Event Spotlight | DSI Search Engines Presents “What Do You Want Me to Say?”

by Josh Harper

Lauren Lee McCarthy wants to follow you. Yes, literally.

Over the course of her career as a performance artist and computer programmer, UCLA Design Media Arts professor Lauren Lee McCarthy has engaged with surveillance and control. She has created projects in which she is both observing and being observed. McCarthy spoke about her works in her talk “What Do You Want Me to Say?” as part of the DISCO Search Engines Lecture Series. In her works, McCarthy examines the role of surveillance and human interaction with technology, engaging with ideas of surveillance as a desirable experience.

The first work McCarthy discussed was her 2009 performance Social Turkers. For this, she hired workers from Amazon Mechanical Turk—a microjob board on which employers post opportunities for menial digital tasks like bug testing and subtitling that humans perform better than automated services—to observe her livestreamed dates and command her through an earpiece she was wearing. Amazon Turkers typically receive little to no pay for completing their tasks, given the worker supply is quite high and employers can refuse to pay if the work is not to their satisfaction.

Watching someone go on a date is nothing new; dating shows have been around for decades, and livestreaming services often include dating shows themselves. What differentiates Turkers from these shows is the element of control and the incorporation of microworkers. Controlling someone’s date differs significantly from bug testing in that the person being given commands is now paying for it and that the interaction is with the social world rather than strictly digital tasks. The increased vulnerability resulting from someone else controlling your date gives them much more power, and reverses the boss/employee relationship. By allowing faceless remote workers to determine her every move, McCarthy seeks to recognize the labor performed by these invisible workers. She also noted that she found the lack of control to be strangely relaxing, being removed from the exhausting process of social interaction and calculation.

After Turkers, McCarthy became obsessed with the idea of surveillance as a means of attention, creating her work Follower. For this project, people requested to be followed through an app that McCarthy built, and would receive a notification on the day they were to be followed, as well as a photo McCarthy took of them during the day. McCarthy programmed the app to allow her to see the real-time GPS location of the participant. In the applications requesting a day of following, many suggested they craved the attention or the thrill of having a stranger track their movements.

Follower occurred during the mid-2010s, around the time of Instagram’s ascendance and the explosion of social networks that coincided with a strong sense of techno-optimism driven by the Arab Spring. McCarthy mentioned that a media outlet labeled Follower a “social network,” and she took issue with this characterization of her work, saying other social networks involve much more surveillance. Her experience with Turkers influenced her decision to disguise herself, as she found the facelessness of her Turkers dates to be something she wanted to experience herself.

McCarthy’s reliance on GPS for this project shows the connections necessary for mass surveillance. In other words, you need to surveil one thing if you want to surveil another. Without this GPS surveillance, Follower would have been much more difficult. Forgoing the GPS would have shown how much or how little one must rely on technology to follow someone, and losing someone would have heightened the stakes for McCarthy. The constant risk of losing a participant would have drawn more attention to McCarthy’s active role in surveilling these people, and contrasted her surveillance with corporate surveillance.

As digital surveillance expanded to the home, McCarthy became fascinated by the rise of smart speakers like Google Home or Amazon Echo, and sought to replicate them. She recruited volunteers to set up cameras, microphones, and smart devices like door locks around their homes and ask her for advice, calling the project Lauren. McCarthy reported feeling a deep sense of responsibility and emotional connection to these people, despite her exhaustion in dealing with their menial inquiries such as requesting the weather forecast.

This piece made me think about the difference between a smart speaker and a human controlling it. How would the participants have reacted if McCarthy began malfunctioning or delaying her responses? Would they keep asking questions or would they give up entirely? How strong is the social obligation to remain part of the piece, and would frustration and dissatisfaction ever usurp the unspoken pressure to not disappoint the human on the other side?

In her works, McCarthy largely construes surveillance as a positive due to the conscious, consensual nature of it, but the larger issue of surveillance is its non-consensual or obligatory iteration, such as security cameras in stores. The increased prevalence of video doorbells like Ring further expands this issue. Why we ignore this issue seems unclear. Maybe we convince ourselves that it’s a good thing along the lines of a just world fallacy. Whatever that reason is might become clear in the future. I’ll get back to you when I’m done reading the terms and conditions.