Reality is collapsing. Institutional trust is extinct. And authenticity is performative. The line between fact and fantasy continues to blur. But when reality is this negotiable, the soil for preferred futures is fertile. If reality is so malleable, then so be it. What’s the future you want to see? You can just do things.
In a series of essays in partnership with Squarespace, we’ll make sense of our relationship with reality and how culture is made.
Making it real is now an act of rebellion, a middle finger to the paralysis brought on by consensus collapse. Making reclaims agency amidst lost meaning. Don’t escape this reality. Design the one you want. We desperately need your alternatives.
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Build a better reality, then charge admission. With member-only areas, e-commerce and content monetization, create your space away from the noise. Decide a price and monetize products, services, courses, or any exclusive content. Make, sell, repeat. Fund your preferred future. No design experience required. Just the will to make something real.
The following piece is a collaboration between Matt Klein + Ruby Justice Thelot.
Ruby Justice Thelot is a designer, cyberethnographer and artist based in New York. He is a professor of Design and Media Theory at New York University.
There’s something odd about getting into a Waymo.
After a couple phone taps, the vehicle slowly glides to the curb with perfectly controlled movement, as if fixed on invisible tram-rails etched into the road for its robotic wheels. The white Jaguar moves with the elegance of a prima ballerina, with none of the emotion. All control. Perfect precision. No mistakes. The interior of the self-driving cocoon is comfortable. Supple leather, still new. It talks with a meticulously paced digital intonation. Ambient lo-fi music eases you in.
The whole affair reeks of violent convenience.
Convenience is the mind killer.
When we look at the tools, products, and systems we design, the guiding problem statement always seems to be the eradication of friction. Eliminate the delays, remove the resistance, rid the human inconsistencies.
In the driverless car, we enter seamlessly and we rest completely. We avoid the small irritations of a driver on the phone or a driver who wants to talk. No more “how-do-you-do’s” or “where-are-you-from’s.” There’s no shared an environment. A troubling silence smothers the car. It is difficult not to be reminded of Sartre’s line from Huis Clos:
“Hell is other people.”
It keeps echoing, because it seems to be the base assumption guiding our fear of friction. In the imagination of contemporary product makers, friction is other people. The designer’s premise tacitly becomes: life would be perfect if only you could remove the human being who stands between you and what you want.
The issue is that thishell is where we come to understand each other.
It is in the conflict of communication that we form consensus.
Many think pieces have been written about echo chambers and their consequential radicalizations, but, more importantly, our digital polarization has made it nearly impossible for us to share any common ground. This common ground, while sticky, uncomfortable and human, is where friction lives. It’s this friction that’s necessary for shared experience, discrepancy, negotiation and ultimately social progress.
This is why we’re witnessing a collapse of consensus.
We no longer share truths, we speak different languages, dispersed amongst a million Babels.
The Tower of Babel is a story in which humanity, speaking one common language, unites to construct a tower to reach the heavens. Seeing their ambition, God scatters the people, giving them different languages, and making cooperation impossible.
The story’s evocative because it foregrounds the complexity inherent in communication and how that complexity was imposed as punishment.
Communication is inherently difficult: we stutter, misspeak, use the wrong words and say the wrong things. We struggle to be understood every. single. day. An off-hand comment can land poorly with a barista. A joke to a friend can avalanche into a full blown conflict. The wrong salutation in an email can risk an entire exchange.
The dream sold by human-AI interaction – or really much of our consumer technology – is that of perfect communication. One where the interlocutor is always comprehended, always right. And one where the receiver is pliable and diligent, flexible and smooth, adaptable and compliant. “Sycophant” is the term – a servile self-seeking flatterer, one who praises those in power to gain approval.
This is why it feels so good to chat with a chatbot, because as interlocutors we are in utter control. As cybernetics scholar Norbert Wiener reminds us,
“Communication and control entail each other.”
But scientists warn of social sycophancy in our AI. As more people seek answers from their LLM companions, the more one is praised (deservingly or undeservingly), and the more distorted one’s self-perceptions become.
The advent of AI-human relationship also signals a similar flattening of the rugged ground of our human relationships.
It is the extension of perfect communication to an experience of endless frictionlessness. A dream of being known without being challenged. But without friction, there is no true dialogue, no true understanding, no true consensus, and no ideological encounter pushing us to new ideas. No fun.
The abolition of friction is the abolition of life itself.
Stripping friction strips a shared reality. For us to maintain consensus, we need to acknowledge one another, not eliminate any opportunity for a crash.
The noise, the glitch, the bugs, the mishaps, the unevenness of life makes it worth experiencing, and, more importantly, sharing with one another.
Perfect communication is communication that is not perfect. Because the misinterpretations, re-explanations, awkwardness, risk and effort is the point.
That’s the communication.
Overcoming barriers is the point. Not eliminating them.
Today, the perfect experience, based on the logic of seamlessness, is one where we are alone and speaking to a digital mirror. Hyper-convenience where everyone atomized in their self-driving cars is no society.
Because to crash is to be alive, it is to be human.
