Konrad Krawczyk | iLiveInPublic: Gen Z, Dataveillance & Digital Nativity

 
As part of the early Generation Z, I am a data commodity. It is not merely because I grew up alongside with the Internet. The very brief history of the Web includes the time when nobody would know if a dog had been sitting in front of the keyboard. Now, various corporate forms of the Internet compete with each other about who knows the person behind the keyboard more specifically and in hindsight. The Internet itself has changed, and it happened right as the first digital natives became adolescents. It was around the early-to-mid-2000s, and it was precisely when the digital form of surveillance capitalism has been invented.
As Shoshana Zuboff put it, the core questions that surveillance capitalism seeks answer to is how to modify human behaviour towards self-serving and profit making ends.The general answer is a wisdom of privacy education that we tend to happily ignore: any interaction with almost any website is a potential data entry that goes far beyond the responses we immediately see on screen. Through timed and massive data accumulation of individuals on the Web, “data-driven” companies gather raw data as commodities for powering sophisticated black-box models. These profiling and targeting models overfit to our relative personal traits over time, thereby increasingly enforcing our standing in the society, largely depriving us of the right to future tense.
Having known both the benefits and risks of this new, seemingly “free” capitalist logic, we still (quite literally) accepted the terms and conditions. For the youngest Internet users, the immense network effect and the subsequent expectation of presence have both made participation a de facto non-decision. What does it mean to live in relation to megastructure that knows you before you know yourself? What does it mean for the digital natives, for whom highly individualised experiences are manufactured before they even get to make up their minds and grow?
iLiveInPublic is a Web-embedded performance installation that captures this new model by putting it into a public and fully visible form. By sitting in a glass enclosure for an entire working day, printing out browser tracking data and publicly displaying the aggregate personality profile, the living human inside the installation turns themself into an observable object of data surveillance. By making the implicit interactions and data flows explicit, the subsequent performance is aimed at prompting the viewers to think of their own relationship to data tracking and profiling, and the extent to which this experience is common for all users of the siloed, corporate-centered Internet.
The subsequent performance has also proved to be a digital social experiment in several ways. Firstly, it documented patterns of browsing, looking and typing that would be otherwise difficult to capture. As users, we tend to find most pages through link referrals (which is how PageRank, the Google’s engine, calculates relevances), although these referrals often reveal a concerning attention logic. Because of it, the data printed out showed the unstructured mixture of knowledge and distraction, where news blend with infotainment and family updates with celebrity gossip.
Another question that came up during the show itself was the issue of consent in performance. Installations, especially with many moving or interactive parts, often invite participants who watch, take pictures, or even try to talk to the performer. How to establish boundaries between the audience, in order to make the performance most impactful? The context of the Final Show seemed extremely important in this case, with highly participatory student exhibitions creating an expectation of interactivity, participation and even dialogue. In order to establish better understanding of the project among various groups, it has been valuable to respect that context, even at the expense of altering the results of the experiment.
As a form of documentation, and perhaps a meta-commentary, the performance has been live-streamed and saved on a video gaming channel, twitch.tv. This has been a major form of engagement with the installation, also for the viewers who could directly observe the performance on site in Shanghai.