Notes on Groveling: a study of our relationship with our data, in multiple acts.



Once upon a time we could characterize the feeling of being online as being uniquely disaffected. The opening and exiting of social media applications (and when is an application not made with some form of “social networking” instinct embedded? Any site of e-commerce can easily expand to inlude “content” about it and for it) like fidgeting, like the soft close and dull thud of a fridge door: many have said our relationship with the “platforms” that we depend on for access to and participation in culture (perhaps a skewed idea of the commons) is like a collective junk food dependence. What is there to our malaise with being online in 2025?

Childhood nostalgia emerges as an easy referent: the MMORPGs and casual (Flash) games I played — as well as their paper analogues I made during recess — were intuitive sites of worldbuilding and collaboration. I try to regain that sense of blithe constitution by stitching together multiple (“Web 2.0”) websites across which I can assemble some multiplayer narrative... Is there an inevitable boom-bust, enchantment-disillusionment cycle with any contemporary mass social media network? What was that peculiar flavor of open exploration that seemed to come so naturally and effortlessly as a kid? Is this once again the distance of age giving things a polish, a shine that was never there? 

Daniela Bologna introduces a way to think of stories as gifts; storytelling allows for sprawling, collaborative thinking, dreaming, imagining together. And indeed — is storytelling not a human reflex? To want to lounge about in speculative imagining together, wanting to stumble around and navigate... someplace? something?



a four-panel webcomic readapted as a meme: two people in conversation — the person on the left begins to speak, continually interrupted by the person on the right. 

(meme text transcript)
  A: “yeah so I’ve been thinking about other ways to gather online meaningfully”
      B: “bro is presencemaxxing so hard right now”
  A: “...”
      B: “bro is currently located at the intersection of touching grass and moving hearts”
  A: “...”
      B: “omg stop is radical attention in the room with us right now?”
  A: “...”
      B: [in greentext format] [eye emoji] “be me, heart LEAPING out my chest to be present with you right now girl”




How much of contemporary social “platform” disillusionment stems from our awareness of being mined? (User generated “content” as ever toppling treasure troves to scrape.) How do we relate to the data produced every day by and about us? When do material, physical analogies fail us?

Notes on Groveling thus opens with a couple questions, all quite rough around the edges:

    Is user/data privacy dead? If so, does it matter that we don’t care?

    When do you feel most like data?

    Do we want to see ourselves represented in technological systems (databases, interfaces) because being able to be visualized is a more vibrant way to feel alive?

    When is my longing still meaningfully mine?

In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff analyzes B.F. Skinner’s notion of a “technology of behavior,” drawing on this precedent to define “instrumentarian power” — the ability to engineer predictable and thus profitable human actions.

black and white image of a man taking a sip from a mug. the man is in front of a desk, at the front of which is taped a big sign, which at the bottom reads 'CHANGE MY MIND.' original text above the phrase is edited to now read 'nothing will allow you to escape the horror and joy of being a human, not even technology.'
My questions are driven by an encroaching sense that our [gestures / self expression] and [media / modes of interaction] are no longer meaningfully ours, a fear that uncritical surrender to the algorithmic sublime through eroticized helplessness will normalize political doomerism and the wholesale abandonment of democratic processes. Specifically: 

    Are we careless with our data? Does this carelessness limit our agency, whether as a user or citizen?
    
    Are there parts of contemporary user interfaces that predispose us to a form of engagement with technology that resists the productive friction that is key to various human pursuits — whether learning a skill or maintaining a relationship, for instance?

While the topics mentioned here are wide ranging and vary in intelligibility, Notes on Groveling (NoG) aims to tease these tensions out in as wide a range of media and as eclectic a range of strategies as possible: all in order to stay with this trouble of articulating our peculiar relationship with the “platforms,” infrastructures, “architectures” (insert vast, intense-feeling noun) that structure much of our daily lives... I sincerely hope it is of use, or of some entertainment, to you.

=== This conludes transmission 0 of Notes of Groveling: an introduction / preface to the project. ===