CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — A finite social network asks us to consider how we would use it if posts were a limited resource. “Minus” gives each user 100 posts – for life. Artist Ben Grosser created the experimental artwork to look at what would happen if social media worked to reduce engagement, rather than induce it.
A University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign professor of new media in the School of Art and Design, the co-founder of the Critical Technology Studies Lab at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and a faculty affiliate with the School of Information Sciences and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, Grosser makes artwork that provides alternative ways of experiencing software and considers its cultural, social and political effects, how it changes our behavior and who it benefits. Grosser’s first solo exhibition in the U.K., “Software for Less,” explores what software might look like if the philosophy underlying its creation was not more, but less. It is on view at arebyte Gallery in London.
The show includes four new works, including “Minus,” that were commissioned by the gallery. The exhibition opened Aug. 19 and runs through Oct. 23; the works also are available online.
The exhibition is set up as an alternative tech expo, with the artworks as products “in an alternative tech future where platforms aren’t optimized for growth and engagement, but instead foreground human voices and temporalities,” Grosser said.
“Minus,” the centerpiece of the exhibition, replaces “like” counts and notifications with an emphasis on users’ words. The only metric visible on the platform counts down, showing the dwindling number of available posts. Grosser said he is curious to see how the 100-post limit changes what people write and make on the site.
“Users of social media are curating posts for a lifetime, thinking the big platforms will last forever,” Grosser said. “Part of the idea with ‘Minus’ is taking the central mechanism or driving force behind today’s online social networks – which is how much you’re expected to participate – and turning it on its head. ‘Minus’ says this is a finite thing. It’s about less, not more – less time, less attention.”
The dichotomy between less and more is on display from the moment visitors approach the gallery, where Grosser’s works “Get More” and “Get Less” are visible from outside. “Get More” is an installation that displays a meaningless metric that visitors can increase anytime they want by visiting the project’s web address. The metric started at the number 50,000 for the exhibition. Meanwhile, “Get Less,” one of the new commissioned pieces, lets visitors reduce its metric down from 50,000. So far, “Get More” is gaining more than “Get Less” is losing.
The film “ORDER OF MAGNITUDE” and a new companion piece, “DEFICIT OF LESS,” flank visitors as they walk into the gallery. Grosser reviewed 15 years of recorded speeches and interviews by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and compiled clips of every time he mentioned the word “more” or “growth” or referred to increasing metrics, to examine his obsession with growth. The resulting film, “ORDER OF MAGNITUDE,” runs for 47 minutes.
For “DEFICIT OF LESS,” Grosser reviewed the same 15 years of footage for the times in which Zuckerberg said the word “less.” This added up to less than a minute of footage that he then slowed down to match the 47-minute length of the previous film. The two supercuts are perfectly synchronized – starting together and running for the same amount of time.
“Platform Sweet Talk,” also commissioned for the show, examines how Facebook is “always telling us to pay attention to something,” Grosser said. Over the course of several months, he collected hundreds of unique notifications that Facebook sent him and eliminated the names used to personalize the fill-in-the-blank messages. The depersonalized results – “Someone shared your post,” for example – cycle across three screens at the exhibition, allowing us to more easily see how social media works to attract our attention, keep us engaged and “seduce us into a one-sided relationship where we do all the work,” Grosser said.
Several recent works are included in the exhibition. “Tokenize This” produces a unique digital object in the form of a custom color gradient and exclusive identification code and URL. It exists only as long as the browser tab is kept open, negating any attempts to copy or share it. The project is a response to nonfungible tokens used to own and collect digital objects, and concerns about how cryptocurrency-based commodification of digital art is softening the genre’s often-critical cultural stance, Grosser said.
“Not For You” is an “automated confusion system” designed to circumvent TikTok’s video recommendation algorithm and show users the videos that TikTok tries to suppress. It pushes back on the extreme conformity the platform rewards and on having a corporation choose everything a user sees, Grosser said.
“The Endless Doomscroller” is a constant stream of abstracted headlines from the last 16 months, such as “Global Crisis Looms” and “Variants Surging.” At the exhibition, the headlines forever scroll down three screens into the floor, reflecting how today’s social media platforms always show us more of whatever it is that keeps us scrolling.
The exhibition also features “Go Rando,” which randomly chooses a reaction to a Facebook post when a user clicks “like”; “Facebook Demetricator” and “Twitter Demetricator,” which hide all metrics on the platforms, including the number of likes, shares, retweets and followers; and “Safebook,” which hides all Facebook content, including text and images.
“If you look at the way today’s software has been crafted, it’s all designed for more. It’s designed to induce you to produce more, to gain more users, to grow as fast and as big as possible. That philosophy of more, which animates Big Tech’s relentless focus on growth and scale, has led the sector to amplify a host of societal problems. In its wake, mental health, privacy and democracy are all diminished, while authoritarianism, racism and disinformation are emboldened,” Grosser said. “Hopefully, this exhibition helps others develop a critical lens on software and how it influences us.”
Events related to the exhibition include a panel discussion on the politics and cultural effects of software; an artist talk; a discussion of archiving and conserving new media art; and a workshop on software recomposition. The events will be available online.