure that already habitual humans become even more so, discouraging possibilities of spontaneous decision making and route-choice by making it more inconvenient not to follow the route mapped by the phone than to stick to it. At the same time, small changes to people’s routes can be encouraged by technology such as Apple’s iBeacon and the app ShopDrop, which allow retailers to send offers and information to nearby citizens via GPS tracking. Once in profitable patterns, citizens can be kept there.

Although user data is often shared between different corporations and between the public and the private sectors, this fact is generally by our patterns of thinking and talking about these data giants as discrete brands. While in China Google’s censorship means thatWeChatuses Baidu Maps as its API, the international version ofWeChatsimply taps into Google Maps, showing just how deeply integrated these corporate technologies already are. This integration means that there is no comfort to take in the idea that different kinds of data are going to different places rather than to a centralized state database. From 2016 WhatsApp was sharing data with Facebook (its parent company), suggesting that the Chinese “SuperApp” is hardly the first time that collected data ends up in one place. Google’s executives are supremely close to the seat of power in DC, and it’s difficult to imagine that Zuckerberg is far away either, givenhis recent feints towards a political profile, indicating that while individual data may not be straightforwardly passed on to the state in all cases, the connections are already there.

From a US or European perspective then, the more openly centralized state control that is so visible in China serves to further consolidate the impression that things are different in the West. But the technology is simply more advanced in the People’s Republic. What this comparative view on WeChat offers us is a glimpse into a dystopic future in which companies and governments can not only track every movement but influence and reprogram these movements. In the end, from crowd control to profit maximization in the “smart cities” in both the East and West, applications play a key role in keeping us confined to corporate and politically conformist paths.

In an even more invasive way, such technologies aim to increase the degree to which decisions taken by the city’s inhabitants are dictated primarily through mobile phones. In his recent book, Italian philosopher Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi has argued that technology is ‘mutating’ human consciousness. If there is any truth in this, it is certain that the mobile phone will play a central role. This is something openly recognized by the CEOs of app development companies but hardly considered by users. With programs like Maps and Uber, the paths of citizens are mapped out so that while the destination remains a user-choice for the time being, the route is not. Yet, with the anticipation of the user’s desire that will come with Google’s ability to predict where you want to go as well as how you want to get there, even this may change. If so, we are currently in the early stages of the intervention of the mobile phone into the decision-making capacity of individual citizens.

“Predictive” applications (which include Spotify, Siri and other popular apps) are on the rise and are widely considered the next big thing in app development, but we may be thinking about them the wrong way. These services aim not only to predict but to influence, deciding for us what we want and how we go about getting it. In this lightPokémon GO (now banned in China) can be seen as a kind of testing phaseto see what Google could make people do. Predictive analytics tools look at “training data” (everything you have done and said) and use algorithms to predict an outcome. While certain kinds of decision-making algorithms have been ubiquitous for some time now, the difference with these ones is that it is the user’s own data that is used to make the decision rather than wider publicly collected data, so each individual has their own personalized decision-making algorithm. The important point, straightforward but with huge implications, is that some of these predicted outcomes were not destined to happen before the algorithm predicted them. In short, phones will soon make personal decisions for each individual.

Freud remarked that “man has become a god with artificial limbs,” and these individualized algorithms may be one of the more important of such cyborg features.The situation can be considered in relation to Freud’s concept of the“preconscious,” a kind of interim space between conscious and unconscious thought. The preconscious describesthoughts and desires that are unknown at the particular moment in question, but are easily capable of becomingconscious. It is impossible for unconscious drives to enter the preconscious without transformation, so we should be clear that a mobile phone cannot give us access to our unconscious except in the way that all media may relate to unconscious thoughts. However, when it comes to the preconscious, mobile phones may bring into consciousness desires and drives which might otherwise have remained in the preconscious. Yes, they were part of the individual’s history and potentiality (their metadata) but they may never have emerged into conscious desire. As such, we are handing over an important part of our decision-making skills to a device designed to map our actions in state and corporate interest.

Expand on preconsiousness

While speculative scientists and sci-fi enthusiasts tirelessly consider whether human consciousness could ever be uploaded, the scariest thought may be that from a certain perspective elements of consciousness are already being outsourced to our mobiles, devices with a particular bias in favor of corporate expenditure and state control. While the West seems intent on obscuring this realization to preserve the feeling of full individual choice, China seems to embrace or at least acknowledge these increases in corporate and state control. On the one hand, this might even suggest that China’s reactions are the healthier of the two, but on the other hand there is an acceptance of inevitability of such developments in China, whereas there may still be more space for their resistance in the West.