Existential Technology: Wearable Computing Is Not the Real Issue!

Abstract

The author presents "Existential Technology" as a new category of in(ter)ventions and as a new theoretical framework for understanding privacy and identity. His thesis is twofold: (1) The unprotected individual has lost ground to invasive surveillance technologies and complex global organizations that undermine the humanistic property of the individual; (2) A way for the individual to be free and collegially assertive in such a world is to be "bound to freedom" by an articulably external force. To that end, the author explores empowerment via self-demotion. He has founded a federally incorporated company and appointed himself to a low enough position to be bound to freedom within that company. His performances and in(ter)ventions over the last 30 years have led him to an understanding of such concepts as individual self-corporatization and submissivity reciprocity for the creation of a balance of bureaucracy.

As our world becomes more and more globally connected, the official hierarchies of corporations and governments become larger and more complicated in scope, often making the chain of command and accountability more difficult for an individual person to question. Bureaucracies spanning several countries provide layers of abstraction and opacity to accountability for the functionaries involved in such official machinery. Thus, policy affecting our everyday life is moved further from our ability to influence, affect or even understand it. At the same time, the increased use of surveillance and monitoring technologies makes the individual more vulnerable to, and accountable to, these very organizations that are themselves becoming less accountable to the surveilled populace.

In this paper, I propose the concept of "Existential Technology" as the technology of self-determination and mastery over our own destiny, and I provide several examples of in(ter)ventions (new inventions I filed with the Patent Office as well as new interventions). In this article I deliberately conflate the terms invention and intervention, as I did in my recent exhibit at Gallery TPW, Prior Art: Art of Record [1]. (The terms "Prior Art" and "Art of Record" are commonly used in patent law.)

My performances and in(ter)ventions attempt to reflect the technological hypocrisies of large bureaucratic organizations on a moralistic (or humanistic) level by way of firsthand encounters with low-level "clerks," rather than the more traditional approach of writing letters to management, politicians or the like. By mirroring the structures of bureaucracy and complexity, I engage in a Reflectionist approach that I have found is, in many situations, surprisingly far more successful than writing letters to high-level officials [2].

Ironically, Existential Technology serves to empower the individual by disempowering the individual of responsibility for his or her own actions. Empowerment is achieved through self-demotion (e.g. assuming a low rank in the corporate hierarchy of a subservience services corporation such as the Existential Technology Corporation). In the same way that large "covernments" (convergence of multiple governments corrupted by interests of global corporations) are empowered by being less accountable for their actions, existential technologies allow individuals to self-bureaucratize in order to achieve a balance of bureaucracy when dealing with government organizations.

Existentialist theory holds that individuals are entirely free, thus entirely responsible. Clerks and functionaries, however, are not free, or at least can allege to be not free, and thus, ironically, are in some ways more free to escape responsibility or accountability for their actions. In the existentialist tradition, my apparatus of computer-mediated reality (e.g. wearing a computer and living in a computer-generated world) suggests the absurdity of reality that is so much a part of existentialist thinking [3].

Existentialism is not a philosophy but a label for several widely different revolts against traditional philosophy. The refusal to belong to any school of thought and a marked dissatisfaction

Fig. 1.

Installation of SeatSale: Seating Made Simple, at the San Francisco Art Institute, 2001.

© Steve Mann

with traditional philosophy as superficial form the heart of existentialism [4]. Thus, in formulating the concept of Existential Technology, I deliberately try to avoid making it too clear upon exactly whose shoulders...