On Self-Betrayal

My heart is irreplaceable by the Algorithm

1

“When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

For a few years, I have been torn between returning to my artistic path or continuing down the corporate route — a brand new endeavor that started back in 2021. I shared this with my dear friend over dinner the other day. She mentioned that she has left her interest in art far behind; the closest she gets to creative world now is watching Netflix, which has become more and more dull. I recommended that she subscribe to Mubi instead. What distinguishes these two platforms is data and humanities. Netflix relies on its algorithm to provide its subscribers with its ‘content,’ while Mubi is curated with the love of film for film lovers.

In Il Maestro, an essay regarding filmmakers in Harper’s Magazine, Martin Scorsese writes,

“Curating isn’t undemocratic or ‘elitist,’ a term that is now used so often that it’s become meaningless. It’s an act of generosity — you’re sharing what you love and what has inspired you. (The best streaming platforms, such as the Criterion Channel and MUBI and traditional outlets such as TCM, are based on curating — they’re actually curated.) Algorithms, by definition, are based on calculations that treat the viewer as a consumer and nothing else.”

Algorithm seems to be the one behind everything after the pandemics faded around 2021.

I remember when I was in London in 2020, when Rishi Sunak, who was the Chancellor of the Exchequer, cut funding for the arts. It urged me to pause, or rather, back then, I believed I had to give up my path as an artist in England to join the corporate world for a stable source of income in Thailand — my home country. I found myself working as a sales executive for an established tech company before moving to a content designer role for a tech start-up based in Singapore. It could be argued that I was shallow, trusting the media that spread the news about art fund cutting. The news still plays with this topic nowadays because this type of story receives more engagement from the audience.

Returning to Thailand this time was a fundamental period of my life where I found my agency to live. Never before had I earned my own money, bought my own things, or solo-traveled. Life was good. Bangkok, especially the oldest part — Charoenkrung, where I resided, turned beautiful to me. It was as if I had acquired a new lens to live life in the same house, area, and family, yet with a different perspective. Simultaneously, an unusual desire to earn more, travel more, get a better job, and study in business school also emerged during this time.

It was a period where I saw all kinds of possibilities. When you open social media, you often come across content like: “But we can be more, we can have more, we can be more productive, we can achieve more. More, more, more.” Facebook says we can be more loved. Instagram says we can be more beautiful, more wealthy. LinkedIn says we can work more, be more intelligent and productive. TikTok says we can be more eccentric. YouTube says we can be cooler.

Moving on to my work life, I found that the corporate world does not encourage employees to philosophize but to make analyses, and to generate reports. The same thing became evident when I enrolled in a business school in Milan, Italy. Business schools, which are the main suppliers of the corporate sector, teach their students to rely solely on data to make assumptions and decisions on all subjects. The marketing practitioner nowadays, for instance, can rely on ‘data’ to manipulate customers’ decision-making processes end-to-end, from generating desire to convincing them to buy the product. Although strong facets of business knowledge has been imparted, I found something was wrong about it, something snapped within me. One day, I wrote this on my journal:

Years spent in art have made me an artist regardless of the medium.
However, it is my fourth month now that I enrolled in a business school.
Oftentimes, I found myself miserable and self-betrayed.

Now it’s clearer than ever what it feels like to serve the culture ruled by globalist corporations, billionaire technocrats, and the establishment. An individual is reduced to a subject, can-subject and yes-subject, exposing themselves to burnout, trading their freedom to navigate this world of peak capitalism.

Clearly, we approach the world in different proximities. They have high hopes spawned from a source I find doubtful. They want to look for framework, while I want to penetrate to the central question. They are creative, but I am an artist. It’s different.

It foreshadows my future if I keep going down this path, albeit I doubt if there is an escape. Either deal with it now, or struggle around it again in the future.

In this world where “values” are quantified on “income statements”, choices are scarce, and for those who have already heard their sacred calling, every day is a moral quest to live against self-alienation.

And so, “I can’t go on. I will go on,” says Samuel Beckett.

The Cambridge Dictionary defines “Conspicuous Consumption,” a term coined by Thorstein Veblen, as the situation in which people spend a lot of money intentionally so that others notice and admire them for their wealth. I have tried a luxury resort and purchased some luxurious garments, but I am also suspicious that these curious demands actually stem from my best friend during lockdowns — my mobile phone. And what is it behind the mobile social media app? Algorithm.

‘The soul of the second enlightenment is data totalitarianism or data fetishism,’ writes Byung Chul Han, a Korean born German philosopher in his essay ‘Big Data.’ ‘Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology … psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it …. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.’

At business school, I was taught how to write effective questionnaires to create effective surveys, and then convert those variables into numbers. We would run analyses in programs such as R, using ANOVA to identify if any given data has significant relationships in order to make business decisions. In real practice, a marketing campaign would start from some creative idea, and data is a backup (sometimes manipulatively) so that no one questions your business decision.

Having worked in a corporate environment and studied some marketing and branding courses in business school, it is evident to me that being ‘creative’ and being ‘an artist’ are very different things. ‘Creativity’, ‘Creative’, and ‘Creative Industry’ have become mere supplements for ‘Art’ and ‘Artist’. This stems from the British government’s attempt to consolidate all that into the creative sector. Because “art students were also seen as of low value to the taxpayer,” writes Patricia Bickers in her book ‘The Ends of Art Criticism’. “By incorporating the arts into the so-called ‘Creative Industries’ that inadvertently opened the door to the Neo-liberal co-option of the arts and of ‘creativity’”.

And so, being creative means serving business by using the brain’s right hemisphere to generate value on income statements, attracting consumers through advertising and marketing. A ‘creativity’ which can be measured by corporate metrics, KPIs, such as bounce rates, views, likes, turnovers, and so on. For instance, an A/B testing on Facebook can test which picture in the ads yields more likes or clicks. Creative professionals, such as marketing and media, rely so much on correlations.

When I worked for Tech company as an advertising solutions salesperson in APAC, I was frequently asked by clients why some pictures or graphics worked for certain groups of audiences while some didn’t, despite their equal quality. I would ask the same thing to the managers, strategists, and engineers. ‘It’s about testing and learning what works and what doesn’t,’ I would be returned with such vague answers. My conclusion is no one knows. Even the ones who create the algorithm don’t know. It just is that way. It’s just correlations. No real clarity.

But ‘False clarity is only another name for myth,’ says Theo Adorno. And so ‘Dataism likewise heralds false clarity,’ says Byung Chul-Han in the same piece. ‘Data simply fills up the senseless void.’ It takes away our meaning. It convinces us to live, eat, drink, dress, buy, and behave in a certain way.

I once attended an online webinar with an artist whose practice is based on extrapolating data to create artwork. I asked him what he would make of the fact that data is just correlation. It does not help discern, reflect, and question lives, which is what art does. He did not reply. Perhaps he did not see the question in the Q&A box. Yet somebody said that in this case, data is just brushstrokes to create the painting. Well, I don’t know. Data is not a brushstroke; I do not see it that way. And I believe many would not be able to believe it either.

The other week at SAC Gallery in Bangkok, I went to a screening night to see the work of Taiki Sakpisit. A camera was set up to observe things in detail, from boxing fans in a stadium and football fans in a stadium led by a member of the ruling class to photo studios favored by the ruling class, and various recurring stories. It helped me understand that if John Berger’s “perspective makes the eye the center of the visible world,” and McLuhan’s idea that all communication means “exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values,” then the Thai cultural landscape may also be shaped by what we see. The ruling class rules and reproduces their power through “the visibles” that entertain, indoctrinate, and intimidate us. There is joy and a willingness to identify with the tribe, believing in heroes and leaders and being moved by them. Taiki’s work made us see clearly through his “communication means” of cinematic language and the aesthetics of sounds. Financially, this is how the artwork generates its value. It is created through the artist’s lives, crafts, and brushstrokes. And the art world is where I am compatible.

2

Earlier this year in Singapore, I witnessed mass layoffs in giant tech companies, namely Google, Netflix, and Amazon. Some of my contemporaries had to hastily pack their bags and return to Thailand within a couple of weeks. Those who strives to be ‘productive’ and ‘successful’ find themselves conforming to the societal norm of ‘being the best self’.

Our focus on body and health has become crucial not only because it’s beneficial to be healthy, but also because we cannot afford to be anything less than healthy if we want to achieve in today’s world. We are compelled to adapt. There is little tolerance for negativity, “which is essential to being human” says Hegel. How much of our time, was spent striving to be positive: leading a healthy lifestyle, studying a respectable degree, and securing a proper job?

“It takes ‘livingness; from life, which is much more complex than simple vitality and health” writes Byung Chul-Han in his famous piece ‘Burnout Society’. He broaches “They are too alive to die, and too dead to live.” I ask myself similarly. “How much do I have to change myself from an artist into a mere subject exposing to burnout, trading freedom to grow the world of peak capitalism?”

Having experienced the corporate world, witnessed the dynamics of business schools, and observed the world around us, as well as in my own life, I feel drawn back to art and humanities. These disciplines still encourage ones to cultivate their own gardens, and the ability to think independently is crucial for maintaining a degree of freedom in these crazy times.

3

“Protect me from what I want.”

— Placebo

Around the end and beginning of the year, from December to January, is the time for the dust. A substance called PM 2.5, a cloud of dust spawned from farm burning, will cover Thailand’s sky, spying its shadow on the sun, particularly over millions of acres in the north where the Doctor spent years studying medicine. Most Thai people wear a mask when going outside, even before the pandemic during this period of the year.

According to Greenpeace’s report, Thai farmers burn their farms to prepare for the harvesting season as it is the cheapest approach. Corn is key to livestock. In the 1980s, the Thai authorities wanted to increase meat exports to compete with other players on the world economic scene. Hence, millions of acres in the northern part of the country have implemented the strategy. Giant livestock players started outsourcing farmers in the north. These businesses make unfair contracts that push the responsibilities and costs onto the farmers’ shoulders while forcing them to use their products, such as seeds and fertilizers.

Decades later, the North is where most chronic diseases related to the respiratory system, such as lung cancer, are found. For almost a century, but mainly since the end of WWII, Thailand has adopted cultural values to lift us out of absolute poverty. We believe in working hard to earn and save money to marry and buy the dream house to settle down, have kids, and live a perfect life. Those who acquire such lives are winners; those who fail to do so are labeled as failures and left behind. An occupation such as being a doctor is arguably the most promising path to the ideal life and the most revered profession.

Nowadays, the ideal life does not have to be propagandized through other channels but is homogenized through social media, according to Kyle Chayka, the author of “Filterworld: How Algorithms Flatten Culture.”

My feeling is that algorithmic feeds and recommendations have kind of guided us into conforming to each other and kind of having this homogenization of culture where we all accept the average of what everyone’s doing. We all kind of fit into these preset molds. And now AI is kind of promising to just spit out that average immediately — like to — it’ll digest all of the data in the world. It’ll take in every song, every image, every photograph and produce whatever you command it to. But that output will just be a complete banal average of what already exists. Like, that almost signals to me, like, a death of art or a death of innovation.

I remember waking up one day and found a Facebook page by a 28-year-old doctor who has been diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer, gaining over 500k followers over night, lamenting how precious life is and questioning if it has been fully lived, followed by dozens of cases revolving around pathologies caused by the Northern region’s polluted air that the media bring forth to seek audience attention, it stands in antithesis with rural farmers, who are considered nonentities, ciphers, looked down upon and overlooked by the middle class. We keep on living as tiny units of the whole economy, leaving behind the question: “Why do we need to fight so hard for life?” “And if we are going to die tomorrow, what is it that we actually want?” “Can we know it from data and content on social media, or actually from real-life experience, having felt and lived?”

Out of contemporary crises in identity, liberty, and society, we all seem to live with the same belief regardless of where we are identified on the political spectrum. Our thoughts, interests, beliefs, and values spawn from untrustworthy places; data disguises itself as truth, idiocy as virtue, algorithms replacing our real desires. And, pressed by economic conditions, we are forced to betray ourselves and pretend not to notice that we live and lead our lives in self-betrayal.