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The Magnus Archives

The Magnus Archives is a weekly horror fiction anthology podcast examining what lurks in the archives of the Magnus Institute, an organization dedicated to researching the esoteric and the weird. Here, the term is being using for it’s spooky connotation.

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Human Remains

This is yet another fringe case where the term archive applies. The University of Michigan holds a collection of Native American human remains and funerary objects. 

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Svalbard Global Seed Vault

This is an interesting fringe case that I came upon when searching for uses of the term archive. A seed vault fits the definition for an archive in many ways, and misses the mark in a few others. The main two reasons why one might argue that a seed vault is not an archive are: 1. It does not store media 2. It is not for public or private access.

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Stone tablets from second millennium BC

This is one of the earliest examples of an archive. The image is a four thousand year old stone tablet found in a library-like building during an archeological dig in Syria.

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Nuclear Archives

This is a very puzzling use of the term archive to refer to images of a suspected cache of nuclear weapons. The use of the term in this article is in many ways contradictory to more traditional uses. In this case, the “archive” is strictly hidden from public or private interests. The choice of the word archive here seems sensationalist at best and plain incorrect at worst.

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Presidential Tweets

This Politico article is about the National Archives struggle to archive former president Donald Trumps tweets after they have been removed from the platform. This is important because it tells us, despite the similarities between archives and social media sites, the primary function of an archive is different than that of a social media site such as Twitter.

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Public Libraries

This is a seemingly obvious application of the term “archive”. However, it is important to note one aspect of libraries that make this sort of physical archive unique from digital archives. That is the property of locality. Unlike digital archives, institutions like local libraries predominantly serve the local community. 

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The Wayback Machine

This is a large collection of pages and websites that have since been removed or updated. In this use of the word Archive, it more closely aligns with the terms original meaning. There is a collection of information stored by an institution for research. The only difference being, there is no physical space in which the wayback machine exists in the way libraries do.

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Instagram’s Archive Feature

This is yet another modern usage of the word that shifts the original meaning. Here, archive is used as a verb meaning to remove something from the public’s eye. It is also less committal than deleting a post, as the post is still stored on the app.

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Archive (2020)

This is a film about a man who attempts to construct an AI replacement for his late wife. This is a very complex and layered use of the term, a common theme amongst its modern use. The term archive is used in restorative or retroactive sense.

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Archive 81

Archive 81 is a horror podcast that sources from found footage. This aligns with the standard definition of the term while also going beyond the original meaning to infuse the word with the feeling of dread. 

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National Treasure

This is a great and fun example of a different way to understand archives in the modern age. In this presentation of the National Archives, it is treated as a bank vault of sorts, containing valuable secrets.

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Game Your Enthusiasm

By combining the escapism of a role-playing game with real life, and productivity with smartphones. Habitica projects values that fly in the face of societal preconceptions that have existed since before the innovation of the internet.

Habitica is an app that seeks to help users improve their productivity and build habits by treating real life tasks as if they were objectives for an avatar in a game. It does so by tracking your habits and goals and rewarding users with in-app features for checking off tasks. The app works to foster behavior changes that help users become healthier and happier. Habitca’s foundational design narrates the app’s perspective on habit-forming, productivity, and connectivity which argues that artificial structure and positive reinforcement is an effective replacement or supplement for motivation that stems solely from the individual.

The design choices made by the app developers provide a window into the assumptions made when creating the app about the current media environment. This method of analysis was discussed in reference to the computer interface within Leo Manovich’s piece from 2000, “The Interface”. Manovich wrote, “In semiotic terms, the computer interface acts as a code that carries cultural messages in a variety of meda (Manovich 2000).”

The cultural messages being carried in Habitica’s design are prevalent in how the app prompts the user to organize their ambitions. When a new user joins Habitica, they are taken through a set-up process that has them categorize the things they wish to accomplish into three categories, habits, dailies, and to-do’s. Emily Fox wrote a medium article where she explains that this structure was, to her, the most desirable feature of the app. The imposition of artificial structure is a form of coding which embodies how the app conceptualizes productivity and the environment the app exists within. We can glean from this structure that Habitica places value on categorising your responsibilities according to urgency is an effective method for improving productivity. From this design narrative, conversely, it follows that Habitica embodies the value that a lack of productivity likely stems from a lack of organization of tasks.

Organization of tasks is only one way Habitca offers to improve productivity for users. The foundational affordance that Habticia advertises to its users is the ability, as their website put it, to “Gamify Your Life”. This feature boils down to in-app positive reinforcement upon completion of tasks outside of the app. The rewards for completing a task come in the form of customization options for your avatar, health boosts, experience points, in-app currency, and more. This process of positive reinforcement shows that the software values external motivators as a means of increasing productivity. It then follows that this app reflects a worldview in which motivation that comes without outside influence is not enough to inspire people to be as productive as they ought to be.

Moreover, Habitica speaks to a larger cultural shift that has been taking place since the innovation of smartphones. In 2018, Forbes contributor Barnaby Lashbrooke wrote a scathing takedown of smartphones in the workplace, focusing on how smartphones spell terrible things for an individual’s productivity. Habitica’s existence, however, is in stark contrast to Lashbrooke’s argument. Instead of being another vector of procrastination, Habitica counteracts arguments like Lashbrooke’s, which say that smartphones can only cause a decrease in productivity, by being an example of how to increase productivity through use of smartphone based software.

There is one final way in which the design of Habtica speaks to the greater values of the software. This is through the “party” feature. This allows users to track their progress alongside their friends who have also downloaded the app. This gives users a sense of accountability for one another, as completing or failing to complete your individual tasks can affect your entire party. This demonstrates another contradiction of traditional views of technology. In “Interface Culture” (1998), Steven Johnson observes a similar phenomenon when discussing the internet as a whole.

“Instead of being a medium for shut-ins and introverts, the digital computer turns out to be the first major technology of the twentieth century that brings strangers closer together (Johnson, 1998).”

By analysing the Habitica interface design in comparison to societal values and norms, we learn that Habitica represents a marriage of concepts that can be considered antithetical by some. Habitica combines real life with the escapism of a role-playing game, and productivity with smartphones. This way, Habitica rejects assumptions made about smartphone software.

References:

Manovich, L. (2000). The Interface. In The language of new media (pp. 62-93). MIT press.

Johnson, S. (1998). Interface Culture. (p. 64)

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Deepfakes and the Observed

Most of the functions of the developed world are based on the accuracy of photos or video. This is a often crucial assumption to be made. This extends to situations as high-stakes as operating a rover on another planet, but also applies to the routines of everyday life. For instance, video calling with a relative that lives far away, it is the common assumption that the video feed being displayed to both users is an accurate representation of reality. “Deepfakes”-media that is so realistic it appears authentic- have exploded in use and quality. An advertisement by State Farm featuring a deepfake of SportsCenter anchor Kenny Mayne. Mayne is depicted in the ad as a 38-year-old version of himself. This was accomplished through clever video layering. While there are many entertaining and harmless applications of this technology, it presents many challenges and dangers as well. Emerging deepfake technology is ushering a shift of the contemporary scopic regime, towards a healthy amount of skepticism in how reality is represented by media we are consuming, driven by constantly improving video editing technologies.

Now, this is not to imply that you should prepare questions that only your grandma knows the answers to for your next facetime, no one is making a deep fake of your grandmother. The point is the horizon of what was once impossible but is now afforded by new technology Is ever expanding and altering the way we perceive the world. This barrier of hyper-realism has only been broken recently. Ironically, the line between realism and hyper realism is a blurred one; so placing the invention of deepfakes to a certain point in time is an impossibly subjective endeavor. Nonetheless, deepfakes have arrived in the modern era, and they deliver deep philosophical and epistemological repercussions. While for now deepfakes remain relatively uncommon, their effects are dramatic and constitute a change in the modern media landscape.

It is not without good reason why the average media consumer in the global north should be concerned with deepfakes, either. The potential for abuse afforded by deepfakes is astounding. Such examples have been documented by MIT, “Deepfake Porn is Ruining Women’s Lives”, and WIRED  “Authoritarian Regimes Could Exploit Cries of ‘Deepfake’”. Examples like those reported by MIT are just one reason deepfakes have been the basis for many legal battles in recent years. The fact that deepfakes drove legislatures to consider enacting new laws is evidence that this technology inspired a collective philosophical dialogue about the moral and ethical implications of deepfakes in the global north. Like the technologies Jay discusses, deepfakes alter humanities relationship to the media and challenges our understanding of what is real.  As Jay put it, to acknowledge this change is;

“to wean ourselves from the fiction of a ‘true’ vision and revel instead in the possibilities opened up by the scopic regimes we have already invented and the ones, now so hard to envision, that are doubtless to come” (p. 20)

This is not the first time a new technology has effected societal practices. Jonathan Crary recounts a similar shift in visual culture that took place during the 1820s and 1830s. Both the phenomenon described by Crary and the contemporary shift in visual culture are beget by the emerging technology of the time.  Just as the collapse of the camera obscura model of an observer befell a new model of an observer, so too does the collapse of observer certainty in digital media befall an equal and oppoosite philosophical and epistemological revolution.

The source of the uncertainty that causes the cultural revolution necessitated by the existence of deepfakes differs from the revolution necessitated by the fall of the camera obscura model Crary describes. In Crary’s writing, the uncertainty of media influence is based on the observer’s “innate capacity, one might even say a transcendental faculty, to misperceive” (p. 39). The revolution ushered by deepfakes instead are based on the sources ability to be intentionally deceptive. These two notions do not negate each other and can be seen as compounding factors contributing to the uncertainty that defines the modern era of visual technology.

To conclude, innovations in visual technologies have and continue to shape our visual culture, as well as challenge assumptions about our relationship to media that may be taken for granted. As humanity’s ability to capture, persevere, and represent reality improves through visual technology, our understanding of reality and our relationship to it as necessarily changed. Deepfakes are a wake up call, that certain visual media technologies are not the bastions of unfettered reality we once assumed them to be. As deepfake technology continues to improve and saturate the media landscape further, it becomes of even greater importance to maintain a healthy amount of skepticism about the “reality” portrayed by contemporary technologies.

References

Crary, J. (1988). Modernizing Vision. Images: A Reader, 270-274.

Jay, M. (1988). Scopic Regimes of Modernity. Vision and Visuality, 3-23.

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