Me. You. Us. Them.
By Douglas Coupland, Hans Ulrich Obrist & Shumon Basar.
Have you wondered why the inside of your head feels so strange these days? We think you’re morphing into something else. We call this “The Extreme Self.”
What follows is a sample from our next book. It charts the transformations taking place in individuality and in crowds — emotionally, socially, and spiritually. It’s also a sequel to our previous title, The Age of Earthquakes: A Guide to the Extreme Present. Like that book, The Extreme Self is designed by Daly & Lyon, and the imagery predominantly comes from seventy of the world’s foremost artists, designers, filmmakers, musicians, and more. We asked them to send us portraits or self-portraits. Why? Because the “face” has become the basic unit in what Shoshana Zuboff calls the “age of surveillance capitalism."
Here’s a discussion charting the evolution from “the extreme present” to “the extreme self” in our extremely uncertain times.
"...The Extreme Self explores the mutation of personhood inside the “extreme present.” It’s about our interior worlds more than the exterior world. It asks, “What does being ‘you’ mean right now versus, say, ‘you’ of thirty years ago. And what is a ‘group’ compared to 1990?”
SB: Then COVID-19 came along and pushed us even faster and further into the twenty-first century.
DC: It really did. I do find it remarkable how, with 9/11, the twentieth and twenty-first centuries broke away so cleanly from each other. Even to watch an episode of Friends right now feels like temporal ecotourism, which is probably why it’s so massively successful in streaming format."
"HUO: Doug, what is happening to the individual? Socially, technologically, philosophically?
DC: I think the sequence is that technology changes the person, and then those changed persons collectively, consciously or unconsciously, create philosophy. The evolving global philosophy disproportionately seems to favor US-style libertarian thinking as well as magical thinking. Tech also seems to make people believe they have more agency than they actually have, so it brings out the worst in them because most people want power, and if they see a possibility of getting even the tiniest amount of it, they’ll usually pounce. Technology creates astonishingly granular feedback systems for calibrating (perhaps meaningless) individual power statistics with likes and views et al. So, everyday life for the individual becomes an arena for monitoring, creating, and reinforcing stats."
"SB: Maybe we have to go backwards first. One of the hallmarks of modernity for Charles Baudelaire in the nineteenth-century city was the ability for an individual to melt into mass crowds. Anonymity became a core facet of identity.
DC: I love that.
SB: This is ever truer for the anonymous individual in a virtual crowd. Digital anonymity provides an impunity that empowers armchair trolls in the comments section. Such anonymity turns the craziest conspiracy theorists into major media players who now have hotlines to the Oval Office in the Whitehouse. “Drink bleach. It will make you immune!” And, you know what? People did drink bleach. That’s how powerful untruths are today, when consensus-based reality has been dismantled."
"DC: No! It’ll be the opposite! But, okay, here’s a thing. I know that the “virtual world replacing the physical world” is a very old idea, but if you’re asking for a visual of life in 2030, then I think that’s going to be it. The people who are going to enter a state of permanent isolation are probably the same people who won’t stop wearing masks when a vaccine to this wretched ordeal is deployed. We’ll have to wait and see."