Mon, Mar 16, 2020, 1:32 PM
safe/soft hand-holding
Like everyone else privileged enough to be deemed ‘nonessential,’ I was stuck inside once the pandemic began, tracking its relentless spread through my news feed.
But in my inbox, I noticed another narrative unfolding in parallel with the news. Day by day, my promotional emails grew stranger and more frantic. They were full of new phrases:
“Our hearts go out.” “As we navigate this unprecedented time.”
Fri, Mar 27, 2020, 2:29 PM
Thank you for being a part of the Googleful family
As cases spread, the CEO of my coffee shop personally reached out.
As the death count climbed, my family and loved ones were invoked with alarming frequency.
As unemployment claims surged, the food delivery service encouraged me to consider tipping my Shopper extra.
Tue, Mar 31, 2020, 1:48 PM
experience another dimension completely unfurl...
The corporate voice evokes the contradictions of corporations themselves.
Its vocabulary and phrasing are at once unique and generic: imbued with personality, yet precisely calibrated for familiarity and broad appeal. It shifts easily from singular (‘Pepsi’) to plural (‘we’): an artifact of corporations’ strange personhood, in which they are afforded the rights of an individual without the responsibilities.
Tue, Apr 7, 2020, 4:12 PM
Text your StumbleUpon Community
But this felt different. The emails’ tone swung wildly, some somber and authoritative, others uncomfortably chipper. They reminded me of George Saunders’ “jon,” a short story about a group of teenage influencers, raised in captivity in a marketing facility, who struggle to express their overwhelming emotions through the constrained language of advertising.
Like Saunders’ characters, corporations can’t find the words to describe what is happening.
Mon, Apr 13, 2020, 9:19 PM
American retail experience
Again and again, they used the word ‘together.’ But the other story—the one in the news—makes it clear that we are not, in fact, in this together.
The clarity is, in fact, breathtaking.
As workers are fired for demanding basic health protections, the cruelty of our economic system is brought into exquisitely sharp focus.
As Black, brown, poor, and incarcerated Americans die in staggering numbers, the racism and inequality built into this country’s foundations are illuminated in merciless detail.
Thu, Apr 16, 2020, 10:26 AM
CRUISER CARE - HEROES DIGITAL
When these strange words are taken out of context and spoken back in the wrong order, what do they tell us?
What logics and priorities do they reveal?
Wed, Apr 22, 2020, 8:56 AM
Text your new freelancer
Writer Kelly Pendergrast proposes a new spatial metaphor for the gig economy: not a platform, with its connotations of a level field, but a membrane:
“The membrane flips the platform sideways, putting the customer on one side and everything else on the other, hidden behind a shimmering screen.”
The membrane, Pendergrast writes, obscures the ‘sacrifice zone’ — “the out-of-sight arena where our goods are produced and services are procured, conveniently hidden behind the scrim of frictionless technology.” Now, the membrane is thinning, and the sacrifice zone is harder to wish away. Under the strain of describing hazard pay, relief funds, and strikes, corporate language is imploding in my inbox.
Sat, Apr 25, 2020, 7:55 PM
Thank-You for your kindness.
As the messages accumulated, I started experimenting with ways to make their subtle ruptures—and the social and economic logics they implied—more visible.
Mon, Apr 27, 2020, 12:11 PM
A special relationship will be instantiated in every person…
To create these texts, I trained an AI model on the emails I collected. I wanted to defamiliarize the ubiquitous marketing messages; to change them just enough to make them visible again.
Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 3:35 PM
People mistake cleanliness for intelligence
Like the marketing emails, the AI model itself tells a story about the social and economic systems that produced it. It’s a story about efficiency and automation—words we use to describe the process of transforming labor and emotion into commodities that can be purchased and sold for profit.
Fri, May 1, 2020, 1:57 PM
I hope you are staying safe and doing everything.
I generated hundreds of emails. As I fed the model more and more, I noticed a new kind of narrative emerging.
In this story, an entity, a kind of marketing hive mind, writes its way through the pandemic’s isolation. As its world falls apart, it grows more and more deranged. It worries about the recipient of its letters, and pleads for a response.
Sun, May 3, 2020, 3:23 PM
Our team is ready to serve you grocery with a smile
It asks for forgiveness.
The membrane tears, the screen shatters, and we don’t know what’s on the other side.
The model that generated this email text was trained on Open AI’s GPT-2 language model.
GPT-2 was trained on non-consensually scraped text from millions of websites.
I fine-tuned the model using Max Woolf’s gpt-2-simple.