Examining four-dimensional life: In Conversation with Laurence Scott

Prior to the release of his debut book 'The Four-Dimensional Human: Ways of Being in the Digital World', I met with Laurence Scott to discuss the ideas and themes that inspired and shaped his thinking.

Read my review of the book here.

MJ
Jean Baudrillard famously said ‘we live in an age of more and more information and less and less meaning’ – what I sense you are saying in your book is that this information takes on new meanings that can only have real resonance with those living within this four-dimensional realm. How far would you see your idea of the ‘four-dimensional human’ building upon Baudrillard’s ‘hyper-reality’ or Guy Debord’s ‘society of the spectacle’, or do you think they are now quite outdated?

LS
I think that all of those philosophers who were getting more and more aware of increasing mediatisation were really on-the-money; my book is just a hyperbolic version.

Where I really love Baudrillard is in the image of the desert space, that is a great metaphor for this really strange blankness... he saw the desert space as a big projection screen onto which we, and America particularly, project an image of itself. The desert is one of the most potent images of contemporary life.

MJ
I thought that was a really interesting section... particularly regarding the Google Mapping of the desert. I read recently that they are now considering mapping part of the bottom of the ocean. They’re almost creating in reality that short Jorge Luis Borges piece ‘On Exactitude in Science’ in which the professional geographers create a map to exact scale of the territory and covers the entire area.

LS
I think that’s a new lament now actually, but look back at the Romantics against the material brutality of industrialisation for the loss of the pastoral. In a world of service industries it’s enough for us to sense this in the categorisation and slicing up of everything; we see a marked increase in that in terms of our loss of the pastoral.

MJ
Throughout the book you adopt the ambivalent, almost celebratory, tone of J.G. Ballard. In the epilogue though you worry whether you’ve been too ‘alarmist’ and are keen to ward off the ‘Demon of Melodramatic Prophesies’ – why did you choose this strategy?

LS
I was very cautious, as I mentioned in the epilogue, because I’m at the perfect age to be very nostalgic for a kind of ‘lost world’, writing this in my early-30s. But I think that’s been true forever and so I wanted to be careful not to create another predictable lament.

But also, I hate the idea of generalising people’s experiences online, I couldn’t think of anything worse. I look around and tend to write perhaps more about the uneasiness and some of the strange anxieties mainly because that’s an easy thing to write about... ecstasy is a lot harder to grasp. But I also look around and see people really brimming with joy, connections, solace, comfort, and just pure wit... I know a lot of the stuff I read online really enriches me.

So there couldn’t be one single moral guide and it isn’t even that interesting a proposition.

MJ
I suppose the success of the book for me lies in that you aren’t taking a firm moral standpoint. Nicholas Carr’s book ‘The Shallows’ as an example - a good book, but there’s almost the increasingly resurgent cry of the neo-Luddite about it.

This leads to another question – the sensation of Google stifling particularity or the presumption of original thought. Do you see the creative arts as facing a real dilemma in terms of how they incorporate the digital dimension? Might we see (or are we already seeing) a heavy reliance on nostalgia and pre-Internet time periods?

LS
Yeah, that’s a really good question. There was a section of the book, which I didn’t end up including, looking at dramatic irony. I was thinking that you could define dramatic irony as something’s ‘being on stage’ and another thing’s ‘being off stage’, that are loaded with meaning. It’s all about the imbalance of knowledge; if everyone is disclosed how do you get these levels and that’s a big part of where we get tension from.

I just wrote a review of ‘Unfriended’... I found it really interesting because what they did was to make the connectivity the drama, whereas people had been saying something like ‘Romeo and Juliet’ would never have happened if they’d had cell-phones because they could’ve just texted each other!

So digital life collapses a lot of dramas, but with ‘Unfriended’ the horror was that everyone was being pulled closer and closer together and being forced to reveal things about each other. That’s been one of the first examples where I’ve seen a creative dramatisation of this claustrophobia and breathlessness.

But it is a huge problem, you can write any line down as a writer, Google it and find out it may already have been said; it is the dictionary of absolutely everything!

MJ
From what you were saying about ‘Unfriended’, it just reminded me of a Japanese horror film from a few years ago ‘Pulse’ which I found really intriguing... it reflected the generation of young Japanese becoming hermit-like and living entirely through, at that time, the very new technology of the internet.

LS
I think a commenter on the article mentioned that it was derivative of ‘Pulse’.

Regardless, that hermitically-sealed room will be where the future drama will come from and the horror genre is really good at that because the big irony of [‘Unfriended’] is that whilst they are apparently all together when, as it were, the blade hits the skin, there’s no one actually there to help. I’d say the artists of the present have to deal with the intense melancholy.

But that isn’t altogether that new when you think about the 19th century emotions and the rise of modernity and people being gathered together in cities and the atomisation of that.

MJ
Just as the Camp Grounding slogans such as ‘the most important status we’ll update is our happiness’ would have meant nothing to the original boy scouts, my sense while reading the book was that no one born today as very much a ‘digital native’ would grasp its investigatory quality or forensic examination given that all this is just their world/their normal, would you agree?

LS
I’ve taught bits of this to students in their early-20s and they seemed to totally get the ironies of it... anyone younger, I’m not sure what they’d make of it, maybe it does rely on at least a 1980s-childhood just to get a sense of what we’re missing that they never had. Though they must have different fantasies about where they get their escape from or where they get their sense of peace, isolation or remoteness.

MJ
The book refers to the Savile scandals – ‘the broader cultural mood that feels the proximity of its past, its accessibility, a sense that it has been preserved for our moral re-evaluation’... do you see this as something that can only continue now, especially post-Snowden, in an age where anonymous apps are targeting young people under the auspices of offering privacy?

LS
That was quite a careful theory I put forward. With digital life there is the sense that nothing is ever really lost, things leave traces and old crimes deserve to be reconsidered and morally re-evaluated.

The flip side of that, where there isn’t actually grotesque criminal activity involved, is this relentless presence of the past in peoples’ lives. All this tainting of Hollywood actors who you’ve quite liked and then you hear they’ve done something in the past; it’s almost as though this has been a piece of radiation at the bottom of the sea leeching stuff out.

It does give a strange sense that we’re hauling our pasts behind us all the time and asked to be accountable, not necessarily in a sensational way, but the way nothing can be off-the-cuff, there can be no such thing as misspeaking.

Remember that beautiful time when you could wake up feeling a bit icky about what you might’ve said the night before at a party, whereas now everything is on record. When I think about that too much that’s when I get dreams of desert-scapes..!

MJ
I get the impression now as well that this ‘haulage of the past’ is directly related to the imbalance of demographics, the ‘grey generation’ that have saturated our cultural lives with their produce... the Rolling Stones constantly on tour, that sort of thing.

LS
It is incredible. But that’s the real oedipal thing isn’t it? That’ll be the big affect to deal with, the simulacrum of everything being a copy of something else...

MJ
People like Umberto Eco and Baudrillard were writing about the Disneyland culture and the simulacrum of that... the problem is that this was perhaps only at one or two removes from ‘the real’ whereas now, like you say in the book, there’s almost this endless hall of mirrors of replication.

LS
I agree, and there’s a dreamy ‘wonderland’ quality to it, but at the same time, cutting through all that is quite a brutal solidification in terms of privacy and anonymity.

MJ
Early on in the book you touch on the internet’s early promotion as an egalitarian realm free from hierarchy and property power. I wonder how you see that as having fared in light of the Occupy movement that you suggest was stalled by a lack of progressive movement.

Also, the Arab Spring which was lit by the touch paper of social media but quickly dissipated under the very three-dimensional pressures of control, ideology and violence?

LS
We shouldn’t be too surprised when utopian visions don’t quite pan out how we wanted them to! It is quite stark that the manifesto was a kind of disembodiment, a move away from the corporeal self, and what’s happened is that it’s been literally incorporated.

The students I teach and those younger are coming up with the sense that they’re mini-corporations who have their own publicity departments, PR departments, when they study abroad they have to be their own tourist board, etc. It feels as though the celebrity culture of the 90s and 00s was setting us up for this, teaching us what celebrity-dom means and allowed us to then transplant that. I wonder whether the idea of celebrity has been eroded because everyone has that possibility now...

MJ
I’m sure it’s due to the celebrity culture of the 90s morphing into the ‘celebrity of everybody’ in the 00s with reality TV as the vanguard...

LS
And everyone’s meeting in a strange middle where an aspect of celebrity is now revealing the domestic space, and I wonder at what point in the algorithm is it decided that this is where they’ll share a child’s birthday party or whatever...?

MJ
The economic claustrophobia you describe, whereby it seems you can’t do or buy anything without fuelling or legitimising forces we might otherwise object to... do you get the sense that this tacit knowledge exemplifies our personal insignificance and lack of power and influence to change and assists with the growing weight of apathetic inertia?

LS
Yeah, when the best expression of morality is an economic one it’s a very dreary state of affairs! Because it relies on the fact that there is a moral competitor all the time and that isn’t necessarily the case. So unless you’d rather not buy anything and just not participate in a consumer society at all, you’re stuck!

Thinking about this in terms of just the morality of people’s ‘digital brands’, the culture of life which is its own currency – you have to get so many followers or so many ‘likes’ – there’s a real moral question to that because if we load that with value and currency then it has all sorts of ramifications on the examples I give, such as the ‘click farms’.

MJ
I found that quite astonishing. Those must surely be an incarnation of some kind of Marxian hell!

LS
It’s just so satirical! Its sweat converted to Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, and that constant jubilation. That’s one of the awful things about it all, this cynical commoditisation of smiles.

MJ
Reading that section reminded me of a friend of mine who worked a few years ago on helping produce an independent film. He told me that one of his tasks during the marketing stage was to sit on YouTube and refresh the trailer over and over again just to ramp up the viewing figures.

LS
Exactly. We’re living in an age where almost every technological breakthrough has been already imagined.

When you were talking about the stifling older generation – even our innovations have a retro quality to them and datedness. Captain Picard had an iPad in 1989! I remember watching The Simpsons in the 90s and them joking about picture-phones and Skype, so it’s one thing to say it’s hard to write a story that hasn’t been done before but now even our gadgets have a slight passé feel to them.

MJ
I certainly sensed that last year at the Barbican's big digital technologies exhibition. There were all these interesting futuristic displays and yet the thing you couldn't get near for the crowds were the old-school Pacman and Space Invaders arcade games machines!

There is certainly the sense though that we’ve seen all this before isn’t there? The oppression and control metamorphosing into new forms, like Edward Bernays and his ‘happiness machines’ which was all about engineering positive thought to keep the masses docile and happy through consumption.

Now we have moved on to charity as a commodity in itself with things like the ‘ice bucket challenge’ and ‘clicktivism’...

LS
Yeah I meant to write about the ‘ice bucket challenge’ actually, and the sense that other charities then had to compete to come up with something equally gimmicky to capture the viral imagination like that.

It does us a great disservice I think, there’s a lot of anxiety, the idea that we won’t be able to engage with anything unless it’s instantly amusing or we’ve already seen it before in some variation.

MJ
Charity campaigns might almost become pastiches of themselves...

LS
Don’t you think that absurdism of pouring the ice over the head does come at times when it seems increasingly oppressive? There’s a Jean-Paul Sartre novel [‘The Age of Reason’] - WWII is approaching, the Spanish Civil War has just begun, France is in complete paralysis. It’s a very melancholy novel, two lovers, in a very Sartre way, meet in a bar and they have a game where they stab each other in the hand.

There is a sense of the ‘ice bucket challenge’ being like that; this shock to the system as the purer form of sensation that we were craving in some way, or something that hadn’t been done before, having to turn to the body.

I’ve not read much of it but the book ‘My Struggle’ by Karl Ove Knaussgard... the first few pages are these descriptions of the innards of the body and imagining the organic life of the body as this vast Russian landscape... so there’s no real space anymore, even at the cellular level you had to magnify that up to get the vistas.

MJ
Do you foresee a gradual rise in wilful ascetism, a rejection of the ‘fourth dimension’? Or, as you touch on, has ascetism as a ‘thing’ or lifestyle choice already been colonised by the digital, with mindfulness podcasts and meditation apps, etc.?

LS
That’s one of the big terrors of the claustrophobia, even the exodus choice is also somehow internalised.

I think there will be, it’ll be interesting to see what people tolerate, there’s these two quite mutually exclusive strands where there seems to be this complete reliance – what would my social life be like without it? What would my business be like without it? – especially since people are becoming freelance and not embedded within the mechanisms of an institution, to survive in that milieu we’re forced to have this digital presence, even for romance.

At the same time it’s hard to find people with a pure sense of enthusiasm for it and that’s putting it too mildly – it’s hard to find someone without some degree of panic or weariness or a sense of ‘get me out of here!’

MJ
Which is amazing after something like the Snowden revelations, which were met with just a chorus of shrugs...

LS
It is about what you can bear and it’ll depend upon the next generation to see how weird they think this kind of interaction is and whether they can put up with the ghostliness of it or whether they won’t even notice.

MJ
Lastly, what do you plan on working on next?

LS
There’s a book of essays which I’ll be doing. And also a novel that I had in mind before writing this book, but it’s very inchoate at the moment.

REVIEW: Laurence Scott - 'The Four-Dimensional Human: Ways of Being in the Digital World'

If the noughties was the decade in which the digital revolution liquefied before evaporating into clouds, so far this decade seems set on warning of brewing storms of discontent and the increasingly acidic rain trickling down the glass between our human and online selves. The catalogue of Cassandras decrying the digital is now considerable and so it is a minor relief to find Laurence Scott's debut book adopting the ambivalent, indeed almost mildly approving, tone of J.G. Ballard towards the technological zeitgeist.

A recent Ofcom survey found that Internet users aged 16 and over now spend around 27 hours a week online. With this kind of statistic in mind Scott presents the view that the internet now saturates the contemporary world and the minutiae of our lived experience to such an intense degree that the digital has come to represent a fourth dimension. In a way, Marcuse's theory of the 'One Dimensional Man' as a blank canvas flattened by 20th century capitalism and scientific rationalism has been hoisted aloft by the centre pole of the hyperreal.

The Situationists were writing about the possible response of the individual to the post-modern ‘spectacle’ of cybernetics and the consumer culture decades before anyone had any notion of an online self that could be categorised as four-dimensional. Whereas writers such as Guy Debord saw the response, in the socio-political context of 1968, as revolutionary in nature, Scott, as much in tune with the spirit of his own generation as Debord, prefers to channel ambivalence and nostalgic distraction.

As such, the book builds upon the semiotic scaffold of Umberto Eco with his 'Travels in Hyperreality’, exploring the communal loneliness and 'melancholia of inconsequential proximity' that radiates like a dull ache through the glare of the now-digitised spectacle.

Scott is successful in capturing a bounty of incidental emotions and impulses that characterise the fourth dimension. He scrutinises the skeuomorphs of digital life, the banal neologisms ('VoiceChat', 'life hacks'), the resurgence of Gothic terminology (trolls, ghosts, stalking), and the unstoppable digitisation of the physical landscape by Google Maps. He also pinpoints the creative artist's increasing struggle for particularity with Google immolating any pretensions to original thought; the sense of entrapment in the compulsive go-round of websites; and describes the 'ship-in-a-bottle feelings...the pocket-sized shipwreck that occurs when an inbox shows us, with treacherous indifference, the pale, empty horizon of read emails.'

Peppered with great aphoristic sentences such as this, and largely devoid of the weighty sociological academe of the Frankfurt School writers, the book succeeds through its striking readability. Like the philosopher John Gray, Scott favours as imaginative touchstones for his theories the lessons from literature, poetry and age-old myths that resonate through cultures and ride in the slipstream of accelerating technologies.

Writers such as Henry James, Herman Melville and James Joyce are invoked alongside a mish-mash of ephemera from Mr Men to Love Actually, Seinfeld to Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, scored through with autobiographical vignettes. It feels like it shouldn't work, and some points lack the cohesion of others, but curiously the overriding impression is one of reading an accurate textual portrayal of the scattered and disparate internet experience itself.

The potency of Scott's associative thinking is what gives the book its vitality. He frequently engineers collisions between two ostensibly unrelated events that explode into new possibilities of interpretation. In terms of contemporary perspective, James Lovelock's Gaia theory of equilibrium is taken as the macroscopic apocalyptic view of the world counter-weighted by the gossip columns of Katie Price as the microscopic celebrity non-event.

Similarly, the Marxian process of reification being brought to bear on the powers of the digital information economy to commoditise the past is the tune to which the 2011 John Galliano scandal is made to dance a tenuous bolero with the exposure of LSE and several pop stars' financial links to the Gaddafi regime. The ice is slippery but the theory somehow manages to stay on its feet.

For all its strengths, there is the inescapable impression that the book is conspicuous by what it chooses to overlook. Considering the subtitle 'Ways of being in the digital world', there is barely anything on the way primal instincts of human nature - sex and violence - have been recalibrated in the digital dimension, whereby one can traverse from hardcore pornography to desert videos of Isis beheadings in an evolutionary supernova of clicks.

The book is similarly light on historical contextualising. It is a shame there is no examination of Edward Bernays and the way in which public relations became an engine for manufacturing mass control and docility through rapacious consumption, turning us into 'happiness machines', which would seem to be the direct paradigm for today's 'clicktivism' and self-promotion through social media.

The future is given similar short-shrift; the author seems reluctant to posit a forward view or indicate a possible direction of travel, which considering the bounteous scope for discussion - anonymity and privacy post-Snowden, the Singularity, transhumanism, the 'Internet of Things' and its proposed impact on our experience of urban space - feels like something of a missed opportunity. Scott pins vignettes and canny observations under glass like a lepidopterist, noting their unique markings before letting them flutter away without consequence, which adds to the book's readability even if occasionally you long for them to be bulked out with the taxidermy of interrogative thought.

Overall though, one could be forgiven for thinking that given the frantic exponential rate of online change (an average website's lifespan is now reputed to be around 18 months), this apposite and witty exploration of the digital quotidian could, by being so focused on contemporary mores, be rendered strangely out-of-date by the time it even gets to a paperback edition. On the basis of this debut work though, it is clear the author's career may have rather more longevity.

The Toxic Veil of Anonymity

Imagine yourself, if you will, several years in the future as a working professional, scaling ladders both in terms of peer admiration and career trajectory. You might be in a position of some authority, a manager of a small team, a representative of certain interests, a mediator between various parties’ means and ends. A promotion might be on the cards, a young family might have been planned or have already arrived and with it a whole life-raft of other duties and responsibilities to keep buoyant.

You wake up and scrape the frost of sleep from the windscreen of your tired eyes; another day beckons and as you traipse to the shower, standing for a micro-sleep whilst the jets heat, you begin to sift through the catalogue of events that will provide its form. You step from the shower and start to dress.

As you proceed through these morning rituals you reach for the digital device to begin your online engagement for the day. A strange message is waiting for you, one that switches on the ice-cold shower-head of surprise and confusion. It says that on this day 8 years ago you sent an anonymous message using an app that was popular at the time.

You vaguely recall using those kinds of apps back when you were in your teens, impressionable and a little disaffected, but their interest soon faded and you forgot all about them. You certainly don’t remember sending the message that is now being presented to you, in all its lurid immaturity, as though the intervening years had been a long and particularly vivid dream from which you’ve only just woken.

It’s only after a few seconds that you realise the message is a threat, promising to send your teenage indiscretion to particular addresses – the boss with whom you have an 11:30 meeting, your still-sleeping partner. Just as the adrenaline begins to joy-ride around the freeways of your nervous system you realise there is an option of escape being offered to you: a fee to pay.

***

Such a scenario may seem blanched with melodrama, but it can surely be taken as the extension of real possibilities from observable contemporary behaviour with social media. One of the weightier trends among consumer applications in 2014 was the rise of ‘anonymous social networking’; apps that allow users to post publically to networks without disclosing their real identities.

Once the foundations had been laid the construction of these apps was formidable with sites such as Ask, Snapchat, Whisper, YikYak, Secret, Afterschool and Formspring leading the way.

In 2014, 9% of American internet users aged 10-18 visited Ask on a daily basis, 5% used YikYak and Whisper, whilst at its height Secret boasted over 15 million users. In February, The Guardian reported that the Tinder ‘dating app’ was generating more than 60mn profile reads and 6mn matches a day.

In a sense, this proliferation of assumed online anonymity was a logical response to the Edward Snowden revelations of mass surveillance of ordinary internet users on the part of NSA and GCHQ. The knowledge that teams at GCHQ had been assigned with analysing the sexual video messages of Yahoo users for instance, was hilarious for its absurdity but also rather perverse for the way in which it cast the security state as voyeurs on a grand and unaccountable scale.

So it is unsurprising to see the growth of these vines of anonymity spreading across youth internet culture and yet, given what we know about the lengths to which the state will go to monitor our digital platform, it doesn’t take the most wilful conspiracy theorist to begin to wonder where all this might lead. It is almost as though the state were now happily distributing tin-hats to everyone, only making sure they have GPS-tracking capabilities built into them.

Of course, with these apps serving as digital confessionals, receptacles for our boundless appetite for salacious gossip and sensation, it should also come as no surprise to note the nature of this ‘anonymous’ content. A brief trawl across Whisper for instance offers these as a routine sample:

‘worried my baby doesn’t belong to my fiancé. What to do?’

‘I was molested by my older cousin when I was a child and I’m still afraid to speak out about it’

‘I can’t stop my evil thoughts’

‘I have 2 kids, my wife has no idea’

‘I’ve slept with 20 guys’

‘I’m a lesbian and madly in love with my best friend who is straight and pregnant’

‘wish I could be single and childless again’

‘I’m an alcoholic and have been since I was 14’

‘I cheated on my boyfriend and loved the thrill of it’

‘I love the taste of blood’

‘I’ve tried killing myself before and no one knows, not even my parents or friends’

‘my personality that they love so much is 60% fake’

‘my aunt and I took a shower together when I was 10’

‘I cut myself too much’

‘I’ve had sex with my friend’s dad more times than with anyone else’

‘my husband loves watching black guys fuck me’

‘I’ve had sex with my older brother. We still do it. I regret nothing’

‘I plan on drinking this bottle of wine tonight. If my mum hears me puking in the middle of the night I’ll just pretend I’m sick...again’

‘I was high when I asked her out, I’m even higher at the wedding’

‘that moment when you buy weed you don’t need because the weed man is the best booty call you ever had’

‘my husband is so quick I hardly even get to start getting excited, don’t know what I’d do without my toy’

‘being gay isn’t a choice - the government injects every 100th baby born with a gay virus to control the population'

'in a perfect world my son will never find out that my boyfriend isn't his real father'

Whilst much of the sleaze reflects the apparent titillation in anonymously sharing, the more disturbing examples emit the nihilistic sentiment of the genuinely troubled. Each one though is a viral wrecking ball poised to smash into the citadel of an individual's reputation at some point in the future.

Of course, it is very probable that a sizeable portion of posts will be mere lies and hyperbole concocted out of boredom or the desire to elicit some small measure of shock or opprobrium from the community who respond. But this argument misses the fundamental point: regardless of the reality behind these meme-masks, once the digital fingerprints are there they cannot be wiped clean and truth or falsity is an irrelevance. Like Josef K's plight in Kafka's 'The Trial', an offence will be registered and doggedly pursued leaving it up to the individual to prove their innocence.

A cursory examination of the Terms and Conditions of these apps is enough to isolate passages from amidst the suffocating legalese that offer sufficient ambiguity to fuel the misanthropic imagination.

In late 2014, The Guardian reported that Whisper was tracking the whereabouts of its users even if they had disabled location services. Their updated T&Cs state that 'we collect very little information that could be used to identify you personally', only information that could be utilised to improve services and overall user experience. However, that collected information amounts to the type of device being used, the operating system, the web browser, the ISP and IP address; all information that could easily lead to an atomised individual being identified.

Snapchat, an app that allows users to send messages that spontaneously combust after a few seconds, state that submission of content grants them an 'irrevocable, non-exclusive, sub-licensable, and transferable licence to use, reproduce, modify, etc...such content'. Similarly, YikYak 'reserve the right to retain your Submissions, even after they have expired from view within the App or even after you have deleted them'. Along with Snapchat they reserve the right to sublicense content to third parties.

Expanding on this point, Whisper state that they may establish business relationships with third parties but only if they 'believe they are trustworthy'. Continuing to ladle ambiguous reassurances, they state 'we may give service providers only the information that's necessary for them to perform services on our behalf', and:

'we may share the information we collect from you with businesses that control, are controlled by, or are under common control with WhisperText. This means that if WT is merged, acquired, sold, or in the event of a transfer of some or all of our assets, we may disclose or transfer such information in connection with that particular transaction.'

Put simply, if at any point in the future the team behind Whisper decide to sell up, the purchasing company will acquire all that juicy gossip; low-hanging fruit to be picked for potentially dubious gain.

Across the internet there is the feeling that the beginning of the end for anonymous apps may be nigh. Each of these apps spurt up like geysers from the Silicon Valley ooze yet their lifespan is predictably brief (earlier this year, Secret announced it was shutting down), in accordance with the fickle whims of their target audience - the digitally-adept teen market searching for distraction and reacting like one of Pavlov's dogs to the bell-ringing of scandal and sleaze.

The obvious reason for this decline, alongside controversies regarding privacy and cyber-bullying claims, is that they have failed to provide a clear path to monetization for their investors. This is a stark problem because the funding behind these apps is substantial; $61mn behind Whisper and $70mn behind YikYak, for example.

Rather more modestly, Secret generated $35mn of funding and in the aftermath of its demise it has been reported that whatever money is left is to be returned to the investors. Without adequate means of marketing and advertising revenue generation, anonymous apps face a steep decline unless they are bought-out by a mega-firm like Facebook (who are also developing their own standalone app 'Rooms').

As the common cliché goes, if the service is free then you are the product. In the absence of any other means of remunerating their investors all of this information is, or will shortly become, incredibly valuable and the reward for those willing to strike the right deal may be too tempting to resist. As the hacker/writer Stewart Brand said, 'information wants to be free', although he followed this with the proviso that 'it also wants to be very expensive.'

One of the finest Monty Python sketches is 'Blackmail', a mock TV show in which the host Michael Palin plays grainy peeping-tom footage of individuals in increasingly compromising situations, with the target urged to call in as the ransom fee inflates.

This could be a prophesy of the extortion propagated by nefarious digital debt-collectors of the near future - not the public shaming via social media such as Jon Ronson has written about recently, rather the undercover private shaming of individuals before those with whom the ramifications will be most severe.

If not shady 'third parties' sublicensed several years down the line when the information asset is ripe for off-loading, then surely mischievous hackers could play havoc with such a trove of dirt - that woman you're about to promote as regional manager or elect to a board, here's an incriminating message she posted as a teenager ... that guy you're about to get engaged to, here's a sample of the chauvinistic comments and nude pictures he used to send to women.

Who knows, perhaps a heroic 'third party' will mysteriously appear from the trees and swing into action, promising that they will wipe clean the dirty fingerprints left smudged along the surface of your web history. Any service for the right price...

Culture - May

Read:

Owen Jones - 'The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It' (non-fiction)
Laurence Scott - 'The Four-Dimensional Human: Ways of Living in the Digital World' (non-fiction)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - 'The Sorrows of Young Werther'
Steven E. Jones - 'Against Technology: From the Luddites to Neo-Luddism' (non-fiction)
William Shakespeare - 'The Merchant of Venice'


Watched:

'Amour' (Michael Hanake)
'Made in Dagenham' (Nigel Cole)
'Ivan's Childhood' (Andrei Tarkovsky)
'The Mayfair Set' (Adam Curtis) (documentary series)
'The Century of the Self' (Adam Curtis) (documentary series)
'Melancholia' (Lars Von Trier)


Listened:

Swans - 'The Seer'
William Basinski - 'Melancholia'
Ash Ra - 'New Age of Earth'
Stars of the Lid - 'The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid'

Attended:

Swans (live at the Roundhouse, Camden)
'The Merchant of Venice' (Globe Theatre, Southbank)