#sherryturkle — Public Fediverse posts

Delivery robots as evocative objects

I came across these delivery robots on Sunday morning, clustered in the corner of a park. One had been covered in graffiti, two had their flags snapped and a third one was covered in some strange green slime. It looked like Saturday night had been tough.

I find it hard not to anthropomorphise these robots. I heard the way they crossed the road described as ‘scrabbling’ yesterday and it’s the perfect adjective for how they appear to look left and right, before accelerating out into the traffic. People interact with them, talk about them, respond to them. In many ways the vandalism is the flip side of the anthromorphism. They are evocative objects in Sherry Turkle’s sense of provoking responses in the humans who encounter them. You might find them cute, you might have the impulse to cover them in graffiti, you might want to help them cross the road, you might want to block their path to see if they do.

The key thing is that they are evoking a response from you. If their design enables them to do that reliably then they are likely to be normalised, even if the economic model might not currently work in its current form. The real significance of them is how they become evocative features of the urban landscape and what that means for the political economy of the city.

It occurs to me that if we are projecting into these robots, which we clearly are because they obviously do not feel anything, it raises the question of what we are projecting. My hypothesis is that when I saw them on my run this morning, feeling sad about the vandalism and exhibiting a spatial sense of having retreated into a corner of the park, I was doing something with my own insufficiently acknowledged guilt about the gig economy. I’ve stopped using delivery platforms but I still end up taking Ubers regularly, even if I’m slowly tipping the balance to black caps.

When I feel vaguely sympathetic for these robots (while recognising how absurd that reaction is) am I expressing in an alienated form my own desire to demonstrate solidarity with gig workers, which is being subordinated to my own convenience in a way that provokes guilt in me?

I wanted to add that I think vandalism against delivery robots can be a political act. There are clear examples of this in vandalism against robo-taxis for example. I’m just not sure this particular vandalism can plausibly be read in those terms, though perhaps I’m wrong.

Delivery robots as evocative objects

I came across these delivery robots on Sunday morning, clustered in the corner of a park. One had been covered in graffiti, two had their flags snapped and a third one was covered in some strange green slime. It looked like Saturday night had been tough.

I find it hard not to anthropomorphise these robots. I heard the way they crossed the road described as ‘scrabbling’ yesterday and it’s the perfect adjective for how they appear to look left and right, before accelerating out into the traffic. People interact with them, talk about them, respond to them. In many ways the vandalism is the flip side of the anthromorphism. They are evocative objects in Sherry Turkle’s sense of provoking responses in the humans who encounter them. You might find them cute, you might have the impulse to cover them in graffiti, you might want to help them cross the road, you might want to block their path to see if they do.

The key thing is that they are evoking a response from you. If their design enables them to do that reliably then they are likely to be normalised, even if the economic model might not currently work in its current form. The real significance of them is how they become evocative features of the urban landscape and what that means for the political economy of the city.

It occurs to me that if we are projecting into these robots, which we clearly are because they obviously do not feel anything, it raises the question of what we are projecting. My hypothesis is that when I saw them on my run this morning, feeling sad about the vandalism and exhibiting a spatial sense of having retreated into a corner of the park, I was doing something with my own insufficiently acknowledged guilt about the gig economy. I’ve stopped using delivery platforms but I still end up taking Ubers regularly, even if I’m slowly tipping the balance to black caps.

When I feel vaguely sympathetic for these robots (while recognising how absurd that reaction is) am I expressing in an alienated form my own desire to demonstrate solidarity with gig workers, which is being subordinated to my own convenience in a way that provokes guilt in me?

I wanted to add that I think vandalism against delivery robots can be a political act. There are clear examples of this in vandalism against robo-taxis for example. I’m just not sure this particular vandalism can plausibly be read in those terms, though perhaps I’m wrong.

Delivery robots as evocative objects

I came across these delivery robots on Sunday morning, clustered in the corner of a park. One had been covered in graffiti, two had their flags snapped and a third one was covered in some strange green slime. It looked like Saturday night had been tough.

I find it hard not to anthropomorphise these robots. I heard the way they crossed the road described as ‘scrabbling’ yesterday and it’s the perfect adjective for how they appear to look left and right, before accelerating out into the traffic. People interact with them, talk about them, respond to them. In many ways the vandalism is the flip side of the anthromorphism. They are evocative objects in Sherry Turkle’s sense of provoking responses in the humans who encounter them. You might find them cute, you might have the impulse to cover them in graffiti, you might want to help them cross the road, you might want to block their path to see if they do.

The key thing is that they are evoking a response from you. If their design enables them to do that reliably then they are likely to be normalised, even if the economic model might not currently work in its current form. The real significance of them is how they become evocative features of the urban landscape and what that means for the political economy of the city.

It occurs to me that if we are projecting into these robots, which we clearly are because they obviously do not feel anything, it raises the question of what we are projecting. My hypothesis is that when I saw them on my run this morning, feeling sad about the vandalism and exhibiting a spatial sense of having retreated into a corner of the park, I was doing something with my own insufficiently acknowledged guilt about the gig economy. I’ve stopped using delivery platforms but I still end up taking Ubers regularly, even if I’m slowly tipping the balance to black caps.

When I feel vaguely sympathetic for these robots (while recognising how absurd that reaction is) am I expressing in an alienated form my own desire to demonstrate solidarity with gig workers, which is being subordinated to my own convenience in a way that provokes guilt in me?

I wanted to add that I think vandalism against delivery robots can be a political act. There are clear examples of this in vandalism against robo-taxis for example. I’m just not sure this particular vandalism can plausibly be read in those terms, though perhaps I’m wrong.

Delivery robots as evocative objects

I came across these delivery robots on Sunday morning, clustered in the corner of a park. One had been covered in graffiti, two had their flags snapped and a third one was covered in some strange green slime. It looked like Saturday night had been tough.

I find it hard not to anthropomorphise these robots. I heard the way they crossed the road described as ‘scrabbling’ yesterday and it’s the perfect adjective for how they appear to look left and right, before accelerating out into the traffic. People interact with them, talk about them, respond to them. In many ways the vandalism is the flip side of the anthromorphism. They are evocative objects in Sherry Turkle’s sense of provoking responses in the humans who encounter them. You might find them cute, you might have the impulse to cover them in graffiti, you might want to help them cross the road, you might want to block their path to see if they do.

The key thing is that they are evoking a response from you. If their design enables them to do that reliably then they are likely to be normalised, even if the economic model might not currently work in its current form. The real significance of them is how they become evocative features of the urban landscape and what that means for the political economy of the city.

It occurs to me that if we are projecting into these robots, which we clearly are because they obviously do not feel anything, it raises the question of what we are projecting. My hypothesis is that when I saw them on my run this morning, feeling sad about the vandalism and exhibiting a spatial sense of having retreated into a corner of the park, I was doing something with my own insufficiently acknowledged guilt about the gig economy. I’ve stopped using delivery platforms but I still end up taking Ubers regularly, even if I’m slowly tipping the balance to black caps.

When I feel vaguely sympathetic for these robots (while recognising how absurd that reaction is) am I expressing in an alienated form my own desire to demonstrate solidarity with gig workers, which is being subordinated to my own convenience in a way that provokes guilt in me?

I wanted to add that I think vandalism against delivery robots can be a political act. There are clear examples of this in vandalism against robo-taxis for example. I’m just not sure this particular vandalism can plausibly be read in those terms, though perhaps I’m wrong.

When Lacan came to America

This is fascinating from Sherry Turkle about what she terms Lacan’s psychoanalytical protestantism:

But for me, there was more to Lacan’s popularity than the idea that the French had found a Catholic and French Freud. My working hypothesis: In the aftermath of the failed student uprising of May 1968, Lacan’s notions about the centrality of what he called the symbolic order became a way to think through the political ideas of May. May ideology insisted that there was no line between the political and the personal. Lacan insisted that people and society are constituted through language. There is no “natural man” prior to life through language. Lacan’s idea of the symbolic became a way for people to keep politics alive. For a generation that was abandoning the barricades, thinking of yourself as Lacanian did not feel like giving up on the political world.

From the point of view of psychoanalytic Protestantism, the psychoanalytic institution sells its indulgences for the price of a medical degree, a psychiatric residency, a training analysis, and promises of obedience to dogma. Lacan, like Luther, was trying to draw attention to the moment when each must stand alone and make a personal commitment, not to an institution, but to a belief or a vocation (Turkle 2022, p. 236).

It’s from this special issue, which I want to explore more.

#Lacan #psychoanalysis #SherryTurkle #structuralism

If one is afraid of intimacy yet afraid of being alone, even a stand-alone (not networked) computer offers an apparent solution. Interactive and reactive, the computer offers the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship. One can be a loner yet never be alone.
-- Sherry Turkle (Life on the Screen)

⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #SherryTurkle #Companionship #Computers #Loneliness

⬇ #Photography #Panorama #Guangxi #China #LiRiver #LiJiang #TowerKarst #Geology

If one is afraid of intimacy yet afraid of being alone, even a stand-alone (not networked) computer offers an apparent solution. Interactive and reactive, the computer offers the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship. One can be a loner yet never be alone.
-- Sherry Turkle (Life on the Screen)

⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #SherryTurkle #Companionship #Computers #Loneliness

⬇ #Photography #Panorama #ChacoCanyon #Sunset #NewMexico