In Eliot Peper’s Analogy trilogy, the feed is a crucial part of near future society. It offers a real time curated input of culture, mediated by a global monolith firm Commonwealth who have effectively amalgamated social media & search then internalised them in what is implied to be a neural link:
The feed was your personal lens through which to gaze into the digital abyss, the algorithmic curator that delivered what you needed when you needed it from the surfeit. It was the permeable membrane through which you experienced and participated in culture, the arbiter of what you found when you searched and what you discovered when you dipped into the roiling, throbbing cosmos of global conversation.
The surreptitious hacking of feeds, as well as the geopolitics of the infrastructure, drive the plot of the first book. But it struck me how strange it seems in retrospect to conceive of this function in passive terms, as opposed to the feed talking to the user. It left me thinking about a (dsytopian) future where we have a personalised digital daemon as a cognitive prosthesis which filters our engagement with the world. It would co-evolve over the life course by accumulating and analyzing user-specific data, aiming to enhance self-understanding and foster personal growth. As they evolve, these systems could predict user needs, drawing connections between diverse data points to offer a more personalized experience.
It’s a speculative scenario but I find this really interesting as a thought-experiment for thinking about digital inequalities of the sort which are now opening up. Would there be more or less powerful digital daemons? What would this mean for capacities for reflexivity and decision making? Would the accumulation of expertise over the life course mean that generational inequalities would be entrenched?
Mark Carrigan 