Made to Order

by Jonathan Strahan

Idols can be used defensively as well as offensively. In addition to judges and opposing counsel, the firm also keeps idols of every member of our own litigation group. These are in super-high definition, as they are trained on not just publicly available information, but also private feeds. The litigators are regularly instructed to probe their own idols and the idols of their fellow team members to discover exploitable weaknesses and mitigate them. Therapy, controlled exposure, de-sensitization—whatever it takes to avoid having the other side win a trial by pushing one’s own buttons.

  (I suppose by now you can understand why I never go to court myself. I have no interest in torturing my own idol to discover ways to drive myself into a frenzied rage—life is hard enough without that particular brand of suffering.)

  I examine the clues that had led the machine to conclude that the anonymous poster was speaking of Gaughen (a few overly-descriptive references to office furniture and wall art; a quote that seemed to be taken straight from one of her speeches); I scan the poster’s comment history (they started a few weeks after the Rule 12(b)(6) hearing in this trial); I look at the time stamps on the comments (early in the morning, exactly the profile of a firm associate posting from personal equipment outside of work hours).

  Everything is so plotted, so neat, placed just-so. In fact, the trail seems to have been planted to draw my attention. Haven’t I always had a chip on my shoulder because the Law Review rejected me? Haven’t I always craved the prestige of recognition for my talents, nursed an insatiable hunger for status? Haven’t I always wanted to win and win now, as if winning would fill the insecure void at the center of my heart?

  What have you done?

  You tell me you like your work.

  I close my eyes and let everything stew in my head. I’m not a supercomputer with proprietary algorithms to conjure a living person out of scattered digital snippets, but I do have millions of years of evolutionary history as a social primate on my side. My orbital frontal cortex, my mirror neurons, my mentalizing cognitive capacity are all geared towards constructing idols—models of other minds—though we didn’t start to call them that until recently.

  I can see a shadowy figure emerge out of the chaos, a mind clever and devious. They know the workings and weaknesses of idol-construction software as well as I do. Greedy for data, the harvesters tend to over-gather, and the integrators tend to over-interpret. It would be easy for someone like that to leave a few adversarial examples around to corrupt the process, to poison the idols to lead their opponent down the wrong path—especially if they already have an idol of that opponent: me.

  A frisson of terror and joy tingles my spine.

  I open my eyes, a grim grin on my face. I instruct the modeling software to delete from Gaughen’s idol the anonymous poster’s comment and every conclusion derived from it.

  But that isn’t all. Have they been probing me? Have they found about Dylan and found a way to use him to get to me? Have they been dipping into his social feeds, pushing his desire for children, to be the father that his own never was to him, engineering a domestic crisis to throw me off on the eve of the trial?

  Maybe I’m paranoid. Or maybe I’ve grown too comfortable.

  I imagine the trial to come: the mad rush to update the jurors’ idols to high-resolution once they’ve been empaneled; the sleepless nights as we feed the arguments to the simulations to assess our chances of victory; the exhausting effort to refine and optimize every exhibit to maximize their impact based on idol-feedback; the feints, defenses, thrusts, parries...

  Once, all that would have seemed routine, even a little boring. But now, I know this trial is going to be so much more exhilarating because I’ve met a worthy opponent: an idol-whisperer every bit as skilled as me, and maybe even better, even more ruthless.

  I wish I could share this... this not-quite-triumph, this thrill of mirror-gazing with someone. Someone who truly understands.

  But something is still bothering me.

  What have you done?

  You tell me you like your work.

  Is there a chance, however remote, that I’ve been given a look of myself that I’ve been avoiding: This isn’t about Dylan or children or work-life balance or the vacations I plan but never take. Do I like myself?

  But there’s no time for that.

  “Game on,” I whisper to the screen, and press the button to bring the idol to life.

  3. γνῶθι σαυτόν

  Artist Statement by Sara Honan

  I’m no fan of artist statements. If my work could be summarized in the form of an essay, I would have written one. The very point of art is to say that which cannot be said, to escape from the tyranny of rhetoric, argument, persuasion, discourse.

  But as I’ve been told that if I do not write one, a substitute curator’s statement will be provided for me, I am forced to the keyboard. The only thing worse than explaining your own work is to have someone else explain it for you.

  Gnothi Seauton is about idols, artifacts emblematic of our self-obsessed age. An idol purports to model the inner life of a person based on digital external self-expression, to capture something of the psychological truth of selfhood through inferences, machine learning, simulation, pattern recognition and amplification. It claims to portray the soul as accurately as the lens captures the light reflecting off a body.

  Idols of influencers and celebrities are familiar to us, but they’re also used in law, medicine, education, government, finance, diplomacy, product development, and all sort of other ways little discussed. There are probably idols of you in the data centers of multiple tech giants and government agencies, and whenever you are denied a benefit or granted a reprieve, approved for a loan or barred from admission, chances are: your idol(s) play a role in that decision.

  My work invites you to create an idol of yourself and play with it (and if you are willing, to allow your idol to be played with by your loved ones). I’ve simplified the interface to professional idol-sculpting tools and set up guided interaction patterns so that you need no technical knowledge or experience. You can curate and filter the sources of data, adjust the parameters, probe and prod the result. It sounds trite to tell you to have fun with it, but that is genuinely my most important instruction.

  The nature of the work requires permission to access your social media feeds, cloud archives, phone databases, and so on. You may grant as much or as little access as you like. I don’t keep any of your data or idol past the end of your visit (you can read the details in the user agreement in AR), but it would be very sensible for you to not trust me, as I’ll explain below.

  The cloud processing power, storage, and server-side modeling software for this installation are donated by Mnemosynee, which is a major player in idol-space (among many other tech spaces) and no stranger to data-collection controversies. Data that can be used to refine idols of you is worth a lot, I need not remind you, since your idols are used to make so many decisions about you. We’re long past the halcyon days when advertising was the biggest worry anyone had.

  For what it’s worth, they came to me with the offer, not the other way around. I told them that I had conditions: they could keep no data, would have no control over the work, and I would neither thank them nor allow any sponsorship messages at the show. They readily assented, assuring me that a better public understanding of idols was all they were interested in. My lawyers tell me that their promises are enforceable.

  In spite of all that, some will argue that my work is irredeemably corrupted as a result of their involvement. I applaud them for their purity of vision. But I can’t afford to buy the amount of cloud computing resources needed to make the installation work for all of you. Idols must be powered by something: incense, offerings, purchased indulgences, faith.

  At the end of the exhibit, there is an autointerview booth where you may record your thoughts about the work and share it with the public (or not, as you wish).

  May you find what you’re looking for.

 
; Chaaya Settlemire-Bonano, 32, and Dani Settlemire-Bonano, 28

  Chaaya: It’s a little like the first time you see yourself on camera, only worse. Mortifying!

  Dani: [laughs] I thought it was pretty accurate.

  Chaaya: Yours or mine?

  Dani: Yours. She said everything just the way you would.

  Chaaya: But she sounded like an asshole! Arrogant. Loud. Insufferable really. Explaining trade policy to me! [Mimics] “You’re not very good at listening. I’m the expert.” I wanted to punch that fool in the face.

  Dani: Uh-huh.

  Chaaya: What are you giggling about? I never say things like that—

  Dani: Mmm.

  Chaaya: Besides, she’s wrong. Her understanding of the field is at least two years out of date, and she’s so dogmatic—

  Dani: You haven’t been posting about your work the last two years, right? The modeling software can only work with what it can harvest. You’ve evolved—in some ways.

  Chaaya: What’s that supposed to mean?

  Dani: I love you. But I’m glad you got to see yourself this way.

  Chaaya: [A pause] I love you too. [Reluctantly] You put up with a lot.

  Mia K., 16

  I didn’t put in anything from myself. What am I? Stupid?

  When it asked me for my feeds and deets, I put in the official PR feed of the New York Yankees, the Pegalbum for Miss Universe, and the customer service Rumble account for Mnemosynee.

  What an idol that was. Glorious.

  I haven’t laughed like that since the time we released two hundred chickens onto the football field right before the homecoming game.

  E.J. Song, 45

  As far as I know, I’ve never posted publicly about my love for Les Fleurs du mal or quoted from it. I’ve never even talked about it with anyone; what I felt when I read those poems was so personal. Yet, when I asked him about it, he told me his favorite lines, which were the same as mine.

  What magic was this? My idol terrified and unsettled me. Has my language been subtly influenced by books I love so that the algorithms could identify the source with pinpoint accuracy? Am I so predictable that my literary tastes could be inferred from the memes I share, the restaurants I frequent, the throw-away comments I toss into the ether? Am I nothing more than the intersection of overlapping digital tribes, clusters of preferences?

  No one likes to think a computer can model them, can calculate thoughts never voiced, passions never expressed. We want to believe we’re unique, special, with a will of our own. I don’t want my mind to be a mere machine whose inner workings could be discerned, whose tendencies could be pinned down and predicted. I want to be able to surprise those who think they know me. That’s the very definition of freedom, isn’t it?

  So I tried a little experiment.

  I began to delete bits of data that fed into my idol. My Rumble feed, my Clap history, my Pegalbum, accounts on VRRumors, LikLak, Tidyshelf, Retrojournalideas.net. After every deletion, I would push the button that remade the idol and test him again. I’d hog the workstation until the queue of visitors behind me got so long and the complaints so loud that one of the docents had to come to tell me to give someone else a turn. Then I’d go to the end of the queue and wait again.

  I was methodical. I listed the data sources and sectioned them off with half-interval search. To rescue my humanity from the machines, I relied on the tools of the machines.

  Finally, I found the key. It was a photograph taken five years ago, a meaningless selfie posted to Pegalbum. When it was included, the idol recited Baudelaire to me. When it wasn’t, he claimed to have never read it. I got out of the chair at the workstation and brought up the photo on my phone, zooming in to examine it pixel by pixel.

  I had been standing in front of my bookshelf, and the book, a bilingual edition, could be seen in the background, just over my right shoulder. The lighting was terrible, but the glowing stylized lamp on the spine, Mnemosynee’s logo, stood out—it was the Centaur edition, where the Mnemosynee machine-translation was edited and polished by So-young Paek, Baudelaire scholar and an accomplished poet herself.

  As for how the modeling software figured out the lines... I have a habit of flipping to my favorite passages and pressing down upon the pages so that they would lie flat, so that I could stare at the words until they were seared into my retina. It wouldn’t be very hard to pick out the creases in the spine of my book and recreate those lines.

  It is an impressive bit of technology, to be sure, but... not magic. Yet, the revelation felt empty, brought no relief.

  I hesitated in front of the interview booth. I couldn’t just leave the museum. Something about the idea of that half-finished idol bothered me in a way that I couldn’t, and still can’t, explain.

  So I lined up again. And when my turn at the workstation came, I put all the feeds back, brought the idol to life, and asked him again what was his favorite poem. It mattered to me that he gave the right answer. It did.

  How real that idol of me had seemed, how uncannily lifelike. We talked about literature, about art, about the meaning of existence. We talked until the docent threatened to call the guards. Only then did I reluctantly get up and watch as my idol vanished from the screen.

  I must sound pitiful to you. To care so much about a book. I didn’t, after all was said and done, rescue my soul.

  Am I nothing more than the sum of the books I’ve read, the images I’ve shared, the links I’ve clicked and the videos I’ve posted? To know all of my digital emanations and penumbras is to know me; there is no there there, no impenetrable self beneath the feeds. I am as cobbled together as my idol, a parlor trick.

  L’oubli puissant habite sur ta bouche,

  Et le Léthé coule dans tes baisers.

  Liz Joso, 24, and Casey Sayer, 26

  Liz: Why not?

  Casey: Because it’s creepy.

  Liz: How’s it creepy to want to see how our children might turn out?

  Casey: That’s not what the program is designed for! You can’t just mix our social media feeds and expect it to... pop out a vision of our unborn child!

  Liz: So you’re a computer expert now?

  Casey: Can we not do this while the camera is on?

  X.V., age withheld

  I tried it. It didn’t sound much like me. I didn’t expect it to.

  Not everyone is free to say what they want, to tell the truth to a computer. The platforms are designed by some people for people who think-talk-look-act like themselves. The rest of us have to adapt, to wear disguises, to speak in code.

  Who do you think volunteers for the psych experiments used to generate the algorithms? Whose minds do you think the computer has learned to treat as the default, to center as the model as it grows an idol?

  I had fun, though. It’s like looking at my costume in a funhouse mirror.

  Bella Doubet, 30

  I’m familiar with idols. I work with them all the time. My firm... constructs them for business reasons, and I consider myself a sculptor of some skill. The ones I work with are far higher in resolution than ones available to the public, and I thought I knew all there was to know about them.

  But I’ve never played with my own idol. Partly it’s because I can’t justify doing so on company time and computing power; partly it’s because... well, let’s just say I don’t do nice things to idols.

  So I decided to come to the exhibit.

  I purposefully kept everything related to my work out of the idol. You can’t trust any promises made by artists or a company like Mnemosynee, and my work is confidential and privileged. But there’s also a deeper reason: I wanted to see if I’m defined by my work.

  She was fun to talk to. We chatted about our love of video games, our delight in stage magic, our passion for going on trips to faraway places by ourselves. We talked about Dylan, about our parents, about friends we lost touch with. Some things she remembered better than I did—no surprise; I haven’t read the diary I kept in college in a deca
de.

  It’s like getting a chance to see how I would have turned out if I hadn’t picked this fork in the path, if I haven’t chosen to dedicate myself to this profession, walked down the roads I have. She’s more idealistic, less complicated, more trusting. She thinks better of other people than I do. I can see how my work has made me harder to like.

  Is she more me than I am? Or less so?

  She’s made me rethink how I judge people. The idols I work with are constructed with the aid of harvesters who prioritize information about conflicts, arguments, performances in front of an audience. We don’t get access to subjects’ college diaries or high school crushes. We focus on the “professional.” I’ve grown so used to attacking these idols in the hope of discovering some weakness that I’ve started to conflate the image with the original.

  Each of us wears masks: one for our husband; another for our children; one for relatives who insert vacation videos into our feeds to collect claps; another for clients who expect us to be cool, calculating, eyes on the prize. Maybe there is nothing to this “self” we prize so much except the totality of this collection of masks. Or maybe there is some essential thing beneath the layers of masks, a beating heart, raw, bloody, vulnerable, yearning to connect, hungering to know where we come from and whither we go. That’s what you see when you peer through the seams and cracks in the masks, when you punch through the defenses we erect against reality, and searing emotion erupts.

  We treat such outbursts with scorn and mistrust. We think to be human is to be inhuman. How sad.

  So I would like to say: be kind to yourself, to those imperfections you detect. Who knows but that we’re all merely idols for a deeper, inarticulate soul that expresses itself only faintly, like tremors in the crystalline spheres.

  BIGGER FISH