The interface effect
An interface is not something projected on a screen, it is a mediation technique between interrelated levels and layers.
No one knows for sure, how Gyges came to the throne of Lydia (680 BC), which led to countless stories and legends about it. At that time, Lydia was ruled by Candaules, a man who according to Herodotus was very much in love with his wife Nyssia.
Plato, in Book II of The Republic, mentions that when Gyges was a shepherd, after a storm he found a semi-buried horse, and inside it a magic gold ring that, when turned on his finger, made him invisible.
The Ring of Gyges
This myth had a great influence in philosophy and literature to exemplify that all people are unjust by nature, and that this behaviour only emerges when we are “invisible”.
The previous version of Herodotus on the story has a more erotic-festive nuance…
Candaules apparently was obsessed with the beauty of her partner, often bragging a lot on her beauty. Gyges, one of his servants, did not give him much credit, and to convince him, the king invited Gyges to secretly see her naked.
Obviously, this gesture was not very amusing to Nyssia, and in revenge against Candaules, he gave Gyges the choice between being executed or killing the king and seizing the throne. A tough decision for Gyges. Candaulism is a type of voyeurism where the subject obtains erotic gratification by exposing his partner to other people.
By observing passively, Giges projects himself onto the figure of Candaules, generating a fictional personality without autonomy, as if he were watching a film.
The cinema forces us to wear the Ring of Gyges, when the lights go out we become voyeurs of the world, sometimes exposing ourselves to situations that we would not accept in the real world (terror, violence, exploitation, sex…).
“To be cinematically present in the world, to experience the pleasure of films, you have to be a bit masochistic”
Stanley Cavell
We voluntarily submit ourselves to some pain and humiliation, overriding our own ability to act on the situation. But this submission is at the same time an exercise in empathy, we identify with the characters and the story, and sometimes we feel recognized.
However, we do not cry at the computer as we cry at the films.
If the cinema screen is always projected towards us, the computer screen is always directed the other way, like a window. In the cinema, you tilt your head back. On the computer, you lean forward. The cinema is an altar. The computer a rosary.
The computer is an anti-Gyges ring where the stage is inverted. The wearer is free to wander in plain sight, while the invisible world is represented as being another. The world no longer tells us what it is, we indicate ourselves to it, and in doing so, the world materializes in our idealized image.
The interface effect
This metaphor that I have taken the licence to give a twist, is briefly commented by Alexander Galloway in “The Interface Effect”, a book published at the beginning of 2013, where the author makes an exhaustive reflection on the implications that have the interfaces in the definition of our world.
It is a book straddling anthropology and philosophy, where Galloway goes from the old conceptions of media and interfaces as objects, to the effects of the interfaces that mediate between people and the world around us (from the relationships to global events, etc.).
Throughout history, the media such as radio, film, and television have changed our sense of space, time, and social relationships, conditioning our experiences and perceptions. They have gone from defining the message (Marshall McLuhan, 1960s) to determining our situation (Friedrich Kittler, 1980s).
With the advent of the World Wide Web in the 1990s and the proliferation of mobile devices, we have experienced dizzying transformations in the frequency, speed, scale, and quality of human communication. The Covid-19 pandemic has further catapulted our dependence on technology to communicate, making us experience a dystopian cocktail of science fiction stories in the first person.
For Galloway, the interface effect is produced when the computer goes from being an object (or a creator of objects), to a process or active threshold that mediates between two states. An interface is not a stable object projected on a screen, it is a multiplicity of processes. “It is not a thing”; it is “always an effect”, a mediation or interaction technique.
Computers define horizons of possibility.
Layers and devices reduction
We are used to thinking of an interface as an easy-to-use surface that hides the depths of the code; For Galloway, however, it serves as a way of thinking in terms of interrelated “levels” or “layers”. To illustrate this he presents some historical examples:
Etienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904), was a French physiologist considered one of the pioneers of photography and film, inventor of various scientific measurement tools and data representation techniques. At one point in his life, he was fascinated by the movements of birds and took a different approach to capture a sequence of movements in various images. The chronophotography of the time required positioning and synchronizing up to 12 different cameras, the task was therefore to get rid of 11 cameras to perform the same task.
Marey devised the chronographic pistol in 1882. Perhaps inspired by the design of the Colt revolver, which had reduced the need for 6 pistols to one, it was an instrument capable of taking 12 consecutive frames per second, recorded in the same image. A snapshot of 12 different moments.
Television did something similar with cinema, perhaps taking inspiration from the radio, joining several image narratives on a single channel, and then later allowing the coexistence of several narratives simultaneously, through several channels. Now the transmission channels are almost infinite.
Computers represent the last link in the reduction of devices, not only have they made countless analogue tools obsolete, but they have also reduced all dimensions to zero. Nothing takes up space and everything happens at the same time. The ultimate pistol.
Software and Ideology
Galloway elegantly weaves the connections between the interfaces he analyses and the ideological devices that function within them.
An ideology is not something that can be solved like a puzzle or cured like a disease. Ideology is better understood as a problem, that is, theoretical problems arise, are generated and sustained precisely as problems in themselves. And there is nothing that is more attractive to software than solving its own problems using the software.
“Software is a functional analogue of ideology”
Wendy Hui Lying Chun
In software, code obfuscation or “information hiding” is used to make code more modular and abstract and therefore easier to maintain. The code never looks like it is. Instead, the code must be compiled, interpreted, and parsed, and hidden by even larger code balloons.
But despite its obfuscation, you could say that code has become as important as natural language, allowing us to execute commands that the machine can interpret and execute actions.
Code that runs on a machine is performative in a much stronger sense than natural language. When a judge says “I declare this session open” or “I declare you joined in marriage,” these phrases may result in changes in people’s behaviour, but the performative force of language is conditioned by complex chains of mediation and interpretation. On the contrary, the code executes changes in the behaviour of the machine, and through the network it can initiate other changes that affect our reality. Ordering food at home from the palm of our hand, or paying with a gesture of our wrist, is something like a spell.
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Arthur C. Clarke
In summary, it is a book that is highly recommended if you fancy a reading to take a little distance and a critical perspective on the technology that surrounds us.
