Robot dog
Responding to an essay by Karen Russell about compulsively watching the "plotless footage" from one's baby monitor, Michael Sacasas makes the point that "we monitor in order to relieve anxiety, but our anxiety is heightened by our monitoring. Put another way, we will grow anxious about whatever we are able to monitor." To the extent that social media has made me aware of myself, of opportunities to broadcast myself and monitor the responses, it has made me extremely anxious about who I think I am.
Instead of watching a baby on a screen, I've watched my Twitter mentions, looking for signs of life. Or I would stare at the feed as if its flow was reflective of the flow of life itself, of thoughts and feelings, and that while I sat there not contributing, life was passing me by.
When I started writing this newsletter, I thought it would be more like the blog I used to write a decade ago, only on a weekly rather than a daily pace. I would keep a list of things I'd read or seen that made me want to add something, and then rather than compress my reaction into aphoristic or quasi-oracular statements for Twitter, I'd write something a bit more expansive and exploratory, in a space where the metrics and reactions would be less immediate and more opaque to me. I used to want to do that, I thought to myself, with more than a little self-satisfaction for thinking it. I wanted to develop ideas rather than register reactions.
But it turns out that subtracting the sense of immediate social media reaction has made me turn inward rather than outward. I'm not cataloging and developing ideas; I'm reminiscing about having been a child, having felt lonely. I can't keep these newsletter posts from turning elegiac, memoirish, self-indulgent. I'm motivated less by having some argumentative points I want to make than by having discovered some avenue into my memory, to some detail that suddenly seems vivid and vital to me, something I want to bring into focus by pinning it down in words. I don't know if these images mean anything to you. That's probably the only reason I can write them.
An article I read in yesterday's Wall Street Journal started me thinking about this: "Sony to Unleash Pet Robot," about an internet-connected robot dog that will not only be able to control household appliances but also, according to the company's CEO, "be capable of forming an emotional bond with customers, and able to grow to inspire love and affection." The robot dog is being positioned as a sort of ambulatory Alexa; it adds gestural triggers to the repertoire of tactics a device can use to get you to comply to constant, ambient surveillance. It actively seeks to win your trust, which is marketed as a feature: Its relentless determination to make you use Sony's services is its way of trying to "inspire love and affection." It makes having Sony listen in on your household seem cute — presumably the robot dog cocks its head at you when it picks up transmissible audio. And it can follow you around as it records you, but in a doglike way that might makes this persistence come across as servility.
This is precisely the sort of article I imagined would be on my list, the kind of news item I routinely used to blog about circa 2007. I can imagine what sort of post I would have written about it: The positions to take seem well-rehearsed. I would develop the "manufacturing consent for surveillance" angle and possibly complain about the reification of emotion, voicing suspicions about representing "emotional bonds" as phenomena one can experience alone, as an on-demand commodity. Then I would probably temper the view that there is something wrong or unusual about having an emotional relationship with a thing. Most products, especially branded ones, are already engineered to elicit emotions and fuse our attention to them, to generate a sense of a relationship. The robot dog is really not much different from a pack of cigarettes that way. Another way to look at the robot dog (and at Alexa and Siri) is as offering a different sort of device interface for people who have difficulty using keyboards or touch screens.
Lots of other people have made all these arguments before, more persuasively and thoroughly than I can. Critiquing the robot dog feels superfluous; it makes me feel superfluous. So I started thinking instead of why, of all the articles in the Wall Street Journal yesterday morning, this article — and not, say, the articles about senators criticizing Trump, or WeWork buying the Lord & Taylor department store building in Manhattan — made me want to write something. What detail am I trying to remember?
In The Future of Nostalgia, Sveltlana Boym distinguishes between "restorative nostalgia," which seeks to construct some version of the past in the present in all its imagined detail, as if it had never been lost, and "reflective nostalgia," which fixates on the feeling of loss itself, on ruins and partial memories, of different sensations of time overlapping each other. Drawing on Proust, Boym notes that reflective nostalgia is often a quest for the present self rather than an actual past."Remembering doesn't have to be disconnected from thinking," Boym writes. "I remember, therefore I am, or I think I remember and therefore I think."
But the self-centeredness of reflective memory doesn't mean it is solipsistic. What might be remembered is the resonance of things that have lost their shared significance, the sense of collective belonging they once intimated, so that they can now serve as an emblem of one's isolation, one's having slipped out of time. What Boym calls "the shared social frameworks of memory" are revealed in how those frameworks seem to be slipping away, at least with respect to what we are choosing to dredge up from the past in that moment; how social frameworks guide the memories we're in the process of forming now won't be revealed until those too are fading.
So in my contemplation of various ruins, whether these are literal ruins I interpret as personal metaphors, or just fragments of memories, I am trying to reconstruct a past in which I didn't feel alone, a time when the world I moved through reinforced my sense of belonging, of understanding. But that is always an illusion; in the actual past, I was likely just as confused and lonely, probably already thinking back nostalgically and sentimentally on an even earlier time of warmth and inclusion. I never had a dog as a child but my family did, and it bit my face when I was very young, an event I don't remember at all and may very well have invented.
There's little chance I will ever own a robot dog, but I still felt threatened by it, by its supposed ability to "grow" and therefore compel "love and affection." Is there really so much love and affection to go around that we should loose these machines into the world to absorb the excess? Of course, that is not the point — there can't be too much love, and robot pets would be machines for producing more caring qua caring, even if some might see the object of that care as undeserving. Maybe I already feel like a robot dog. Robot dogs amass data, but they don't have memories.
While we were In Priština, we got a bit lost, in part because I mistook this concrete utility tower for another antifascist monument — it wasn't until we got closer to it that it became clear that it was fenced off on the property of the Kosova Petrol company and was just some sort of reservoir tower or something. Walking back to the center of town, through a maze of massive concrete apartment blocks and terraced walkways in various states of reconstruction and disarray, past the stray dogs and the stacks of bricks and plywood, the decontextualized piles of rubble and trash, we decided to have a coffee at one of cafés we passed. It was embedded in the street-level floor of one of the apartment towers along with some dusty dress shops and produce stands, and felt entirely different from the more tourist-oriented places near our hotel. It felt like we were in a neighborhood, and we were going to get a helping of "neighborhoodiness" with our espressos. The people at the tables seemed like they were probably from the apartments above; they didn't pay any attention to us.
Beside us was a young family — a guy in a track suit, a women in a black tank top, both in their mid-20s probably, both smoking, and a five-or six-year-old girl holding a doll. I did a double-take when I saw the doll, because its face, and only its face, was covered in deep, blood-red ink. It was scary and troubling, yet at the same time was almost too on the nose of my preconceptions about "war-torn Kosovo." I sat there thinking about whether I could somehow surreptitiously take a picture of it, trying the whole time to avoid contact with the girl, or the doll, for that matter.
I assume lots of children everywhere take things out on their toys; maybe one day the baby in that writer's plotless baby monitor feed will have a doll he'll decapitate, and an internal narrative his mother will never understand. I didn't take a picture of the doll, but I think I will always remember it, making up my own stories about it to hold together strands of ideas about where I was, where I am, and why.