Interfaces and Us: User Experience Design and the Making of the Computable Subject

Cover
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Introduction
	Laws of Love
	The Historical and Conceptual Underpinnings of the Computable Subjectivity
	Are We and Our World Nothing but Data?
	Fragmentation, Prediction, and Identity
	New Normals and New Morals
	Is the Computable Subjectivity Actually the Problem? If So, What Do We Do?
	Concluding by Way of Beginning
	The Co-Constitutive Nature of Design, Design Scholarship, and Design Education
	Notes
1 Historical and Conceptual Roots of the Computable Subjectivity
	Introduction: Disrupting the Insurance Industry—“Convenience” and “Freedom”
	Producing and Looping, or, Biopolitics and Biopower
	The Value of Convenience
	Freedom and Countercultural Technocracy
	The Selfish System: Cybernetics and Rational Choice Theory
	Markets as Information Processors: Cybernetics and Economics
	The Neoliberal Governmentality
	Conclusion: Foundations and Ramifications
	Notes
2 Data=World
	Introduction: Can You “See” Your Dream Data?
	Data and World: An Origin Story
	Computational Instrumentation: Templates and Translations
	How Computational Instruments Disappear
	Conclusion: The Great Inversion, or, Operationalism’s Legacy
	Notes
3 Prediction and the Stabilization of Identity
	Introduction: The Scrambling of Algorithmic Anticipation
	The Digital Production of Fragmentation and Alienation
	Ontological Insecurity: One Consequence of Fragmentation and Alienation
	The Digital Mirror Self: Soothing Ontological Insecurity with Computation
	The Role of UX in Producing, then Soothing, Ontological Insecurity
	Consequences: Soft Biopower and the Proscription of Potential
	Conclusion: Becoming Cyborgs
	Notes
4 The Moral Imperative of Normality through Computational Optimization
	Introduction: The Optimized Professor and the Pressures of Optimization
	Measurement, Normality, and Morality: Two Origin Stories
	The Moral Imperative of Self-Optimizing Technologies: The Case of the Amazon Halo
	Consequences: Anxiety, Superfluity, and the Instrumentalization of Interpersonal Interaction
	Datafied Superfluity: Bullshit Jobs, Bullshit People, and Teaching from beyond the Grave
	Conclusion: Fighting for Servitude as if It Were Salvation
	Notes
5 The Questions of Political Economy and the Role of Design Education
	Introduction
	Question 1: The Issue of Political Economy and Chile’s Socialist Cybernetics
	Question 2: The Role of Design Education in Resisting the “Reality” of the Computable Subjectivity
	Conclusion: Returning to Political Economy and the Limits of the Reformist Approach
	Notes
Conclusion: Toward a Luddite Design Education
	The Politics of UX and the Computable Subject as the Ideal Political Subject
	The Lingering Problem: The Computable Subjectivity and Political Economy
	The Revolutionary Approach: Luddite Design Education
	A Provisional Program of Luddite Design Education
	A Luddite Design Education, Now
	Notes
Bibliography
Index