Lured by the Cookies
Working from home or “hybrid” will drive the biggest change in how we interact with our local communities and neighbours. As companies are settling towards 2 days office weeks ( Thursday is the new Friday) we have regained 3 days back at home, reducing commuting stress and increasing time spent locally.
The dogs are happy, so are your local High Street traders and coffee shops. How can we make the best of this ‘gift-from-the-plague’ ? Is it a Trojan Horse or a blessing for working parents?
In Episode 3 of Horizon Scanning project titled ‘Tales from Cybersalon’ we asked 4 sci-fi writers to re-imagine how our online and offline communities will be impacted with this rapid shift. To support the horizon scanning, Cybersalon invited 4 online and offline communities to share their work and future hopes/anxieties about how this new life would pan out.
Four key themes emerged from the sessions and stories :
- Distraction – more automation of online and offline communities means more interactions /push notifications by bots and AI , poking you with nudges and torturing with prompts to ‘integrate’ and ‘contribute’ to your ‘hood.
- Identity – increased fraud as online personas are increasingly easy to fake
- Intrusion/Surveillance – instead of trust, bosses are using e-monitoring and AI to control home-based workers
- Appearance of choice – multiple online/offline communities competing for your attention and money, commercialisation of communities, artificialisation of ‘hoods.
Spending less time in the office means spending more time online at home. Instead of face-to-face meetings, we are at the mercy of our screens for the full 3 days when we are not with colleagues and teams in the office.
As our expert, sci-fi writer Yen Ooi noticed, the writers sensed this new vulnerability, illustrating the reality of constant bot notifications, reminders, AI pokes and automated nudges or alerts. “How will we get anything done in such noise, in a distracted society” Yen asked.
In “Disconnect”, Wendy Grossman introduces a character called Celia, whose job as ComunAgent is to monitor, stimulate and control local communities, ensuring regular use and positive reinforcement for small, friendly gestures, with her role not being transparent, not seen or understood by the community members. Celia does not understand her own impact, as she ‘never talks to the users’. She is startled, discovering that those are real people with her manipulations having a real, often unforeseen impact.
A similar level of manipulation by bots is illustrated in ‘Accept All Cookies’ by Liam Hogan. Here we accompany the main character on her journey from a reluctant newcomer to a neighbourhood, thru her AI-poked system-enforced visit from her neighbours, to her acceptance of the level of disclosure that everyone knows everything about her.
Her upside is that she gets to interact more with local people and accepts the trade of personal information sharing for increased intimacy with the community. In just 12 months she ends up being one of the participants of the articial ‘hood’ by offering gluten-free cookies to a new neighbour (in response to an AI nudge) . The story is chilling in the main character’s resigned acceptance of this trade, internalising it, seeking positives in her immersion into this sinister high-surveillance local neighbourhood.
Intrusion
As Prof Rachel Armstrong noted, both of the stories are showing people’s willingness to accept such a high level of distraction by bots. Secondly, the participants also accept the level of deep intrusion. They don’t rebel. ‘It is just as if everyone took a Blue Pill, like in the Stepford Wives movie where people are just going thru the motions becoming part of the system, a cog in the AI machine” – she observed, noting their lack of rebellion and sheep-like propensity, a strange willingness to ‘go with the flow’.
In Stephen Oram’s story ‘Gather Power”, the characters are injected with hardware body implants that convey messages and the mood of their friends. You can dial the volume of messages down to have some peace and quiet, but people are reluctant to withdraw, concerned with becoming invisible to their implant-connected friends as those are the only ones they have.
“She wanted to be alone and she wanted to be wanted. What someone had once inaccurately nicknamed Schrödinger’s Friends” as Oram introduces his protagonist’s dilemma.
The main character does not question this world, accepting the implants presence as given.
As Prof Armstrong observed, the worlds constructed for us by the writers are sinister in their intrusiveness, but they appeal to our need for connection, leaving us in constant push-pull relationship with social media, our online communities and our souls.
There is no black-and-white answer to this intrusiveness and high level of surveillance, private data submission is a price to pay for being a part of a group. The writers picked up on this instinctive need for belonging, for being part of a social scene, wanted to be included so badly, that even invasive body devices like an implant seem to be an acceptable price to pay.
Perhaps it is time to reveal the junkiness of online relationship and superficiality of the online community – as Eva Pascoe (Cybersalon Chair) commented. A “like” here and a “heart emoji“ there is all we can give to our friends from the distance, better than nothing but all just unsatisfactory gestures, all way short of a hug and a chat we would do face to face when someone needs support.
Appearance of Choice
Wendy Grossman’s story explores commercialisation of communities- you can join your local council community, but that is ‘for losers’. Instead, you can join Tik Tok or say a Weatherspoon group, much more glamorous and ‘with it’, but then you need to invest time to either create time-consuming TikTok memes, or go to Weatherspoons a lot – both unappealing but better than the council community that is not aspirational.
Wendy Grossman picks up that most of us want to be with cooler people than us, following Groucho Marx attitude that we don’t want to be part of a club that is willing to accept our membership. We want to join something exclusive, more elite, a special group.
Ultimately this is the struggle of modern online participants, modern urban dwellers. The community on offer like Facebook is really ‘down market’ now, while TikTok is up with the smart kids and Coinbase exchange is Da Place for those who are really ‘in-the-know’.
Human competitiveness is a deep instinct, anyone who would like to see more socialist behaviour may be encouraged by an increased Covid-Era community empathy and self-help networks that have emerged from the Pandemic. But the utopians do recognise that short of a mass Blue Pill swallowing, we are all Groucho Marks on line as well as off line.
Deep Fakes
The most disturbing of stories was The Valens Program by Jesse Rowell. The story presents Deviant agents creation project where a start-up creates imaginary personas that serve as a target of hate for online communities.
The Valens Program, as it has been known, is based on the premise that it is optimal and healthier to offer deep fake/virtual personas as objects of hate, virtual, fantasy “people” instead of being the real members of the community. The Thomas Mann-esque like character of this start up founder argues that he considers ‘deep fakes’ a way of stabilising societies, a way of ‘cleansing’ them by creating then banishing the object of hate (like the example of travelling salesmen who brought a deadly virus to the group and was subsequently ‘banished’).
Creating fictitious deviants ensures no real people get hurt – says the founder.
Unfortunately, to be ‘believeable’, AI creates the deviants from identifiable characteristics, like ethnicity, religion, or culture. In fact, the personas reinforce prejudice rather instead of alleviating it. We alter reality at our peril, is the warning shot from the author. This is an apt warning as we are about to step into more VR and AR on line worlds- both environments where deep fakes thrive while all reality is altered.
Writers:
Wendy Grossman, Jesse Rowell, Liam Hogan, Stephen Oram
Experts:
Prof Rachel Armstrong, Edward Saperia, Yen Ooi
Chair: Eva Pascoe
Stories links here:
