Where Turing ’ s artificial intelligence test attempted to detect machine intelligence by testing its reflection in human cognition, projects like Bell ’ s suggest capture of the totality of autobiographical experience by couching it within a personal universal Turing machine and so (as the research was for Microsoft) to prototype the sorts of data management, visualization, semantic sorting, editing, and indexing interfaces necessary for the yottabyte-fluent absolute User to come ? Of course, in that future, part of what would be recorded are her sessions during which she plays back past experiences, which would then also be available for review later on, and so on, and so on, a mirror held up to a mirror, reflecting up into the darkness. <sup>19</sup> The phenomenology of metadata would be overwhelming. Certainly new vistas of self-mastery might open up for her, but at the same time new psychopathologies would emerge in her attempts to manage the infinite regression of reflections of reflections. Leaving aside the service design implications for Microsoft and focusing on the vertiginous depth of this kind of autocognitive technology, wouldn ’ t the absolute User at some point lose (or let go) the ability to differentiate present experience from past memory and from future wish? A kind of transcendental infantilization or enlightened disindividuation? Would memories of memory become unwound such that the consciousness of a situated subject is forever unwound as well, leaving little piles of neurofabric throbbing in the feedback of its own disassembly? <sup>20</sup> If so, then can those be rewoven into different, less individuated User-subjects, after the fact?
To define this process more formally, in the short term, an increase in the intensity, granularity, and reflexivity of information about a User’ s traces in the world first produces a cartoonishly overactualized diagram of the self as a continuous individual unit. In the long term, the quantity of information reflected back becomes too great, and so these same technologies undermine the boundaries of self and other, resulting in an open, incoherent, and discontiguous identity. The self burns brightest just before falling apart; more is more, until it is actually much less, and in this case, less may be a more fruitful accomplishment. (For this, intensity refers to the scope, scale, and computational capacity of a diagram to capture an event or life; granularity refers to the detail it can capture; and reflexivity refers to how much the diagram can be meaningfully acted on, either as a GUI that controls a feedback loop or social connections providing surveillance, and a stage to show off the self-events under the social microscope.) Where exactly the threshold point between solution and dissolution sits, we can only hypothesize, but we can anticipate, and not without optimism, the crumbling of the psychologized single-serving human User as the generic universal User position in relation to The Stack, and consider instead the soupy ingredients for alternatives that are left behind. Nicholas Felton is an information designer famous for his obsessive and ironic annual reports on himself, as if he were a corporate client needing to comply with shareholder reporting requirements. <sup>21</sup> He also was a major contributor of a redesigned Facebook timeline in 2009, which shows how Quantified Self, turning accounting techniques born of big box supply chains and reassigning them to the surfacing of unseen patterns in our everyday lives, is not an isolated subcultural phenomenon but increasingly central to Stack culture at large. From the Reids, the Hagens, Saul Griffith, and Gordon Bell, and toward the mainstreaming of QS logics, especially for social networks of Users online and offline, what will be their societal impact more generally? Are billions of Users being convinced that their individual profile biographies are more real than they actually are, or are they being trained toward the distributed realization of the opposite ultimate conclusion? In aggregate, will each of us become further atomized, more grotesquely overindividuated, staring dumbly into our own templated reflections of profiles, feeds, and complimentary feedback, or will we become even more hive-like, drifting in the wake left by the memes of our curated externalized cognition? The better question is: What kind of User can be designed instead?
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User Layer