INTRODUCTION 0.1: ACTIVE VS. PASSIVE DISRUPTIONS
We can align technological disruptions around an axis of agency. On one end are technological disruptions that are highly active. These are complications which involve people directly creating disruptions, a “misuse” of tech that would not exist if it were not for the unorthodox users. An example of these complications would be the Google Books laborers who occasionally upload imperfections in their manuscript scanning, or artists creating unauthorized AR (Augmented Reality) art that populates elite galleries. The other end of this axis are technological disruptions that do not involve explicit interaction, like the contradictions that arise through an analysis of the “You Will” commercials.
Passive technological disruptions might be considered forms of media, like the commercials that are analyzed in this introduction. They are not literally disrupting how a virtual space is used or working with a device in an unexpected way. Instead, the contradictions of passive technological disruptions are revealed once they are recontextualized by the contemporary world. Like any technological disruption, it is not a problem until someone calls it one. This is what separates technological disruptions from other forms of virtual failure in general, like a computer’s motherboard shorting out or a null-pointer exception in a piece of software spiraling it into a lockdown. Technological disruptions are only complications because the users have issues with them, not because of any objective malfunction.
Chapter One looks at how technological disruptions operate in the physical world, using the gold farmer phenomenon as a way to explore how marginalized groups can use virtual environments to their advantage. The main difference between interpreting the gold farmer case study and the “You Will” commercial series as technological disruptions is the focus of conflict. Gold farmers are individuals and active agents in their creation of technological disruptions, so they lie on the active end of the axis described in the previous paragraph. They contradict the game worlds that they work within intentionally. “You Will”s technological disruption is more passive. The conflicts that arise through AT&T’s commercials are complications that happen after the fact, decades after the retrofuture presented in the media was released to the general public.
Chapter Two focuses on technological disruptions found in media, the kind found on the other end of the active/passive axis. A glimpse of this type of analysis can be seen here, in the introduction—though Chapter Two expands further on the subtext technology gains when reinterpreted through fiction. It looks at the media reaction to Polish video game developer CD Projekt Red’s upcoming Role-Playing Game (RPG), Cyberpunk 2077. Through looking at how Cyberpunk 2077 plays with concepts of race, the player’s embodiment of the avatar, and the cyberpunk subgenre, Chapter Two highlights the technological disruptions that occur when we comment on our contemporary world through the lens of science-fiction.
Finally, the Conclusion ties the concepts explored through the previous two chapters into my own experiences with technological disruptions. I delve briefly into my research over the summer of 2019 interviewing new media artists, and end with presenting some of my own glitch art along with a mixed media art project I made, titled The Manual.
When dealing with modern technology and virtual spaces, we tend to be blindsided by the failures that do not lead back to a quantitative misstep. If a flaw's origin is of a technical nature, like a software bug, then the flaw can be defined and fixed with relative ease. It is much more difficult to pinpoint a flaw that has nothing to do with materialistic failure. When the error comes from ideological/political conflict, then the defining the problem involves the complicated, human aspects of physical/virtual dynamics. If technological disruptions are not understood—if we cannot develop the analytical framework to separate them from other forms of virtual failure—then we will continue to be blindsided by the many unexpected ways tech is (and will be) utilized. This thesis should serve as a primer to the conversation around the blurrier forms of failure and contradictions in the post-Internet era. We might not know what goes wrong or why, but this is a step towards figuring both out.