‘The project investigates what it means to be a human User in today’s technological
infrastructures. Reflecting on the impossibility of addressing a complex structural problem
from a singular vantage point or field of expertise, the publication draws on interviews
with practitioners including policy researchers, user-experience designers, software
developers, architects, journalist, social activist, and media theorists. By bringing
together sometimes opposing perspectives, the project puts forth possible strategies to
contest the regime of platform capitalism. Inspired by cybernetic thinking and the values of
the American 1970’s counterculture movement, such as self-sufficiency and ‘access to tools’,
the research circulates as a PDF and a printed publication, given away on the basic of
voluntary donation. The relations between interviews, texts and diagrams are presented as
feedback loops, providing examples of what cybernetic publishing could look like in the age
of ubiquitous computation.’
‘Today, any inhabitant of a city is treated as a computational User by default. Smooth
interfaces and real-time feedback loops augment our urban experiences making us feel
empowered, while subjecting us to processes of profiling, quantification, optimization, and
isolation.’
‘A citizen cannot traverse urban space without encountering any of its ubiquitous sensing
technology.’
‘Digital applications, providing by tech giants such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, Uber and
Airbnb, have become the main (and sometimes the only) prism through which we encounter and
understand urban space. Locate, like, review, rank up, vote down, follow, swipe.’
‘In fact, citizens interact with privately owned digital platforms more often and more
intimately than they do with the platforms of the state.’
‘To live in a city today means to be in a state of constant transition between being a
citizen and being a User, augmented by networked technologies.’
‘User is not a body. In computation, User is traditionally defined as a person who uses
software, but this is less true in today’s reality, when bots account for 48 million, or 15
per cent, of all Twitter accounts.’
‘Rather than being a human, User is a profile, an avatar, a body double, and a virtual
stand-in for somebody on the platform. As formulated by the design theorist Benjamin
Bratton, being a User is a question of authentication: anyone or anything can become a User,
as long as they have a username and a password, be that a piece of software, a bot, an
illegal immigrant, or a smart object connected to the network.’
‘The same cannot be said for a citizen. In order to be qualified as one, a citizen needs to
fit within a strict set of requirements.’
‘The obvious benefits of being a User over being a citizen are easy access and the ability
to use convenient services regardless of citizen status. But when exactly does a citizen
become a User, and what does it gain and lose in the process of this transition?’