- Quantified Self and Its Mirror
Above I identified two tracks by which the User-subject is at once synthesized and made alien to itself: the experience of the self reflected through visual-quantitative technologies and the granting of subjectivity to nonhuman agents imbued with computational intelligence. The following sections explore both of these in greater depth. Elsewhere I have identified what we can call the “ death of the user. ” By this, I mean the expiration of a specific kind of user, and the displacement its soft humanism from the conceptual center of design strategy by the proliferation and predominance of both nonhuman and nonindividuated actors within the expanded field of ubiquitous computation. <sup>16</sup> “ Joe and Josephine ” are no longer generic; they would now be seen, in comparison to all possible Users, as specifically and idiosyncratically primate. As discrete human individuals believe themselves in charge of their tools, they nevertheless represent an increasingly particular, even marginalized type of User-agent within a diverse throng of alternatives. At the same time, this same dispersion and diversification of User-agency into the wider landscape of the world provokes a belligerent overdetermination and overappearance of the individuated human as the base unit through which that world is measured.
As we human Users reflect on our selves with images of quantified digital traces, the richly detailed portrait reflected back convinces us of our individual coherency and efficacy. However, as this User is outpaced by nonhuman actors and multitudinous objects, he appears to himself as another one of these things. Like the addressable haecceity tracked through logistical space, you are a smart object held together by platforms for deep biographical comparability. The apparent stability of the profile image reflected back conceals the necessary fragility with which any one thing holds the position of User-subject. That fragility is a bit like Theseus ’ s paradox, which questions whether an object, having had all of its parts replaced one by one over time, remains essentially the “ same ” object. You may have heard a version of this as a story using George Washington ’ s axe instead of Theseus ’ s ship: “ The handle has been replaced three times and the head twice, but it is essentially the same axe. ” The new axe occupies the same “ place ” as the old axe, but even so, it is not the same bunch of molecules. What we have at hand is a double within the exact outline of what is now displaced. It is the same for the positions of User subjectivity into which we step for a moment or more.
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User Layer