/RESEARCH & CREATIVE PRACTICE

Interfaces and Us: User Experience Design and the Making of the Computable Subject (2023)
Hybrid Artist-Scholar Monograph
Published by Bloomsbury Visual Arts
(purchase at the link above)

I am extremely grateful to the folks at Bloomsbury for taking a chance on this book. And I am very proud of how it turned out. This book began in 2017, when I attended the Design Incubation Writing Fellowship in New York. Nearly four years after that, I finally got a contract, and, eventually, in February of 2023, it was published. In glorious full-color no less (thanks to a grant from my institution and to Bloomsbury’s Design publisher and team for making it happen). I think the book is a good read and will remain relevant at least for a little while longer. Go get yourself a copy.

About the book, Tim Maughan, writer, tech critic, and author of Infinite Detail along with many other brilliant stories, writes: “Interfaces and Us dares to peel back the plastic film protecting interface design to reveal how it is both shapes and is shaped by everything from convenience and consumerism to market forces and economic inequality. While finally putting to rest the idea that design is inherently neutral, it's an indispensable guide to the politics of how we interface not just with the digital systems around us, but with late capitalism itself.”

Here’s the back cover text and the Table of Contents, which, together, I think to do a decent job of capturing the vibe:

We’re all familiar with smart TVs making suggestions on our future watching, real-world exercise data being transferred to our workout apps, and turning up our home heating before we start our commute, but how does this world of technological interfaces affect our actions and perceptions of self? When society relies on computer models and their interfaces to explain and predict everything from love to geopolitical conflicts, our own behavior and choices are artificially changed... In this book, Zachary Kaiser describes and details the role of user-experience design in the adoption of the “computable subjectivity,” where an individual believes that they are both computing—where they process information like a computer—and computable, meaning that they can be entirely understood by computers. He explores the characteristics that underpin the development and proliferation of this particular subjectivity, including the ideological commitment to the equivalence of “data” and “world,” and the aspiration to both be legible to, and predictable by, computers. He also explores the harmful social consequences of this subjectivity and outlines how design practice and education can respond.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction

1. Historical and Conceptual Roots of the Computable Subjectivity

Introduction: Disrupting the Insurance Industry-“Convenience” and “Freedom”
Producing and Looping, or, Biopolitics and Biopower
The Value of Convenience
Freedom and Countercultural Technocracy
The Selfish System: Cybernetics and Rational Choice Theory
Markets as Information Processors: Cybernetics and Economics
The Neoliberal Governmentality
Conclusion: Foundations and Ramifications

2. Data=World

Introduction: Can You “See” Your Dream Data?
Data and World: An Origin Story
Computational Instrumentation: Templates and Translations
How Computational Instruments Disappear
Conclusion: The Great Inversion, or, Operationalism's Legacy

3. Prediction and the Stabilization of Identity

Introduction: Whisper and the Scrambling of Algorithmic Anticipation
The Digital Production of Fragmentation and Alienation
Ontological Insecurity: One Consequence of Fragmentation and Alienation
The Digital Mirror Self: Soothing Ontological Insecurity with Computation
The Role of UX in Producing, then Soothing, Ontological Insecurity
Consequences: Soft Biopower and the Proscription of Potential
Conclusion: Becoming Cyborgs

4. The Moral Imperative of Normality through Computational Optimization

Introduction: The Optimized Professor and the Pressures of Optimization
Measurement, Normativity, and Morality: Two Origin Stories
The Moral Imperative of Self-Optimizing Technologies: The Case of the Amazon Halo
Consequences: Anxiety, Superfluity, and the Instrumentalization of Interpersonal Interaction
Conclusion: Fighting for Servitude as if it Were Salvation

5. The Questions of Political Economy and the Role of Design Education

Introduction
Question 1: The Issue of Political Economy and Chile's Socialist Cybernetics
Question 2: The Role of Design Education in Resisting the “Reality” of the Computable Subjectivity and the Reformist Approach
Conclusion: Returning to Political Economy and the Limits of the Reformist Approach to Design Education

Conclusion: Towards a Luddite Design Education

The Politics of UX and the Computable Subject as the Ideal Political Subject
The Lingering Problem: The Computable Subjectivity and Political Economy
The Revolutionary Approach: Luddite Design Education
A Provisional Program of Luddite Design Education
A Luddite Design Education, Now