Corrosion of conformity
On Twitter, social media scholar Brooke Erin Duffy called attention to this luxury car ad from Infiniti, which posits "the algorithm" as limiting force of conformity that people without the means to buy an expensive car are required to live by. Those who want to show how unique and irreducible they are — those who "live life beyond the algorithm" — can drive an Infiniti.
As Duffy points out, it's pretty ironic for marketers — whose demands have produced the system of data tracking and algorithmic recommendation to target individual users — to then turn around and scapegoat algorithms, situating them as the aspirational horizon that consumers should aim to exceed. But of course, such ironies have always characterized advertising, which is always trying to balance de facto manipulation with the affective experience of empowerment. (Think of the countless number of ads that tell you not to follow trends, or implore you to "be different.") Advertising establishes the norm of consumers needing to escape the norm, which is construed as the set of tastes and fashions that consumer-goods makers made before and now are trying to render obsolete.
Or to put that another way, advertisers do the most to establish the idea of a sovereign consumer who can not only express their singularity through goods but are compelled to continue to express it, lest everyone else catches on. There is nothing defiant about "living life beyond the algorithm," anymore than there is in "being authentic" on the terms marketing establishes. Ads try to play a temporal game with the source and the moment of the consumer's desire: They purport to be uncovering a desire in the consumer that they are actually trying to incite. Like algorithmic recommendations (which are just a specific kind of programmatic ad), ads represent what they are showing as what the consumer already wanted — it was really their idea, their qualities, their selves that the ads are just concretizing — but now that those qualities have been made representable in the ad they are also under threat of being copied by others and devalued.
When the Infiniti ad castigates "algorithms" for generating conformity and reducing people to stereotypes, it's of course disavowing what all advertising does and projecting it onto an ostensibly rival discourse that is just the same thing. When ads say, "Don't listen to the ads that are compelling you to be like everyone else," they are simultaneously reinforcing the idea that ads really do actually work and you need to resist them — resistance that is being pre-emptively co-opted by the new ads.
The Infiniti ad is reassuring viewers that algorithms are accurate and efficacious, even as it is trying to motivate a kind of resistance to them, a renewal of "authentic desire." That renewed desire is not somehow outside the dynamic system of tastes and trends and norms and hierarchies of early and late adopters; it's fundamental to it. Algorithms (and ads) would grind to a halt if they didn't succeed in reproducing a modicum of resistance to them, a vector that can still be plotted within the matrix of tastes and seized upon by marketers as useful indicators of who can be sold what and when.
The "algorithm" has become the most recent articulation of what advertising has long been — the field of discourse within which one is subjectivated. It is not disrupting our ability to be unique but stabilizing the terms in which we can perceive our own uniqueness. When the ads aren't calling out to you — and now, when the algorithms aren't pigeonholing you — it's easy to become dislocated. As much as I may try to disavow it, I depend on this barrage of marketing to organize my sense of self, the "wrong" ideas about me I am always trying to negate and against which I can mount a counter-discourse of who I really am.
In The Psychic Life of Power, Judith Butler analyzes the idea that in order to have subjectivity, to experience self-consciousness or agency, it has to be generated by the impact of some external power on the self, in response to prohibitions or coercions or imputations of identity and social caste. The book feels like it is about 75% rhetorical questions, but this is useful account of what is at stake:
A critical analysis of subjection involves: (1) an account of the way regulatory power maintains subjects in subordination by producing and exploiting the demand for continuity, visibility, and place; (2) recognition that the subject produced as continuous, visible, and located is nevertheless haunted by an inassimilable remainder, a melancholia that marks the limits of subjectivation; (3) an account of the iterability of the subject that shows how agency may well consist in opposing and transforming the social terms by which it is spawned.
If subjects are in some sense dependent on that which oppresses them for a consciousness of their being, then we become attached to our subjection. This is asymmetrical across different forms of social identity and the different ways they intersect. The subjectivation people experience at the hands of marketing is by no means primary and may even be considered a privileged experience reserved to those less marked by marginalizing identities. But algorithmic prediction offers an explicit, concrete example of how individuals are "subjectivated" by external forces ("regulatory power" in Butler's terminology), one in which individuals are necessarily complicit in the process, extracting tangible experiential benefits along with the ideological indoctrination. That is, algorithms "work" because it can feel good to be targeted (you are worthy of attention, you are socially legible, you belong to the system), not because the targeting is accurate to some pre-existing self. Systems like TikTok, where algorithms help coordinate conformity and regulate social visibility within the app for a primarily adolescent user base, make that especially explicit with its "For You" page.
Butler's idea of the "inassimilable remainder" — the part of the self that precedes and rejects how it is being subjectivated or interpellated (to use Althusser's term) in particular ways — is key to figuring out how resistance to social control can be configured, if at all. How can one refuse to hear the call, when the ads and now the algorithms hail you from everywhere, before you can even know to ignore them, or when they are instrumental in shaping what you are exposed to, what you experience, in the first place?
The failures of recommendation systems mask their larger successes in subjectivating us — the failures foreground the idea that we are still somehow escaping the system that is structuring our sense of our own elusiveness.