Mood Map

 

Length: 4:56

 

Jonathan holds up his iPhone to show us Mood Map, a program that he can use to track his moods by swiping left (for bad moods) and right (for good moods). On the phone itself is a swirling cloud of light, supposedly depicting the aggregate “mood” registered by Jonathan’s swiping.

 

Jonathan offers the following commentary in a voice-over:

 

The first time Mood Map prompted me—and I didn’t know it would prompt me—I took out my frustration on it by swiping left multiple times. I taught it new words: irritated, bleah, fuck you. I began to realize over time and through such promptings that this object, now reaching out to me through my phone, has its own agenda. It has its own intentions. Surely those intentions are programmed by its designers, who are responding to a larger culture that equates good mood with productivity. We want to be happy, right? Especially since we’re more likely to be content workers if we’re happy. And then the more subtle orienting: swipe left for bad, right for good, left bad, right good. What the hell?

 

Ultimately, we must acknowledge that the devices we invite into our lives, and that we often feel pressured into acquiring and using, are programmed to do certain kinds of work. But we must also consider the ways in which we willingly surround ourselves with these objects that shape us, orient us, lay down trajectories for us. Objects are always reaching out to us, as we are always reaching out to our objects. Surely the engagement is dynamic. The ecology is not static.

 

For instance, Maneesh Sethi has created Pavlok; it's a wristband designed to give the wearer electric shocks when engaging in “bad” behavior, such as failing to go to the gym or even “wasting time on Facebook” (Trew). A partner checks a log of your activities and pushes the zap button to punish you as necessary. Sethi is building in a reward component too to encourage good behavior. Along these lines, Pavlok is surely a self-disciplining use of techno-webbed relations that mobilizes objects and our relations with and through them to produce particular kinds of subjectivities. We need only imagine different subjectivities, however. What if we partnered up through Pavlok to reward . . . orgasmic experimentation? When my online partner recounts attainment of a superior orgasm, I press the reward button; when he fails, daily, to try for a stellar orgasm, I zap him. By partnering up with people to encourage time spent every day on sexual pleasure, on cultivating orgasmic intensity, we momentarily disable the mandate to mobilize our bodies in the service of capital. We redirect it—we redirect our bodily possibilities—for other ends, for other trajectories. In Judith Butler's words, we refuse “to acquiesce to dominant logics of power and discipline” (20) and we experiment with our own logics instead.

 

Cultivating pleasure is hardly the only possibility. Indeed, I can fuck with Mood Map. Indeed, Mood Map, fuck you. Maybe I want to have a bad attitude. Maybe I don’t want to accept the status quo of the good mood. Maybe I need some negativity, some criticality. Maybe that dis-ease in my gut is telling me something I need to know. Maybe being pissed off is not only okay, but sometimes necessary. And when my phone corrects my typing or vocalization of the word queer to clear or career, then fuck it too. The phone needs to be reoriented, not me.

 

My phone’s failure, as well as my frustration with it, is an opening into critical consciousness. In The Queer Art of Failure, Halberstam argues that "failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world" (2-3). More specifically, Halberstam asserts that recognizing moments of “failure can exploit the unpredictability of ideology and its indeterminate qualities" (88). We may need now more than ever to exploit not just the unpredictability of ideology but the unpredictability of technology. We need to queer the ever-moving indeterminate webs of technai through which we move, make life, make love, make and remake ourselves. We are moved by that web as it forms and sometimes deforms us. Making choices to move with and against it can be strategic in opening up critical consciousness, and the unpredictability of technology can activate divergent paths and loops in the web. I can use these programs and objects to reflect on orientations, trajectories, normalizations, and the necessity of queering some orientations, some trajectories, some normalizations.

 

Periodically, the video of Jonathan holding up his phone is interrupted with the following words in white type on a black background, for emphasis:

 

irritated

bleah

fuck you

what the hell

surely the ecology is not static

orgasmic experimentation

fuck you

Halberstam: “failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world.”

We need to queer the ever-moving indeterminate webs of technai through which we move, make life, make love, make and remake ourselves.