Getting Hard for Hard Surfaces
While the realm of personal computers had largely followed a logic of increasing specifications and lowering costs (Apple was always an outlier here but occupied only a small corner in the territory and wasn’t much copied), the smartphone era and the increasing ubiquity of flat-screen monitors signalled an emphasis on form - on accommodating the human in the industrial design. In some sense this was always what was promised; computers were big and clunky and ran loud and hot now but as technology improved they would become small and light and even fashionable. Yet there had never seemed to be enough computing power to enable this transition (nevermind that Apple had already largely made it or was gesturing toward it in its product line), and even the pre-iPhone cellphones that served as signifiers of success and the ever-ethereal ‘cool’ felt cheap and tacky in hand. With the iPhone, the world of smartphones and eventually computing itself began to transition from one of cheap plastic, inexplicable contours, and gummy surfaces (with all the cloying tackiness which that word implies) to one of aluminum and glass, magnesium and carbon fiber and Alcantara. Plastic, the ever-pliable, insubstantial, willing accomplice to every novel application began a slow decline to a devalued status in consumer electronics. At long last, there was a return to real materials and attention to tactility1 that had been brutally suppressed in endless replications of meaningless consumer detritus. By no means though was this renewed appreciation for the material - soon to become a cultural fixation - limited to hardware.
Satisfaction, Satisfaction
The meaning of the word satisfying has undergone a near replacement of meaning in the little over a decade After the iPhone (A.i.): videos on YouTube bear witness to a culture that would be bizarre and inexplicable to someone from only fifteen years ago. Satisfaction takes the form of virtual materialisations to substitute for our sense of dwindling materiality; a longing for the world of tactility as our lives are furiously dematerialised. Satisfying videos depict people carrying out mundane tasks in an often repetitive manner, zoomed in, focusing on the hands, interacting with an object, set of objects or material itself, with the object being the subject. The viewer becomes immersed in the visual and aural virtuality of the object-subject, the ‘scrape’ of a knife whittling down a block of wood or the ‘squish’ of an orange being sliced. The mundane and the routine is writ large across the digital canvas, made significant, sublime (?)… satisfying.
Then there are the ASMR videos. Standing for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, these aim to elicit in the viewer a real tactility via virtual stimuli. A typical response involves a static or moving tingling sensation across the skin. To achieve this the videos are generally simplistic, stripped down and focus on a singular (or set of) repeating aural-visual cues.
All of these serve as attempts at a release valve for a virtualising culture. A culture that is fixated on its screens now from the cradle and knows little of working with its hands cries out in agonising gasps for any hint of weight, of texture, of substance. That a large portion (possibly the vast majority) of ASMR videos feature female subjects and seem specifically targeted at a cis-male subject (an intent focus on a woman’s breathing, her gently heaving chest and thereby breasts cannot help but be read sexually, to say nothing of the more provocative videos out there), speaks to the emasculation, the spreading de-sexualisation that accompanies dematerialisation. Divorced from manual labour and human contact we reach out and touch our smartphones, seeking to replace the lost reality with an ever more sophisticated simulacrum. Our carnal needs not satiated but only diverted, we become incessantly fixated on the signifiers of tactility - the sound of tearing paper, the wet squish of hands plunging into viscous fluid - with manic desperation. There is a mad scramble to replace the disappearing appendages as our materiality evaporates2.
Fixing the Fixation
To be sure the products of tactile fixation are not universally bad. In the world of consumer electronics, there has been a bit of a necessary corrective against the frenzied pace of heady dematerialisation. The fixation itself can also alert us to what is being replaced, what cannot or should not be replaced. Would YouTube voluntarily carry a disclaimer that its videos are not a substitute for human contact? Virtual technologies should not signal freedom from the physical, but increased freedom to work within the physical. Yet with every chime, ding, and brightly coloured bauble, we engineer attention-stealing mechanisms that rob us of opportunities for meaningful interaction.
We are embedded within physicality, a universe of infinite depth for us to extend ourselves and explore. We do not need liberation from this state, nor is such a thing possible, but the means with which to more fully realise ourselves within it.
Footnotes
1 True, the iPhone did usher in the demise of the warm tactility of the physical keypad, and while this loss has never been fully compensated for in smartphones, the predominant trend has been toward an industrial design that is simultaneously inviting and inoffensive to the touch.↩
2 A culture not as far along the path to virtualisation as ours is baffled by the emerging concept of tactility. An in-touch human takes the tactile world for granted and so develops none of the obsessive-compulsive cravings and longings exhibited by a flesh that finds itself being betrayed.↩
